My insurance will not send emails to my first@last.family domain. Neither will several other systems. A number of systems flat out refuse to acknowledge that such a tld exists. (Improper assumptions about valid email addresses)
RethinkDNS does everything for me. You're tied to their DNS server if you want to use the in-app interface to make changes to the blocklists in use, but that's not a hard requirement. As a bonus, it also supports actual VPNs (wireguard, http connect, and socks proxy). If you don't care to micro-manage it, trackercontrol is also pretty good. There's other apps as well, like personalDNSfilter.
In this setup you're explaining, the phone is doing all the work though right? Filtering DNS and sending traffic to a wireguard VPN, is all done on the phone.
But it's not tunnelling traffic to a desktop station which then processes that traffic like its own (filters DNS as set up on the desktop, and forwards traffic through the same VPN that is set up on the desktop). Am I getting this right?
In that case, I suggest (not having tried it) that updating the OS and then resetting it might work better? Does Windows still have the reset option it had in win8?
The issue is the update license is different than full install licenses, and the red sticker oem licenses people scam are hardware specific.
You usually must pay for windows twice (or more if you don't know) to be Pro license compliant for commercial use.
Setting a machine up for multi-boot Linux/BSD is not always a simple process with every BIOS firmware, and configuring Windows to stop automatic encryption of NTFS volumes is nontrivial. Even with an offline install for games, if the OneDrive account is ever activated... files are upped to Microsoft cloud anyway.
Running an offline win11 account with a recent "rclone gui" NFS mounter for cloud APIs is a better option:
Thankfully, disarming Win11 TPM/Drive-boobytrap/BS-encryption/Spam is easy with Rufus, O&O ShutUp10, and Copilot removal (note undocumented AI API areas suggested RAT/snitch-ware... the final straw with Microsoft BS around here...)
I kept my floppy drive installed until I got tired of explorer freezing every time I accidentally selected it (quite often as I have a habit of navigating with the keyboard)
I detest magic links. I have probably 9-10 accounts with a certain service that uses magic links (I mostly use them to get an API key or download a file every few months and never visit directly otherwise) because
1. the only login method they support is magic link and login with Google/Facebook. There's no password field so my password manager can't fill out my login details for me.
2. I don't have a Facebook account, and I don't keep my Google account signed in. Even if I did, I don't want them using these as my primary email address. (I use a catch-all and don't give out the primary address; I give each service it's own address)
3. A bunch of newsletters and forums (hackaday, etc) mention them by name every few weeks, often in the subject field, making it hard to search for. They don't send me any newsletters themselves, and I don't participate in their forums so there's nothing from them directly. They can't do anything about this, but it makes things harder.
4. If you enter a new email address that they've never seen before, the process exactly the same until after you click the magic link you received. They don't tell you they've never seen it before until you verify the address.
5. As such, if I can't recall the exact address I used to sign in, I automatically create a new account and don't find out until after I click the magic link and I'm asked to enter a new username or use the existing username they've already created. Proceed to settings and create a new API key for a new account instead of just adding one to my existing account.
This is an extreme case, yes, but I have similar issues with several services that only support magic links and GitHub login, and it's hard to configure services to use a new catch-all address when they harvest my address from GitHub login and won't let me change it. Magic links are a great tool, but they should _never_ be the only option. They should supplement existing login methods. Password managers exist for a reason. Several services that I have since stopped using for this reason have in the past decided that they should start sending emails to the addresses they harvested from login with other service. Two services have gotten my magic link address stuck in their system because it's not associated with an account (the account has been deleted) and thus I can't manage subscriptions.
As much as I hate the weather app myself, this isn't an equivalent solution. The weather app shows the temperature in the taskbar itself, without opening anything. Also, I don't keep my browser open 24/7, so it's more than just loading a single extra tab, you need to wait for the browser process itself to start up.
If you want to load weather in a browser from the taskbar instead of having it available without having to open another application, I'd recommend using dillo or some such to load wttr.in or similar. A single http request that loads fast from a comparatively simple application that also loads fast. You might even be able to load it as a .hta file.
The DMCA doesn't care exactly how the authorization works, it only cares that it's needed.
Quote from Wikipedia[0] of DMCA section 103:
> No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.
> "circumvent a technological measure" means to descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work, or otherwise to avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological measure, without the authority of the copyright owner; and
> a technological measure "effectively controls access to a work" if the measure, in the ordinary course of its operation, requires the application of information, or a process or a treatment, with the authority of the copyright owner, to gain access to the work.
Worse is when the hotkey is underlined but doesn't actually work (multiple buttons with same hotkey, and instead of switching between them it just doesn't do anything. Admittedly this is rare). Or when the list is an MRU that can be navigated with the first letter of the item names, but some letters are reserved for static functions (looking at classic shell start menu: I can't start certain programs from the MRU or pinned list without the mouse because (A)pps Sh(u)tdown (S)ettings are reserved. Numeric helps with MRU, but can't be used in multiple places for the same reason)
