hello, crystalblue

Welcome to the crystalblue blog.

I do not particularly anticipate that it will attract a large readership, if any at all. However, if you have happened upon this space; please feel free to pull up a chair and grab a metaphorical cup of tea & a biscuit. I would suggest a chocolate-dipped viennese finger.

I largely envision crystalblue as a small slice of the internet that’s disconnected from algorithms, adverts, and general noise. It is a quiet space, somewhere that invites the writer & reader to linger without expectation.

I intend to use it to document my transition away from Google and foray into self-hosting. Long-term, I would like to migrate this project to a self-hosted solution, however Cloudflare Pages is suitable enough for now.

Currently, I am exploring Invidious as a way to watch YouTube without providing a mega-conglomerate with all my data. My initial intention was to simply always be connected via my commercial VPN and run it through Docker, but YouTube’s anti-abuse metrics have made that difficult. It seems that my VPN exit was blocked. I thought perhaps I could run it through a specific VPN exit that I know works with YT via gluetun - I know this would involve rotating the server every so often, but this is an acceptable trade-off to me. I typically reach for Eastern European servers to access YT, which do work in the browser. However, to my dismay, it seems YT treats headless requests differently. verifying an exit works on the browser isn’t enough to verify it’ll work in Invidious. I’m also unable to use DASH when running behind gluetun, which is unfortunate as I don’t really want to watch in 720p.

In the meantime, I’m watching with a VPN on via YoutTube with Privacy Badger, an adblocker, and a private window. but I would prefer to self-host, eventually.

— Frost