Klaus Zimmermann's Corner

Latest status updates and micro updates

In between a Twitter/Mastodon feed and a full-fledged blog, except it's all static-generated and no tracking! Click a timestamp for a permalink to a specific status.

There's also an Atom feed now here, so it might read out more or less like social media feed on your favorite reader.

Comments? Get in touch through my tilde.town mailing address!

Restoring the Mediatek WiFi drivers in Alpine Linux 3.19.1

![A type of Mediatek USB wifi adapter](/images/mediatek_usb.jpg) Not sure if anyone has a setup similar to mine, but after the update to...

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A record of when I first joined the Fediverse

A great side effect of using [mutt](https://www.mutt.org) is that I can easily scroll way back and check even the first email I ever received - no "in...

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Two lines you need to block Threads from your digital life

Threads, Facebook's Mastodon-compatible microblogging service, [started testing today their cross-platform posting](https://www.reuters.com/technology...

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"Bring your Pi to Work" day

For the past two days I decided to do a quick experiment in my office, owing to the fact that a lot of people were in vacation and the workload was qu...

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Enabling SFTP mounts on Alpine Linux and FreeBSD

Another day, another thing learned. In many "out-of-the-box-preconfigured" Linux distros, it's possible to mount remote locations directly into your f...

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Happy 25th birthday, cURL!

Twenty-five years ago on this day, cURL, the hackers #1 web scraping and raw content fetching tool [was launched with the name that we carry on today]...

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Happy (late) 70th birthday, Richard Stallman!

A little late, perhaps, but the message is still valid as ever: **Happy birthday, RMS!** Enjoy the big 70! ![A greyscale picture of Richard Stallman,...

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Setting doas with passwordless authorization

Ever since I discovered that [Alpine Linux](/articles/alpine_linux_desktop.html) was running a [shim for the sudo comma...

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FreeBSD mounting of external drives for the Linux user

Just another quick note for [Linux users switching to BSD](/articles/learning_freebsd_as_linux_user.html): the mounting...

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Sanest way I've found so far to transfer files from Android phone to Linux

Maybe it's just me, but for some mysterious reason, I find that transferring files out of my Android phone using a cable - or at least not without hav...

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Road to getting a persistent install of Puppy Linux in a USB

The original mission was simple enough: get a [Puppy Linux installation](https://kzimmermann.0x.no/updates/20210910_0840.html) in a USB drive so I can...

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A quick historical runthrough of all the Desktop Environments and Window Managers I've ever used

To be as brief as possible and still give some short explanation: - 2010 ~ 2011: GNOME 2. Default of Ubuntu Linux, which was [the first distribution...

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Have I been swiped?

So I was going through the expense list of a credit card which I almost don't use to pay the amount and noticed something that in the listing: among t...

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How to force wired connection in FreeBSD 13 on a laptop

Quick note-to-self sort of post: I decided to plug my FreeBSD machine into the wired LAN cable. The WiFi connection is still going great, but I'd rath...

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I realized that the way I use my computer is so different that other people wouldn't be able to use it

This past week in the office, I left my computer unlocked for about a minute while I went to get some water. It was just enough time for a coworked of...

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What else should I host in this (not tilde) server?

Now that I got the Raspberry Pi out there and doing some work with the static site, I'm now left wondering what else could I do with it in terms of ot...

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This blog is now mirrored from my own machine

I finally took the plunge and decided to self-host this website in my own hardware at home - a Raspberry Pi. Temporary domain in hand and Let's Encryp...

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Happy 39th Birthday, GNU!

Almost missed it in my timezone, but here it goes: **Happy Birthday, GNU Project!** On September 27th 1983, Richard Stallman announced his intentions...

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What OS would you put in a bug-out drive?

So after a few weeks of waiting I'm looking again for a distro that works with Secure Boot enabled to install (frugally) in an external drive as an [e...

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Trying out OpenBSD, back to FreeBSD

So over the weekend I made a point to [try out OpenBSD](https://fosstodon.org/@kzimmermann/108930427056625371) bare metal to a spare drive in a laptop...

