Episode 76 – Traveling at Home
Scott: Friends with Brews.
Scott: Did you hear that?
Peter: I could barely hear that.
Scott: Oh, okay, I’ll have to boost that.
Peter: You sound fine, though, to me.
Peter: So there you go.
Scott: Peter, let’s not talk about the obvious woes that we’ve just been having, because I don’t think…
Peter: You don’t want to go on for the last half hour that we’ve spent troubleshooting audio problems on our brand new MacBook Pros?
Scott: Well, A, life is too short, and B, now that we’ve gotten this far, I have to leave in less than an hour, so let’s not…
Peter: I’ve got dinner plans tonight, too, so that’s fine.
Scott: Yeah.
Scott: Okay.
Scott: Well, here we are.
Scott: We’re as happy as can be.
Scott: We’re thrilled with technology, because nothing ever goes wrong, and you can’t tell us that it does, so screw you all, and you can all go to Hades with Apple, by the way, because that’s where they’re going, I’m pretty sure.
Peter: I’m not going to disagree with that analysis in any way, shape, or form.
Scott: All right, Peter, what are you drinking today?
Scott: It sounds like you’re drinking a non-alcoholic beverage.
Peter: I’m drinking a coffee, and it’s 3 o’clock Eastern time, which is late for me to be drinking coffee, so I want to pound this and get it into my system as quickly as possible, because if I sip this, I’m going to be up all night.
Peter: I thought that this had been on the podcast before, but apparently it has not.
Scott: Okay.
Peter: So this is a newcomer.
Peter: This is, I’m trying to call up the website right now, this is a signature coffee special, whatchamathingimabobber, from Wegmans.
Peter: It’s Wegmans Organic Coffee Specialty Whole Bean Daybreak.
Peter: So Daybreak Coffee, Daybreak is the name of the coffee.
Peter: It is a dark roast, and it’s their organic stuff.
Peter: Allegedly, they sell it in 32-ounce bags, but I have never seen those.
Peter: So maybe that’s only in like the flagship stores in New York or something.
Peter: But it’s really good.
Peter: I enjoy it a lot.
Peter: I generally only buy it when it’s on sale, because it’s not super different from their regular old espresso roast.
Peter: But yeah, it’s a dark roast, whole bean, and unfortunately, I don’t have the actual package with me, and I’m looking at it on the website, and they just have the front of it.
Peter: So all you know is Wegmans Organic Specialty Coffee.
Peter: Complex with a smoosh, smoosh.
Scott: With a smoosh.
Peter: Complex with a smoosh.
Peter: Yes, complex with a smooth finish.
Peter: I’m going to assess that right now.
Scott: Okay.
Scott: Tell us if it is.
Peter: Oh, that is complex.
Scott: Yeah, I was going to ask you.
Scott: I didn’t care about the smooth part.
Scott: I wanted to know, was it really?
Peter: But wait, I’m about, I’m finishing now.
Peter: I’m, oh, that’s smooth.
Scott: Oh.
Peter: You know, this is good.
Peter: So I’m going to, but now this is good.
Peter: I could drink this just as it is, but I am going to add a Lando Lakes Half and Half Mini Moo.
Peter: And I take that back, a Mini Moos, Mini Moos.
Peter: Now, Scott, you and I are lovers of apostrophes, so you can see on this.
Scott: Yeah, I see it.
Peter: It is a Mini Moos.
Scott: But what they’re saying is Mini Moos Half and Half.
Scott: They’re doing it correctly.
Peter: Yes, it’s Mini Moos.
Peter: So now the question is, who is Mini Moo?
Peter: I have not yet seen, heard from, or met Mini Moo.
Peter: But recently, because I bought a case of these things on Amazon, so I bought two 192 Mini Moos boxes of these.
Scott: Okay.
Peter: And the plan was I was just going to keep one or more of them up in Vermont, because I get sick of like buying a thing of half and half every time I drive up to Vermont, and then it goes bad.
Peter: And so I was like, well, these things, you know, stay pretty good for a long time.
Peter: So I’ll just buy these.
Peter: And the interesting thing is half and half, but nutritionally speaking, they’re a lot closer to just cream because they’re all fat.
Peter: There’s no carbs.
Peter: There’s no sugar in this.
Peter: And it’s also a nice portion control for me, because one Minimoo is like just the color that I want for my coffee.
Scott: So I’ll tell you who Minimoo is.
Scott: Minimoo is the direct assistant and companion to Dr.
Scott: Cowville.
Scott: One million dollars.
Scott: No?
Scott: Too soon?
Peter: That tracks.
Peter: That tracks.
Scott: Yeah, cow tracks, right?
Scott: Cow tracks.
Peter: That cow tracks, yes.
Peter: So that’s what I’m drinking.
Peter: What are you drinking?
Scott: I have two drinks today.
Scott: One is Wandering Goat Coffee Roasters, Hair of the Goat Blend.
Peter: That sounds delicious.
Scott: Oh, yeah, yeah.
Scott: It’s a balanced blend of Latin American and Indonesian coffees suited for all day sipping.
Scott: And let’s see if there’s any other.
Scott: They don’t give any other description of what flavor notes I should taste or any of that.
Scott: It just, anyway, so that’s what it is.
Scott: It’s a blend.
Scott: It’s pretty good.
Scott: It’s smooth.
Scott: I drink it black, of course.
Scott: Let me take a sip here.
Scott: It has a bit of, I don’t know if I would call it bitterness, but it has a tiny bit of that along with it, but it’s good.
Scott: It’s not too bitter.
Scott: It’s not.
Scott: It could be a little warmer, but I don’t have a fancy doohickey like you do.
Scott: And then I have another drink, Peter, and this is one that I’ve been waiting.
Scott: I’ve been saving this for the podcats.
Scott: I haven’t had a beer on the podcats in a long, long time.
Scott: And today, I’m having a rogue, which I’ve drank many rogue beers here before, Rogue Santa’s Private Reserve 2024.
Scott: This is a collaboration with Portland Coffee Roasters, and it is a Mocha Stout.
Scott: And I’m going to open it now.
Peter: You’re speaking my language.
Peter: I’m going out to dinner tonight.
Peter: I’m hoping that they’re going to have some kind of festive, festive, seasonal beer thing that I can imbibe.
Scott: Here’s the darkness of the drink for you.
Peter: That’s darker than my coffee.
Scott: Yeah, it’s got, according to them, it says, this festive brew captures the holiday spirit in every sip.
Scott: I’m going to be the judge of that.
Scott: Perfect for Santa.
Scott: Oh, wait a minute.
Scott: Santa’s going to be drunk driving.
Scott: Oh, my God.
Scott: I didn’t know Santa was an alcoholic.
Scott: But I mean, his physique sort of suggests it.
Peter: OK, here we go.
Scott: Yep, that’s good.
Scott: It is slightly bitter.
Scott: I definitely get the coffee taste.
Scott: I definitely get the stout beer taste.
Scott: I like it.
