Untrusem's Forest

How I browse the Web with uBlock (Hard Mode)

2026-08-17T18:30:00Z

How I browse the Web with uBlock (Hard Mode)

Figure 1: Actually I surf with Images off <32K>

I have been asked quite a few times, whenever I show my browsing setup to people, Why don't you use the web as a normal user?, Well… Isn't it normal to see or read what you actually want, without all the all the ~~crap~~ ads & trackers being shoved down our throat by every site on the web.

Actually, my first choice to browse the web are text based browsers like eww, links, offpunk. chawan is nice too (It is more featureful than the others I mentioned). I use librewolf browser for normal browsing, part of it because I help maintain it for guix but if you want more customized and personal experience you should go with using user.js and profiles.json configuration setups.

Anyway, all it takes is one comment to motivate someone to write something, So with this I want to share how I browse the web with the help of Ublock, Redirector and Localcdn.

Note: The images in this piece are dithered to reduce bandwidth for the visitors, you can go the original image by clicking on it. Also caption also have sizes of both images, like this:

<caption> <dithered image size> <Original Image size>

Ublock Origin

Ublock origin is fundamental to my online presence over the Internet, I won't use a browser it without it, period.

It is a Wide Spectrum Content Blocker that means it can not only block ads and tracker but other content on a webpage as well using filters and rules.

Ublock's origin is fully supported only in Firefox and its derivatives, there are some chromium browsers like helium and ungoogled-chromium which still supports MV2 version of Ublock otherwise you will need to use Ublock Origin lite in chrome which I won't touch.

Install it using gnuzilla or sources listed on the its Repo. I would not go into detail explaining each option because that what Ublock's wiki is for that and its everything you need.

Also Pin the extension to the toolbar, you will need it.

Setting Defaults

Open the Ublock dashboard, by opening the Ublock Ui popup (by clicking the settings icon) or doin Ctrl+Shift+A and opening setting from there.

Every pane in the Dashboard have a Book Icon on the top right, you can click on the to go to the related wiki entry for that.

Go to Setting Pane > Check all the four options

[] Block media elements larger than KB
[] Block remote fonts
[] Disable JavaScript
[] I am an advanced user

Figure 2: Ublock's Setting pane <8.0K> <40K>

Add Filter Lists

> Go to Filter list pane -> In Annoyance area -> [] Enable uBlock Filter

-> Import oisd and hagezi blocklists (people maintaining filter lists have my utmost respect, seriously its these lists that are making our browsing experience 1000 times better)

https://big.oisd.nl
https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/hagezi/dns-blocklists@latest/adblock/ultimate.txt

Figure 3: Ublock's Filter Pane <8.0K> <15K>

Disable Third Party

Go My Rules Tab > In Temporary Rules pane, paste this > Click save > Click Commit > The rules will Appear in Permanent Rules

* * 3p block
* * 3p-script block
* * 3p-frame block

Figure 4: Rules pane <16K> <100K>

Add Shortcuts

Go to about:addons (Ctrl+Shift+A) -> Setting Icon -> Manage Extension Shortcuts

Figure 5: Extension Shortcut Window <8.0K> <64K>

Now visit any site you want, when you open the Ublock Ui popup, you will be able to see what third party a that website connecting to. Its such a super power.

Ublock Hard Mode

What we have done until now is enabled Ublock Hard Mode, Now try visiting some sites that you use daily and see if that breaks or not. We are going to see how to unbreak sites soon.

Dynamic Filtering

By enabling I am an Advanced User, we have enabled Dynamic Filtering, PLEASE READ THAT PAGE!!!

Why I am screaming at you is because this page explains everything you need to get started using Ublock in hard mode, and I don't want to duplicate thing that are already explained really well.

You MUST also read about Filters and Rules as these are the fundamental elements of Ublock Origin.

What we create with Dynamic Filtering are Rules but all the custom list we imported are Filters, You can create your own filters as well. SyntaxMeaningsThatAreActuallyHumanReadable is a very nice resource on Filters Syntax. Filters are static and need to be compiled before ahead of time, so it take more memory.

You can take a look at differences between different filtering types to see their advantage and disadvantages.

See the Overview of uBlock's network filtering engine to see how a request in handled.

Element picker and Zapper

These both tools allow you to block elements, basically they are the easier version of going into devtools, inspecting element and then deleting it, the differences is that zapper creates temporary filters and picker creates permanent one.

What is going behind my browser?

Now comes a the thing every curious user would like to see, What is actually going behind a site?.

That's what the Ublock Logger is for, Open it via clicking on extention and choosing the logger option or through shortcut (Ctrl+Y).

