“It would be a good value if the value was good, but it isn’t.”

FANTASTIC reference! This movie is so funny and awesome, and it seems to have completely disappeared from pop culture. I never understood why Conan looms so large in our collective memory, but this movie totally vanished.

You might be talking about Never10, made by Steve Gibson over at GRC.com. It has since been updated and renamed InControl. It now also works to prevent unwanted Win11 upgrades, as well as other things. https://www.grc.com/incontrol.htm

Thanks for this tip. I hadn’t heard about this before, and it sounds like an interesting thing to add to my tool chest.

so if you browse youtube that can go via a country that does not allow ads.

Can you tell me more about this? I’ve never heard about that this is a thing, and it sounds like a good thing to known

I can’t think of any problems I’ve faced in over 3 years. I have an app on my phone that I can use to temporarily disable my Pi-hole if I need to do some testing, but I don’t know if I’ve ever had a situation where the Pi-hole was the source of a problem. Definitely not a maintenance headache. I run an update on it every now and then, but only because I see a notification that there is one, not because there’s something going wrong.

You’ll sometimes hear IT people use “Layer 8 problem” which is a reference to the OSI networking model. The model has 7 layers. It starts at layer-1, the physical layer (the literal wires that the signals flow through), and ends with layer-7, the application later (things like http, ftp, etc.).

“Layer-8” isn’t technically part of the OSI model, but unofficially it refers to the human layer, or the user. When IT people are troubleshooting an issue, trying to identify where in the model the issue is happening, “layer-8” is a tongue-in-cheek way of saying “there isn’t an actual problem… the person is the problem”.

Another good one is the “ID10T” error (read as “I-D-ten-T”), which looks a lot like “IDIOT” when written down. It means the same thing.

Exactly. Layer 8 problem.