Huh very cool. I'm going to have to try this

Cool. My rule of thumb of only buying products that either are open source or can have open source firmware and software is sticking.

No adblocker built in, but Rethink DNS is a great app that will set up a local VPN and do firewall filtering and DNS filtering. There are other apps too and they should all work on any OS.

Personally I self host a VPN and pihole and stay connected to that

That's a good idea.

Probably just a shell script. Someone mentioned using curl so that'd be pretty easy

Yea. My issue now is finding a list of these sites

I like this. Is there some sort of list of safe sites that exists that I could use in a script?

Edit: something like this

Very similar yes. Trackmenot but for any site not just search engines. Although it may be a good option too

Yup. Tailscale+Mullvad isn't a bad option, but I'd rather not depend on tailscale and a true local connection will always be better. But then you have to pay through tailscale and then more identifiable.

As I mentioned I have a server, and I use a VPN to connect always to it. This makes using a paid VPN a bit harder. The dedicated VPN IP should fix this issue but I haven't looked into how difficult that'd be.

Hmmm how is Beeper? Isn't it run on someone's Mac instead of your own? Is it FOSS?

I have yet to run into a situation where I am unable to use the VPN back home.

Do you have a situation that this would happen in?

Okay I may have to look into kodi again. Any recommended skins to make browsing things like Disney+ easier?