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If you’re from the Midwest, anywhere in the Midwest. It’s all exactly the same.

Source: Went on crazy long road trips as a young adult looking for something new; ended up moving somewhere completely outside the region later.

One thing I want to bring up just so you’re conscious of it is WiFi calling.

I currently use Tailscale and a sophisticated setup to route traffic via commercial VPNs. I also do a ton of DNS ad/tracking blocking which Tailscale wasn’t really designed for (and requires a rat’s nest of routing, iptables and the like).

I’ve noticed I never receive incoming calls now even while attempting to send traffic to my carrier’s WiFi calling server (it’s just another traditional VPN server at a technical level) through the nearest Tailscale exit node.

All this is to say, if you want WiFi calling to work you should consider this. I believe it’s the same for Android and iPhone.

As for the traditional VPN bit I kind of discovered this a few years ago when using one of those mobile cellular gateways you can plug into your LAN (I lived in a dead zone). When looking up my current carrier’s WiFi calling server (a different carrier) I realized the port matches the same VPN thing they were doing on the cellular gateway, so I think it’s fairly common for wireless carriers to just use a VPN to get you into their backend.

I killed off ads in the News app by blocking doh.apple.com. I find it kind of funny that it looks up its DoH server IP using the existing DNS server and that simply returning NXDOMAIN cuts it off.

Not sure if they use it for much more than that though (doesn’t seem like it).

I just ignore them completely. They don’t exist for me. Depending who it is, I can say “I didn’t have time to listen to it but next time if you text/message I can probably get back to it faster.”

My wife was raised in a culture where this is extremely rude. I know she hates it so I just take the bowl into the kitchen and finish it off there. I don’t want to screw around with the spoon for 10 hours either.

People that leave trash in my car, usually the same people that exclaim “your car is so clean” when they first get in and see that it’s completely empty save for a few things in the glovebox.

You need to block Google completely. Simply abstaining from Google services and/or using a browser ad blocker will do you no good — like 80%* of apps / the web include their tracking assets (among many others).

* Just a number I pulled out of my ass, don’t sue me

Maybe DNS or IP blocking, but blocking only in the browser likely won’t be helpful as apps (on basically any platform) also track users by calling assets on their domains.

I definitely think it’s cultural/regional. I was highly sarcastic with everyone in real life growing up, but moving across the country I came off as extremely rude and have met people from all different parts of the world that only appreciate certain nuances/layers of sarcasm and have adjusted myself accordingly.

I already VPN 99% of my traffic offshore. Do you think the threat to VPNs is eminent? I’ve been thinking about shadowsocks a lot but I’m not sure.