Dreamwidth Development

Proton VPN is an awesome service, but has always been a thorn in my side on iOS. It stubbornly refuses to work after a network change like leaving my house and switching to cellular. Or coming back home, or any network change.

I have tried iOS shortcuts before and failed but today I got it right somehow. Now a shortcut runs when I join or leave any wifi network and reconnects the VPN which restores its connectivity.

Other VPN providers don’t have this problem. But I also don’t trust them as much as I trust Proton. They will always choose security over convenience so I rest assured that there is some security reason why this doesn’t work out of the box.

My very first recollection of anything computery is my Dad taking me to work at York University when I was 6 or 7 or somewhere around there. At that time computers were massive things that took up rooms and didn’t have keyboards. You’d program them with punch cards and the punch card machines were fuuuun! I couldn’t type or program but wow I loved the sound those machines made.

I didn’t touch a computer again until I was in junior high (middle school, to some). My school brought in a card reader (yes, 5 years later) and we spent a week or two in social studies playing with it instead. Mr. Wareham is one of the very few teachers I remember and I think this behemoth card reader was one of the reasons. We learned that computers would only do what we tell them and that started my critical thinking engine about how, precisely, we do everything.

That same school got its hands on 3 Commodore PET computers, stuck them in a closet and called it a computer lab. That’s where I discovered BASIC and my world changed forever. My parents bought a Commodore Vic 20 for the house and I became a full-on computer recluse. A friend down the road had a Commodore 64 with acoustic modem and that’s where I learned about BBSes.

This all happened while I lived in Ontario. We moved to Alberta at the end of junior high and I didn’t touch a computer again until I was in my 20s. They had changed a lot and I was now learning how to install Windows 3.1 on 6 x 3 1/2 inch floppies (not so aptly named), and the older 5 x 1/4 drives were still very common and many computers of that age had both types of drives in them.

Thus began a computer career, such as it was in the 90s.

Several years ago I bought an old Texas Instruments TI4/99 to play with. I’ve never really used it but I get nostalgic periodically and set it up to play with. It’s a fun reminder of a time before the internet industrial complex pitted us against each other and stole all our identities solely for the sake of profit over people.

I recently had a spam attack against one of my email addresses. Enough got through that I noticed it and made a filter, but by the time I did that Proton Mail had already identified them and started filtering to spam. That was amazing but not my point.

My point is that I learned that particular email address is so old that it almost only gets spam anyhow. I never would have noticed that, so thanks spammers!