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When your Encryption keys can be found in a Google search

I've seen bad things happening from clueless devs copying shit verbatim from StackOverflow before, but this? Nope, this is another *whole new level* o...

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Happy 29th Birthday, Debian!

Today August 16 marks the 29th anniversary of the [Debian project](or://bits.debian.org/2022/08/debian-turns-29.html). Congratulations to all of the i...

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Irresponsibility with data that you shouldn't even have in first place

Another day, another data breach: personal information for 5.4 million Twitter accounts [exposed and offered for sale](https://www.schneier.com/blog/a...

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In case Artix doesn't recognize your wired connection after suspending

Lately all my posts here seem to be a note to self or something, but since I don't have a better way to jot it down, here it goes again. After gettin...

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In case you can't connect OpenVPN in Alpine Linux due to '/dev/net/tun not found'

Quick posting for a quick fix regarding Alpine: earlier today I wasn't able to reach my VPN servers with it via the `openvpn` command-line tool. The m...

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Make the Home, End and F-keys work correctly in URxvt

Just sharing a quick tip to make [URxvt aka rxvt-unicode](https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Urxvt) a little more usable as a lightweight, fast and dece...

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Sending secure "email" from a public / shared computer

These days I did a little thought experiment concerning a situation in which I don't have access to a machine I own and still would like to securely r...

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Fix the "Broken Window Borders" issue in Fluxbox after a Firefox update

Quick note to self again here: if you are a fluxbox user, sometimes after a Firefox update it reopens without the Window Decorations and remain unresp...

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I've created a "Rocks" page too

Hell yeah, [Suckless](https://suckless.org) doesn't have a monopoly on laying out on the web what kinds of thing suck or rock. Since so many other afi...

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On the origin of the infamous 'rockyou.txt' wordlist...

Holy crap, it never appeared to me that *this* was the actual origin of the infamous `rockyou.txt` wordlist used in many a password cracking applicati...

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Setting timezones in Linux the raw way

Another sort of note-to-self thing: this is how you can change timezones in Linux easily, and without the need to delve into GUI settings applications...

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Collection of new vulnerabilities found in BusyBox

So it has just been made public that [14 new vulnerabilities involving BusyBox](https://thehackernews.com/2021/11/14-new-security-flaws-found-in-busyb...

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Notes from attempting to sys-mode Alpine Linux on the Raspberry Pi 4

A quick-and-dirty set of notes that perhaps will become a real essay in the future: Installing Alpine Linux sysmode (that is, directly on the disk un...

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Getting xsane network scanning right with HP devices

Sort of a note-to-self kind of thing, but this turned a lot of head-banging on the wall and frustration from non-explanatory error messages into solid...

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kzimmermann's podcast Episode 023 - using Puppy Linux like a Pro!

[Puppy Linux](https://puppylinux.org) is probably somewhere in your "already tried" distribution list, but likely is not the first distro that comes t...

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Fixing the SSL Certificate issues in Raspup (Puppy Linux for the Raspberry Pi)

In my quest to find the perfect desktop-like distro for my Raspberry Pi, I've been back in black with good ol' *Puppy Linux*, the original live medium...

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Happy 30th birthday, Linux!

There you have it: exactly thirty years ago a 21-year old Finnish Computer Science student named Linus Torvalds announced in a usenet board the creati...

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The "Screeching Minority" and the need for real privacy

In an insider leak that is now already somewhat old news, Apple decided to start scanning and monitoring pictures uploaded to its iCloud service for C...

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If you can't download it, you don't own it.

A recently published article by The Atlantic seems to be bringing back into the light some age-old concerns about [keeping all your media inside DRM-l...

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Looking for a non-systemd distro that supports Secure Boot. Any ideas?

So I finally decided that a Core i7 laptop with 32GB of RAM is too precious to waste on an OS with systemd, especially since the very thing that it tr...

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Is this the lightest modern Operating System ever created?

