In this episode, I discuss my decision to purchase the Insta360 camera as a replacement for my previous web camera. The camera offers high-quality streaming, 4k resolution, and unique features like a gimbal and AI tracking. It has excellent image quality, but comes with a higher price compared to other models. Despite a few drawbacks, I am very satisfied with its functionality and recommend it for education, training, and online content creation. Check the show notes for visuals and feel free to reach out with feedback or questions. Farewell and best wishes to the listeners!

My short demo of the camera can be found here:

https://youtu.be/ysfXe8bTp0E 

In episode 144 of Martin & Cut, we discussed Apple's September 12th event and Google's privacy sandbox. We explored the privacy sandbox's impact on user data control and speculated about the new iPhone's features. We also touched on potential Apple Watch upgrades and highlighted Apple's commitment to environmental sustainability. Don't forget to tune in next time for a camera review or discussion.

Links related to the privacy platform:

• https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/09/googles-widely-opposed-ad-platform-the-privacy-sandbox-launches-in-chrome/
• https://privacysandbox.com
• https://brave.com/web-standards-at-brave/6-privacy-sandbox-concerns/

In this episode, we discuss the benefits of habits and routines. We emphasize the importance of a morning routine and finding opportune moments throughout the day to establish additional routines. We also explore the process of establishing new habits and share tips from books focused on habit formation.Join us for a product review in the next episode and don't forget to recommend the podcast to a friend!

The picture of the car almost in the Amsterdam canal

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Martin does his yearly ”walkabout”. Hiking with the dog alone for a couple of days. A way to gather thoughts and prepare for the year ahead. This years walkabout happens in Dalarna and involves the Norra Mora Wildmark, Våmhuskölen, Anjosvarden and Stopåns nature reserves. An area bigger than 200 square kilometers. 

This episode is different and a test, a practice, in storytelling and a different format. Feel free to give me some feedback at martin (at) mbh . se. 

The nature reserves can be found here:

• Norra Mora Vildmark
• Våmhuskölen
• Anjosvarden
• Stopån

Martin talk about journalling. 

What is it all about and from a scientific stand point; what are the positive effects of writing a journal. Some of the positive effects are; lowered stress, increased productivity, larger working memory, better immune system and lower blood preasure. 

Martin talk about his current journalling process and that he is using paper and pen. 

Links mentioned in this episode: 

[1] https://www.tryhabitual.com/journal/the-science-behind-journaling

[2] https://www.intelligentchange.com/blogs/read/benefits-of-journaling

[3] https://www.reflection.app/blog/benefits-of-journaling

In this episode of Martin Uncut, Martin discusses the importance of effective list management and shares his personal experiences with different list managers. He emphasize the need to create actionable tasks and focus on concrete next actions rather than just creating projects and goals. He mentions using his list manager as a project repository and highlights the usefulness of including an inbox to capture ideas and tasks that cannot be immediately addressed.Martin acknowledges the temptation to constantly search for the perfect list manager but emphasizes that there is no perfect application. He share his experiences with various list managers, starting with phpGTD, a small web application that served him well until it became outdated. He then moved on to a Java application called Thinking Rock, and later tried apps like Todledo, Remember the Milk, and Things before settling on Nozbe for seven years.However, his journey didn't end there. The host attended a meetup where OmniFocus was highly recommended and decided to give it a try. After initially finding it complicated, he went back to Nozbe but returned to OmniFocus when version 3 was released. He invested more time in setting it up and used it successfully for a couple of years.Last year, Martin wanted to try something new and switched to Todoist. He discuss the browser-based app and its features, comparing the user interface to other apps like Obsidian and Craft. He talk about the ability to create projects and subfolders, as well as the usefulness of tags for context. Martin also mentions the power of filters in Todoist but finds them somewhat cumbersome to set up.Martin shares his preference for relying on their calendar for tasks with specific deadlines rather than adding due dates to tasks in Todoist. He mention the task flags feature but advise against using it in accordance with the principles of Getting Things Done. He explain how he personally use flags in his morning routine to prioritize tasks for the day.While the Martin has some issues with Todoist, such as difficulty in setting up filters and a lack of a smooth email integration, he still recommend it to certain people as a versatile and affordable option. However, he recently made the decision to switch back to OmniFocus due to his dissatisfaction with Todoist's clarifying process and missed features such as the ability to set defer dates.Martin talks about his positive experience with OmniFocus, highlighting its simplicity and intuitive clarifying process. He mention the integration with his email client, Airmail, and the ability to hide tasks temporarily using defer dates. He discuss his project organization in OmniFocus, emphasizing the importance of simplification and reducing the number of contexts.In the final part of the podcast, Martin summarizes their recommendations for effective list management, such as simplifying the task manager, relying on calendars for time-sensitive tasks, utilizing deferred dates, and avoiding complex automations. He encourage listeners to find a list manager that works for them and invite feedback and suggestions for future episodes.

I'm back with a new episode. 

In this episode I talk about note takers specifically Obsidian, Evernote and Craft. I go in detail about what I use the applications for, how I use them and how I structure my information inside them to give me as much value as possible. 

