Simplification of my digital self. Removed most of my online accounts. Removed all my VPS's. Removed most apps from my phone except core ones. Cancelled a lot of online subscriptions.
In the real world finally moved everything to USB-C. Gave all my old cables away. I have two chargers in my home and a handful of C to C cables. Everything connects to everything now.
Home is now downgraded to a dumb home. Lights work on physical toggles. No hubs or sensors anywhere. Heat and AC is with a dumb panel on the wall.
I did a similar thing a few years back, but rather than simplifying, I focused on getting rid of hacky DIY things that needed maintenance.
I got rid of almost all the customized software in my life, and the few projects I decided to keep, I aggressively modernized, getting rid of thousands of lines of original code and adding many times more tests than I'd ever had before.
It very significantly improved my life and career to not have a second part time job maintaining a note taking app.
With off the shelf options, preferring FOSS if possible, I still enjoy using and contributing to open source.
Some of the substitutions wound up being a step down in features, or required rethinking parts of workflows, but the time savings is such a benefit.
Custom notetaking tool with p2p sync-> Google keep
Custom batteries included Linux distro for SD protection, Kiosk browsers, offline docs, creative commons content packs -> a few scripts built into my control server on vanilla RasPi OS
Rsync-> Borg -> Kopia(to avoid fussing with Borg's community NAS package)
For me, it’s always having website productivity blockers on all my browsers across all my various devices (and for the most part, not installing news apps on any devices either). Haven’t simplified my digital life, but at least it’s very restricted. Yeah, if even one device doesn’t have one installed, feel like am vulnerable to having hours sucked away.
And actually, still browse the web and watch YouTube, but just on my non-work days.
It was a lot of micro-USB and some Lightning. CAT5E and lower. HDMI 1.4 and lower. All still useable cables for many people. It went to my local hackerspace.
I had a lot of hobby projects. Some home automation. Some would scrape websites for archival purposes. Maybe a seedbox and an arr-stack. Total monthly cost of a bit over €60 for all of them. Didn't really add anything to my life and the upkeep took about an hour every month, even with auto-updating as much as possible, sometimes things broke or required manual updating (+migration).
None of them were open to the public, I SSH-tunnel into them. All stuff just for myself.
I backed everything up locally and shut them down. They should be auto-removed at the next billing cycle.
I'm a big VPN user since I am the citizen of one country and the resident of another. Even for government services I have to use a VPN. I tried to access the bureau of statistics of my home country through my foreign residential IP and got 404s on all pages. Enabled VPN and everything magically started working. For watching the election result video stream I also had to VPN but at least that one gave me a clear message. For doing taxes in my home country I then have to disable VPN since all VPN access is blocked but it's OK to use a foreign residential IP.
I would easily pay €30 a month for a VPN in my home country that uses a residential IP and isn't noticeable. I am aware that those exist, but 99% of them are shady.
Do you have friends or family in your home country that will run an AppleTV box with Tailscale for you as an exit node?
I can't get into work from a non-US IP, but I can Tailscale back to my house and it works just fine. I even gave my in-laws (who live several states away) an AppleTV box running TS just to have another endpoint if for some reason the power goes out at my house while I'm gone (rare, but happens).
Why do you need an AppleTV box and Tailscale for that? Use any PC (even a Raspberry Pi or any cheap "thin client") with Wireguard and you remove Apple and Tailscale from the equation entirely while keeping your setup 100% self-hosted.
Lots of people already have Apple TVs and the Tailscale integration is pretty good and can serve as an always online exit node. So no new hardware required. Could even remotely walk a non-techie through the process without too much effort.
personally, I've just upgraded my family's wifi to Ubiquiti and can then use Tailscale Wireguard running on the gateway as a proxy! (with their permission)
The only folks using Apple TV in 2026 are like 60+ yrs old.
I've literally not seen one in anyone's home for probably 5+ years. And even then nobody used them.
Apple TV was one of those products that relatively few people bought but they were loud about buying it, so it seemed more popular than it was. Then other services like Roku($20) quickly replaced it.
