The Sandbox is a personal blog, not a business. There's no premium tier, no content locked behind a paywall, and no plan to turn this into anything more than what it already is.

I'm Michael — thirty-six years in IT, the last twenty-four of them inside banks moving other people's data around for a living. These days I build cloud and AI systems for work. This blog is what happens when that experience meets a growing distaste for how casually the rest of the internet treats the same thing.

What's actually here

Practical, tested write-ups of building a privacy stack, one piece at a time — DNS, VPN, passwords, email, photos, search, browser, phone. Real configurations, real costs, real trade-offs. No paranoia, no assuming a nation-state cares about your grocery list. Just enough friction between you and the companies whose business model is knowing more about you than you know about yourself.

The failures stay in

Not everything here worked first time. Some posts end in a solid, working setup. Others end in "this cost me a weekend, broke twice, and went in the bin — please don't try this at home." Both get published. A blog that only shows the finished version of things is marketing with extra steps, and that's precisely the kind of nonsense this blog exists to push back on.

No Endorsements

I don't advocate for particular products, and nobody pays me to like anything. I'll tell you what I use and why — warts and all, including the bits that annoy me — and where a genuinely solid alternative exists, I'll mention that too, rather than pretending my setup is the only sane option.

If a reader thinks something else does the job better, tell me and I'll take a look. If someone from the company behind what I'm using has tips to get more out of it, I'll take a look at that too. If a company wants to send me their product to try, and their ethos actually lines up with mine — no dark patterns, no unnecessary data grabs, nothing that quietly tracks people who didn't ask to be tracked and does not sell their data — I'll take a look, but the only thing I'll give back is an honest write-up. No affiliate links, no sponsored posts wearing an opinion as a disguise.

Subscribing

Want new posts in your inbox? The subscribe box does that — no spam, no sharing, no tracking pixel. Would rather not hand over an email address at all, even to me? There's an RSS feed instead. Either's fine. That's rather the point.

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father. son. tech geek. film buff. sim racer. privacy advocate.