Minimalist computing enthusiasts, what was the lightest and fastest distribution you have ever used? Puppy Linux? SliTaz? Perhaps [Alpine Linux](https...

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Privacywashing: the marketing threat to software freedom

After seeing an ad at the train station I usually commute through that said *Privacy: that's iPhone*, I couldn't help but feel triggered, given [Apple...

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Starting to get a hang of digital artwork

So over the last week I got a hold of a drawing tablet while [dumpster diving](/articles/dumpster_diving_hacker.html) a...

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TFW I'm old enough to participate in the RetroChallenge!

So I just found out about this website: [RetroChallenge.org](www.retrochallenge.org/p/retrochallenge-rules.html) It seems to align well with my passi...

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Sxmo: impressive demo of an X environment for Linux-based Smartphones

Just saw [this demo](https://diode.zone/videos/watch/3f0948cf-47df-437e-b1ea-76fec58479c2) of *Sxmo* (Simple X mobile), a lightweight X environment fo...

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Audacity goes Poo-Poo...

[Audacity](https://www.audacityteam.org/), the once go-to solution for all sorts of audio edits small and large, has pretty much dug its own grave in ...

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MikeRoweSoft.com and shilling

So today I learned that a teenager fond of programming named Mike Rowe in Canada [registered the domain mikerowesoft.com](https://en.wikipedia.org/wik...

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Damm you again, Javascript!

Unaccessible web design struck me again last evening, but this time hitting me where it actually hurts: money. After some sort of update, apparently ...

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What is up with "Apps" for the Linux Desktop?

There has been a trend, especially after the release of the Steam platform for Linux, of some software developers creating Linux versions of their "ap...

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Email has come full circle back to the 90s...

Back in the early nineties, email was still something of a rarity, usually as something part of your work or academia, or something you had to pay for...

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Browse the Free version of the web with Redirector!

Earlier this year, I started curating a [list of privacy-friendly and Javascript-less frontends of popular web sites](/...

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SimpleScreenRecorder - probably the best desktop recorder available for Linux

I just found out [SimpleScreenRecorder](https://www.maartenbaert.be/simplescreenrecorder/), the lightweight minimalistic but powerful desktop recorder...

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Hacking isn't just a computer-related process

A very interesting talk by Bruce Scheneier on the HOPE 2020 conference. Unlike his previous technical security talks, Schneier this time goes on the c...

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Would you use a laptop that only works with Secure Boot?

Previously, I [explored the boot time](/updates/20210525_0654.html) of an Ubuntu machine that I thought was pretty slow...

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Testing two-in-one for ungoogled-chromium browser

Go into any neckbeard Archlinux forum and you'll see a common recommendation of the presumably ultimate browser ever: [**ungoogled-chromium**](...

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Happy 32nd birthday, Bash!

The Bourne-again Shell, default in the vast majority of Linux distributions, [turned 32 yesterday!](https://groups.google.com/group/gnu.announce/msg/a...

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Recommendation of algorithm for a new PGP key?

I've noticed that `gpg` (at least the version here in [Artix](/articles/aur_made_easy.html)) has been "recommending" ot...

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Freenode vs Libera drama and IRC

Late to the party with this notice, perhaps, but I also decided to leave Freenode as my go-to IRC network and join the folks at [Libera.Chat](https://...

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Is Ubuntu boot time slow?

A few weeks ago, I complained about one of my machines running Ubuntu taking a very long time to boot. It certainly felt long, like a good 3 minutes, ...

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Opinion: you don't like Linux, you like being free!

Unpopular opinion, but with a tad (or large amount) of truth: if you use Windows at work and hate it, you look forward to using Linux back home not be...

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Happy 13th Birthday, Fediverse!

Wow, thirteen years! Who could imagine that the fediverse was really that old? Although I don't consider myself a sort of a latecomer to this party (j...

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How to enable suspend-hibernate in Alpine Linux

Yes, I'm still trying and experimenting with [Alpine Linux](https://alpinelinux.org) and gave it a full install (sys mode) it in the machine I found f...