They’re not insanely common even in the US, since Roku and Android sticks are cheaper and I don’t live in a wealthy area, but they’re not hard to get or unheard of.
The distinction between AppleTV, the hardware, and Apple TV+, the streaming service, was lost on many. Now that they are “Apple TV 4K” hardware and “Apple TV” service, it’s even harder to convey the correct meaning.
I don’t work in technology, so my knowledge base is almost certainly in the bottom 10% (or lower) of HN readers. I can install Linux, or a BSD, and following guides I can be reasonably certain that I am doing so safely, which puts me comfortably in the top 10% of all users out there.
It’s not what I’m comfortable setting up for myself that is the issue; I am willing to put up with oddities for something that is just for my convenience and amusement. The problem is what I am knowledgeable enough to fix from far away if and when it goes wrong, and how to explain to my very non-technical family how to access it.
I have a NAS, and I could roll my own with that (in fact it’s my exit node at home, because I’m fairly sure it has better encryption speed than the AppleTV), but when something I’m in charge of maintaining goes in someone else’s house, the last thing I want to spend my spare time doing is trying to diagnose and fix issues over the phone with people who don’t own a computer.
It’s not the perfect solution to every situation. It is reliant on Tailscale and Apple, and there are cheaper, more capable systems (like the RPi) out there if you have the knowledge and inclination to set them up. But it’s a very, very straightforward solution that is unobtrusive and easy to maintain and thus is extremely well-suited for my needs. I thought it might be for OP as well. Anyone who is willing to shell out €360 a year for a truly residential-IP VPN should at least be made aware that it’s an option.
> Wireguard and remove Apple and Tailscale from the equation entirely
I agree you could send them a preconfigured pi, but can we stop pretending talescale is just wireguard - there is a lot of convenience in the NAT traversal that you otherwise need router config and/or a publically routable server to achieve.
I wish there was a way to use the tailscale app to connect to my own vanilla WireGuard endpoint at home. I don’t want to use and pay for tailscale when I can run WireGuard myself. But there seems to be no good WireGuard app for tvOS (there is for iOS and macOS though) and if the TS app works as well as it says, I’m jealous I can’t use it with my setup.
(There’s another really shitty VPN app for tvOS that I tried, but it also costs money so screw that. It’s also buggy as hell and crashes all the time.)
I should add that my use case is the occasional trip where we take the Apple TV with us places and want to access my media library. Or being able to share my media library with extended family (setting their Apple TV up with a vpn to my house.) More complex things like travel routers can work, but are more hassle than I want, although I’m increasingly leaning towards taking the plunge there…
Personal-level Tailscale is free for up to 3 users. So your immediate family is covered even on trips.
You could create an account with any one of their identity providers (or roll your own OIDC, it's possible) and just have it not have a linked credit card. The account you use to authenticate Tailscale doesn't have to be the Apple account that you use to log into the hardware device itself - my wife's laptop, phone, and iPads are logged in under my Tailscale account but separate Apple/iCloud accounts (we have family sharing for our apps, etc., but the TS is usually going to be up to me, so I haven't created another account for her). Free gets you 100 devices, so we're nowhere close to running out of those.
Doesn’t have to be an apple box either. A raspberry pi is what I’m using. I’m in the exact same situation, living in one country temporarily but citizen of another, and I have an exit point in my home country at my parents place on a raspberry pi. Basically any computer will work.
The advantage of the AppleTV is that it's basic consumer hardware that a lot of people have, that you can provide for them at a reasonably low cost if they don't, and that doesn't really require much in the way of tech skill for the person whose house it's in to keep it up to date. You don't even have to do anything to update versions - tvOS will do it automatically.
I can't find it right now but there was a post announcing the port to tvOS on their blog where a developer from the UK (but living in the US) talked about how it let him buy, configure, and ship a simple consumer box that uses little power and needs minimal hands-on maintenance to his parents' house as a replacement for a server he had been running in their house as a VPN endpoint for this sort of thing - so he could watch BBC, etc.
