You can’t change your IP with your own VPN server, you have to go through a third party VPN or proxy

I run PiHole on mine

I’ll quit YouTube before I watch ads.

Long time ago, already downloading it

I think what you’re doing is fine, in fact, it’s one of the Microsoft recommended methods of doing it.

What are you trying to accomplish? Hide/anonymize your Internet/torrenting activity? Or access your LAN devices from the Internet? Because those are two different use cases for VPN. One requires paying a third party provider, the other - hosting a VPN server on your network.

It doesn’t matter as you’re encrypting your cloud backups anyway. You’re encrypting backups, right?

Not cool, bro, it’s against the pirate code to cheat at multiplayer video games.

Site is dead

I use ecobee and block it from the Internet. Works great with Home Assistant via Homekit.

You’re comparing apples and oranges, reverse proxy and VPN serve two different purposes.

None of my mine come as PDF attachments, it’s always “click here to see your statement” which goes through the login process to the company’s portal. I get it, they think they’re doing it for security. But email is no less secure than paper mail and they send paper statements in regular mail, so why not email?

I just organize it properly in a folder structure that makes sense to me. No need to do anything more complicated if you’re organized.

Yeah, but you have to log in to the company’s portal and click through their menus to get the PDFs. I wish eBill/eStatements would mean sending them over email, that would be easy to set up an automated way to grab them and file them.

Sending me an email notice that eBill is available is NOT useful at all, it’s only a little more convenient than paper bills

legitimate (non spam) bulk email

I don’t think there’s such a thing, all bulk emails is spam to me as a user.

None.

Have a good backup strategy and nuke the OS/restore data from backup when needed.

I wouldn’t trust any antivirus to clean everything properly after my machine has been infected.

Any guides/resources on how to get started on that? I have backups and could probably get my stuff up and running after some tinkering but I love the idea of some script I can just run on a fresh environment that would bring all my containers up and restore all the data.

Yeah, I’d rather not go down that rabbit hole, it’s too much for what I need. I just want to be able to search for torrents easier and add them with one click, I don’t need the whole automation stack.

How do you install search plugins in qBittorrent? When I follow their instructions, paste the plugin URL to add it, nothing happens. I’m using a headless qBittorrent web gui

I stay away from anything not selfhosted. Any third party, no matter how good and friendly it seems now, will eventually screw you once they get big.

Besides, even if it doesn’t, I don’t want them to have access to my data.