I Would Like To Take My Dash And Print It Out Like A Newspaper. I Want To Thumb Through Its Pages. I

I would like to take my dash and print it out like a newspaper. I want to thumb through its pages. I want to sit on a bench in the park and just read my dash, without having to stare at my tiny phone with the brightness at ten million on the shitty app to look at each post one by one and scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll. I want to hold it in my hands. That would be nice :)

Most people wouldn't say that Stack Overflow is in any way obscure, but then again most people don't really go below the surface of simply asking and maybe answering. Most people have no idea that, for example, Stack Overflow has it's own chat server which, although it hasn't been updated in years, is quite possibly the best system of it's type that I've ever used. In fact, there are actually two different servers, one for Stack Overflow and one for the rest of the Stack Exchange Network.

But that's how I got my start to being online. Way back when I didn't even have any social media, I made a Stack Overflow account to ask a terrible (now deleted (not by me (pretty sure it got roomba'd))) question about some especially tricky programming question that I couldn't solve after days of searching. As I used the site more, I began learning more about how it functions and the systems that underpin it, and eventually found my way to meta and then to chat, where I found a very friendly room of people who were the first real software engineers I got to know.

The only problem is that the userbase on stack overflow skews pretty old, especially compared to me at the time, and I think I picked up a lot of my internet-speak from them. Even now, when talking to closer to me in age, I frequently get called out for sounding old or being a boomer, which I think is on account of the dialect of internet I first picked up.

Also, feel like I gotta throw this in, but I know stack overflow gets a lot of shit thrown at it for being hard to approach and for being rude/unwelcoming/mean/heavy handed etc etc I'm sure you've heard the refrain. But as someone who's gotten to know how all these systems work, I promise it isn't all that scary once you understand how to approach it. Anyways, I'm getting off topic, but maybe I'll post about how to be a new user on stack overflow one of these days :P

What was your obscure chatroom/forum that you used before social media? Don’t say Gaia Online or Club Penguin. I’m talking obscure.

hey hi! so i talk to computers. and well uh no I'm not going to write an install guide for non-computer-people, yes the one on their website requires tech know-how, but that's because it's really a totally different beast from normal ad-block. But, I do want to do an explain for what makes it different, and why yes, it's sorta better but also it's sorta worse than conventional adblock!

But first, a little about the internet and ads because we'd be really lost without this context: The internet is just a lot of computers talking to each other. To load a website, your computer asks another computer for the website, and then that computer will give you back the website you asked for. But how do we know which computers to ask for which websites?? You can't ask tumblr's computers for facebook.com and you can't ask the ASPCA's computers for reddit.com because those websites aren't on those computers.

To solve this problem, there's a system much like an address book ("DNS") that lets your computer look up who's computers to ask for which website. Sure, you have to know where the computer that owns the DNS address book is, but once you know that you can find anyone!

DNS isn't the whole picture though -- when I use the internet I don't just ask for "tumblr.com," I want a specific page on tumblr.com like perhaps tumblr.com/blog/pile-o-words. To do that, I ask DNS which computer runs tumblr.com, and then I tell that computer to give me "/blog/pile-o-words" (along with a bunch of other metadata like that I'm using firefox, that I'm a logged in user, that I'm on desktop, etc).

The important thing to note here is that DNS only knows about domain names. It doesn't know anything else, which is a good thing and a bad thing. More on this later.

So now we know enough to talk about how conventional adblock works! When I ask facebooks computers for facebook.com, they'll send me back the code for facebook.com, but that's not the whole story -- perhaps one of the posts has an image that's actually stored on imagur.com! So the code for facebook.com will say "go get this image from imagur.com and then show it in this slot." A similar thing happens for ads! Most companies don't host ads on their own servers, they instead use an "ad broker" (which usually is also a data aggregator). They'll instead say "go get an ad from eviladbroker123.com and then show it in this slot."