You get my favourite and most used obsidian plugins. Pros and cons about the applications and what tool I am currently using the most. 

I am happy to receive feedback on this episode. Feel free to email me at podcast at m b h . s e  

Topics of the day

• Broken network
• Update to the DuckDuckGo story

Broken network

As I mentioned in both episode 135 and 136, I have made some changes to my network setup. I now have a nice private network between different sites setup using VPN. Multiple NAS:es has been setup and data is flowing freely in this private network. This is great. 

During the setup of the network I realised that me and Michael by pure chance was using the same IP-network segments - and no it was not the 192.168.1.0/24 network that seems to be the one that everyone is using. To not break the routing - since a network cannot exist in two places at the same time - one of us had to change. And since I am a nice guy… 

I looked through my configuration and there was actually just a few things that I really needed to change. It was the interface IP of the firewall and the IP-ranges that the local DHCP-server was serving. So as I sometimes say, no one remembers a coward, and changed the IPs. The network went down and didn’t go up again. 

Reboot if the router. Reboot of the router. And I for saw a re-setup of the router and all the VPNs and everything. But by pure chance I tried to use my RoadWarrior VPN - and I was so surprised when that still worked. I was still able to connect to the router through that. I was also able to connect to the office on the other side of one of the VPN tunnels. But the local network was down. 

I probably spent an hour or two troubleshooting. The setup just looked fine. There was nothing wrong with it. I checked DHCP-server, firewall rules, NAT . Yeah everything you could thing off. But no luck. 

After a while I did the standard setup guide of the router. It makes the basic config of the router. And then the local network went up. For 2 minutes. Then it was down again. Did the setup guide again. Network worked for 10 minutes and went down. That was strange. But it made me think about the pfBlockerNG that I setup a few weeks ago to block TikTok traffic. That is the only thing I could think about that was doing anything on a time-base in the router. To be sure I disabled it and deinstalled it - and after that no problem with the network going down. 

I still can’t explain what was causing it but when the rules engine ran to update the sites to block - it also blocked my internal network. Since this was an internal blocklist it was not visible to in the UI and hard to find. This is a thing that could take a long time to find and I am pretty happy that I did. I still haven’t reinstalled it and reconfigured the block-lists — that is a project for a calm weekend in the future. But it so brought back memories from the old days when I was working as a network technician setting up big networks. 

The good thing is that I now have a new IP network range and we could configure the networks. Learning - next time - let Michael change his IP-range instead…. 

Update to the DuckDuckGo story

In episode 137 I talked about the new that DuckDuckGo got caught not blocking all 3rd party cookies in their browser but allowed Microsofts cookies. After releasing the episode I got pinged by Gabriel Weinberg, the CEO and founder of DDG. He stated that they do block 3rd party cookies from Microsoft and sent a link to a reddit article - of course linked in the show notes - where he explains in what way the do not do this. 

The article states that they do block 3rd-party tacking cookies - e.g. the carrier of the individual id to be placed on the computer - even from Microsoft. They also have the capability to block 3rd-party scripts - e.g. the script that will put the cookie in the first place. They do this for most 3rd-party trackers but not for Microsoft. This means that Microsoft can still track your activity on a site where their tracking script is available - but they will have a much harder time to track you cross sites since their cookie identifying you will not be available. This will likely still give enough information to Microsoft to still identify you though different fingerprinting technologies. 

So yes blocking third-party cookies but allow the 3rd party scripts from some providers. Splitting hairs in my opinion. 

I am still thinking that DDG are genuinely trying to do a good thing but has gotten some issues since they are a private company that needs to pay their staff. The big failure here is still the lack of transparency - if they were just open and honest about what they do and don't do this would be a non-issue. They allow some scripts - we know about the Microsoft scripts - who else are they allowing and why. Just be open about it - it will be found and leaked any way. 

And to iterate - this whole discussion is about the DDG browser not the DDG search. I see no problems with the search. 

On Wednesday Bleeping Computer reported that DuckDuckGo allowed trackers from Microsoft but blocked most other 3rd party trackers. That caused a storm in twitter - but what is that all about? But let's break this down. 

What is a tracker - it sounds ominous  - like a spy bot following every step you take. It is just a cookie, a small text-file, that the browser store on your computer. The content is unique and is used to identify you. As you surf around on the network your browser will submit the cookie when requested to do so and this is how you are tracked. 

What is a third-party tracker. Essentially it means that a website includes a script from a 3rd party - this script provides functionality and sometimes these places a tracking cookie. If this script is used by multiple sites the script provider can track how people moves around the network. One example can be the google analytics scripts - they will measure traffic for the website but at the same time be able to track user across websites. Facebook can do the same through their like buttons etc. 

