Early this week I set up an old Lenovo ThinkCentre to run a headless install of Ubuntu, and started playing around with some projects I’ve heard of from others, but never used myself. First up: Pi-hole, a network-wide ad blocking option. It took a little while to get everything configured the way I wanted, and I’m still working through some odd behavior, but overall I like it. Most of my browsers already have some form of ad-blocking enabled, but this works even with devices I don’t have as many options on (phone, iPad, etc).
I’m still sticking with OmniFocus, and actually started using one of their slightly more advanced features, Mail Drop. I’ve used similar functionality on Todoist to auto-forward certain types of emails as tasks to my inbox, and I’m happy to now have the same workflow set up with OmniFocus.
I spent some time digging into Tailscale’s permissions management options, and was pleasantly surprised at how easy it is to configure. I wanted to start limiting certain connections on my tailnet, instead of leaving settings wide-open, and within minutes I was able to set up a few simple rules that put things in a much better (and arguably more secure) state.
A few weeks ago I heard about LocalSend, an app that gives you an AirDrop-like experience between virtually any two machines, on the Linux Matters podcast, but didn’t have a reason to use it at the time. Fast-forward to this weekend, and I needed to transfer some large files between two machines on the same network, but didn’t have another mechanism set up. In almost no time at all, I was able to download the app on both machines, and send the files… it was one of the most “it just works” experiences I’ve had in a while. I highly recommend checking it out.
