As the title says I cannot believe I used a US company (Apple) to create an email address for Lemmy.ca, I have been going wild on seeing what “free” services/emails I have been signed up for using Apple’s hide my email and sorting through my inbox. Seeing if I need things anymore or if there are Canadian alternatives. I strongly suggest to everyone go through your password manager (please say you are using one) and then go through what you may need in the future or what not (then sign up for a Canadian password manager like 1Password).

I am not sure that I got down to Lemmy.ca in my Apple Passwords, but I checked out my email for Lemmy.ca and it was a freakin’ icloud address. It was not easy to figure out how to change my email address but as of today I can proudly say my Lemmy.ca account is on a Canadian server.

So I have bad habits of doing in app purchases because I have a pihole that blocks the ads, so I cannot use the commercials to get power ups or whatever. I do not want to pay Apple for things so I needed to find a way to help me stop paying Apple for things. I wanted to originally fine the address to just block payments to apple from through my pihole, after reading things I found that this would probably block updates and all that and that is not a good thing. So I ended up blocking payments as if I were a freakin child on the devices, I guess I can still do it with the password maybe? Feels a little demeaning but I need to stop myself and making it harder for me to buy power ups or whatever is a good thing.

I also think there will be secrete DST charges, of greater then the 5% or whatever it is, added to in app purchases come the first. The big tech companies will not be happy that they have to pay a retro active sales tax.

I already have a Canadian company hosting my domain and random emails; I create a new email for every service I signup for which forwards to another address so that I do not get junk mail, one address starts spamming me I can just turn off the address. Then I have my ISP’s email address which I am thinking of leaving, but this is all besides the point. I am stuck on my iPad and iPhone because of family things, does anyone know of a non US mail app to replace my iOS mail app, I want to stay away from proton? I have replaced Safari with Vivaldi no complaints, it works along side my piholes at blocking ads, I have almost replaced Reddit with Lemmy, I have replaced YouTube with Unwatched, I am in the process of moving my media to Jellyfin, I have replaced Apple’s media store with a bunch of arr apps, and I am replacing all my Apple computer devices with raspberry pi’s.

Once upon a time there was discussion about the DNS servers 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 and how we need to move to a Canadian one. The one passed around was 149.112.121.30, CIRA (protected).

I had said something about going a step further and just using your own via Pi-Hole and Unbound. Someone I do not remember who as that is why I am posting here said yes but the pi still has the DNS server you set it up with, they said they would look into it further at a later date If they did look into it and post something I am truly sorry as I cannot find it.

I have gotten into using less US internet things and I recently got to find out that I needed to figure out my VPN setup a little better. This lead me into a deep valley of infosec and I am trying my darndest to strip things away. Anywho I was looking into something and there was mention of apps possibly falling back to system DNS so I found /etc/resolv.conf where I changed my DNS system on my 3 currently operational pi’s to access DNS like this.

Edit: I fixed some editing and hopefully made the commands more clear

This was bolded (I guess putting the comment marker first in the line makes it bold) but inside of the conf file at /etc/resolv.conf I changed it from,

Generated by NetworkManager

nameserver 9.9.9.9 To

Generated by NetworkManager

nameserver 172.16.1.50 # Primary Pi-hole

nameserver 172.16.1.52 # Secondary Pi-hole

nameserver 149.112.121.30 # Canadian DNS (CIRA Canadian Shield: Protected)

I also needed to add this to the end of /etc/unbound/unbound.conf.d/pi-hole.conf

This is for Canadian and psuedo-Canadian backups.

forward-zone:

name: "."

forward-addr: 149.112.121.10 # CIRA Canadian DNS

forward-addr: 9.9.9.10 # Quad9 Canadian (with filtering)

forward-first: no

I get into computer projects and find ways to one up myself, I wish I could say I crash tested everything the old fashioned way but I have used ChatGPT to crash test things. Only because I do not have a computer with a strong enough graphics card to run a local LLM and breaking one thing could set me back hours or even days.

So someone on here suggested calling Amazon and closing your prime account and getting your whole year back, $109 for me. So I got curious what other services have I just cancelled but maybe I could get money back, turns out if you call Disney+ they will cancel and refund your account I paid through Apple so they will have to do their thing first but hopefully I will get refunded for that. I saw that I was also paying for Trilogy+ but I have cancelled that and have asked Apple to refund that.

Then I thought about what other services have I forgotten about, or are just set to not renew. I had transferred my domain to hosthero so that I could get a .ca address so I thought maybe I should check out wordpress, it has been cancelled but after getting past the dumb artificial intelligence I got a full refund!

I should add this is an open letter for people to copy and send off their MP.