Those Protectli Vaults are neat little devices.

It definitely makes it more difficult to switch endpoints manually. I have multiple VPN connections with different exit nodes configured for failover in case one (or more) of them is unreachable. I don’t run into geoblocking issues very often but I also don’t route all my WAN traffic over VPN. Just some of it.

What you can automate depends on your routers capabilities. Mine is a Mikrotik which does have fairly extensive support for custom scripts. However, detecting Geoblocking is probably going to involve parsing HTTP responses which is beyond the capabilities of almost all consumer grade routers. You would have to effectively do a MITM attack (aka deep packet inspection) in order to accomplish that on something other than the client device.

TLDR: I manually change routes to a different VPN if needed but I very rarely run into Geoblocking issues.

/*
By all accounts, the logic in this method shouldn't work. And yet it does. We do not know why. It makes no sense whatsoever. It took three weeks and numerous offerings to the programming gods, including using one of the junior devs as a human sacrifice, to unlock this knowledge. DO NOT LET HIS VIOLENT AND UNTIMELY DEATH BE IN VAIN! Touch this at your own peril.
--jubilationtcornpone 12/17/25
*/
public async Task<IResult> CalculateResultAsync()
{
     // Some ass backwards yet miraculously functional logic.
}

I exclusively use my router as the VPN client for a few reasons. There are multiple services on my network that use the VPN. I’ve got static routes configured which effectively act as a kill switch and I can use QOS to prioritize traffic. It’s pretty much set it and forget it. You can use any VPN service as long at they offer a protocol your router supports. I use Proton via WireGuard and have for years.

Everyone else should just ignore us (the US) and tell Russia to fuck off. You probably don’t have to worry about us interfering too much since we’re too busy planning to lose a war with Venezuela.

He’s just looking for a bribe in the form of a settlement, as usual.

The news has prompted scrutiny online, though there is no evidence of any connection between the award and prosecutors’ move to dismiss the charges.

If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck…

Why not just use what you have until you can afford to and/or need to upgrade? SAS drives are more expensive because they typically offer higher performance and reliability. Hardware raid may be “old” but it’s still very common. The main risk with it is that if your raid card fails, you’ll have to replace it with the same model if you don’t want to rebuild your server from scratch.

I’ve been running an old Dell PowerEdge for several years with no issues.

Ok. There’s clearly been some instances corruption and that warrants concern. On the other hand, this article seems to lack …uh… situational awareness. Foreign countries trying to micromanage the aid they’re providing Ukraine while the country is fighting a full scale war is assinine.

That’s like having to deal with FEMA (which is a huge pain in the ass) while a tornado is ripping through your living room and you’re just trying to not die.

Oh man. “Inner restlessness” is probably my least favorite ADHD symptom. I’m not outwardly hyperactive but my defective little brain sure is.

I used to treat it daily with Jim Beam but that’s not a good way to live either.

Now I take my bed time meds (including melatonin) about 3 hours before bedtime and put on my blue light glasses. It’s not perfect but it’s better than it used to be.

“This hallucination is brought to you by Coca-Cola.”

Battleships were an interesting chapter in naval history. They were first developed around 60 years before aircraft carriers, increasingly designed with the idea that they would be able to hit enemy targets while remaining out of range of returned fire. That ended up being an unrealistic expectation. Those 16 inch guns can lob a 1 ton shell nearly 24 miles but not very accurately at that range.

Battleships probably outlived their tactical usefulness. They were definitely good for projecting force. Few things say “I’m going to obliterate you” like a large, fast ship armed with 9 giant-ass canons.

You just need a reminder to check your reminders.

One of my old bosses used to say, “the choice is often not between right and wrong, but good, better, and best.”

I agree with that sentiment for the most part. Different styles is fine. But sometimes you run into someone who is trying to use a socket wrench to drive nails and all you can do is just kind of watch in amazement and wonder how they arrived at the conclusion that this was the way to go.

First One:

Big ASP.Net Core Web API that passed through several different contract developer teams before being finally brought in house.

The first team created this janky repository pattern on top of Entity Framework Core. Why? I have no idea. My guess is that they just didn’t know how to use it even though it’s a reasonably well documented ORM.

The next team abandoned EFCore entirely, switched to Dapper, left the old stuff in place, and managed to cram 80% of the new business logic into stored procedures. There were things being done in sprocs that had absolutely no business being done there, much less being offloaded to the database.

By the time it got to me, the data layer was a nightmarish disaster of unecesary repo classes, duplicates entities, and untestable SQL procedures, some of which were hundreds of lines long.

“Why are all our queries running so slow?”

We’ll see guys, it’s like this. When your shoving a bunch of telemetry into a stored procedure to run calculations on it, and none of that data is even stored in this database, it’s going to consume resources on the database server, thereby slowing down all the other queries running on it.

Second One:

Web app that generates PDF reports. Problem was it generated them on-the-fly, every time the PDF was requested instead of generating it once and storing it in blob storage and it was sllloowwwww. 30 seconds to generate a 5 page document. There were a list of poor decisions that led to that, but I digress.

Product owner wants the PDF’s to be publicly available to users can share links to them. One of the other teams implements the feature and it’s slated for release. One day, my curiosity gets the best of me and I wonder, “what happens if I send a bunch of document requests at once?” I made it to 20 before the application ground to a halt.

I send a quick write up to the scrum Master who schedules a meeting to go over my findings. All the managers keep trying to blow it off like it’s not a big deal cause “who would do something like that?” Meanwhile, I’m trying to explain to them that it’s not even malicious actors that we have to be concerned about. Literally 20 users can’t request reports at the same time without crashing the app. That’s a big problem.

They never did fix it properly. Ended up killing the product off which was fine because it was a pile of garbage.

“I’m going to set this right here. That way I will definitely remember where I put it.”

Narrator: “He did not remember.”

US Farmers having the day they voted for:

Its also incredibly fast.

“We’re going to use NestJS for the backend.”

Wait… Oh no. Oh please no. God why!?!