Oh awesome! So pleased to see Mistral AI integration for paperless-ai.

It can technically be used to extend your stay in Palau long enough to establish tax residency since it would allow you to stay in Palau for longer than 183 days a year. Not unusual for people sitting on big crypto stashes to move abroad or buy citizenships in order to cash out their crypto without capital gains tax (or at least that’s how it goes - I imagine the IRS doesn’t go down that easily).

The whole point of this card is basically to bypass KYC requirements for crypto exchanges that don’t allow US customers. They are very explicit about this in their marketing.

China scary tho

The X3 CPUs were essentially quad cores where one of the cores failed a quality control check. Using a higher end Mobo, it was possible to unlock the fourth core with varying results. This was a cheap consumer Acer prebuilt though, so I didn’t have that option.

I had a old Acer SFF desktop machine (circa 2009) with an AMD Athlon II 435 X3 (equivalent to the Intel Core i3-560) with a 95W TDP, 4 GB of DDR2 RAM, and 2 1TB hard drives running in RAID 0 (both HDDs had over 30k hours by the time I put it in). The clunker consumed 50W at idle. I planned on running it into the ground so I could finally send it off to a computer recycler without guilt.

I thought it was nearing death anyways, since the power button only worked if the computer was flipped upside down. I have no idea why this was the case, the computer would keep running normally afterwards once turned right side up.

The thing would not die. I used it as a dummy machine to run one-off scripts I wrote, a seedbox that would seed new Linux ISOs as it was released (genuinely, it was RAID0 and I wouldn’t have downloaded anything useful), a Tor Relay and at one point, a script to just endlessly download Linux ISOs overnight to measure bandwidth over the Chinanet backbone.

It was a terrible machine by 2023, but I found I used it the most because it was my playground for all the dumb things that I wouldn’t subject my regular home production environments to. Finally recycled it last year, after 5 years of use, when it became apparent it wasn’t going to die and far better USFF 1L Tiny PC machines (i5-6500T CPUs) were going on eBay for $60. The power usage and wasted heat of an ancient 95W TDP CPU just couldn’t justify its continued operation.

I really liked Miniflux and its clean design too too, but I found without an adequate categorization functionality, it quickly became overwhelming. Since I don’t check my RSS reader as often as I should, it eventually got overwhelming and I had to switch to FreshRSS.

A lot of these comments are downright unreasonable.

It’s important to evaluate your threat model critically. The average tourist (that isn’t going to Western China) or student is not a target for surveillance or data extrication attempts, especially firmware level attacks that are very specific to devices and are expensive to research and implement.

Companies tend to require employees to carry burner devices for international travel because that’s just good practice. You’re far more likely to lose your device when traveling, border officials have broad discretion to search for and access your devices, and companies tend to have high value information available to their devices past the corporate gateway, like trade secrets, technical designs, accounting records or employee data. That applies to any country, even Western countries.

Take your privacy seriously, but the notion that anything that touches Chinese soil means your devices are instantly compromised is a bit of a fallacious claim. Critically evaluate your role, the information you carry and why you might be the target of anything.

Anyways, as far as VPNs go - technically not illegal. Companies, universities, etc. all have sanctioned MLP gateways in Hong Kong to bypass the firewall. Every expat in China uses a VPN. There’s only one public case of anyone ever being arrested for using a VPN (and it was under a catch-all law), the others were all operators of ShadowSocks/V2Ray airports.

Tailscale and WireGuard is dicey in Mainland China. If you’re just a short term visitor, just buy a 3HK roaming sim for China and call it a day. As a best practice, you don’t really want to expose your self hosted services to the web anyways, so I would probably not even bother trying to VPN from a mainland connection directly.

I never got Plex or Jellyfin to work well on actual Mainland internet connections, simply because the Chinanet backbone that most people in China use is excruciatingly bottlenecked to the point that torrenting from other Chinese peers is just a much more pleasant experience.

People who are looking for direct integration between podcast players and SponsorBlock seem to be missing that a lot of podcasts these days that do have advertising in them oftentimes have dynamic ads where the ad audio will change depending on the day, the geographical location of the download, etc. So SponsorBlock can’t actually account for what are essentially dynamic timestamps Whereas with YouTube you typically have fairly static timestamps that can be shared across a user base, only smaller podcasts are really going to be able to be captured by SponsorBlock unless someone discovers a way to mod an Android APK to essentially prevent the client-side compilation of ads and the original podcast audio assuming that there is a podcast app that does this on the client side.

I mean, some bird species have mothers that essentially drop their fledglings to predators to distract from themselves (and their insecurities), or just simply don’t feel bothered to actually help raise them to maturity.

That’s definitely an interesting suggestion! but I probably wouldn’t risk my life over keeping a separate profile with a VPN on it.

From what I gathered, the deep-packet inspection appliances they’re deploying in Myanmar aren’t working off terribly advanced rulesets. They only seem to be blocking obvious VPN connections since VPN protocols like WireGuard, IKEv2, OpenVPN, etc. make no effort to obfuscate themselves as being a VPN connection.

There aren’t as many data points in Myanmar as one would like, but this Psiphon test from OONI seems to validate that even basic obfuscation is working in Myanmar.

Random phone checks for VPNs are definitely another level though, yikes.

The great firewall situation was always interesting, because if you would use a roaming Sim, then you will be able to access anything

Roaming SIMs work because the APN sets a network routing path outside of China.

Cool writeup. I remember implementing BBR many years ago when I was trying to bypass the Great Firewall for an extended stay. Helped deal greatly with the huge congestion on Chinanet backbone at the time, but it’s less of an issue these days now that foreigners can use CN2.

I remember visiting a youth summit here in Canada, and the Indonesian ambassador to Canada was present. I remember he got pretty exasperated that the only thing people in attendance knew about Indonesia was Bali (and thought it was Indonesia’s capital), despite being the world’s fourth largest country in population. He gave us all Indomie and ginger chews though - nice guy, but he got me hooked on Indomie for much of university.

Appreciate the thoughts. I’m not disagreeing with you I’ve heard Bhutan is debatable from a handful that have been there, simply because there’s a sizable amount of tourism from India and Bangladesh. The infrastructure for getting around and staying overnight is definitely there, but the diversity of attractions is very limited as well (heavily focused around temples), so I feel like it’s a bit of an edge case.

Since I heard this though, as I understand it, it appears that the freedom of movement for Indian citizens in Bhutan has been limited and the Sustainable Development Fee tax got reduced from 200 USD to 100 USD, because of how dramatically it impacted the amount of “high value tourism” they were getting.

I liked Solana Cain’s new photo essay in the Globe and Mail today about Bhutan. I probably ought to put it on my radar.

Basically. Keep in mind that these enterprise drives are often much better built and have much better QC than consumer level drives, so they can last forever. It’s kind of like debating between a used 4-year-old Toyota Corolla and a brand new Range Rover.