Scott: I like this.
Scott: I would drink this again.
Scott: They should just keep doing this every year instead of mixing it up like they do.
Scott: Like next year, they’ll have some crappy, terrible, stupid thing that no one wants.
Scott: And I’ll be angry, but this one is a good one.
Scott: I will have this again.
Scott: And the good news is right now, you can buy this at Costco.
Scott: Any of you Costco lovers?
Scott: Or maybe they have it at Whole Foods.
Scott: I can’t recall.
Scott: But I did buy it at Costco.
Peter: I’ve seen rogue stuff around, you know, most of the good places, the places that just carry like Budweiser products don’t usually have it.
Peter: But most of the other places where I bought beer do.
Scott: The places that just carry Budweiser.
Scott: Why are you going?
Scott: Why are you even stepping foot in those places, Peter?
Peter: Sometimes I need to use the restroom.
Peter: I was going to say I need to gas up my car, but I don’t.
Scott: You’re going to go in there and use the restroom.
Scott: Do it on the floor, just out of spite, because you are a Budweiser only crew.
Scott: So here, take this.
Scott: Dump, dump.
Peter: All right.
Peter: Let’s get to our topics, shall we?
Scott: Let’s get to our topic.
Scott: Let us do.
Peter: Dive right in.
Peter: So now we have switched.
Scott: Wait, we’ve got two topics, Peter.
Scott: We’ve got two topics, but they’re both related to the larger overarching.
Scott: And you should always have an overarching topic because that sounds sinister.
Scott: The overarching topic of travel.
Peter: Travel, which is to say work.
Scott: Or to say Macintosh, new Macintosh.
Scott: So, Peter, you are a world traveler, are you not?
Scott: You’ve recently traveled the world.
Scott: You recently went to Germany and all other Europe.
Scott: All of other Europe, many of other Europe’s.
Peter: I don’t think I went to all of other Europe, but I went to some of other Europe.
Scott: Okay.
Scott: So, what I was curious about, because my wife and I are looking at taking some trips, potentially, to check out some areas and see what they’re like.
Scott: And my instinct is to not give the TSA anything to search when I come back into the country, because they will and they’re assholes.
Scott: And I don’t want them to compel me to open my devices.
Scott: Not that I have anything to hide, but do I really need to in order to have that belief?
Scott: No, I don’t think so.
Scott: So what did you do when you went to Germany, bearing these things in mind?
Scott: Because taking a wiped device and then trying to restore it overseas sounds like a horrible idea.
Peter: It may sound like a horrible idea, but it is not a bad idea.
Peter: If you fear your stuff being confiscated or rifled through, the best thing is to not have it with you.
Peter: When I went, I took an iPad and a phone, and I did indeed do a wipe on the iPad.
Peter: Sorry, the, yes, I did on the phone, and I did the, what do you call it?
Peter: Travel mode.
Peter: Oh man, what’s it called?
Peter: In one password, there’s a thing where you can say, hey, I’m traveling, and lock stuff off.
Peter: Essentially what it is, I just, I looked at that and I was like, I can’t figure this out, and I just deleted one password off of my phone.
Scott: Yeah, yeah, that’s a good way to do it.
Scott: That’s probably what I would do, honestly.
Peter: Yeah, so just remember though, when you do that, you need to know your email, your password, and your key, perhaps, your secret key to get back into one password.
Peter: For me, since I use a throwaway iCloud email, those are all three things that I don’t necessarily remember, which is kind of fun.
Scott: See, here’s the weird thing though.
Scott: Whenever I’ve not had one password installed on a device, and then I install it, it seems to already know what account I’m going to use.
Scott: And so then all I have to do is put in my one password.
Peter: Sometimes that is the case.
Peter: Sometimes it’s not.
Peter: I don’t know.
Peter: There are definitely times when I’ve been prompted for my secret key.
Peter: It could be because I’m using a new machine.
Peter: I don’t know where that key is stolen.
Peter: Stolen.
Peter: I don’t know where that key is stored.
Peter: If that’s like a hardware, it’s like a pass key where it’s associated to that device, or how that’s maintained.
Scott: No, I don’t think so.
Scott: That secret key is your account specific.
Scott: It’s specific to your one-password account.
Peter: Right.
Peter: But I think it might be kept somewhere, like once you’ve authenticated to it, like they hash it somehow, and they say that this device has been registered, right?
Peter: So it doesn’t become an actual pass key, but it’s registered on that device somehow, probably in the secure enclave, I’m assuming.
Peter: But do I sound like I know what I’m talking about?
Peter: Okay, that’s cool.
Scott: Yeah, you do.
Scott: You sound exactly like you know what you’re talking about.
Peter: So here’s the thing.
Peter: What’s cool is when I go to Germany, I generally, knock on wood, breeze right through, and it’s all electronic.
Peter: I put my passport, my German passport, onto the scanner.
Peter: I smile for the camera, the door is open, and I’m done.
Peter: And that’s it.
Peter: I don’t even speak to anybody.
Peter: Now, that could change, right?
Peter: So there’s always a possibility that the Germans could want to, you know, like, hey, we need to ask you some questions or something like that.
Scott: I need to do what you did and register for the…
Scott: whatever you did that gets you through TSA.
Peter: TSA, pre-check.
Peter: There’s pre-check and there’s clear, and then when you return, there’s global entry.
Peter: So there’s three different services.
Peter: And I think pre-check and clear are pretty much the same, but global entry is different, but I don’t recall off top of my head.
Scott: And then there’s also this thing of airports loving to use face recognition now.
Scott: Was there any point in time where you had to submit your face and just know that you’re part of some global facial?
Peter: Oh, absolutely.
Peter: No, the very first thing when you sign up, the very first thing in the TSA pre-check, when you hit the TSA guys, they’re like, pull your ID, smile for the camera.
Scott: But then when you get to the airport, do they use that?
Scott: Are you looking into things that are comparing your face anywhere?
Peter: Yeah.
Peter: So you, yeah, I do.
Peter: I’m pretty…
Scott: Wait, am I making that up?
Peter: Maybe I didn’t.
Peter: No, I thought I did.
Scott: I thought I…
Peter: Huh, now I might be hallucinating like a bad AI.
Scott: Because I know in US airports, if you’re not traveling internationally, there’s an option to do it, but you don’t have to.
Scott: And…
Peter: Yeah.
Peter: I now honestly…
Peter: I don’t remember.
Peter: I had to show my ID to the TSA agent, but I now don’t remember if that…
Peter: Well, actually, if they took a picture of me there or not, I don’t recall.
Scott: But what about in Germany?
Scott: Do they…
Peter: In Germany, when I enter the country, I put my passport on a scanner and I smile for the camera for sure, because I remember lining my face up along the thing.
Scott: So they’re definitely tracking you.
Peter: So they’re definitely doing facial recognition.
Peter: Yeah.
Scott: Okay.
Scott: All right.
Scott: So I’m just going to succumb to that and let it be, I guess.
Peter: Yeah.
