Author: Ryan Neudorf

Return of Vegetarian Fast Food

I was a lacto-ovo vegetarian for roughly 5 years and a pescitarian for another 5 years.

That was nearly 10 years ago.

My reasons for becoming a vegetarian were vaguely ethical. PETA did a great job of marketing to my demographic around the turn of the century. The punk/DIY-esque social circles I interacted with on the early internet (and occasionally IRL) were generally pro-vegetarian/vegan and there were a large amount of resources available for new vegetarians.

At the same time, the early-to-mid-00s saw a huge jump in vegan options available locally. Grocery stores started carrying decent meat alternatives (like Yves). And surprisingly, mainstream fast-food chains began carrying (at least one) vegetarian option. McDonalds, Burger King and A&W all had veggie patties. KFC had a faux-chicken burger. Subway had their “veggie max” patty (much better than it’s gross sounding name).  Panago introduced their meat-free pepperoni during this time. It was a good time to be a fat vegetarian. With the exception of Panago, all of those options fell off the menu sometime in the past 10 years.

My reasons for starting to eat meat again were vaguely social and selfish. If I’m being honest with myself, the ethical and environment problems of eating meat are still something that troubles me occasionally. I’ve simply chosen not to care about them for the time being.

What I’m about to say is a bit of an uncharacteristically lofty statement for me to make but… I honestly think the world would be a better place if we ate less meat. I don’t think this can happen until we have nearly indistinguishable faux-meat, if not perfectly synthetic vat-grown meat. And I believe fast-food will be the major vector of change.

To that end, I’ve been watching the rise of more “realistic” faux-meat technologies with much curious anticipation. I was pretty stunned when I heard that A&W has started to serve (the Bill Gates + Twitter + Kliener Perkins funded) Beyond Meat “Beyond Burger.” I first heard about this company 2 or 3 years ago, they looked really promising, I just assumed they were still in R&D mode. Needless to say I’m looking forward to tasting this burger ASAP.

Coincidentally, I noticed that Subways has started to prominently stock their veggie max patty once again. I wonder if we might see a resurgence in vegetarian fast food.

The History of Vagrant Records

The Washed Up Emo Podcast published a great 2 part interview with the co-founder of Vagrant Records. If you were ever in to the first batch of Vagrant bands, I’d highly recommend listening to these to episodes.

#70 – Part 1 of 2 – The History of Vagrant Records with co-founder Rich Egan

#71 – Part 2 of 2 – The History of Vagrant Records with co-founder Rich Egan

I just discovered the podcast and these episodes are a few years old at this point, still well worth the listen.

DIY Internet: More on personal VPNs

A few followup thoughts regarding Monday’s post about setting up a personal VPN.

Self-Sufficient, DIY Internet

All the Facebook Cambridge Analytica nonsense has really emphasized how dependent we have become on third party services and social networks.

As I thought about it, the idea of being self-sufficient online has really started to appeal to me. I mean this blog has always been independent, fully controlled by me. As a web developer with fully-stack devops ninja experience, I have all the skill and experience I need to set up any sort of web service I want.

So when I thought about the reasons for using a VPN regularly and the likelihood that I’d have to pay for a decent service, I wanted to see if i could do it myself. On severs I own.

I think there are more opportunities to DIY online, to rely less on dubious third parties.

Peace of Mind

As I alluded to in my first post, the real world security threats associated with public wifi are only a minor concern. I’m not generally too concerned, most of the time.

That said this little icon next to my WiFi connection gives me such a massive sense of security and piece of mind. The fact that it auto-connects without me having to take an action is just the icing on the cake.

Censorship

Streissand is an anti-censorship tool designed to bypass draconian government censorship like China’s Greatfirewall. You don’t live in China, do you really need do worry about censorship? Probably — and if you hang around the right subreddits — increasingly so.

Canada’s telcos are presently lobbying for a censorship regime. Perhaps the first draft targets content most of us would agree is “bad,” but who knows what the next version will look like.

Even if you’re less paranoid, there’s a good chance your workplace or school is filtering some content. Maybe it’s not content you bump in to very often. But if even if they are not filtering traffic, they’re almost certainly collecting your web traffic. That’s something I’ve never been too comfortable with.

A VPN allows you to take back your online freedom whenever you’re using a work, school or any other network that distrusts you.

Bypassing Geographic Restrictions

In case you missed, VPNs allow you to bypass geographic content restrictions. When you use a VPN, you traffic originates from the IP address of the VPN server. And since cloud providers host servers in many physical locations, you can easily bypass any geo restrictions based on IP address.

If you missed Monday’s post you can read it here:

How to: Set Up A Personal VPN

How to: Set Up A Personal VPN

Skill Level, Novice: To set this up you’ll want to be mildly comfortable with the command-line. But you won’t necessarily need know (or care) about the technologies involved.

Way back in 2010, firesheep scared my pants off. I was traveling for work when it dropped and I became acutely aware of just how vulnerable my data was on huge airport wifi. In the 8 years since then  https everywhere has become a reality and the threat of bad actors sniffing your web traffic is nearly a thing of the past.

But I’m still paranoid. And today I finally did something about it.

Enter Streisand

Streisand is an open-source project with the goal of defeating censorship. The best way to defeat local censorship is secure, undetectable VPN connection (usually in a foreign country). The goal of defeating censorship aligns nicely with the goal of hardening your internet connection.

Streisand is essentially an installer for a set VPN tools which you’ll install on a cloud hosted server that you control. The project presently supports Amazon EC2, Azure, DigitalOcean, Google Compute Engine, Linode, and Rackspace. You simply run a few commands, select a few options (the defaults are totally fine) and Streisand does the rest.

If you’ve ever run apt-get or setup homebrew on MacOS you should have no problem setting this up. Streisand’s installation instructions well written and easy to follow (jump right to the instruction here).

Much to my surprise — unlike many of these types of command-line driven projects — I ran into absolutely zero issues during the install.

It gets even easier.

If that doesn’t sound easy enough — get this — Streisand copies over an HTML document with an incredibly easy to use guide, per-filled with all the configuration settings your need for your server. It’s dead simple to share this with anybody you choose.

Bonus points: Auto-Connect on public WiFi.

The last time I used the TunnelBear app, I noticed an advanced setting to auto-connect to all wifi except for a whitelist of trusted network. So that if you’re on your secure home, work or other trusted wifi network, you don’t waste VPN bandwidth or take the potential performance hit.

Unfortunately, iOS doesn’t support settings like this natively.

In order to accomplish this, you have to create a custom .mobileconfig file. These files are huge XML documents that you probably shouldn’t write by hand.

Save yourself a headache, use this iOS VPN autoconnect generator (props @klinquist).

Costs

I am hosting my Streisand VPN on Linode, my goto host for the past serveral years. Their lowest tier server is more than power enough to host a VPN. And they generously include 1TB of service. For US$5/mo.

The $5/mo price-point is competitive with many of the popular VPN services. Except, since you’re self-hosting, you are not limited to 1 user. You can freely hand out the streisand connection to friends and family.

Conclusion

One of the most powerful aspects of the internet and open source software is the ability to take control of everything yourself. As somehow with this skills to do this myself, I am going to start to make a concerted effort to take control of more things myself and be less dependant on untrustworthy third-parties.

Running my own VPN is just one small step.

I wrote a short follow-up post you might enjoy:

DIY Internet: More on personal VPNs