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Happy World Penguin Day!

April 25th is [World Penguin Day](https://www.asoc.org/advocacy/antarctic-wildlife-conservation/penguins/1189), the day when Adélie Penguins from Anta...

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Podcast episode 13: Installing and Setting up Alpine Linux

I've been recently talking a lot about [Alpine Linux](https://alpinelinux.org), my newfound love in Free Software, and my favorite distro at the momen...

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"How Linux works

I remember reading this book way back in 2016 and it helped me understand quite a bit what makes Linux click together: [How Linux Works by Brian Ward...

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Giving Alpine a try on the Raspberry Pi

After trying [Alpine Linux](https://alpinelinux.org) on a virtual machine and pretty much falling in love with it, I decided to step my game up and tr...

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kzimmermann goes back to 2010

I must've gone back in time with respect to my computing these last weeks. Evidence includes: - Getting child-on-Christmas excited about discovering...

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The "technical philosopher" and the IT market

As much as I enjoy or write about it, I still don't see myself as a "technical" person when it comes to Free Software. [Time using it](https://tilde.t...

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Quick publishing test

Just a test status to see if the automation script to Mastodon worked. If it did, this means that I've achieved full [write-only](https://tilde.town/~...

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Fixing mouse issues with VirtualBox

Sharing this just in case if you get this issue when test-driving OSes with Virtualbox (my favorite choice in trying out new Linux distros and OpenBSD...

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Free Learning Programming resources to start hacking on a budget

Just came across this Free-as-in-freedom collection of Programming Languages resources (books, guides, etc) in the form of a Github Awesome list, of w...

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Analysis paralysis with Linux

I'm currently running on what I believe is a case of [analysis-paralysis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analysis_paralysis) with Linux: too many thing...

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Akihabara Live Tooting finished

Thanks to everyone who followed up the [live tooting](https://fosstodon.org/@kzimmermann/106032742203024345) at Akihabara where I went around looking ...

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Live tooting Friday Apr 9th at Akihabara

I'll be "live tooting" a visit to [Akihabara](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akihabara), Tokyo's famous Geek/Tech/Otaku district and hub, where I'll be...

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If you don't host it, how can you be sure you own it?

"We get all of this great stuff, and for free! I mean, how do they manage it?" ZDNet: [Yandex said it caught an employee selling access to users’ inb...

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Featherweight and lightweight browsers

Getting to use the [Raspberry Pi Model B from 2012 in a graphical mode](https://fosstodon.org/@kzimmermann/106000719205016879) again makes it feel lik...

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Insulting move, even more insulting explanation

If there's one thing that pisses me off that pisses me off more about corporate PR people than their marketingspeak is when they try to "talk down" to...

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2021/04/04, 05:45: Beginning OpenBSD

I might have come full circle in my trial of OSes yesterday night by trying out OpenBSD for the first time, after about 11 years of Linux and about on...

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2021/04/03, 09:33: yet another documentary on Social Media manipulation

A subject that has been overexposed and almost overblown (much like privacy after the Snowden Leaks in 2013), manipulation of social groups on Social ...

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2021/04/02, 08:58: This Feed is also going live!

So I went ahead and did it: kzimmermann's [Collection of Thoughts](/updates/) is made into an Atom feed. This will help...

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2021/03/31, 10:04 - loosenin' up the web

As part of my journey to try to limit my mindless wandering of the web without a goal, I realized that the barebones model of plain web pages without ...

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2021/03/31, 07:08: "Write-only"

To fight the "addictions" that dealing with a lot of web content has caused to me, I'm trying to make an effort to from now on adopt a *write-only* st...

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Status on 2021/03/30, 03:14

Some of us like to say they "left" the reach of Social Media because they don't participate in those surveillance-laden websites, but in reality, the...

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Status on 2021/03/24, 09:45

Found this great [cheat sheet](https://i.imgur.com/7FB7tW4.jpeg) on Imgur chock full of useful commands and other terminal tricks that can be used in ...