I wouldn't want to update a RPi that's in someone else's house on the other side of the ocean.
Android TV works great as well. I have it running on an old Chromecast that cost less than $50 new.
While I still prefer running a plain Wireguard VPN if possible (i.e. when there's a publicly reachable UDP port), the really big advantage of Tailscale over other solutions is that it has great NAT traversal, so it's possible to run a routing node behind all kinds of nasty topologies (CG-NAT, double NAT, restrictive firewalls etc.)
I have run into the firewall problems before. Even seen them that block authentication but -if already connected to the tailnet before joining the WiFi in question - will continue to pass data. OpenVPN would not connect and couldn’t handle the IP address switch.
At worst, I turn on phone hotspot, authenticate, then switch back to WiFi. A purely serendipitous discovery on my part, but a very welcome one.
Interesting, maybe they block the orchestration servers of Tailscale, but not the actual data plane (which is almost always P2P, i.e., it usually does not involve Tailscale servers/IPs at all)?
I'm sure they do, but the question is, why did OpenVPN fail? It's pure P2P. I've got a dynamic DNS through afraid.org, and that resolves on that network, so it's not just DNS-level blocking. I effectively have a static IP anyway; there's no CGNAT going on, so I've discovered that I misconfigured my DDNS once or twice only when afraid.org emailed to tell me that I hadn't updated in X months.
Were you using the semi-well-known port (1194)? Otherwise, maybe it's just more fingerprint-able, or whatever DPI the firewall uses hasn't caught up to Wireguard yet?
I built TunnelBuddy (tunnnelbuddy.net) just for this. I am the same: citizen of one country and resident of another. I have multiple friends and family where I am from. I get them to open tunnelbuddy (nobody needs to sign up), to share a one-off password (like TeamViewer) and I get to access the internet as if I was at their place.
Underneath, it uses WebRTC (the same tech as Google Meet). It is free to use, I just built to fix this problem that I have... I am quite surprised expats only get by using a traditional VPN whose IPs are known by online services...
AppleTV is pretty random and only vaguely incidental to the solution. Tailscale runs on computers. Basically anything will do. If you don't have a home server, just grab a cheap RPi or an old laptop. Or in a pinch drop it onto an old phone from your old phone drawer.
I have been thinking about it but it is tricky from a legal standpoint. What I'm trying to arrange next time I visit is to have a secondary line installed at my parents place that is in my name. So that when I pull heavy traffic from that line it doesn't impact them and I can't get them in trouble for posting a message that isn't government approved.
> I would easily pay €30 a month for a VPN in my home country that uses a residential IP and isn't noticeable. I am aware that those exist, but 99% of them are shady.
For residential IPs you can't even pay per month like normal VPNs, normally they charge per GB, usually over $2 usd per GB.
Damn, I’m throwing away hundreds of dollars per month.
And I can get a semi-anonymous cable internet connection too (if your line is “hot”, you could sign up with any address… not sure if it has to be under the same node or just the same city). Would be difficult, but not impossible, to track down which residence the shadow connection is coming from.
Most of the people whose devices and connections are being used as residential proxy exit nodes are not aware of it.
They likely charge per GB because these residential connections are slow and limited compared to datacenter connections (doesn't help that they're often located in third world countries), and are often used for aggressive scraping, so charging a fixed monthly price would not be viable.
Even worse is the Reddit approach, where leaving your VPN on will get your account shadow banned permanently. But you are not notified of that, so if you are wondering why nobody is replying to your comments, check in a private session if you can visit your profile page.
i can live without reddit and hackernews. i can't live without online banking, bill paying, insurance, healtchare portals, etc.
it is funny i have been probing HN for years, and i've found a number of cases when everything is normal, but i check the account from another device and it isn't there, or is free of posts despite having made many. yet i would do the same if i was an admin trying to keep a walled-garden free of trolls.
Something like that happened to me, my 10+ year account and everything I've ever written just vanishing one morning. Even posts to a subreddit I moderate were repeatedly removed after every approval.
