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Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: November 2nd, 2024

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  • Sometimes even that’s not enough. I’ve had some questionable kit before that would just ignore the DNS settings fed to it if it thought they were no good, and fall back to something else preconfigured.

    pfSense is a wonderful tool for situations like that. Anything intended for local use only here just doesn’t get outside at all. Handy for stuff like a fire stick that only needs to be calling up a local media library.

    It can also mangle any DNS requests going out to a different server and redirect them to itself instead. You could do this without it with iptables/nftables on a generic Linux box, but pfSense makes it much friendlier.

    There are other packages that can do the same, but physically all you need is one piece of hardware as a bouncer that manages connections between inside/outside.



  • Was about to say, £s not pence :) 50s will also out you as a tourist, if nothing else does. Whereabouts are you planning to visit? Just London for the touristy stuff or going for more of an explore?

    As mentioned above, electronic payments are now the norm here and have been for ages. Shouldn’t have any problems using a phone or contactless card to pay in most places. Chip/PIN covers most everything else & when you get prompted to insert the card as a security check after trying contactless.

    Swipe & sign is possible last time I checked, but pretty much defunct with chip/PIN being readily available. Cash only places are rare and usually associated with food or drugs.

    .zip isn’t blocking UK access via apps/api, but it is for browsers. I like VPNs and supporting my home instance, so here I am :)






  • Aftermarket OS options are getting better as time goes by, which is nice. Come a long way since the old Cyanogenmod days.

    But yeah, Sammy won’t be keeping the bones patched beyond what they already have. The risk for me is acceptable, and preferable to shelling out for new hardware every few years. It works and I’m not too stupid with it.



  • I don’t think I’ve used a microsd in a phone for about 6+ years now, so I couldn’t really care less. Not a photographer and I don’t travel enough to need so much offline media on the go. Just a few albums for the commute.

    Still using an old Galaxy S10 and appreciating the 3.5mm jack though.