Figure 6: Ublock's Logger <80K> <588K>

Here you can see what's actually going on, what request, image, font is blocked, what is allowed, what is being requested in realtime. This is very useful in unbreaking the site by enabling just what is need to function the sibe by seeing the logs.

You can also filter, search, reload and open the toolbar by clcking the Ublock icon, It is really helpful.

When you click on a element a popup will open below, it contains three tabs:

Details

This contains various details about the request.

Figure 7: Logger's detail pane <8.0K> <36K>

Rules

This shows the rule of the selected element.

Figure 8: Logger's rule pane <4.0K> <32K>

Static Filter

Through This pane you can create static Filter, this allows very granule filtering of the elements.

Figure 9: Logger's Filter pane <8.0K> <48K>

DOM Inspector

Ublock logger also comes with its own DOM Inpector which helps in creation of cosmetics filters, You can access it by clicking the </> icon. It will also show an overlay over the things you have created filter for, It is really helpful overall.

How to Unbreak Things?

Now we are ready to Unbreak the things we need. We already know the tools now. I will be honest with you, I have very rarely have to unbreak a site as most of sites I use just works fine with things disabled.

My workflow is kinda like this:

-> Go to a url -> Somethning doesn't work -> Open the Ublock Ui popup -> Use Dynamic Url Filtering

So Over the years, I have gained enough knowledge about the things that usually unbreaks a site, you most of the times I don't even need to open the logger, If something still breaks:

-> Open the logger -> Reload page -> See what's the site is Requesting -> Allow needed things

So yeah that's it. I am also mentioning two other things are also helpful but I haven't had need to use them yet.

Firewall Filter

Through this you only see what's blocked in a page and that really helps to just allow the things we need. Check the wiki to see how to use it.

Dynamic URL Filtering

Another thing we can do via logger is Dynamic URL Filtering, it takes precedence over Dynamic Filtering and Filters. It provides even more granule filtering.

(ノ◕ヮ◕))ノ*:・゚✧

So yeah this is all for my ublock setup, I assure you its totally normal :P

I can't thank you Gorhill enough for making Ublock, they don't even take any donations, Its such a Selfless act.

Its such a blissful feeling seeing people's faces lit up whenever I install Ublock in there devices because then they just see what they want to see :D

Redirector

Redirector is an extension I use to redirect url using wildcard or regex patterns mostly to alternative private front-ends to services like youtube, reddit, imgur, twitter in case I need to open them. I really love this extension as you can apply the redirects to almost every part of the browser. I even read a book on regex because I wanted to use this extension.

Here is what a example rule looks like:

Figure 10: Twitter Redirect <16K>

Edit - A few folks asked about my redirects after reading the post. So, here is my Redirector.json that you can import so you don't have to write the redirects yourself, just adapt :D

I would like to say I will be forever grateful to Einar Egilsson who passed away in 2022, RIP Einar.

Localcdn

In most of the cases, when you have to unbreak a site, you have to mostly enable CDNs and localcdn extension emulates CDNs so you don't have to make a request to those resources, From its homepage, It intercepts traffic, finds supported resources locally, and injects them into the environment.

To set it up for ublock, you need to go to its extension setting -> Click on Advanced Tab -> Scroll down -> Generate rules for uBlock and add it your rules, like we did in Disable Third Party.

To this date, I blocked 7,199 no of requests to CDNs, damn.

What's the point of All this?

In the time where every second website is trying to exploit you, Government making absurd rules in the name of children. The point is your privacy, security, freedom, ability to tinker, to actually know what's going on behind the scene and that to me is everything.

Thanks to all the people to encouraged and helped (@tusharhero) me write this piece.

Until next time…

MiniDebConf & Me

2026-04-01T18:30:00Z

MiniDebConf & Me

As long as you have candy, you can enjoy it even if you're alone.

Hello to all those three people who read my blog, I have been meaning to write a blog post for a long while but I was haunted by the demon of Procrastination for quite some time, Actually before this post, I wanted to write another post titled THIS SITE IS 100% EMACS because now it is :D. But let's leave it for later.

Nodus Tollens

Before I go on to ramble about my experience, I would like to introduce you folks to Nodus Tollens, It is an effort by me and kishy to promote Permacomputing to Indian people and I thought this MiniDebConf could give be a place to introduce this to people, So I submitted the talk 20 mins before the closing of CFP, yeah I know..

So I started gathering resources to read up on Permacomputing, I have been following its principles for 2 years but still to explain it to people I would need to be concise and clear, I mean I have only got 15 to explain this Vast and Radical topic.

I also asked folks in the Permacomputing Communities I am in about "How to Introduce this topic to people" and got very good answers but I couldn't use all of them in the talk and went with my intuition.