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Status on 2021/03/18, 12:51

And the saga continues - learning FreeBSD one command at a time. Turns out that suspending the system is not that bad, in fact you can do it via com...

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Status on 2021/03/02, 06:13

Learning FreeBSD one command at a time: if your sound isn't coming from the right speaker, or you want to change its source, the `sysctl hw.snd` comma...

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Status on 2021/02/26, 11:50

Using FreeBSD for the first time after 10 years of Linux usage - what have I learned so far? Find out in [my newest article](https://tilde.town/~kzim...

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Status on 2021/02/23, 03:52

Learn something, try something, fail at something, create something, achieve something, enjoy something. Hell, just *do* something. But do it for th...

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Status on 2021/02/22, 07:15

Learning FreeBSD has been a great, fun exercise. Looks like having learned the Linux Console has helped plenty, but still the two are a little differe...

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Status on 2021/02/19, 05:13

Increasing eye candy when performing work in a console-only environment: change the prompt cursor back to the blinking block like in graphical termina...

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Status on 2021/02/16, 23:12

Following my adventures in [Project 128](/articles/project_128.html), I finished the first batch of my "revised" backup...

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Status on 2021/02/13, 10:47

It's getting clearer to me now that the [ZIM format](https://openzim.org/) is the future of information storage. Spearheaded by the [Kiwix Project](ht...

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Status on 2021/02/09, 23:20

The Linux Console is a tool, not just an interface. And thanks to the constant improvements and updates it receives, it remains to this day a modern a...

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Status on 2021/02/03, 09:36

After searching so long for a solution as to how can I pipe content in and out of the tmux buffer, I finally found a [sane, simple answer](https://uni...

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Status on 2021/02/02, 11:43

kzimmermann's podcast episode [012 - CyberChef review](https://diode.zone/videos/watch/f4653cb7-7b9e-4aad-8af4-1baad6f311fe). This is a great applica...

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Status on 2021/01/26, 12:59

Took one (relatively) small step towards asserting my independence from cloud platforms by *self-hosting a git repository* in my own house. What orig...

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Status on 2021/01/25, 07:05

kzimmermann's Podcast Episode 011: **Is Data the new Proprietary Software?** Everyone is publishing their software in Github nowadays, but does that ...

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Status on 2021/01/19, 08:58

Silly game of dice that you can play in your browser or over the network (tis just a simple python WSGI application): #!/usr/bin/env python3 ...

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Status on 2021/01/18, 08:39

The way you extinguish privacy from the ordinary everyday life is by pretending it's outdated and irrelevant. Let's not allow that to happen. [New vi...

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Status on 2021/01/13, 00:37

I've decided to convert the great, but lengthy [*Hitchhiker's Guide to Anonymity*](https://anonymousplanet.github.io/thgtoa/guide.html) into a nicely ...

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Status on 2021/01/11, 05:58

Went dumpster diving this weekend (an incredibly fun and rewarding hobby for a hacker!) and found these two interesting pieces of hardware lying there...

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Status on 2021/01/08, 08:12

Haha! just found one of the first images I drew after learning how to use GIMP ten years ago after just starting to use Linux. ![Internet - Piracy Ro...

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Status on 2021/01/06, 14:07

Whew! Turns out that maintaining an `awesome-*` project in git is pretty tiresome, even if it's a simple text list. Thanks to everyone to have contri...

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Status on 2021/01/06, 06:34

I'm not sure if anyone made this before, so I decided to just go with it myself: [a curated list of alternative frontends to many websites](https://no...

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Status on 2021/01/05, 07:17

"Why do people keep using slack at work? There are so many better alternatives that are free and federating out there." "I wish we could use Linux in...

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Status on 2021/01/03, 03:36

Happy belated new year! Lots of new things in my mind and plans for this year, including what I'd like to learn, improve, try and contribute to Free S...

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Status on 2020/12/25, 07:19

I've been thinking about a sort of "semi-disposable" (think: burner) means of communication can be made using temporary and disposable email addreses ...