Peter: But yeah, so there are lots of things that you can do when you’re going to travel.
Peter: So like one is just get a Chromebook, just use a burner device like that or an iPad, and yes, do a restore from, you know, cloud services once you get to where you’re going.
Peter: That certainly is an option.
Peter: Frankly, you could do that with, you know, it’d be a pain to like set up your whole build all over again.
Peter: If you’re going to be like, you know, if I was doing an actual work engagement somewhere, you know, it would be a pain to restore and put all my tools and everything back on to the system.
Peter: But between Backblaze and iCloud and OneDrive, probably get most of my stuff back fairly easily.
Scott: Yeah, I think probably what I would do is if I’m returning, if you’re somebody that’s just going abroad for a while, and you’re returning to the United States, probably what I would do is use something like Carbon Copy Clone, or make a full backup, and then just wipe your computer, restore enough from the Cloud to get it to a working state, unless you need the specific tools, like unless you’re Peter and you’re going abroad, but while you’re there, you also need access to all your work tools.
Scott: If you don’t, just restore enough, and then when you get home, wipe it again, and restore it from the Carbon Copy Clone backup, and it should be back to where it was.
Peter: Yeah.
Peter: And the thing is, the nice thing is that, you know, at this stage in my career, I don’t need like, you know, a ton of hacking tools, which apparently are also illegal to have in certain EU nations anyway.
Scott: Time tracking tools?
Peter: Hacking tools.
Scott: Oh, hacking tools.
Scott: Okay.
Peter: Hacking tools.
Peter: But now the question is, I have not seen a definitive list of what constitutes a hacking tool in Germany.
Scott: Terminal, a terminal.
Scott: Any terminal program, any command line access is a hacking tool and shall be punished.
Peter: I mean, most hacking does start there.
Peter: But then again, there’s Google hacking.
Peter: So maybe Google’s a hacking tool list.
Scott: I don’t know.
Peter: Yeah.
Peter: So there’s a lot to be done.
Peter: I’m a fan of RFID shielded wallets for my passports.
Peter: Ever since I saw a demonstration, this has got to be close to like 18 years ago or so.
Peter: Whenever they started putting RFID chips into passports, I remember someone had this demonstration, and they basically on like a zipline or a clothesline, they had a passport dangling on it, and they moved it past this thing.
Peter: And then it’s like, oh, US citizen detected and this explosive went off right next to it.
Scott: See, I thought what you were going to say was the scanner came sliding by everybody in a line on the zipline, and there it goes, and it’s just getting everybody’s stuff as it goes by.
Peter: I mean, it could.
Scott: So I have a question for you, because it sounded to me like you said, RFID wallet, and then also reference your passport.
Scott: Do you use a passport card instead of a passport book?
Scott: A what?
Scott: Card?
Scott: Passport card instead of a passport book.
Peter: I have a passport book.
Scott: Okay.
Scott: Because there’s an option to get a passport card now, and I’ve never, I’ve only had a passport back when I lived in Japan.
Scott: I’ve never seen a passport card.
Scott: I don’t know what it is.
Scott: I don’t know what the difference is.
Peter: I’ve got the old school books.
Peter: I’ve had three passports.
Peter: They’ve all been old, you know, book style.
Peter: Well, four, if you count my German one now.
Scott: All right.
Scott: Let’s get on to the other travel really topic.
Scott: This is cool.
Scott: First of all, how did you stumble across this?
Scott: Tell people what it is.
Peter: It was not stumbling.
Peter: This was deliberate research.
Scott: Okay.
Scott: How did you deliberately research across this?
Peter: Okay.
Peter: What is this, first off?
Peter: This is the gl dot or dash, depending on who’s writing it.
Scott: Dash hyphen gl hyphen.
Peter: gl hyphen inet.
Peter: So that’s the brand of router.
Peter: And this is a little gl net, gl dash inet hyphen.
Peter: I sound like I’ve been drinking beer.
Peter: Swear I haven’t.
Peter: This is their ax 1800 wireless router, model gl dash ax t 1800.
Peter: So it’s the ax 1800 model number gl ax t 1800.
Peter: Got it?
Peter: Got it.
Scott: Also called the slate ax for some reason, even though it’s never referenced that in any of the documentation.
Peter: Right.
Peter: So it’s got a lot of different names.
Peter: How did I find this?
Peter: I searched on Google and Reddit and on tailscale.com to find a travel router that supported tailscale.
Peter: I also did separate searches for travel routers that supported open VPN and travel routers that supported wire guard.
Scott: Okay.
Scott: Now, tell people why you give a shit about having those things on a travel router, as opposed to just running them from a Mac or whatever.
Peter: A couple of reasons.
Peter: Number one, you might have multiple devices with you, and you don’t necessarily want to remember to turn on the VPN every time, or you may not be able to install a VPN client on them, right?
Peter: So if you took a printer with you, for example, which I don’t generally do.
Peter: So the other answer is, like, I have…
Peter: So I’ve been using NordVPN.
Peter: I bought AtlasVPN a year, year and a half ago or so, when Guga Foods was giving a promo on them.
Peter: You know, Guga, the guy who makes the great burgers and stuff.
Peter: I don’t watch his show in his channel nearly as much as I used to, but that was my way of supporting the show.
Peter: I used promo code Guga.
Peter: I got, you know, like 18 months of AtlasVPN for like a dollar or something.
Peter: It was, it wasn’t that cheap, but it was stupid cheap.
Peter: And I used it, and it was great.
Peter: Frankly, I used it to watch some episodes of the World Cup on BBC, and that was great.
Peter: And then like a week later, they locked down on all that, and it didn’t work anymore.
Peter: And so I was like, all right, well, there you go.
Peter: So I have a VPN for the legitimate uses of VPN, meaning generally I don’t want people snooping on my stuff.
Peter: That said, there are plenty of services which flat out block known public VPN subnets.
Peter: So for example, at my previous job and my current, you know, basically my largest engagement seven years ago and my largest engagement for the last year and a half, I cannot log into their portals, whether it’s insert any of your big provider here, whatever your identity provider is, whether it’s Azure Identity or Okta or Citrix Concentrator or a Cisco VPN, those were all configured to block access if you were coming through, say, NordVPN, I can’t remember any of the popular VPN clients, right?
Scott: So I kind of understand that maybe it’s not technically necessary, but I kind of understand that because those portal logins are specifically to replace certain types of VPNs that we used to log in to our corporations with.
Peter: Bingo.
Peter: And, you know, maybe they are, you know, have a heightened sense of concern that attackers could be using those to anonymize their presence, right?
Peter: Because a number of these VPN providers explicitly go out of their way to not maintain logs.
Peter: So you have plausible deniability.
Peter: Get that.
Peter: But sometimes stuff just doesn’t work.
Peter: And sometimes I might be in a hotel.
Peter: And you know what?
Peter: I don’t even want to take my work laptop, right?
Peter: Or my laptop for my most, you know, my highest sensitivity client engagement that I’m working on.
