<p>As an IT consultant, I travel a lot. I mean, <em>a lot</em>. Part of the pleasure is having to deal with day-to-day online life on open, potentially free-for-all hotel and conference WiFi. In other words, the type of networks you really want to do your online banking, ecommerce and other potentially sensitive operations on. After seeing one too many ads for VPN services on bad late night TV I finally decided I needed to do something about it. Ideally I intended to this on the cheap and learn…

<p><em><strong>Update 2019-05-07</strong>: The java8 cask is affected by recent licensing changes by Oracle. There’s a <a href="https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-cask-versions/issues/7253">discussion over on github about this</a>. I’m leaving the post up partially for historic context, but the java8 cask is no longer available, at least at the time of writing.</em></p>

<p>We all love the odd debugging story, so I finally sat down and wrote up how I debugged a configuration issue that got in the way of the iOS mail app’s ability to retrieve email while I was on the go.</p>

<p>I’ve blogged about getting Manjaro Linux to work with my AMD RX 470 <a href="https://www.lonecpluspluscoder.com/2016/11/19/switching-to-manjaro-linux-and-getting-an-amd-rx-470-to-work/">before.</a> The method described in that post got my AMD RX 470 graphics card working with the default 4.4 kernel. This worked fine - with the usual caveats regarding VESA software rendering - until I tried to upgrade to newer versions of the kernel.</p>

<p>My adventures with Manjaro Linux continue and I’ve even moved my “craptop” - a somewhat ancient Lenovo X240 that I use as a semi-disposable travel laptop - from XUbuntu to Manjaro Linux. But that’s a subject for another blog post. Today, I wanted to write about package download performance issues I started encountering on my desktop recently and how I managed to fix them.</p>