The IIT Kanpur's Security Hell

So actually I was also helping organizing this conference, For that Me and Ravi went to meet local organizers to get the show rolling but what rolled was us due to all the security checkup hell we had to go through, When you first enter the IIT Kanpur campus, you need to wait in line, give your address, your purpose of visit, Ok I can tolerate this but there is more, You also need to get your face save in a database of a random private security company, give them a government id to double check. This pissed me off, What If I just wanted to explore then campus? , I would not want to go this experience ever.. But wait there is more.

We met with the local organizer Sanskar at the gate and took a e-rickshaw to his hostel, and guess what, you need to enter the hostel as a Outsider, You need to write your Government Id details into the register and submit it with them, I mean What the actual Fuck!! . So I wrote false information as any normal person would.

It's not over yet!

Day 0

The conf was on 14-15th of April but most of the people had reached kanpur on 13th, so bunch of us had dinner that day at Under the Sky, its the place name :P, It was pretty interesting meeting new people and seeing faces of people I had been having conversations with over the years via various communication medium.

Some things I remember:

Subin asking me "How you got into Free Software"
Abhijit asking me about Emacs
We all waiting for Contrapunctus and joking she might be mapping on the way :P

Day 1

So you remember the The IIT Kanpur's Security Hell? Yes I had to face that once again, So when I reached the campus on 14th, I saw there is a Option for QR Passes, I let out sigh of relief, see I don't particularly like QR as it is not accessible to someone without a mobile phone, yes we exist but I thought, "At least I won't need to go through that horrible process again", but how wrong I was, so on the webpage, you need to give your name, number, address, upload your photo, same usual shit.. but whats outrageous is that you also have to put the number of the person of contact inside the IIT and then they would need to allow something in some app then you get the otp on your number and give that to the security guard, and that means you still have to stand in the line and wait.

Just kill me!!

So while doing all this shenanigans I met Niya and Luna and lucky for them I just added them to my QR pass so that they don't have to go through this.

But Our problems did not end here, When we reached the venue, We were notified that the room we booked for the conference was not given to us, So This delayed the conf for over 2 hours. In the meantime, We waited at Cafe Coffee Day, There again, I got meet many new people, I was happy either way, This made me think that "It doesn't matter how shit things goes, If you have people you can vibe it" you won't remember that, i.e "We can't forget bad memories but we can make lots of good memories, so we won't have to think about bad ones".

So Finally we were allotted a room, we all rushed there and conf finally kicked off, I had so much fun listening to bunch of talks and also nervous for my talk, It was in the evening. I was trying to perfect the slides (I had so much content, so I deleted most of it and just kept pictures) and also as My Slideshow program show notes in the terminal, My setup was little weird, I just wanted to share one window and keep the terminal window side by side and I had never successfully screencasted my screen to a projector before, So I was nervous. So when we were going for lunch, I tried to test it but was unsuccessful, What finally helped me was wl-mirror , I mirrored the projector's output and shared that.

Then It was time for my talk, I had my first slide of my talk as black, So people kept pointing that "The screen is black", So I had to tell them that It signifies "the current state of the world", I think that made people tad bit curious or I don't know. I thought I would be shaking as my first talk but I was super chill, I had so much fun telling people about Permacomputing, the thing I love, I felt people were more intrigued by my slides.. I don't know if I was able to get the message across but I did make one person curious about this, So I guess I can call it a success :P.

Figure 1: A Collage of pictures of me giving the Permacomputing talk

How did you make the slides?
Are you crazy?
It was a powerful talk
I missed the talk, give it to me personally

These were the comments from the people after my talk, I was elated that people listened to me rambling for over 15 mins :P

As everything was delayed, So did the lunch, Lunch was supposed to be at Sanskar's hostel's canteen, but as it turns out there was electricity cut at the campus that time, So we couldn't order anything there, we then went to the mess, we were late again, but some people were able to eat lunch there. We then had to walk about 1.5 km to different hostel's canteen. We ate our lunch there. I was getting pretty tired with all this, but all that was overshadowed thanks to the colorful conversations I was having with people. Ok this is getting too long.. Fast-forward time

lunch done > again the 1.5 km walk > back to hall > conference started again > Amazing Talks & Amazing Conversations.

I won't get into the talks as then this post won't ever end. At the end of the day we all went to the Server Room where we tried to see the ever rumored Sun Microsystem Computer but we couldn't as they were doing some renovation there but we did see the "Samyak" Supercomputer.

I really liked this street..