DuckDuckGo is famous for their privacy friendly search engine. But it was not the search engine that this was about. Using the search engine you are private - you are not being tracked. Not even by the ads nestled into the search result. The ads that are being displayed are only context sensitive ads and doesn’t build a profile on you. Ads provided are proxied through DuckDuckGo making sure that you are not leaking any data. As long as you don’t click on an ad you are private. But clicking an ad will provide some data about you (IP and browser information) to Microsoft. No search query or profile (there is none) will be provided to Microsoft. But the second you leave DuckDuckGo you can be tracked by 3rd party trackers on the sites you go to - depending on the browser and setup you have. This is not the fault of DuckDuckGo - but of the sites you visit.

DuckDuckGo also has a private browser - it can be found in the Apple App Store and Google Play store. It is this application, not search, that is not blocking Microsoft tracker cookies. One of it key features is just to block 3rd party trackers. But since the DuckDuckGo company has some agreements to deliver Ads for Yahoo/Microsoft they are not allowed to hinder any of their tracking assets. That is why their browser doesn’t block the Microsoft owned 3rd party trackers. 

So, do you need to be worried about this? If you are not using the DuckDuckGo browser - no, with the information available at this point you should be safe. If you are using the DuckDuckGo browser - yes, then you should be aware that Microsoft can track you. Clear your browser cookies often and diligently. Or switch browser. 

I think that DuckDuckGo genuinely tries to do the right thing. If you don’t want to be tracked - use a different browser - such as Firefox with a bar-age of blocking plugins or why not use brave? 

Minor issues like the one reported is to be expected even from a company like DDG. It costs money. A lot of money to run and operate a search engine. And they need to make money some how. With agreements you sometimes have to give a way some small things to gain the bigger piece. I think they do what they say - not tracking their users.

The root cause comes down to infrastructure. Internet is fundamentally built like an ever growing network of networks. Where each part is working autonomously. Look at the basic services like DNS, Email and Web. These where all foundational pieces. Image only having one DNS-provider, or a handful of email suppliers or that one web-host? That is hard to image. But when it comes to search we have allowed just that. Search is a fundamental part of internet and if this had been understood in the cradle of internet - we would probably se search be working similar to email or DNS. Be autonomous and distributed. 

We shouldn’t allow a handful of companies sit on the power of search. Just as social media such as Mastodon can be made distributed or video such as Peertube - search should be something distributed. We all should be able to setup our own search engine and gather and federate the index. That would be a game changer for internet freedom. 

But until we have a federated, secure and privacy friendly search in place, I will continue to use DuckDuckGo. 

Let's continue the story from this Monday. Should we!?

It is fantastic to have a NAS. You do not really have to worry about running out of space. And if you are getting close to that point it is fairly easy to just expand it by adding more drives. Storage is really cheap these days. And it will likely only get cheaper with time - that is relatively speaking. More MB per $ spent - or I should probably say more TB per $ spent. 

It is however not only "gold and green forests" - that is a very Swedish expression and would translate to the land of milk and honey. Keeping the data safe is a challenge when the size grows. And this is how I have solved it. 

My NAS is in my office - this is available through VPN to my home or via a Road Warrior VPN. I can always get access to my files. It is equipped with 4 4TB drives running in a raid configuration meaning a drive can fail and the data will still be fine. But what if I have multiple disk failures at once or if have a fire or a break in. The data needs to be backed up offsite. 4 x 4TB in raid equates to roughly 10TB of usable disk space. 

The approach me (and Michael) solved this was to fix an additional Synlogoy NAS (Michael had a 920+, 4 bay over) and buy a bunch of disk. I bought 3 16TB -- running these in raid will give you close to 28TB of usable disk space. We setup the device and put it in a place that me and Michael both have network access to. Then we can backup our NASes to this unit. That means we can have multiple disk failures, burglaries and fires and the data should still be safe. Don't worry the units are not publicly accessible on the net - VPN access is required to get to the data. 

With Synology you can do this in many different ways. The way we did this was to use a Synology backup application called "Hyper Backup" - this runs on my NAS in the office. I configure it to connect to the backup NAS by schedule and backup the files from my NAS according to my choices. I also can encrypt the data on the client side before it is sent to the backup NAS. This means that I can be sure that Michael cannot look into what I have on my NAS and he can be sure that I cannot see his - even though we both have full access to the backup NAS. That is really cool. 

Setup on our own NASes was really straight forward. It was even more simple on the backup NAS. There a small application called Hyper Backup Vault is installed - and no configuration is needed. Super easy. And that is a thing I value when it comes to setting things up. 

The main issue is now that network connections, especially from my office, is a bit slow. Backup is taking a long time - or at least the first one - after that the application should be doing a delta and thus only backing upp mew files and this speeds the whole process up quite a lot. To protect the networks from overload I also limited or shaped the traffic and in this process I used a few cool tools on the NASes. But I will save that for another episode. 

What's next with this backup solution? Well it will have to run for a while so that I can get comfortable with that it is running as it should. It is important that there is not service failures or missed out backups. Then in a few weeks I will do a restoration test. That is what most people forget to do - test that their backups are working and that data can be received out from them up on a failure. I will let you know how that goes.

I hope you enjoyed this episode - and if you did - why not recommend it to your best friends!? 

Tomorrow, Thursday, is a public holiday, no episode will be released. But I'm back here again on Friday! 

Ciao!