Recent content on ParanoidPenguin.net
Have you ever wondered which clearnet web domains (as in not onions) are the most popular among users of The Onion Router project (Tor)? Is there any evidence to support the popular mainstream opinion that Tor is predominantly used by people with malicious and criminal intent? To add some spice to this question in 2026, I’ve aggregated non-identifiable data based on DNS queries made by my…
Alpine Linux is designed to be a small, simple, and secure Linux distribution. For many, it’s the default choice for containerization. In fact, you might already be running an Alpine container somewhere as a part of a deployment without even knowing that it’s there. I quite enjoy the ease of administration and the sans systemd part of Alpine Linux. I’ve never experienced any…
It’s a dirty job, but somebody’s got to do it. Well, actually, that’s not quite true. I’ve been mirroring this blog as an onion site since 2016, so I figured it was time to contribute a little time, effort, and money towards the infrastructure of the Tor network. Besides, running Tor relays has always been on my bucket list, and I am getting old. No more time to waste ;)…
Hello again, let’s take a little detour from our regular programming. Turn back time a decade and a half, or something, and I was spellbound by the game Dark Souls from FromSoftware. Like many others, I eventually stumbled upon the EpicNameBro YouTube channel. ENB was an American living and working in Japan who frequently posted interesting gameplay videos from the Japanese edition of Dark…
Artificial Intelligence is everywhere these days. It’s even sucking the last drops of blod out of the wasteland that is this blog. How arrogant of me to believe I was writing content for humans, when in fact, a battalion of AI bots are my only constant readers. Zero Wing - The epic game behind the meme “All your base are belong to us”. Consuming your content in real-time I was…
I’m already coming up on my sixth anniversary with Hugo. Wow, time really does fly. I feel like sharing some of my experiences with Hugo and how it compares to my previous long run with WordPress. The way of the Hugo Hugo is a fast-moving target and it does not care much for backward compatibility. You get a few deprecation warnings and then stuff just blows up :) On the flip side, you do…
At the end of last year, I decided to move my email server to Contabo. This came to be after being enticed by the “too good to be true” prices and specifications of its VPS offerings. I have great faith in German businesses, but in retrospect, I should have done a bit more research before hitting the deploy button. Infrastructure issues Our story starts after two months of smooth…
After spending the majority of my personal computing adventures on my MacBook Pro last year, I received my final deprogramming session with the latest batch of macOS updates. Surveillance tech has now festered deep inside macOS Sequoia itself with the rollout of Apple Intelligence. Apple’s promises of groundbreaking privacy protections aside, I employ a strict zero-trust policy when it comes…
The rclone mount command worked without throwing any errors, and I could browse all my files from the local directory. However, when loading up my music collection with VLC, I got that little annoying spinning beachball of death. The reason appeared obvious going by rclone’s error log: 2024/12/07 15:22:18 ERROR : 1914 - Eschatology of War/1914 - Eschatology of War - 01 War In.flac: vfs…
When I deployed my email server with DigitalOcean five years back, it delivered at a competitive price and performance. A few years later, the same server has gotten a price hike but no upgrades or resource increases. Even so, hosting your email server is not for the faint of heart, and IP reputation is a big part of the game. Therefore, I stayed with DigitalOcean until the depletion of resources…
A couple of years ago Disney released a new series based on the classic Willow movie. The show had everything you’d come to expect from Disney: Strong independent women kicking ass. A beautiful young prince in distress. And a band of silly bickering men for comic relief. It continued none of the magic from the movie, except from Warwick Davis himself. Regardless, I was planning on finishing…
StackSocial, an online marketplace owned by StackCommerce is seemingly always running the deal of a lifetime on Windows 11 Pro. StackSocial is offering the software with a retail value of $199 with 89% off. Reputable technology websites like ZDNET, CNET, Android Police, Cult of Mac, and PCMag are running commission-based promotions on Microsoft Software from StackSocial. ZDNET’s expert staff…
After my improbable love story with the MacBook Pro M1 I have descended further into madness. Awed by the ARM architecture of the MacBook Pro, I decided that I needed to get my paws on one of those new Windows ARM-based Copilot+ PCs. Being a longtime fan of Dell’s XPS product series, I bought the XPS 13 9345 Snapdragon® X Elite X1E-80-100. The XPS 13 9345 Copilot+ PC sits on top of my…
For reasons that currently escape me, I bought a 13-inch M1 MacBook Pro during a black Friday sale back in 2021. After feeling somewhat discouraged with the latest offerings in the Enterprise Linux world, I decided it was time to unwrap the MacBook and have a closer look at macOS. Now, six months later, I thought it would be fun to look back on this journey and maybe get an answer to the dreaded…
After logging into my Hetzner account, I was met with a message informing me that my current cloud server plan was being deprecated. I could either choose to keep my existing server plan or rescale it. In my experience, this approach is usually a disguised upsell attempt, but thankfully not so with Hetzner. CX11 is deprecated. It’s possible to migrate this server to another server plan.…