Peter: I don’t even want to connect that to the hotel wireless.
Scott: Dude, I don’t even want to do my personal stuff on the hotel wireless.
Peter: Right.
Peter: Well, unfortunately, you have to for at least a little bit to do public, you know, and this is the thing.
Peter: I don’t know if this thing supports a captive portal.
Scott: It does.
Peter: OK.
Peter: I haven’t tried that yet.
Peter: They say they do.
Peter: I haven’t seen that because I don’t have any captive portals here in my living room.
Scott: That’s good.
Scott: I’m glad you’re not taking captives in your house.
Peter: What I do have is Wi-Fi in my house, and I was able to give this my SSID and my wireless password, and it joined just fine.
Peter: And then I was able to take, say, my work laptop and my iPhone and my iPad and my personal laptop and put them all behind it and surf the web just fine.
Scott: This is interesting.
Scott: I did the same test in my house, okay, and I connected it to my Eero’s Wi-Fi, my home Wi-Fi from my Eero, and that was its Internet.
Scott: That was effectively its WAN.
Scott: And then I connected my MacBook Pro to it, and I was sitting in my room, which is across the house from my Eero, and by doing that, I was getting higher speeds than if I just connected my MacBook Pro directly to my Eero.
Scott: And my suspicion is this router has better antennas than my MacBook Pro.
Scott: So it’s getting a stronger signal from the Eero, and then, of course, I’m getting a super strong signal from it to my MacBook Pro.
Peter: Right.
Peter: Yep.
Peter: And then, again, also, too, and sometimes in smaller or older hotels, you might even have Ethernet that you can connect to.
Peter: This reminded me of like, I think, I don’t remember if you and I spoke about this, but I know it’s about a month or so ago, the guys on ATP were talking about, I think it was Casey says, oh, he takes an Apple TV with him whenever they travel.
Peter: And he uses that, you know, to watch TV.
Peter: Well, I have now been to several hotels in the last year.
Peter: You can’t do that anymore.
Peter: The HDMI, even if they have HDMI ports to connect to, there’s no menu, like there’s no way to enable those.
Peter: You boot them up and they’re like in a Roku or whatever operating system, and you are just stuck with whatever they want to give you.
Peter: But that said, you know, like if you’re an Airbnb or something like that, there’s a high probability that you’ll have an Ethernet port that you can connect to right off the back of their cable modem or whatever they’re using.
Peter: And then you don’t even have to do wireless.
Scott: Yeah.
Scott: So here’s the, let’s talk about the different interfaces.
Scott: You can connect to the Internet with Ethernet in the WAN port.
Scott: Okay.
Scott: You can connect as a repeater, in which case you’re connecting to Wi-Fi, which is what Peter and I were talking about.
Scott: You can tether, like you can tether to your phone, you can tether to any…
Peter: And I did that.
Peter: I forgot to tell you that.
Peter: I did do that.
Peter: I took a USB-C cable, I tethered into the back of this thing, and I used it then as a tail scale client.
Peter: So tethering using my phone as my internet connection, I then routed it through my Apple TV in my living room.
Peter: So even via my cell phone, on my Mac, via this router, everything looked like it came from my living room.
Peter: And then I turned it to, with tail scale, to point it to come out of my home in Vermont.
Peter: So it’s pretty slick, the stuff that you can do.
Scott: It is pretty cool.
Scott: And you can use cellular.
Scott: So if you have a cellular device, you can use that.
Scott: You can plug it into that.
Scott: This is weird.
Scott: You can also do SMS on this thing if you have a, you can insert a SIM card into some models that allow you to send and receive SMS messages, which is weird.
Scott: I don’t know why you would do that.
Scott: I don’t know.
Scott: I don’t know.
Peter: I’m sending SMS messages via my router?
Peter: I don’t even know.
Scott: There’s also a dual ethernet WAN, which means that you can use…
Peter: Two ports.
Scott: Right, two ports, so that you can have redundancy.
Scott: And I believe, even without the dual ethernet WAN, I believe that you can configure this to use multiple.
Scott: So you could have ethernet plus have it on Wi-Fi, I think.
Scott: I haven’t tested that yet, though.
Scott: But anyway, it’s so versatile.
Scott: It’s impossible not to get a connection with this thing.
Scott: The one thing that Peter and I haven’t tested, of course, is the captive portal and see how well that works.
Peter: Now, let’s give props where it’s due.
Peter: This is running on what firmware?
Scott: OpenWRT.
Peter: OpenWRT.
Peter: That’s right.
Peter: It is running OpenWRT, which has been around for 20 how many years?
Scott: Yeah.
Scott: And I guess it’s been forked a billion times and all that.
Scott: And there’s different groups that think OpenWRT should be different things.
Scott: But here’s the thing.
Scott: I actually do not care.
Scott: And why do I not care?
Scott: I know somebody was making a comment to me about, Oh, OpenWRT, I can’t believe that still exists.
Scott: And by the way, did you know that there’s big disagreements in the group?
Scott: And I sure am glad I don’t do open source stuff anymore.
Scott: And my thought is, I don’t care.
Scott: Why?
Scott: Because of what this Wi-Fi router does, and the fact that it’s really up to GLINet to get it to provide the functionality that they want.
Scott: So I honestly don’t care.
Scott: It could run on closed WRT.
Scott: It could run on a jar WRT, slightly a jar WRT.
Scott: It could run on open WRT.
Scott: I don’t care, as long as it doesn’t turn out that there’s some huge security hole in open WRT 21.02 that nobody knows about.
Peter: Yes.
Peter: And it is, you know, I’ve liked open, you know, open WRT.
Peter: It’s Linux, right?
Peter: You know, it’s a lightweight, super lightweight Linux thing.
Scott: Yeah, you can SSH into this thing and get on the Linux command line, by the way, which I’ve done.
Peter: Yeah, right.
Peter: I used to use OpenWRT and DDWRT, which is another fork.
Peter: I would buy those old, the blue Linksys home routers.
Scott: Yeah, yeah, and flash them.
Peter: Which were great little bits, you know, decent hardware.
Peter: But the software, the firmware that came with them was utter garbage.
Scott: Because Linksys was buggy as hell, and my God, they did it.
Peter: Dude, this was the only, I guess, no, there were two manufacturers that I had this happen to once.
Peter: Buffalo was one of them.
Peter: Buffalo routers also supported some open, you know, some WRTs and Linksys.
Peter: They were the only two that I ever had devices completely unprompted without any human touching them, lose their configurations, and go back to factory defaults.
Peter: Like one day, all of a sudden, like I’m trying to do stuff and I can’t, and I realized my IP address was 192.168.1.4 or something.
Peter: And we had changed it.
Peter: We were using a different internal subnet, and the router had just flashed itself back to defaults, undoing all my configurations, and I was like, what the heck?
Peter: So once I found out about, you know, then it was DDWRT, I would not buy any more of those Linksys routers unless they supported DD.
Peter: And it was just magical.
