Recent content on Blake Ashley Jr.
I travel often. Sometimes I use a VPN, sometimes I don’t. I use a heavily customized Firefox config on Linux. Cloudflare challenges have made large portions of the web unusable for me. Some recent examples The “unsubscribe” button in Indeed’s job notification emails leads me to an impassable Cloudflare challenge. The “Contact Us” page is also behind an…
I have tried every productivity system imaginable, pairing them with every conceivable app out there, spending countless hours tuning dials and configuring things just the way I need “to get work done.” For many years, Todoist was my go-to tool. However, I decided to transition away due to concerns about data sovereignty. In my quest for the perfect system, I set up countless rules,…
In an era where digital dependence is commonplace, I moved towards personal tech independence in 2023. This blog post details my transition away from mainstream tech giants and towards more secure, private, and autonomous alternatives. Breaking Free from the Norm In 2023, I finally broke free from the likes of Google, Facebook, and other tech giants—a commitment I’d long made to myself but…
In his excellent book, The Righteous Mind , Jonathan Haidt details a metaphor for the relationship between our conscious and unconscious minds: the elephant and the rider. The rider thinks he controls the towering beast because it generally follows his commands, slowly lumbering from side to side at the pull of the reins. Little does the rider know, the elephant could throw the rider to his death…
Tucker Carlson Tonight was the most popular primetime news show in the US from April 2020 until the shows sudden cancelation on April 24, 2023. Carlson was suddenly fired due in large part to text messages that were likely to come out if the Dominion Voting Systems defamation lawsuit were to go to trial, causing the Fox board to pay nearly $800M to settle the case. They were leaked anyway. His…
John Wick 4 is bigger, better, badder than any other fighting-focused action movie, ever. It improves on the earlier installments with its creativity, scale, and precision. Of course, I am only talking about the fighting. The plot was relatively weak, as it was in the others, but man was the fighting good. The people who said it was too long were wrong. In John Wick 4, nearly every character, no…
I have made a career out of WordPress. I am personally responsible for the security, stability, and updates of 500+ active WordPress installations (not including the few multi-sites.) Collectively, they receive hundreds of thousands of unique visitors per day . I have grown to love WordPress over the years, wholeheartedly recommending it to friends, family, and clients for all sorts of use-cases,…