Have you ever wondered which clearnet web domains (as in not onions) are the most popular among users of The Onion Router project (Tor)? Is there any evidence to support the popular mainstream opinion that Tor is predominantly used by people with malicious and criminal intent? To add some spice to this question in 2026, I’ve aggregated non-identifiable data based on DNS queries made by my five Tor exit relays.

Alpine Linux is designed to be a small, simple, and secure Linux distribution. For many, it’s the default choice for containerization. In fact, you might already be running an Alpine container somewhere as a part of a deployment without even knowing that it’s there.

It’s a dirty job, but somebody’s got to do it. Well, actually, that’s not quite true. I’ve been mirroring this blog as an onion site since 2016, so I figured it was time to contribute a little time, effort, and money towards the infrastructure of the Tor network. Besides, running Tor relays has always been on my bucket list, and I am getting old. No more time to waste ;)

After spending the majority of my personal computing adventures on my MacBook Pro last year, I received my final deprogramming session with the latest batch of macOS updates. Surveillance tech has now festered deep inside macOS Sequoia itself with the rollout of Apple Intelligence. Apple’s promises of groundbreaking privacy protections aside, I employ a strict zero-trust policy when it comes to accessing my personal data.

After my recent rant about Enterprise Linux, the company where I work became a SUSE Linux partner. Therefore, I’m giving Enterprise Linux another go. After initially looking at SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED), I decided to go with SUSE’s rolling offering, Tumbleweed.

The Nginx mainline branch (currently version 1.25.3) has implemented support for HTTP/3 and I want it on my server. The first order of business will be to switch from the nginx stable branch (currently version 1.24.0) to the mainline branch. As Arch Linux provides both Nginx branches in their repository, it’s just a matter of performing a quick drop-in replacement.

Earlier this year, Canonical decided to advertise the arrival of Ubuntu Pro by hooking up the following message in the terminal as users were issuing apt update: “The following security updates require Ubuntu Pro with ‘esm-apps’ enabled: (list of vulnerable installed packages)”. Predictable for anyone but Canonical, confusion ensued.

During an issue with a defective storage solution, I had temporarily (as in not added to fstab) mounted an external USB disk under /mnt/usb-disk on a Proxmox server to keep the backups flowing. A day and a reboot later, those backups started to fill up the local storage instead with unfortunate consequences. As they say, you really can’t fix stupid.

A few years ago I speculated in the article “Slackware Linux trivia, history, and things you didn’t know” that slackware.com was being hosted on Slackware Linux 12.0. My assumption was based on the host headers returned from the server. Those headers reveal that the webserver is Apache/2.2.22, coincidentally the last Apache patch ever released for Slackware 12.0. However, it turns out that I was very wrong.

After a few years with the Finnish cloud platform provider UpCloud, I decided to move my services to Germany and try out Hetzner Online. UpCloud has been excellent, but I felt like it was time for a change, and Hetzner Online offers a lot of bang for your bucks.

I wanted to enjoy a lazy Saturday morning by listening to some black metal on my Slackware 15 installation. However, before I could get to that, I had to connect my Samsung soundbar to my Slackware machine over Bluetooth. Unexpectedly, after establishing a connection, the devices immediately disconnected.

For the second time this year, our old FreeNAS storage platform went offline and left our Proxmox VE 6.4 servers in a continuous state of distress. This issue renders the Proxmox VE GUI unresponsive and thus unable to display information about the virtual servers it’s running.

I can’t remember ever having an issue with updating the firmware of my XPS 13 7390 on Ubuntu. Today, however, Ubuntu 21.10 (Impish Indri) decided to throw an ugly-looking warning in my face after proudly proclaiming that it had a new device firmware update ready to be installed. To add insult to injury, Ubuntu told me to reboot the system to install the new firmware, after GNOME Software correctly informed me that it had failed.

If your Fedora Linux installation had only one hour left to live, where would you go and what would you do? Welcome to another brand new installment of my adventures in enterprise Linux’ing.

So .buzz is another one of those new gTLD’s that saw the light of day during ICANN’s “show me the money” run back in 2013. It’s managed by dotStrategy, and it’s advertised as a great domain name for generating buzz around your product.

I always keep a terminal window open to monitor system logs in real-time when I’m in front of my computer. Therefore, it immediately caught my attention when the systemd journal offered zero new lines of output. The most recent entry simply contained information about the previous shutdown.

In the modern computing era, Slackware might be considered an old relic of a long-forgotten past. The old king may have abdicated the throne, but the embers of past glory still smolder. As we’re on our way towards the release of Slackware 15, allow me to share a few amusing Slackware tales I’ve collected over the years.

Slackers rejoice! The dark ages have finally come to an end. Our benevolent dictator for life has spoken, and KDE Plasma 5 has arrived in /testing on Slackware-current. Patrick Volkerding announced the update with his usual lack of fanfare on the Slackware-current changelog:

ShortDot SA, the top-level domain registry that brought us the infamous .ICU TLD is back with yet another useless domain extension. Say hello to .CYOU TLD, the “savvy and uber-cool domain”, at least according to ShortDot.

Last month we had an issue with a multitude of unwanted connections against our mail servers from a specific netblock in Argentina. In my experience, coordinated attacks from IP addresses originating from the same netblock usually indicates an issue on the ISP side.