Congratulations, I’ve done no page ranking, have paid google nothing, did not answer the door when bing rang, and ignored their wailing begging from my porch, eventually getting a PFA from them, and yet here you are.
This is my site of collected links and data I’ve deemed too important (to me) to trust to the originator to keep available. The site itself has risen from the ashes of a not-backed-up-free-hosting account that actually survived for over a decade. There is a lot to wayback through, so for some time you will see both fresh and ancient content added in a truly random fashion. Go ahead, base your RNG on it. Ok, maybe don’t.
OK kids, it about time someone told you that you’re doing Facebook wrong. Fuck Zuck and all the *insane* tracking going on when you visit the site via browser or app. If you are using a app, god help you cause I’m not going to.
llamafile – Download a full AI in a single .exe (or linux executable)
Super cool way to try out a AI on your computer without needing to install a thing! Dip a toe and start your journey into the world of the future!
For more advanced users with a lot of drive space, this is a great way to ‘capture’ a specific AI – a genie in a bottle. There is already talk about doing silly things with AI and this may be a valuable resource some day.
For flat out geeks, use this tool to package any AI into a self contained executable file!
As I spoke about in my longwinded email rant here, using free email for private communication is a thing of the past, at least if you (or the person you are communication with) expect any privacy at all. While there are a few reputable email hosts left, that can change at any time – it is time to own your email.
Fortunately, having your own email address has never been easier or more affordable. I’ll go over a few good options available at this time (July 2026).
It’s time we all face it, free email is dead. Dead for peer communication. Still fine for spam, junk and maybe even your flight reservations (after all, it’s nice when AI offers up personalized ads, right?). But as far as chatting with other people, gmail, outlook, yahoo and the like are compromised.
They stand with the enemy, if not are the enemy themselves.
Every email that goes through their systems is read and deeply understood by their AI.
Google and Microsoft train their AI directly on your email, addition they add significant generated information to the individual dossier they have on you (login / device / physical location are all being used to identify you now – you do not even need to be logged in for their systems to identify you! Even households have identities now!!).
Yahoo has one of the largest individualized datasets available and has been enumerating your data since the beginning (I imagine Redmond as well – Google initially promised not to, but then… money). Remember when Yahoo was going bankrupt? Verizon bought them for $5B in 2017 and sold them for $5B in 2021 to a private firm and little is known now, but the company is thought to be worth $10-20B today in 2026. (Lest we forget, Microsoft offered $44B in 2008)
That is your identity (data) at work making them rich and you more exposed to crime, scams and exploitation.
—————–END RANT—————-
So what do we do about this? Ultimately, our only hope is to pee in the pool. Destroy the integrity of their data. Make it worthless. Tell Copilot you like to wear pantyhose and play rugby. Gemini will tell everyone I’m a Astronaut. Devalue their information. No one will pay them for their poor quality information about me. (Didn’t I just promise that the rant was over?)
But till then, we can take the fairly simple and affordable step of setting up a personal email account on a secure server that we control. Remove this, most sensitive of information, from them and their damned AI.
Please check out my guide HERE for more information about email hosting. (coming soon! -ed)
I am still not totally pleased with last years HTPC rebuild – the Super Low Power HTPC / NAS. While it did achieve everything I set out to do, our usage and some odd file transfer behavior have me looking to redo the redo.
Usage wise, we nearly entirely use the system to watch sketchy internet streams as we no longer play the streaming provider game. (Well, AppleTV cause F1… well really cause Wife.)
On the current system, that means Sandboxie, as the old, power sipping i3 can not run MS Sandbox due to limited resources. With the current state of online streaming being what it is (shitshow), I need serious protection if I’m going to thedaddy or whatever is the new. Sandbox mode at least. Preferable would be a immutable system. I will likely need to seperate HTPC and NAS functions as well – seems super sketch to keep those eggs together at this point.
My overall goal from the past build was easily achieved… Incredible power reduction (90% + reduction), and continuous availability to the network. Expect a writeup on that soon.
At least their new stuff is UTTER SHIT compared to their old stuff, so there is no need to buy any new Logitech Shit. They will fuck you. Painfully. And they like it that way.
First it was Squeezebox, now they have turned all of the Harmony remotes into landfill. AND LOGITECH DARES TO CLAIM “FOR THE PLANET” BULLSHIT.
I certainly expect to find that China is deeply involved in this shit – this is not Canadian behavior.
Okay, WTH is Rob talking about now?! We should be running our own Proxies?
Rob explains the issues with VPN’s today and has a few suggestions. Among them is to run your own internet proxy. He suggests software like Shadowsocks, VLESS + Reality, and Hysteria 2 (at 15:00 in the video)
Today I took my first true adventure into the world of Data Hoarding when I discovered you can download all of Wikipedia in a .Zim file no larger than a modern Triple-A game… and I downloaded it! It was a grand total of 109 Gigabytes. If you have a decent internet speed it shouldn’t take you longer than 1 hour. Just thought I’d share here because it’s cool having Wikipedia stored away on your personal storage devices, and in the event of the internet going out it might come in handy.
Edit: Since lots of people were asking how to do this here are the links to the tutorial I followed and to the download directory page for the Zim files.
I’m a Locate32 fan, from way back. Sure, I’ve tried Everything, but it is so heavy compared to Locate. Always running and for what? I know where everything recent is. Continuous indexing is not needed (in a normal single user environment). When I’m looking (like, using a program to find it “looking”), it is for old stuff. Locate32 indexes on demand and only take a few minutes, so you can do it as part of your sleuthing process.
However, this project, which adds command line functions to Everything, might get me to rethink things…
I think I finally found one of those quote thingies I can put at the bottom of my email!
“The industry is asking you to own nothing and be happy. Computers are no longer a bicycle for the mind. They are becoming the self-driving car that takes you directly to the destination.” – Nirav Patel
Couldn’t agree more with this article. My 2016 F06 640GC is quite the ride and just as easy to maintain as my other BMWs. And best of all, this was the last platform for the N55, ergo, the most refined version of the engine, and the car comes with the older iDrive system.
The M6 pushes it too far in my opinion, with that terrible hot 8 engine which, in reality, almost never gets to be fully utilized. It does make a glorious sound at red lights, but otherwise it is simply over the top in all regards compared to the 640. $4000 a wheel carbon ceramic brakes? For what? The 640 ($250/wheel) will break hard enough to trigger antilocks at the same distance that the M6 will trigger it’s antilock – that is under the control of the tires, so you never really get to use those expensive brakes unless you are tracking the car. And lets be honest, this is NOT a track car in any way. My ’15 F32 is 5000% a better track car, and it is not even the M version of that line!
So get the non-M version with perhaps some of the finer features if you can find them (upgraded leather, B&W radio) and none of the extra crap (lane control, adaptive cruise, etc), and enjoy one of the best cars from what will surely be known as the “peak car” era.
The coupe lost value the quickest, and is quite close to bottom at this point. The convertible seems a car without a cause, no one wants to sit in the back of a convertible… it sucks, even if this one has enough room for adults, they still don’t want to be back there. The GC, or sedan as the rest of the world would call it, at least offers a hint of usable rear seats, but more frequently is where I put the groceries as you are not supposed to put any liquid in the trunk as that is where the computers are. Of course.
Typical to many $100k cars, these have likely been taken car of and were not the prior owners daily driver, so low mileage examples are all over the place.
And the best part of all? BMW choose to outfit the platform with the older 3G Telemetry, so now the car is no longer connected to their servers! Yea!