Peter: Like this thing did so many things.
Peter: And now I have that and even more, and it fits in the palm of my hand.
Peter: It’s about the size of my iPhone, a little thicker.
Peter: It’s comparable to the size of my iPhone 16 with the MagSafe battery pack attached to the back.
Scott: No, that can’t be that thick.
Scott: Is it?
Scott: Oh my God.
Peter: It’s pretty thick.
Peter: Yes.
Peter: So it is indeed almost exactly the same thickness when I stick this to you.
Peter: This is a pretty beefy battery that I have, though.
Peter: That’s pretty thin.
Scott: Okay.
Scott: Let’s make it clear to people what all you can do with this in terms of security, because you can connect to an open VPN, you can connect to a WireGuard client, you can connect to WireGuard server, you can connect to Tor.
Scott: But like, for example, some of the VPNs, I think, are WireGuard compatible.
Scott: Like, I think Nord is.
Peter: Correct.
Peter: And that’s the thing.
Peter: That’s why when I was searching, I was looking for Nord.
Peter: But wait, there’s another cool thing about it, too, is it’s powered by USB-C.
Peter: I can power this off my MacBook.
Peter: And I do, right?
Peter: So I just plug it in, and that’s what’s powering it.
Scott: So there’s places where I would like to test this.
Scott: And I thought, well, I don’t know if there’s any plugs available for me there, but you don’t care.
Peter: Right.
Peter: And I found that out, of course, after I ordered the EU power adapter.
Scott: Oh, I need to order one of those, too.
Peter: Which, well, here’s the thing.
Peter: You know, really, it could just be like, you know, that tiny little adapter.
Peter: So the plug that goes into the standard North American thing, that unscrews.
Peter: And they could just send me that little piece, but no, they have to send me the entire brick along with it.
Scott: By the way, is that adapter, is the way that it hooks onto there, is that a standard?
Scott: Like, could you just go buy someone else’s Europe adapter?
Peter: I have seen similar things before, so probably I could have gone down to, like, maybe Best Buy would have something like that, or maybe in the Frankfurt Airport or the Lisbon Airport, they would have an adapter like that when I get there.
Peter: But where you were going with this is, yeah, it can be a client, and I guess it can be a server to a certain one of those services as well, right?
Peter: But you can have this.
Peter: So if you have an open VPN server or a wire guard server, and again, since TailScale and Nord, I believe, are both built on wire guard, those are supported.
Peter: And but the thing is too, it’s like out of the box when you go into the administrative interface for this, there’s a section like for connecting to VPNs, and there’s another section, a menu section called Applications.
Peter: And there’s a custom TailScale application.
Peter: So when you want to connect to TailScale, you click on that, it redirects you, basically does like a SAML or OAuth type authentication.
Peter: You log in to TailScale, and it pushes this config back to your router, and boom, it’s an end node in your TailScale network, just like that.
Scott: It’s so cool because you don’t have to enable, you don’t have to activate TailScale on like your Mac, or your phone, or any of these other devices that connect to it.
Scott: They will just be on the TailScale network by, actually, I don’t know 100 percent for sure, because all of my devices are TailScale on my TailScale network.
Scott: So I haven’t tried to take a device that doesn’t know about my TailScale network and connect it to this thing, when this thing is on my TailScale network.
Scott: I don’t know what happens there.
Scott: Yeah.
Peter: You know, and then, of course, there’s the obvious uses that some people would use, even, you know, whether or not I do, that’s my business.
Peter: But, you know, like you can watch Netflix using your US Netflix account while you’re in another country, right?
Scott: Yeah, I will say this, though.
Scott: In my testing, even with the fastest TailScale exit node that I could configure.
Scott: So I’ve tried TailScale exit nodes of, I have a Raspberry Pi, I have an Apple TV, and I have a Nanoed on Linode setup.
Scott: And the fastest one is the Nanoed.
Scott: The second fastest one is the Raspberry Pi.
Scott: The slowest one is the Apple TV, but that’s because the Apple TV is on Wi-Fi.
Scott: My Raspberry Pi is Ethernet, and the Linode is in Linode’s network.
Scott: So it is quite a bit slower than what I get just connecting to the Eero, or connecting to this travel router without going through a TailScale exit node.
Scott: It does slow it down, but it’s still fast enough for streaming.
Peter: But have you tried what it’s like using your own Apple TV as your exit node when you’re not at home?
Scott: No.
Peter: See, that’s because that’s the use case, right?
Peter: If I’m sitting at home, I don’t need to use my Apple TV as my exit node because I’m on the same land.
Scott: That’s just in testing to see what would work best.
Scott: But see, because I know that my Raspberry Pi is faster than my Apple TV, even when I’m at home, my suspicion is that would be the same case when I’m out and about, and I would still want to use the Raspberry Pi instead of the Apple.
Peter: Not necessarily, because your internet connection might be the governor of that.
Peter: And if you have only 100 megabits to your Apple TV, but your Apple TV can punch out 200 megabits, if I’m on the other side of the Atlantic, there’s a lot of hops between here and there.
Peter: That’s what I’m saying.
Peter: Or if I’m using my cell phone, because over there, it’s a lot of LTE and 4G, so it’s not going to be super fast.
Scott: Actually, that brings up a good question.
Scott: If you’re already on a crappy hotel network and you’re trying…
Scott: which already is going to cause you problems when you try to stream sometimes, is going through your tail scale network going to slow you down even more, or is it not?
Peter: It’s not going to help, but my suspicion is it might not be noticeably different.
Peter: And so for me, for purposes of work and or personal stuff, I just want to be able to have my traffic at least appear to be originating from the United States.
Peter: Even my own personal website, I have it set to block from a lot of other countries, you know, because I’m like, I’m not appealing to, you know, people in Japan or, you know, whatever.
Peter: I don’t get any Japanese people looking at my website.
Scott: How do you know?
Scott: There’s a lot of, how do you, what, man?
Peter: I have logs.
Peter: I’m not NordVPN.
Peter: I keep logs.
Scott: Man, it’s not like they’re Russians or North Koreans.
Peter: Geographically, they border.
Peter: I mean, there’s a little water between them, but the next country away from them is, in both cases, Korea and Russia.
Peter: So that’s what’s cool.
Peter: And, you know, behind the whole thing, we’ve been talking about this router, but apparently, you know, you and I over the last few weeks have become huge fans of Tailscale, right?
Peter: Since, I guess, it was November 24th, was…
Peter: I’ve been hearing some ads for it, you know, the guys, all of the ATP crew, the Six Colors guys, you know, they’ve been…
Peter: Tailscale, Tailscale, Tailscale.
Peter: And I thought at first that this was like a…
Peter: something to do with the Tails Linux distribution, which is, you know, it’s a…
Peter: I don’t know if you’re familiar with that, but it’s a distro made for, you know, anonymous use and stuff like that.
Peter: But it’s a VPN replacement.
Peter: Now, here’s the thing.
