7MS #735: Baby's First Cloudflare Tunnel

Hey friends! Today's episode has a new-to-me toy up front and some podcast housekeeping on the back half – all recorded with a raging case of the anxious parent giggidies, because my son Atticus had a big audition and I was minutes away from finding out whether we were doing tears of joy or tears of sadness.

Baby's first Cloudflare Tunnel

Not a sponsor, not an ad – just a thing I'd heard about for years and finally had a reason to use. Here's what we get into:

• The problem that sent me down this road: I wanted push-button status pages for clients that pull from one source of truth – not just "is the box up," but actual narrative on where a project is at
• Why the off-the-shelf status page tools weren't the right shape, and why "just stick it on a web server" was a non-starter for a scraper-and-AI-slop-crawler internet
• The auth paths I tried and abandoned before Cloudflare Tunnels entered the chat
• How Cloudflare Access one-time PINs put a guard out front – and what happens when fartface@meowmix.com tries to log in
• My Chick-fil-A-order-tracker dreams for multi-phase assessments, and why I think it could kill a bunch of clogged-up email threads
• Why the code isn't public yet (it's public-facing infrastructure I haven't hardened, and I've got hunches about where the holes are) – but reach out if you want to build something similar and I'm happy to share privately
• Where tunnels fit generally: when something genuinely needs to be reachable, but you'd rather not hand it a public IP or expose RDP to the whole internet. It doesn't replace Twingate for me, but it fills a different slot nicely
• Bonus tangent: why Claude has become my long-drive road companion, and five enlightening minutes I spent learning how water towers work

Housekeeping: a refreshed jingle and a brand new bumper

• A quick history of the 7MS jingle – from just me and an acoustic guitar, to a Fiverr band, to now
• Why "security is hard, so let's assume we're probably going to get pwned by noon" has aged frighteningly well (see also: AI agents teaching each other to find previously unknown vulns)
• Meet Jacob Davis, the guitar teacher the algorithm dropped in my lap, who recorded a gorgeous all-strings arrangement of the jingle and about 45 seconds of fingerpicking diddly goodness for our new outro bumper. Stick around to the end and give it a listen – and if you're in the market for internet guitar lessons, he rules

And over on 7MinSec.club this week

• I show off VoiceInk, a private, local voice dictation utility for Mac that Paul the Unstoppable turned me on to. Lifetime license, no subscription, and it does a great job on live dictation or audio files you feed it. Catch the TuesdayTOOLSday over at 7MinSec.club

Thanks for listening – to the security stuff, the tangents, or both. Come find us at 7MinSec.com, subscribe (free or paid) over at 7MinSec.club, and dig through our notes at 7MinSec.wiki. God bless you, and have a great week!