The Great VPN Humiliation: Why the Government Actually Backed Down
If you woke up on 15 July feeling a strange sense of relief, you aren’t alone. After months of posturing, rhetoric, and vaguely defined threats toward privacy tools, the UK…
Self-Hosting
The Vicious Circle: Beyond the Political Theatre
Watching a Prime Minister resign in a flurry of headlines is a classic British distraction. While the news cycle fixates on who’s moving into Number 10, the laws they actually…
The “Nude” Ultimatum: My Phone is Not a Government Narc
The UK government has officially gone off the deep end, giving Apple and Google a three-month ultimatum: build device-level scanning to detect “illegal images” or we’ll pass laws to force…
Plex, Plex Pass, and the Slow Creep of Enshittification
I’ve been a Plex user since 2012. Back then, I paid around £50 for a lifetime Plex Pass. It felt like a bargain. Plex was a genuinely useful piece of…
From Tailscale to WireGuard: Why I Built a Private VPN with Two VPSes
In my ongoing quest for digital sovereignty, I recently replaced Tailscale with a plain WireGuard setup that I control myself. No third-party control plane, no extra SaaS layer, no mystery…
My 3-2-1 Backup Strategy: Why I Swapped MEGA S4 for Scaleway S3
A 3-2-1 backup rule is the industry standard for data survival, dictated by the logic that any single point of failure is a guaranteed disaster waiting to happen. It requires…
The Browser Sync Privacy Rabbit Hole
It started at 5am. I was up before the rest of the family, so I did what any sensible person with poor sleep habits and a mild obsession with privacy…
Setting Up My Son’s First Blog: A Self-Hosting Journey
As someone who runs a WordPress site myself, I naturally thought setting one up for my nine-year-old son would be a breeze. After all, I know the ins and outs…
The DNS Safety Net: Why I Run Three AdGuard Instances
In my first post, I talked about my love for Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) and my general disdain for the “Big Tech” data-harvesting machine. Today, I want to…