Peter: It also, though, acts as a VPN, and I don’t see myself keeping my NordVPN subscription, although I just like renewed it for like three years or something.
Peter: So I don’t think I need that moving forward either, you know?
Peter: But the free offering with Tailscale, like I right now have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight.
Peter: I have nine devices with the Tailscale client configured on them right now, and it’s free.
Peter: I was like, that’s pretty cool.
Scott: Yeah.
Scott: Yeah, you have more than I do.
Scott: I’ve got six right now.
Peter: Well, I have two phones, an iPad, laptop, two more laptops, a mini desktop, and my router at this point.
Peter: So, yeah, and people apparently have run like tailscale on a robot and on a coffee maker, and stuff like that.
Peter: There’s some funny use cases.
Scott: Yeah, the cool thing about tailscale is not only can it act as a VPN, depending on your exit node, it also gives you the benefit of being connected to a VPN in terms of your traffic for other people being able to see.
Scott: Now, the interesting thing about tailscale is that you’re kind of, how does it work?
Scott: No, because, okay, I know that if you’re using the exit node and it routes all your traffic through the exit node, you’re protected.
Scott: What I’m not sure is if you’re on your tailscale network, but you’re not using an exit node, that’s not really equivalent to a VPN, right?
Scott: Because you’re technically on both networks.
Peter: So I have to look at that.
Peter: I thought if you’re using tailscale, you’re coming out through an exit node.
Peter: I have to check.
Peter: I think the traffic is encrypted on the way out.
Scott: If you connect to tailscale without setting an exit node.
Peter: Yeah, but you’re still coming out through tailscale, aren’t you?
Peter: Doesn’t it change your, it changes your IP address, doesn’t it?
Peter: Yeah, but here’s the thing.
Peter: They also want to upsell you with MULVAD VPN.
Peter: So what’s the purpose?
Peter: Maybe there’s no encryption there.
Peter: Obviously, we have to look at it.
Peter: We’ve been so enamored with the features that we’ve been using.
Peter: I haven’t looked into that one.
Scott: No, I think tailscale does encrypt, but the question is, I think you’re on both networks.
Scott: I thought you were on both networks still, unless you come out through a tailscale exit node.
Scott: Because normally what tailscale will do is give you access to stuff on your, whatever’s on the tailscale network.
Scott: So you can put home devices on the tailscale network and access them remotely without punching a hole in your router.
Peter: That’s the, yeah, I mean, that’s how they were essentially billing it, right?
Peter: It was like get access back to your home stuff if you publish your own exit nodes and your own subnet routers.
Scott: Yeah, and all that’s encrypted as far as I know, but the thing is, is that you’re still on whatever other network you were on for public stuff, unless you set up an exit node.
Scott: We’ll have to check into this, and maybe the listeners are swearing at us right now, but it could be, but I can’t hear them.
Peter: My noise canceling air pods are working.
Scott: I’m doing some bottle sounds in case the listeners are swearing.
Scott: There.
Scott: Got you covered, people.
Scott: So anyway, this was a real cool one.
Scott: This is a really cool device.
Scott: And I was kind of let down when I posted about this on a certain podcast slack for a podcast that I listened to.
Scott: And they were nothing, crickets.
Scott: Nobody gave a shit.
Scott: And I was like, wait a minute, you guys are supposed to be nerds.
Peter: I also recently, I mentioned to you, I have become a recent fan and adopter of the Security Controls Framework.
Peter: And it is a project I didn’t even realize.
Peter: It’s been around since like 2018.
Peter: I only just heard of it this year to my knowledge.
Peter: But the project is to map all Security Controls Frameworks to one another.
Peter: So you can quickly, easily, if you’ve been doing your work, I’m a big fan of the Center for Internet Security, CIS Controls.
Peter: If I’ve been doing all my work against the CIS 20, and I have a client who says, well, we need to go against NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0, or we need to do like COBIT, we need to audit against COBIT.
Peter: I can call this up, call up this mega Excel spreadsheet, and highlight just the COBIT and CIS Controls columns, and see where we’re already covered, all right, because it does this great mapping.
Peter: Recently, like earlier this week, I also noticed that the MITRE ATT&CK Framework is one of those columns covered under the Security Controls Frameworks.
Peter: And I was surprised about that because ATT&CK is not usually, it’s like you can use it to see how people are attacking you, how APTs, how threat actors, ransomware gangs, et cetera, are gaining and maintaining persistence and data exfiltration.
Peter: But you generally don’t go to do that.
Peter: It’s like you do that, you look at the ATT&CK Framework to see how you’re getting attacked, but it’s not generally something that I use as a defense type of mechanism.
Peter: But I was surprised, pleasantly so, to see the MITRE ATT&CK Framework as a column in the Security Controls Framework spreadsheet.
Peter: So I was like, huh, that’s pretty cool.
Peter: Curiously, the MITRE DEFEND Framework is not listed in there, but that’s also newer and not as popular.
Peter: So anyway.
Peter: But I did notice, among all of the categories in the Security Control Frameworks, one is web security.
Peter: And there are plenty of ATT&CK techniques covered by MITRE ATT&CK that target web stuff.
Peter: And so I posted, I said, Hey, I’m new.
Peter: I have questions.
Peter: There are no MITRE ATT&CK capabilities that map to web security in the SCF.
Peter: I would think, you know, like a couple of these would map to web security.
Peter: Is it being worked on?
Peter: Right?
Peter: And my thought is like if people, they would come back and either say, no, this is why it’s not, or yeah, we’d love to, but we don’t have time.
Peter: Hey, do you want to contribute to this?
Peter: You know, something like that.
Peter: And I got one response, and it was, well, the key issue is MITRE ATT&CK and the SCF, it’s an apples to orange comparison, since ATT&CK is not a controls framework.
Peter: It’s more focused on procedures and yada, yada, yada, yada.
Peter: And I was like, okay.
Peter: And other MITRE ATT&CK techniques are present in this document.
Peter: So, for example, as I couldn’t use this control, whatever I did, like Web Number 12, couldn’t that address MITRE ATT&CK framework, ATT&CK technique T1539, for example.
Peter: And it’s just crickets right there.
Peter: So it’s like, well, the problem is that they don’t map.
Peter: I’m like, okay, but you have other mappings.
Peter: You did some of this work, and it looks to me like this could also work here.
Peter: So you get the typical on the Internet, even in a group where you think it’s more mature professionals, you still get that same like, well, you’re asking the wrong question.
Peter: And it makes me want to say like, well, maybe I should just go and delete that entire MITRE ATT&CK column from my spreadsheet, right?
Peter: Because it’s not a right mapping.
Peter: Let’s just delete it all completely.
Peter: So I get what you’re saying.
Scott: Look, we’re nerds.
Scott: We like nerds for the most part, but nerds are so into their use case and their way of thinking.
Scott: Like when I set this up, here’s how I was thinking, that they don’t…
Scott: It’s really hard to get a lot of nerds to be open to, hey, did you ever think of it this way?
