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