I'm sure it comes as no surprise that I am just another computer nerd.
But what bores me almost to tears are videos, blog posts, podcasts, etc... of
computery nerdy things such as deep dives into other people's code or
phlogs that read like they should start out as "Chief Nerd Officer's Log,
stardate whatever..."  and continue to describe some computer maintenence they
did or how they do backups or something.

I don't know I just don't care.  I guess I seek more balance in my life.  I
have enough computer administrative stuff in my daily life as it is and I
don't need to obsorb it from others.

Here, I am going to try to abstain from such talk and really just post things
that won't get out of my head just to ... make them get out of my head; for
better or worse.

This post is probably going to come as close to what I'm trying to avoid as any.
Yesterday I set up a pihole on my network.  If you don't know this is a server
(in my case running on a raspberry pi) which acts as a DNS server and filters
out a lot of crap such as ads, trackers, malware sites, and just generally
"suspicious" sites.

As I've been monitoring activity I noticed there is a lot of DNS requests
constantly coming from two places: A chrome instance on the living room computer
and my wife's phone.  My wife also runs the chrome instance(s) on the living
room computer (I use Brave).

I realize the reason most of the constant "call home-ing" going on is because
my wife browses the internet in a way a lot of younger people do these days:
They don't use bookmarks, they just keep tabs open.

(Nearly) every one of those tabs is not just a static document, it's a program,
for (most) intents and purposes.  A program which is constantly running as
long as the tab is open and often has javascript code running in the background
calling home to some server to report whatever it is it can report.  That
might just be the fact that the page is still loaded up, but it could be more
depending on how security conscious the user is.  For example when you got the
alert that this site wants to know your location, did you read that?  Did you
consider the pros and cons of it?  Or did you just click "ok" because you just
saw it as yet another obstacle in the way of seeing the site?  Did you assume
the site would not work correctly, or at all, if you had clicked "deny" instead?

I can see how companies that rely on tracker data for profit benefit from this
browsing style and it makes me wonder if this shift to "keeping tabs open"
instead of using bookmarks (aka, "favorites") was somehow engineered by the
industry, or if they are mearly taking advantage of it.  Although, at this time,
I am not seeing how it was engineered.
.