Scott: Did you ever think of it that way?
Scott: And they’re like, no, I never thought of it that way, and I never will.
Scott: Screw you.
Peter: But I mean, that’s not just nerds, though.
Peter: I mean, I worked a lot…
Peter: Like I said, a lot of what I do these days is working, trying to get people to buy in and understand their own…
Scott: But with nerds, they think it’s a logic thing.
Scott: They think their logic is correct.
Scott: They are so sure that they have gone through this logically and come to their conclusion, and that’s why they have this righteous belief in…
Scott: It’s like the…
Scott: It’s like…
Scott: I don’t disagree with the philosophy of Stoicism, per se, but have you ever noticed that all Stoics are men and they’re very sure that they came to all their conclusions logically, and therefore, they’re impenetrable, they can’t be questioned?
Scott: It’s a very man-like thing, I’ve found, that people have this self-assurance of, well, here’s how I approached it with logic, therefore, I did it correctly.
Scott: Everybody’s logic is flawed, dude.
Scott: Everyone’s logic is flawed.
Scott: We all make mistakes.
Scott: We all have huge oversights.
Scott: We all see stuff through gigantic filters, and I don’t know.
Peter: Well, let me just put a fine point on what you’re saying.
Peter: Everybody’s logic can have flaws at times.
Peter: There are…
Peter: Sometimes you can come up with, no, this is a perfectly logical explanation.
Peter: I like that, right?
Scott: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Scott: But what I’m saying is you can’t inherently think that because you went through some logical process that you’re perfect and there’s no way this is a mistake.
Peter: The reason I’m saying that, though, is in our current political climate, there’s a tendency for people to say stuff like, well, your reality is just as violent as mine, or my reality is just as violent, and so your logic can be flawed, so I don’t need to listen to anything, so I just want to clarify.
Scott: Right, right, right, right.
Scott: Yeah, understood.
Scott: No, I believe that there are subjective things, but I also believe that there are real things, and those real things are real.
Scott: No matter what you believe about them, they’re still frigging real.
Scott: Anyway, sorry to drag you off.
Scott: So is this the Secure, is this the securecontrolsframework.com?
Peter: frameworks.com.
Peter: Correct.
Peter: Yep, should put a link to that.
Peter: So real quick, before we, we got a little more time here.
Scott: We have three minutes.
Peter: You and I recently both, we both cut new iPhone 16 Pros, and we both got new MacBook M4 Pro.
Scott: I know.
Scott: It wasn’t planned that way.
Scott: We didn’t egg each other on.
Scott: There was no FOMO.
Scott: There was zero FOMO going on.
Peter: Oh, there was FOMO, FOMO, fear of missing out before tariffs kick in.
Peter: That’s the FOMO.
Scott: That is true, but there was no FOMO going on in terms of us egging each other on.
Scott: No.
Peter: But what I have not yet to do, so I did manage to migrate all my stuff from my MacBook Air last night, and I still had the original box, so I just shoved it in there after erasing it.
Peter: I’m going to drive over to FedEx and send it back.
Scott: Well, you say you migrated all your stuff successfully.
Peter: Well, no, I did.
Peter: My Macs did not migrate everything successfully.
Peter: I had to fill in the gaps.
Peter: So it’s funny, because using the migration assistant, it could not do it, even though I have the same size hard drives.
Peter: It’s like, nope, there’s not enough space.
Peter: So I was like, well, leave out my virtual machine images, and also don’t migrate this remote support account that I don’t need anymore, and still didn’t have enough.
Peter: I left out the virtual machines, and it’s fine.
Peter: And then subsequently, manually copy the virtual machine over and everything’s great.
Scott: Interesting.
Scott: Was your hard drive on the MacBook Air almost full?
Peter: Well, no, it had like 200 gigs free.
Scott: That is crazy.
Peter: And now on my new one, I have 120 gigs free on the new one.
Peter: And the only thing is like, okay, maybe it’s going to be a little tight, but literally 90 gigs of that is virtual machines.
Peter: And those come and go, right?
Peter: I can trash those.
Peter: I can stuff those into somewhere else and then pull them down when I need it.
Peter: The only one that’s valuable is a Windows 11 one that actually has an activated license on it.
Peter: So that one I don’t want to lose because you only get so many activations.
Peter: But I generally have 200 gigs or so free.
Peter: Now, what I have not yet done is stress tested this new machine running either Baldur’s Gate 3 in high resolution on my big screen, or running my Foundry virtual tabletop in my big browser, or while running audio hijack, while running Discord.
Scott: You’ve got to stress test this thing.
Scott: I think you’ll be, although what did I download?
Scott: I don’t remember.
Scott: I downloaded some 3D game thing, and I did manage to get my fans to spin up pretty hard.
Scott: But the game was running in, it wasn’t a native game, so it was running in whatever, what’s it called?
Scott: The Apple virtual is-
Peter: Electron?
Scott: No, no, no.
Peter: Oh, Cocoa.
Peter: Cocoa.
Peter: Yeah.
Peter: Rosetta?
Scott: Yeah, Rosetta.
Scott: Whatever the current version of Rosetta is, it was running in that.
Peter: It’s been so long.
Scott: The translation, it was being translated from Intel to Apple Silicon, basically.
Scott: So I did manage to spin it up pretty hard, which surprised me.
Scott: I thought it would handle it a little bit better than that, but that’s the only thing where I’ve ever heard the fans on this Mac.
Peter: But overall, I’d say it’s safe to say that our migrations went fairly smoothly, right?
Scott: Mine went 100% smoothly.
Scott: Everything worked exactly as it had on the, I think I had to, the only thing is that Mac OS now, it’s got so many security prompts for things that even though all that stuff was set up before, I got a billion security prompts to enable this, enable that.
Peter: So here’s the interesting thing.
Peter: You know, when you move signal off of a phone, right?
Peter: You have to go through the whole thing of re-registering or move it from one phone to another.
Peter: I definitely hit a hiccup there trying to move from one phone to the other on signal.
Peter: And the first time, it just like, it wouldn’t connect, wouldn’t connect, wouldn’t connect.
Peter: And then I tried like a day later, and it just connected and it migrated everything.
Peter: And it took like 20 minutes, and it was fine.
Peter: But signal going Mac to Mac just works fine.
Peter: You know, like I didn’t have to re-authenticate.
Peter: I didn’t even need to open my, enter my pin on my new Mac.
Peter: It’s just like, there it is, and I see you, and I see my conversation, and everything’s fine.
Scott: There you go.
Scott: You should all go check out that travel router.
Scott: I’ll put links in the show notes.
Scott: Anyway, it’s just cool.
Peter: We should put an affiliate link.
Peter: We should get credit for this one, because we’re really, really, really pushing it.
Scott: Yeah, it’s really cool.
Scott: Yeah, actually, that’s a good idea.
Scott: Maybe I’ll reach out and contact them.
Scott: I don’t know why people say reach out.
Scott: I hate that phrase.
