Recently, I discovered that a family member’s device on my home network had been DNS-hijacked. This was only brought to my attention because some sites on that machine were resolving to fraudulent servers. This made me concerned about what the other devices on my network may be up to. I decided to do some research […]

About a year ago, I wrote about how to use OpenVPN to provide secure remote access to your home network and its resources to start building your own private cloud. I have been incrementally adding network services since. Recently, I’ve started using WireGuard instead of OpenVPN. I’ve found that the configuration is far simpler, while […]

Recently, I had trouble getting ahold of my wife at home. She had forgotten to take her phone off Do Not Disturb mode, and when I tried to call, she didn’t answer. This happens fairly often, so to address this problem, I decided to build a text-to-speech “Squawk box” using a Raspberry Pi and some […]

We can block trackers and ads while we browse the web with Firefox. But there are still a lot of apps and connected devices that may be tracking us. By setting up network-level ad blocking through DNS, we can further protect our privacy and prevent annoying ads. We will be using Pi-Hole, an excellent free […]

This post is a brief intermission from self-hosting, focusing instead on protecting your privacy while browsing the web. The information in this post can be used regardless of whether or not you have started your self-hosting journey.

Services like YouTube, Netflix, Spotify, and other streaming services are convenient, and I still use some of them. However, the content they offer changes frequently, with some things becoming unavailable due to changes in licensing, or varying depending on which country you are in. When you buy your content free of digital rights management (DRM), […]

In my previous post, I described how to set up an SMB file server with automated backups using Rsync/Rclone. In this post, we’ll be setting up a privacy-focused alternative to cloud note-taking services like Apple Notes, Evernote, or Google Keep.

In my previous post, I described how to access a private network remotely by creating a VPN server using OpenVPN and a Raspberry Pi. Now that we can connect to our local network remotely, we can set up a system to serve files outside our network.

I recently became very concerned about online privacy when I discovered that Google was maintaining a list of everything I’ve purchased and every flight I’ve taken. I had known that Gmail sorts and filters emails for advertising purposes, but seeing everything consolidated was a big surprise and concern to me.