Techrights

Links 19/08/2024: LineageOS and E-mail Encryption on OpenBSD

Posted by Roy Schestowitz on Aug 19, 2024

GNOME bluefish

Contents

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal/Opinions

full moon panic attack

Massive aimless rant to get me out of a panic attack. You've been warned...

The moon is waking me up. I'm feeling really prone to panic right now. A strange sensation, since panic is self-created, it needs a beginning. I can feel my mind racing for this or that. I feel a pain in my leg, is it a blood cloth? I feel a tension in my left arm, is there a problem with my heart? What are all these sensations? Why am I hyper-sensitive?

Panic attacks are strange occurrence, a bug in my programming, a loop that doesn't close and create a memory overflow. The mind hallucinate reality, in a panic attack the hallucination becomes a nightmare.

🔤SpellBinding — ADMNOSW Wordo: MIKES

Consequence thresholds in Silhouette and in Fate

In Fate I’d like to come up with a more deterministic approach to deciding between stress boxes or consequence aspects so that the engine or GM could do it automatically, because it’s such an extradiegetic decision: “do I want to get stressed out or should I get slashed instead?” maybe happens sometimes but Fate makes you make that decision all the time and I’m not into it.

From the gamist perspective deciding between consequences (which has a coarser granularity, but take longer to heal) and stress (which is limited and fine grained, but clear up after the fight) is an interesting and meaningful decision, and that’s the problem, since it doesn’t tie into the diegesis.

clustered thoughts, littered thoughts, thoughts of random abandon

I try to think of a thing to write, then I think of TOO MANY things to write. And then I don't write any of them. But still write something.

So, it goes to journaling (how was my day) et al

It was a decent day. Started with fruit in the morning, then onto pizza, then coffee coffee coffee. I finished out the night with videos about archaeological structures, Easter Island info (apparently part of a continent called "Mu" (no claims/proof of this by myself - I failed archaeology in high school, so... ;)

Halloumi no thanks

I get irrationally angry at the idea of cheese–as–meat-replacement like halloumi and paneer since it has the same climate impact as meat. I get more mad at it than I get at other uses of cheese even.

It’s not logical because in reality a greenwashed environmental foul-up is not that much worse than one that isn’t greenwashed, but I just hate greenwashing so much, and that’s what this feels like.

Science

new compass

i'm doing a little thing i stole from havi brooks. "breathing the compass". for a given period of time, or project, or however you want to apply it, you choose eight words to guide you. qualities you want to embody, values you want to honor, something to inspire and keep you going. you assign one word to each compass point and then, every morning, evening, or whenever you need, you turn in that direction and invite it in via breath. or you can visualize facing each direction, or simply that the qualities are arriving from their direction.

Technology and Free Software

GitHub wikis are kind of baffling

I like GitHub wikis as a simple way of writing documentation for a project. They use simple markup, they have pretty unobtrusive design, and they're easily accessible from a project repository. I use one at work to document our workflows and style guides. However, in my personal life I prefer to use Sourcehut, so I dedided to check out how Sourcehut wikis differ. After setting one up for a project, I find myself completely baffled as to why GitHub wikis work the way they do.

The main issue is that GitHub wikis are completely separate repositories. When you create a GH wiki, it creates a brand new <project_name>.wiki repository that you need to pull to your machine and work on separately. With Sourcehut, you need only create a wiki project and link it to your source repo, then write an index.md file. As long as this file is present, you can write any others and link them together as expected. This is much more logical to me; you manage your documentation in the same repository as your code, and anyone who prefers to read the documentation while they browse the code can do so however they choose.

Running a riscv VM in qemu

The blog post has more details about the commands below.

Gemlog: Adventures In LineageOS

It finally happened: I bought an Android.

Last Tuesday, I went to CeX (short for "Complete Entertainment Exchange"; literally pronounced "sex") to sell a load of old DVDs and a few games, receiving a whole £4 for the entire bag and then buying a copy of Resident Evil 4 for £5. I was about to leave, when the tech in the window caught my eye.

As someone who is more privacy-conscious than the average enby, I had been meaning to try out a de-Googled Android ROM for quite a while. I looked at the wall of phones, their cameras pointed at me, and decided "£200 for that piece of shit‽ No chance". I then turned to the tablets, and found a device with decent specs and a lower price tag: a rose gold Samsung Galaxy Tab A7 for £110. My current tablet, nicknamed "Peridot", was a cheap piece of shit I had bought from Argos which ran Android 7, and which I only got any use out of by moving slowly and using the lightest software available (the trick is to look for stuff from Android 4 and use Termux whenever possible).

Emails encryption at rest on OpenBSD using dovecot and GPG

In this blog post, you will learn how to configure your email server to encrypt all incoming emails using user's GPG public keys (when it exists). This will prevent anyone from reading the emails, except if you own the according GPG private key. This is known as "encryption at rest".

This setup, while effective, has limitations. Headers will not be encrypted, search in emails will break as the content is encrypted, and you obviously need to have the GPG private key available when you want to read your emails (if you read emails on your smartphone, you need to decide if you really want your GPG private key there).

Encryption is CPU consuming (and memory too for emails of a considerable size), I tried it on an openbsd.amsterdam virtual machine, and it was working fine until someone sent me emails with 20MB attachments. On a bare-metal server, there is absolutely no issue. Maybe GPG makes use of hardware acceleration cryptography, and it is not available in virtual machines hosted under the OpenBSD hypervisor vmm.

Emails encryption at rest on OpenBSD using dovecot and GPG

Code rot

Sometimes, I get the type of headaches that causes light sensitivity, and can't use a screen without pain and nausea. It happens rarely enough (and my schedule is flexible enough) that I can usually just take the time to recover instead of focusing on work. I still like to be entertained though, so I've learned how to use TalkBack on my phone to listen to podcasts, browse fedi, the basics.

This week it hit pretty badly, so I decided to turn my screen reader to deedum, which is my current gemini client of choice for Android.

Internet/Gemini

My website and blog is available via Gemini

Gemini is a neat piece of technology. The Gemini protocol somewhat comparable to HTTP and the Gemtext file format comparable to HTML. But it's simple. Like so simple that writing a client or server is actually doable.

All popular web browsers (Chromium and its skins - and Firefox) have their roots in the 1990's and there hasn't been any new web browser becoming usable in many years. Not because people haven't tried - I'm sure many people have - but because the standards around the modern web are so gigantic that it's just not feasable to develop a web browser from scratch.

The best (and only?) attempt I've seen is Ladybird,

The joys of a self hosted Atuin server

Yesterday (or better last night) I set up my own Atuin shell history server. I've been using Atuin for a while now, since February'24 I think. But these were only the isolated shell histories of my 3 main machines. I wasn't aware of the Atuin history sync server, which I can easily self-host. Until now!

Please add an RSS feed to your site

About a year ago now, I was working on plugging our new developer documentation system into our translation system. It was a bit of work, and we had to put in some really ugly workarounds due to a lacking feature in how the translation system could handle files. Cut to last week, when I find out that they actually added in the feature I needed last month. I asked our translation team lead how she found out about this, and she said she gets sent emails about changes.

That's great! Email is a wonderful way to inform people of changes like these. Unfortunately, it's a closed list, so I can't easily subscribe to it. Imagine my joy, though, when I found out that the company actually publishes their entire changelog on their help center. Fantastic! Now all I need to do is subscribe to the RSS feed and...

* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.