Scott: It’s so stupid.
Scott: But anyway, I’m going to reach out anyway, even though I hate it.
Scott: I’m going to hate reaching out.
Scott: That’s what I’m going to do.
Peter: So we have some tail scale homework to do.
Peter: I definitely have a few things I need to figure out.
Peter: Sometimes when I install it, when I have tail scale running on a machine, I can no longer access it via my local network.
Peter: I have to go through tail scale to get to it.
Peter: So I have a feeling I’m…
Peter: It’s acting like it’s not doing split tunneling.
Peter: But I don’t know if I need to advertise routes.
Peter: Yeah, my Foundry server runs on a little Linux box in my basement.
Peter: But I…
Peter: Oh, and so I opened up Firefox, and I opened up my Foundry in my browser, and I hear for the first time the fan on my MacBook is kicking in.
Peter: But once I run this, I cannot access it.
Peter: Like, I can’t ping or SSH to my box locally, but I can do it over tailnet.
Scott: See, that’s interesting, because when I have connected to that router, I’ve been able to access stuff both ways.
Scott: Like, I can SSH into the router itself both ways.
Scott: I can use the 4.whatever address that my Eero hands it, or I can use the 192.168.8.1 address.
Peter: I think it’s got to be, what, advertise routes, advertise subnets.
Peter: I forget what they’re.
Peter: There’s some settings that I’m missing, but we’ll figure that out.
Peter: But for right now, as soon as I realize, I say, wait, maybe that’s just the VPN.
Peter: I access it via the tail scale hostname, and it works fine.
Scott: Yeah.
Scott: Why not?
Scott: It’s interesting.
Scott: By the way, I had to go through, maybe we’ll talk about this next time, but I had to jump through some hoops, and a guy on Reddit saved me, because when I was using my tail scale exit nodes, all of a sudden, I would have no internet access.
Scott: And then this guy, there was a thread on Reddit that I found that addressed how to do this.
Scott: You basically have to go into a weird interface that’s not part of the normal router interface on this thing.
Scott: It goes even deeper than that.
Scott: And then you have to configure it to bypass something for the tail scale zero network anyway.
Scott: We’ll talk about that later.
Scott: But the point is, I could not use a custom exit node to work out of the box on this thing.
Scott: I had to troubleshoot it and go through the hoops that I had to go through.
Scott: So that was a little weird because I think you were able to do it without any issue, right?
Peter: Yeah, it worked for me.
Scott: Okay, interesting.
Peter: So yeah, I don’t know what happened there.
Scott: All right.
Scott: In the same thread, some people were saying, some people that I helped configure it and they had no issues.
Scott: And then with the same version of firmware, other people had this issue and we had to do this other thing.
Scott: So I don’t know why.
Scott: But you and I both tried nanodes as exit nodes and apparently it worked for you, and it didn’t work for me unless I did this workaround, so that’s weird.
Scott: Okay.
Scott: All right.
Scott: Well, we better go.
Scott: I have a daughter to pick up.
Scott: And by the way, we have a Japanese exchange student coming this week.
Peter: You mentioned that.
Scott: Yeah, she’s going to be with us for like five days.
Scott: We’re going to try to give her the full American experience.
Scott: So I’m going to go buy a lifted pickup.
Scott: I’m going to put some huge flags on it.
Scott: I’m going to teach her how to shoot a rifle, maybe an AR or 15.
Peter: Give her lots of milk and cheese.
Scott: Milk and cheese.
Scott: I’m going to make sure to only buy her pizza that has cheese stuffed in the crust.
Peter: I mean, duh.
Peter: Is there any other kind?
Peter: America.
Scott: Cheap beer.
Scott: She’s a high schooler, so I’d give her some Miller or something.
Peter: Obviously.
Scott: Yeah.
Scott: So it should be a lot of fun.
Scott: Anyway, no, it’ll be cool because my daughter’s taking Japanese class.
Scott: And of course, I lived in Japan for eight years as a child, so I can speak very childish Japanese to her and it’ll be fun.
Peter: Childish Japanese is the best.
Peter: All right.
Peter: Well, on that note, I’m going to stop recording.
Peter: But before I do, I’ll remind you, dear listener, if you want to get a hold of us, you already have.
Peter: Hello?
Peter: Duh.
Scott: You already have.
Peter: You can find us at friendswithbrews.com.
Peter: That’s B-R-E-W-S.
Peter: You can also now find both of us, in addition to Mastodon.
Scott: On the BlueSki.
Peter: You can find us on BlueSki.
Scott: I always say BlueSki.
Scott: It sounds very Russian to me.
Peter: Yes, it does.
Peter: I’ve seen people post that on BlueSki.
Peter: Where they said, actually, it’s called BlueSki.
Peter: It’s a Russian application.
Peter: Yes, I finally took the plunge.
Peter: I gotta tell you, the reason that I had been avoiding BlueSki was because Jack Dorsey was the founder.
Peter: And then I found out apparently he’s not involved anymore though.
Peter: I said, oh, okay, then in that case, I’ll jump right on.
Peter: And I am loving it.
Peter: It really is like old Twitter.
Peter: And I’ve followed a bunch of folks that I was following on Twitter and found a bunch of new folks thanks to their starter packs.
Peter: At the moment, I have a recipe in place, so anything I post to Mastodon shows up on BlueSki.
Peter: So I don’t need to necessarily cross post.
Peter: I’d like to go the other way though, because I’m feeling like Mastodon is gonna kind of like…
Peter: I’ll keep it.
Peter: I’m not gonna throw it away.
Peter: But I think BlueSki is gonna be my premiere for some time.
Peter: So anyway, on that note, on BlueSki, I am at peternicolaitis.com, and you are?
Scott: At scottwilsey.com.
Peter: So that’s where you can find us.
Peter: You can still find us on Mastodon, though.
Peter: I am Nicolaitis at…
Peter: Well, I’m at info.exchange.nicolaitis or something.
Scott: I have no idea what the hell I am.
Peter: Yeah, you’re social.lol, aren’t you?
Scott: I think I’m scott.wilsey at social.lol, or I’m scottwilsey.
Scott: I don’t even know what I’m…
Peter: I’m at app.net.net.net.net.net.net.net thing.
Scott: Well, the Friends with Brews account still is.
Scott: Let’s see, I’m at scottwilsey at social.lol.
Scott: That’s what I am.
Peter: So you’re at scottwilsey on both, which is kind of cool, minus the.com.
Scott: Right, it’s just not.com.
Scott: And the Friends with Brews account is friendswbrews at app.net.
Scott: So app.
Scott: is A-P-P-D-O-T, and then there’s an actual dot, and then there’s a net.
Scott: Whatever.
Scott: Just freaking go to our website and take a look at it faster.
Peter: Freaking go to our website.
Scott: Yeah, just freaking go to our website.
Peter: All right.
Peter: On that note, I think it’s time to push that big red button.
Scott: Big red button.
Peter: Big red button.
Scott: Tell your friends.