Conventional ad-blockers look at every single request that goes out of your browser and checks all the details to decide if it should be blocked or not! Sometimes looking at just the domain name isn't enough because the same domain will host both good and evil -- as an example, google hosts the stuff that's used for CAPTCHA as well as ads. This allows maximum effectiveness! However it only works in your browser. Anything else on your computer that uses the internet is totally unaffected.

Pi-hole works totally differently. It needs to run on a separate computer in your house (the name implies that it was originally designed for the Raspberry Pi but it'll run on anything linux really). It replaces your local DNS server (remember, the address book) and convinces everything on your network to use it for all their DNS queries. Then, when anyone asks it "hey where's eviladbroker123.com" it says "haha fuck you nope not telling."

The upside is that it covers everything. Well, mostly. It's actually possible to avoid DNS if the software developers coded the addresses of their servers into the program, but that's pretty rare. However the downside is that it's a very blunt tool -- it can only block by domain name, nothing more granular.

Ad-block on the other hand, can be incredibly granular, but doesn't work on all network traffic/all devices. Personally, I use conventional ad-block just cuz I don't have all that much tech in my home and I use some nice adblock in my browser. I don't think I'd really benefit all that much, and I've learned that domain names being such a blunt tool means that sometimes things will just... mysteriously break. If it's in adblock, I can push a button and fix it, whereas I think pi-hole would be a lot less approachable.

Anyways hopefully this was useful, if you wanna set up pi-hole and have questions uhhhhh send me an ask or something I'd love to help but for now it's dinnertime :P

Oh also PS you can just load the pi-hole blocklists into other adblockers like UBlock Origin (and probably other ones, but I use UBO) :P

extremely excited about that pi-hole thing looking forward to trying it out but a big issue with cool projects like these is almost always that they’re made by people with a lot of technical knowhow and so the install guides they write inevitably wildly overestimate the technical knowhow of the average person. and that’s fine for the original audience of seasoned online computer nerds™ who already know what a dns and an ip and a port are but I think adblocking and network security and online privacy are rights that should be available to even the dumbest densest motherfuckers alive whose knowledge of network management doesn’t extend beyond being able to point the repair guy to where the router is. like im happy for the op of that twitter thread but you shouldn’t need to have a family member who knows about stuff like this to experience the joys of intercepting ads at the network level yknow. not an accusation or anything mostly just a humble request towards cool developers who happen to see this post to consider the explanatory needs of people who have never seen a command prompt in their life but would still enjoy using your product

I think that it’s difficult for anyone who wasn’t of age in 2001 to fully appreciate just how fucking bonkers American culture went in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. I don’t even mean the wave of hate crimes and military invasions; I mean things like, overnight, American TV shows went from depicting torture as a great evil to depicting it as a Good and Necessary Thing to Defend the Homeland; cafeterias in government buildings in Washington DC started listing french fries as “freedom fries” after Jacques Chirac opposed the invasion of Iraq; there was an NHL hockey game in 2002 where the guy who was to sing the Canadian anthem had his car set on fire by a frenzied mob chanting “USA! USA! USA!”; Evanescence had to add aggressive male rapping as a backup vocal to “Wake Me Up Inside” because her label was concerned that the culture had become too feminised; there was a government “terror alert” system that, every few days, would issue vague threats and warnings about formerly innocuous behaviours; Donald Rumsfeld briefly became a sex symbol; they postponed the release of Spider-Man for reshoots to incorporate more patriotic imagery; and all of this is barely scratching the surface.

Every time I make a post, before I hit the "post" button I'll proofread it 7 times and see nothing wrong. Then immediately after posting I'll notice at least 3 mistakes. I'll edit to fix those, but noooo that's not enough. Instead, each time someone reblogs it I'll be forced to notice a NEW minor error. I have been cursed by the blogging gods. I've edited errors out of my last long post on FOUR separate occasions after getting a notification for a like or a reblog. My eyes are simply unable to notice the mistakes of their own creation until I am forced to face the fact that other people actually read the words I type. thank god there's no edit history

oh my god I just discovered that I can turn off the endless scroll. this site was literally built with me in mind. im in heaven.