The owner of ip4.me/ip6.me, Kevin Loch, passed away
64 comments
·March 4, 2025toomuchtodo
jabiko
Also you can watch his memorial service here: https://www.youtube.com/live/YbnPeUgHGu8?t=1271
rafram
I’m not anti-religion in any way, but this left a really bad taste in my mouth. Loch’s nephew (the pastor who led the service) kept saying that Loch wasn’t religious. Then he’d go straight back to talking about Christ, and reminiscing about times when Loch had participated in Christian ritual!
It’s one thing to volunteer your religious organization as a venue for a memorial, even for someone who wasn’t religious. It’s another to memorialize the person with an explicitly religious service.
rrr_oh_man
PSA: Lego turned evil, unfortunately. There are much better alternatives on the market these days.
Brigand
What is your definition of evil?
volemo
> Lego turned evil
Could you elaborate?
x______________
My guess would be a post from 13 years ago with 283 comments but I'm also curious.
HeatrayEnjoyer
Evil... When? How?
mindsuck
What would you recommend instead?
lxgr
Oh no, this has been my go-to site for connectivity tests (as example.com seems to be cached fairly aggressively by my browsers and that has misled me in the past). Ad-free, minimal, does exactly what it needs to and nothing more.
Rest in peace!
Edit: All these (great and much appreciated!) responses of alternatives are making me wonder if this should in fact be a standardized service that could then be offered as a public good in a similar way as pool.ntp.org.
Checking for generic Internet connectivity (i.e. not only having an IP address, but being able to reach public sites, these sites being non-cached, not-captive-portaled etc.) seems like a problem that too many apps, scripts, and devices are solving again and again.
PhilipRoman
ifconfig.me is a similar service which I often use. It has a nice feature that if you do "curl ifconfig.me", you'll get only a string with the ip address, no markup.
HeatrayEnjoyer
This site is behind cloudflare and has captcha-blocked my queries more than once.
lxgr
Me too, but that's a whopping 5 characters more. Think of all the extra keyboard wear!
I do like the curl-ability of that one a lot, though, and on my own computer I can just configure an alias or shell function for it :)
freedomben
I've been using ipinfo.io now for several years and have been very pleased with them.
You can `curl https://ipinfo.io/` and get a JSON blob back with info on your current IP. If you pass an IP explicitly you can get info back on it, for example `curl https://ipinfo.io/104.26.7.98`. Easy to combine with jq also for use in scripts: `curl https://ipinfo.io/104.26.7.98 | jq -r '.ip'`
For personal use it's free, and they have reasonable pricing for large volume. No affiliation on my part, just a happy user.
reincoder
Instead of jq .ip, please use https://ipinfo.io/ip
This API endpoint has its dedicated stack and infrastructure to support unlimited lookups.
Also, for IPv6 connection use: https://v6.ipinfo.io/ip
PS: I am the DevRel of IPinfo.
rmccue
Annoyingly, they no longer show your IP on their web homepage.
reincoder
We are experimenting with some design choices as we try to highlight all the IP metadata we have and move towards being an "internet data" company instead of just an IP location company.
I highly recommend you check out the page: https://ipinfo.io/myip
I understand the data we have for your IP address is not front and center anymore. We have gone through several iterations of designs for our homepage, so if you have any suggestions, I will relay them to our team.
PaoloBarbolini
`curl https://myip.wtf/json` too is nice to use when debugging things
stevenkillian
Also protocol specific hosts:
aeries
For services like this, I always use my own domain which can easily be re-mapped or hosted myself. E.g. "checkip.mydomain.com"
merb
I use ip.me it's not add free, but in curl you can have an ad free version by doing curl -4 ip.me or curl -6 ip.me since it will only send the ip when it detects curl I guess.
comprev
icanhazip.com provides a similar service and has a good story behind it [0]
[0] https://blog.apnic.net/2021/06/17/how-a-small-free-ip-tool-s...
Havoc
You can also use dig to get your external ipv4. That prevents reliance on smaller sites
Don’t have the command on hand but easily searchable
lxgr
How so? Getting your public/external IP does not seem possible behind a NAT without an external service.
speleding
You can use dig:
dig +short -4 myip.opendns.com @resolver1.opendns.com
Havoc
No idea. All I can tell you is that it works and if I need to hard code a IP check like this then I’d rather rely on a big player like Google or cloudflare ns than someone’s project site
null
wizzwizz4
If you have the resources to maintain it, you can contact the estate. (They'd like to sell the domains, so unless they're bundled with Brickshelf the highest bidder will probably be a traffic-farming company or something, but you never know.)
atentaten
He was relatively young; what was the cause of death?
tecleandor
Seems like he passed away in June but maybe the Estate didn't sort out everything until recently?
https://www.brickfanatics.com/tributes-for-founder-lego-webs...
Polizeiposaune
It takes time (typically some number of months) to get appointed as the executor of an estate, and then even more time for the executor to get effective control over the estate's assets.
tecleandor
Ah yeah, I missed part of my response I think. I was trying to say that he didn't pass away recently, but maybe we just noticed it because the estate (or the executor) just started to manage this asset and left that message in the domain.
Deeg9rie9usi
He was also known in the LEGO community: https://www.brickfanatics.com/tributes-for-founder-lego-webs...
RIP
mbreese
I never knew of him from ip4.me, but I definitely visited his Lego site Brickshelf (https://brickshelf.com/).
Thanks Kevin.
narmiouh
RIP Kevin, thanks for the fish!
jmclnx
I never heard of ip[46].me but the site is very informative.
RIP Kevin Loch
easterncalculus
RIP Kevin. These websites no doubt helped thousands of people over the years.
If anyone is looking for an alternative site to check their v6 and v4 addresses, check out this one here:
ddtaylor
RIP silent hero
F_r_k
RIP Kevin. Used these sites a lot!
I hope they give then to a charity/charitable person. I proposed to continue the service ad free, for free to them. Hopefully they accept my proposal. It would be such a shame for the service to become "enshittified" by some greedy company
> In Kevin’s own words on kevinloch.com: “I am also an amateur physicist, programmer, photographer, independent film producer (at WTF Productions) and AFOL (Adult Fan of Lego).” Kevin was also passionate about any and all things space related: the sky, the stars, and beyond; trying to find the meaning in how things work, why they work, and what would make them work better. His latest passion after moving back to Reston was soaking in the skyline from the rooftop of his apartment building and bicycling the paths of Reston and beyond.
https://www.loudounfuneralchapel.com/obituaries/Kevin-Loch/#...
https://bsrender.io/
https://nensus.com/kl-net/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lAuXWARqt8
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm10414562/