Figure 2: A beautiful path with flowers on the side

After that I went to meet Ravi and badri at their hotel for dinner, There, I also met Orendra and Aditya, There Aditya told me their Kanpur experience, it is seriously crazy, but that is Aditya's story to tell, Then we went to a nearby place called Baniya Ke Redi, The food was nice, especially the bread pizza. I first thought it would be rather mid as I don't eat out much., but it was actually pretty nice. After a while Sahil joined and we got another bread pizza and just talked about things.

When I reached my dormitory, I was pretty tired but happy, I just went to sleep.

Day 2

Day 2 went smoothly. I had no problem getting in this time as I had already gone through all the horrible things on previous day itself. The conference went fine. I had another talk on How I got into Free Software / Prav. It went super fine. This day we had some participants from the outside as well. Aryan from Kanpur itself gave a talk on networking. Lothar had the Libreoffice Workshop. And we also had bunch of new students join us that I later found out, came through the mailing list. So yeah, it was overall pretty good. After the conference, we went outside for a Supertuxkart lan party, we were scolded because we were too loud but disastes2life did conduct a small lan party.

So, At last.. everyone was leaving, I was kinda sad, but overall pretty happy that we had these two days. I was just meeting with people, having conversations, saying goodbyes and reminiscing…

It's not The End!!

After

As everyone was leaving, I found out that NLBRT's train had delayed, So I offered them to stay at my hostel while all that pans out, Sneaking them in was easy as my dorm have no security. 67, The day after, Contrapunctus, Niya, Perry also joined us as their train was later as well. Niya had brought many board games with her, I wish we had the chance to play "Exploding Kittes" but Catan took most of our time.

Figure 3: Catan board game laid out

It went for a very long time as we had a very difficult setup from the starting, I WON!!, No it was actually Niya but it was fun, In the Evening We all but Contra had a Supertuxkart party all because she wasn't able to join us due to networking issues. It was also fun, I always came at last..

Later that night, we bid farewell to Contra and Perry. Next day, Niya went home. And after a day or two, NLBRT also departed..

And this was my experience of these 4 awesome days.

Candy

Remember At the top of this post, I put a quote saying "As long as you have candy, you can enjoy it even if you're alone." But If you have lots of amazing people around you, you can taste all kinds of wonderful candies, and I ate lots of delicious candies in this little conference.

Until Next time

Regex

2026-01-27T18:30:00Z

Regex

Before Feared, Now conquered

So I have known about regex for a while, I don't know when I first saw these strange strings, but I feared them.

But now I can proudly say I have conquered over my fear of Regex.

These past two days I read Michael 's Introducing Regular Expression, Its a Pretty good read, would definately recommend to persons new to regex. Now I know what this is ^([\w-.!#$%&;'*+-/?^_`{|}~]+)@((?:\w+\.)+)(?:[a-zA-Z]{2,})$=, its an regex to match email. You can further improve it as well.

So I also use the Redirector extension by Einar Egilsson and now I understand how the regular expression in the redirects actually works and I also ported all the wildcards to regex.

EDIT - I came to know that Einar Egilsson has been passed away, see this issue for more details.

RIP Einar

Overall, Regex

GUIX OS

2025-04-18T18:30:00Z

GUIX OS

Figure 1: Joaquín Sorolla's Italian girl with flowers.jpg

So I have switched to Guix Os full time and its been a ride if I tell you, I tried nix in the past when I had a ~~mac~~ sadly, but didn't stick with it. On Linux, I have just been a Artix user for the longest and its a Great Distro. If you have Artix, awesome. So what made me switch to Guix was:

Reproducibility
Scheme
It just feels cool to have your Os defined in a file.

Why not Nix?

I don't ~~understand~~ like the language, too dumb for it, I am a alien-technology lover, And as a Emacs user I am attracted to Guix More. That's all.

I just wrote this post on a whim as I would like to call myself a blogger. Anyway You should try Guix.

EMACS

2024-01-22T18:30:00Z

EMACS

THE MOST BASED PIECE OF SOFTWARE EVER MADE

Old School Cool!!

I was a member of The cult of Vi before but one day some creature came into my dream and enlightened me about the The Church of Emacs, No, but seriously, at first It was my curiousity that led me try the holy rival at first than I just went deep into this emacs rabbit hole.

Org-Mode > Magit > Eww > Dired > Eglot > Elisp > Avy > Meow > ∞

Now, I do most of my things in emacs, It is my text editor, music player (emms), email client (notmuch), Internet Messenger, file manager (dired), web reader (eww), etc.

Don't get me wrong, I still use the old *nix tools heavily, but I don't think I can remove emacs from my computing system at this point and I don't want to!.

You must try emacs, It is pretty popular in terms of software, it will be available for your distro.