Tech tips

[cocky0]

Per request by @FurmanCock in the chatterbox. There are little tips and tricks we read about and pick up along the way for making life on the web just a tad easier. Unfortunately not all of those tips and tricks are widely known, so it is up to us as loyal netizens to share and propagate these bits of knowledge. 

The tip that inspired this thread idea follows:

Have you ever seen a link to an interesting article, and attempted to read it only to find out that you have reached your maximum limit of free articles with that publisher? Or perhaps you run an ad-blocker, and this site requires that you disable it if you want to read what was written? You could pay for a subscription, and you could disable your ad-blocker, or you can do what I do and use outline.com. 

Outline.com is a free service that scans the URL in question, removes all ads and paywalls, and delivers the actual meat and potatoes of the article to you. You can go about this one of two ways. You can visit the site and paste the URL into the submission field, or you can insert "outlook.com/" between the https:// and www parts of the URL in question to have the article outlined. Note that this service does not work with NY Times. Presumably they have an agreement with each other. It does work for just about every other publication I've tried though.

 

 

[Spur's Addiction]

Opening the link in 'Incognito mode' on your browser often works as well. Thought not all the time. 

 

[cocky0]

So these days, it is pretty well known that services like those offered by Google and Facebook come with a cost. That cost is privacy. Every time you search for something using Google, the data from that search is compiled into databases in an effort to improve marketing profiles and for other not so benign purposes most likely. This even happens while you are using Chrome's incognito mode. The very use of anything on Chrome, IE, Edge, Safari, etc can mean that data about you is being stored somewhere. There is an alternative though.

Brave browser is a free alternative to Chrome. It looks and feels much like Chrome does without all of the privacy concerns. Additionally it has a feature that allows you to surf using TOR. TOR is "The Onion Router" which basically routes your internet traffic through a series of public servers all over the world. Each time you use TOR, your IP address will appear different to the web service you're using. Additionally all of the traffic is encrypted end to end which makes intercepting any data, even over port 80, exceedingly difficult. 

Of course that being said, I do not recommend using Brave on a Windows or Mac machine for the purpose of surfing the Deep Web. The capability is there, for sure, but there are some rather nasty sites out there that can do bad things to your machine. It's probably best to stay away unless you're 100% confident in your host machine's security. 

Anyways I bring up Brave, because it's one of the ways I get around the NY Times paywall. I go incognito on that browser and view my 1 of 3 free articles. NY Times relies on a tracking cookie to keep track of who has viewed what, but Brave deletes all tracking cookies. So once you're out of free articles, just restart the browser and you're all set.

 

[cocky0]

So let's take a moment to talk about Plex. For those who are not familiar, Plex is a little piece of software that can turn your collection of music, movies, TV shows, and other media into streamable content. There are a lot of ways to set it up to make things like 4K steaming and broadcasting over the internet a much easier thing, but for home use, streaming within your home LAN, all you really need is an old computer, your media files, and the Plex Server program. That's basically the setup I use at home right now, and my kid, my wife, and I can all watch different things on different devices all at the same time, which is all we really need.

The quick-start guide for it is here: https://support.plex.tv/articles/200264746-quick-start-step-by-step-guides/ , and it's really self explanatory. Most of the stuff like sorting and adding cover art are automated. As for the client side of things, most smart TVs, Roku, etc all have the Plex app available. The same goes for tablets and other mobile devices. 

Now that being said, I am looking at a future upgrade to my setup with a robust NAS device dedicated solely to streaming my Plex, but those things can get expensive and my current setup does just fine for now.