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Status on 2020/12/22, 02:16

The Copyright Police has just been given superpowers: meet the [COVID-19 bill](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr-esq/the-covid-19-stimulus-bill-wo...

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Status on 2020/12/20, 08:36

The more you use, the more you learn... that's a good Linux metaphor, and a genuine truism. Having switched to [Artix Linux](https://artixlinux.org/),...

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Status on 2020/12/05, 07:26

The more I read about this COVID pandemic, the more I'm assured that this has been completely engineered. Not the virus, that's a whole other can of ...

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Status on 2020/12/04, 06:27

Successfully added a way to put a simple title in these statuses, now not only the permalink pages look better (more explanatory) but I'll also be abl...

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's almost 2021 and IT organizations still are not shipping their end-user computers with a password manager.

Look, how about we all just agree that people downright suck at picking passwords and remembering multiple ones? Just pick one strong one that you can...

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really amuses me how some seemingly simple things can spur an enourmous amount of arguments. Take password strength, for instance.

When Randall Munroe posted [this famous comic](https://xkcd.com/936/) about how `correct horse battery staple` can be a much stronger password than yo...

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ey say "too good an offering, too good to be true." [MEGA](https://mega.nz), an online storage service and spiritual successor to Kim Dotcom's MegaUpload, offers 15GB presumably end-to-end encrypted storage services (it's 35 + 15GB for the first month or so, later it drops to 15 and you have to invite others to get it back).

As usual, without an auditing, there is no way to confirm Dotcom's promises (Free Softwre should make this moot). But thankfully, there's still a chan...

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think I really need to find a way to integrate these smaller updates into my RSS feed somehow. That way, I can also ensure they get posted into mastodon via `toot` (available in tilde.town via pip) and then I can just keep posting everything from one position :D

This could be a shell script, a python program, etc. I can do anything from the infrastructure that Tilde.town offers. Free Software [is really limitl...

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st found out about [Tildes.net](https://tildes.net/), a content aggregator that looks similar to Reddit and probably works in a similar way as well. The difference, though, is in the whole ethics of the platform and its operations: see [their Philosophy](https://docs.tildes.net/philosophy/) for an example.

I think this is a great step forward for the fediverse in general, as I had not seen a service like this anywhere before. The only downside is that it...

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de some laptop stickers with Free Software-related projects and organizations.

It was super easy to do once I bought some sticker paper and just printed the logos I copied from the internet. I should release this as a CC-BY-SA wo...

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mething tells me that I should get more serious about my online presence in the web. Should I try to self-host this very website? I'm thinking about some of the options here among the order of convenience over price here.

What could be the options when my ISP does not do port forwarding? ...

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m now accepting donations through my [LiberaPay account](https://liberapay.com/kzimmermann)!

As always, **my work is and always will remain free to consume, share and remix**. You are encouraged to do all the three! However, if you'd like to s...

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ving how Free Software uses already known-to-work things to complement and add even more functionality to software instead of rewriting the wheel. And I'm not just talking about shell scripts either. Programs integrating code and plugins following the Unix principle are the best.

No freeware with a premium version at all here! ...

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though perhaps the RIAA did "win" the case and took down `youtube-dl` from Github, the wonderful [Streisand Effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect) made a pyrrhic victory out of it. Witness the tens of new repositories that sprung from it, as complete as possible with even commit history, and the hundreds of anonymous copies (like [this one](https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmdZFnkyzP5w8vzt2Us641ZKn8SaXvm3eNTNGMvXXPy4dY) in IPFS) that were made following the announcement.

People will *not* be silenced by corporations, that's for sure. Now we need to work the other side: how do we switch away from a culture that worships...

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is copyright madness can't continue. [Github does not have a monopoly on youtube-dl source code](https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2020/10/2020-10-23-RIAA.md), and go the RIAA does not have a monopoly on free speech.

If you care the slightest bit about Internet Freedom, please take 10 seconds to run the following command in your terminal: `git clone https://codebe...