No idea why, (the "wrong" public Wi-fi?) but my appeal was granted and nothing was fixed.
Now I can't contact anyone, and the appeals page falsely claims that my account is in good standing and refuses to operate.
When I went looking for help from a throwaway account that I made many years ago for resume reviews, the exact same thing happened.
So at this point, I only lurk occasionally, because I'm not going to go through that social hell again, and it sounds like moderation failures have only gotten worse in the years since.
> So at this point, I only lurk occasionally, because I'm not going to go through that social hell again
I feel ya. Sad thing is, there really isn't anywhere else to go for niche interests, or really much any particular information. AI fallout has finally killed the struggling web and online community. I think, there isn't much left besides cutting losses, resetting your dopamine receptors and finding community in the real world and all...
Well, now that's gonna be a bit of a challenge living outside big cities, where you can't afford rent, of course. I guess, if meeting other people is out, you can still always watch brain rot TV, or strap in the amyl nitrite inhaler and goon away for the time between work shifts. Until things are worth remembering again. When those investment trillions finally paid off and humanity accelerates into the new age of blissful meaning.
Wow, very shitty, but I don't expect anything nice out of Reddit. What gets me is: Imagine being the developer writing the system for unaccountable shadowbanning. How do you justify it, ethically? I mean, we all need a paycheck, but come on, at some point one must take a break, walk outside, and think about the effects of the software they are writing. It makes me sad that there are so many in our profession who see that JIRA ticket and say "Yes, boss, no problem, boss, I'll write whatever you ask for, boss!"
I wasn’t even aware of that, but it does not at all surprise me, since it fits right in with the trajectory Reddit has long been on; from freedom of information, to full spectrum thought control and digital psychological reprogramming dungeon.
I remember 20 years ago where you could just impromptu hop onto a train to Paris, party for the weekend and come back Sunday evening.
I just checked online with the Dutch Railways:
- Train that leaves in one hour (18:00), arrives at 21:40 just in time to party. 148 euro!
- Train that leaves 21:00, arrives at 10:35 the next morning. You'll miss the party plus you can't even book the train online for some reason. Multiple transfers and you need to sleep on a bench in Brussels between 00:15 and 07:30
Then for the train back:
- Train that leaves at 17:50, arrives at 22:30, decent times, 185 euro!
- Train that leaves at 20:50, arrives at 08:20 the next morning, right in time for work. Can't book it online. This time your are sleeping on a bench at Antwerpen between 00:25 and 05:50
If you are with four people, just drive the five hours to Paris instead. Have one person be sober. So much better than the train. I'm sure the fuel and tire wear are less than the €1332 in train tickets you would have with the four of you.
Those numbers are pretty much irrelevant. Canadians arent evenly distributed throughout the country (nor throughout Ontario. That province is empty other than a tiny corner of it), the overwhelming majority of them live in a few areas that are quite population dense (i.e. metro-Vancouver area, Edmonton/Calgary axis, and the corridor from Toronto to Montreal.
Besides, Canada used to have a much more extensive train network back in early 1900s when the population was a tenth of what it is now.
Canada could have functioning train networks if we wanted them.
Rail networks are no longer a government priority in Canada because of planes and cars. We've kept some of the rail tracks, but theyre mostly just used for freight transport, not for people.
I have been to places in Germany where it was a 45 minute drive to the nearest train station. I'm not talking about somewhere in the Black Forest but an actual village where people live. It's great for cities but for villages I typically take the car.
Well yes, not difficult to see why. Germany is quite big and quite sprawled, and given how expensive home ownership is in big metro areas people choose commute longer in exchange for affordable housing.
And also the government gives you tax rebates for your fuel expenses the further you have to commute for work which is a double edged sword.
In the real world finally moved everything to USB-C. Gave all my old cables away. I have two chargers in my home and a handful of C to C cables. Everything connects to everything now.
Home is now downgraded to a dumb home. Lights work on physical toggles. No hubs or sensors anywhere. Heat and AC is with a dumb panel on the wall.
It feels freeing.
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