August 2026

Today, me and my dad spent an hour adding a charcoal filter to the water treatment system for our well water.

We wanted to solve the colour problem when it rained heavily outside.

Now we have :

- A 30 micron filter
- A water softener
- A charcoal filter
- A 5 micron filter
- A UV lamp

And my Avalon water cooler has two more filters on top of that (sediment and charcoal).

And the kitchen fridge also has its own charcoal filter.

PEX is so much better than copper.

The charcoal filter is in the blue container on the bottom left.

NordVPN made changes to their servers and broke my current setup.

I had setup a VPN client on my ER605 router that connected to their servers on post 1194 with UDP. It provided VPN access to a VLAN my iMac was part of.

Now, NordVPN uses UDP on port 53 or TCP on port 80.

I could not get my router to connect to the new servers. It seems they also require a more recent version of TLS that my router does not support (I assume).

So I reverted to my old setup : I have my linux server connect using openvpn and provide a SOCKS5 proxy to be used by qBittorrent on my iMac.

But now, the webpage I made to start/stop the VPN no longer works. It was last used a year ago and PHP and Ubuntu were upgraded in the meantime.

The only way I can get it working is to start it manually at the command line.

Ugh.

I updated my torrenting page with my current setup :

http://www.philippe97.ca/torrenting/

Since I can no longer have my ER605 router connect to NordVPN, I instead got my linux server to do it and share its connection with my iMac.

A benefit of this setup is that if the connection goes down, access no longer works instead of defaulting to Starlink as my router would have done (and thankfully never did).