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m loving to become a PeerTuber (is this even a thing yet? At any rate fuck youtube) and share some of my work regarding the Free Software community.

My next step is to become a persistent seeder of all of my works I upload there. To do so, I'll do it like this: 1. Record the stuff the same way I ...

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is might be one of the coolest things ever: a *terminal-based spreadsheet editor*! As much as I hate excel and wish people knew that spreadsheets are for storing moderate ammounts of DATA, not making small operating systems, sometimes you need something a little better than a text editor.

This is where [SC-IM](https://github.com/andmarti1424/sc-im) comes in. ...

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P is a good model for software implementation.

- Protection from censorship just like decentralized applications (Mastodon, XMPP, etc). - No need to have specific hardware to host it (you partici...

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arning C has been one of the best experiences of this (lost year). It has been a while since I learned a program language, so this is really refreshing. I wonder where I'll go to, next: Go, Rust, something else?

...

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This is important:** All privacy and basically the whole bedrock of digital security is under one huge threat right now: [the Five Eyes are demanding that Technology companies remove End to End Encryption from their software](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/10/orders-top-eus-timetable-dismantling-end-end-encryption).

This is quite literally the unthinkable and, if done, will demise every single form of security in the digital world today - no more privacy and no mo...

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w video from my Podcast on Peertube published:

[002 - How did you start in Linux and Free Software?](https://diode.zone/videos/watch/940f08a8-2096-4aa4-b4b5-24230f271190) Unfortunately no IPFS lin...

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ybe I'm becoming a digital minimalist of sorts, but what the hell is wrong with the size of FILES these days?

- A word document: 5MB - A PDF file: 7MB - Picture taken from a cell phone: 7MB - Any movie downloaded since 2017: 2GB Do you really need 3000+ p...

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's good to be back to the Fediverse with a new Mastodon account.

Part of me wishes to keep exploring a "side-fediverse," that of the [Tildeverse](https://tildeverse.org). When I signed up for the town, I didn't orig...

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, it's finally done. My new Mastodon account is under Fosstodon, and you may follow me there at [@kzimmermann@fosstodon.org](https://fosstodon.org/@kzimmermann).

I initially was a little reluctant about using that instance as it has more than 13k members, and didn't want to [unbalance the federation](https://ti...

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reka! I'm loving to "reboot" my programming study and learn C for real this time. Perhaps next on I'll tackle Rust.

[Here's the repo of things I've already written](https://github.com/kzimmermann/c-study). It's a bunch of simple programs that I used to practice thin...

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, it looks like my [Mastodon account at Awoo.pub](https://awoo.pub/@kzimmermann) has gone under. I'm not sure if it's gonna come back (I never see anyone else in that instance ever post anything, maybe they just don't care anymore), so I might set up a different account at a different instance afterwards.

Perhaps that will even be better, a more popular instance might show me some new accounts to follow. ...

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eet! Looks like my plant in `botany` has matured to a real Venus Flytrap! That's awesome.

It's games and programs like these that really help nurture a sense of belonging in the town. ...

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h, this is so cool! I just discovered the `qrcode` module in Python, which apparently comes preinstalled in Ubuntu (?) and allows you to generate ASCII terminal-printable QRs of any string you want.

Here's this website, for example:                                           █▀▀▀▀▀█  ▄█▀▄  ▀▀▀█▀▀ █▀▀▀▀▀█         █ ███ █ █ █▀▄ ▀ █▄ █▄ █...

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n the `town nicethings` command and, to my surprise, had this excellent stoic quote to greet me. Coincidence? Pretty nice, regardless.

> *It’s unfortunate that this has happened. No. It’s fortunate that this has happened and I’ve remained unharmed by it—not shattered by the present or...

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aand it's done! The first usable version of the static page generator is [published in github](https://github.com/kzimmermann/static-sitegen). Obviously it needs a lot of work, still, and probably won't be as feature-rich as Jekyll, but it was a fun little project to work on. Check it out!

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me voiceover comedy I did parodying all those pill commercials... but for programmers! What if there was a programming pill that solved all your problems?

[NILism - a new way to nil](://diode.zone/videos/watch/f981791a-3b4f-4dc7-b2fc-465675a8428a) Also available through this IPFS DAG: `QmXZiEEQ6wTCeZ6FP...

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-mirrored the pinned IPFS content into IP**N**S, the naming system. Dunno how this is going to work, but the difference is that supposedly it preserves updates i.e. serves always the latest version.

Find it out through this [web gateway link](https://ipfs.io/ipns/k51qzi5uqu5dju508dqev94eroilnka36ofdnfa06fgt0442yaam1usyqzeyv8/) or this DAG: `/ipns...

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's done: this web page is now mirrored in IPFS! Available through this DAG: `QmatGsZLELXZPmiPJtrDUB1dNhKhPhK5dhWSsF6hpmMN5R`

You can also try through this [IPFS Gateway](https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmatGsZLELXZPmiPJtrDUB1dNhKhPhK5dhWSsF6hpmMN5R). Hooray for distributed platforms! ...

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aaaand it's done. [Klaus Zimmermann is now on video](https://diode.zone/videos/watch/102f499f-cb61-46db-8807-5e451c373a28). Let's see how this turns out!

Also available in IPFS through this DAG: `Qmf8TZm4cqTTzG7wHoeX4JdFdJU5vLTfvz1JgUE4iFDUc5` ...

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at's it: as my next "home project" I'm gonna mirror my entire site on tilde.town in IPFS. I've been planning to study it closer for a couple of months already, and besides, it's all static HTML anyway.

What better way to make your content available forever than to immortalize it in the global distributed file system of the world? ...

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have the slight feeling that my page-creation scripts in bash have become too spaghetti for maintenance, and I'll need something more organized to keep publishing my blog.

Perhaps it's python time again? ...

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ol, my plant in `town botany` is a venus flytrap! There's something therapeutic in raising and caring for a virtual plant here in the town!

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, so this is how [~vilmibm](/~vilmibm) does the [passwordless authentication](https://linuxize.com/post/how-to-setup-passwordless-ssh-login/) thing with SSH.

I'm surprised by how simple it is, actually. Doesn't even need to be root if there's already `sshd` installed. ...

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last. I know can post here and the updates will find themselves in the main homepage. [Check?]()

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enity](https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/Zenity) gives some new life into otherwise boring shell scripts, and allow you to make small GUI programs without requiring you to pull out another programming language.

Sure, it doesn't do everything a framework can do, but it's pretty awesome as lightweight as it is. ...

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n, I love cold weather. Say what you want, hot weather all year long and sweating sucks. I welcome Fall coming in and cooling everything down.

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at is your favorite Darknet or Deep Web Network? I've been a user of I2P for a good 7 years now, before I even heard of Tor, which I've been using for about 5 years as well.

And then there is ZeroNet, which although the focus is not anonymity, does a great job in ensuring distribution and longevity through seeding a-la tor...

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arning is something you do best by doing rather than studying. Never broke anything? Why, that's probably because you never tried. Pile up your mistakes, learn from them, improve.

Consider them your battle scars that make you a better human. What are you taking from your life besides your experience, after all? ...

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M and CPU are fragile, scarce resources. Protect them and use them with caution! The less you use the more you can share.

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e command line is the most powerful computer resource and interface you'll ever use. Why? Because it abstracts itself, allowing work to be done even in the absence of a user!

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ivacy and security go hand in hand. Can't have privacy due to "security concerns?" Bullshit. That means you deserve neither, *ahem*, Microsoft and all other big tech that capitalizes on data.

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nux teaches you more than just system administration or "computer literacy" (Whatever that means). It teaches you how to be self-sufficient and proficient within whatever you have and know. Some interpret this as hard to use and "user unfriendly" but in reality, this is **power**.

Pure, unfettered power, derived directly from knowledge. If you truly understand this, you'll change forever your life. ...

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