Planet Larry

My son, who’s currently two years old, loves to press the big shiny button on my computer case. The button, which happens to be the power button, is surrounded with a glowing blue ring, which probably makes it even more irresistible for a kid in his age.

I first tried to cover it with a piece of paper and some tape, but that didn’t work. It probably just made it more annoying for both of us. My second idea was a success though. I was able to disable it in the operating system itself. It took me a few tries (read: reboots), before I figured it out though.

I was trying to solve it via acpid, but I never got it to work. It turns out that if you use elogind, it will steal the power button input and shutdown the computer no matter what. Thank you Zucca on Gentoo forums for that piece of valuable knowledge.

TL;DR

I added HandlePowerKey=ignore to the [Login]-section in the file /etc/elogind/logind.conf. I then restarted elogind using the command # rc-config restart elogind. Zucca wrote that it would restart your session, but it didn’t for me. I don’t know if I had to or not, but I manually logged out and back in again, just in case.

And that’s all. When my son is now pressing the power button on my computer case, it does absolutely nothing! I’m happy, and my son is happy!

This is what I did, to make mailto-links open in Mutt, using my web browser qutebrowser. I think, it should work for all web browsers, and I don’t think that you need to anything more than this. Feel free to correct me, if I’m missing something.

I first created a desktop entry file called mutt.desktop, in the folder ~/.local/share/applications/, with the following content:

[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Name=Mutt 
NoDisplay=true
Exec=/usr/bin/urxvt -e mutt %u
Terminal=true

FIY: If you use a desktop environment, and want a fancy shortcut for Mutt, you could consider adding these values as well:

Icon=email
Categories=Internet;
StartupNotify=true

I then added the following content to the file ~/.config/mimeapps.list:

[Default Applications]
x-scheme-handler/mailto=mutt.desktop;

And then everything just worked for me.

I have always wanted support for comments on my blog, but I could never figure out how to do it, while keeping the website 100% static, and avoiding any complexity or anything that could be considered privacy invasive.

In the end, I decided to go with a static solution that only requires a tiny bit of manual work by me. I don’t expect a lot of comments anyway. It’s all based on the “Dead Simple Jekyll Comments” project.

I basically copied their product, removed a bunch of features, made some tweaks to it, to make it work better with how I like things. I removed things like the privacy invasive feature that make calls to the Gravatar service, and the ‘reply to comment’-feature. There’re also no notifications or anything like that. I wanted it to be as simple as possible.

It works by you e-mailing me your comment—using my fancy mailto-link—that you can find in the comment section, located below each post. When I accept your comment, I’ll just send the content to a shell script that does the rest of the work for me.

While this might not be for everyone, I personally really like the simplicity of it.

As a long-term, and satisfied customer, of Gandi’s services, I’m sad to have witnessed them being sold to a greedy company like Total Webhosting Solutions B.V., earlier this year.

I first heard about Gandi, the French cloud service provider, after getting my Ubuntu Membership back in 2009. It turned out that the Ubuntu Membership came with a few perks. One of the perks, happned to be a generous discount rate at Gandi.

I became a customer at Gandi, partly because of the discount, but also because I liked that they both funded and supported various non-profit organizations and open source projects, like Creative Commons, Gnome, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Students for Free Culture, World Wide Fund for Nature, International Federation for Human Rights, Ubuntu and Debian. They also used open source software themselves, at least for some of their services. And their services seemed to be good and reasonable priced as well.

The new pricing at Gandi

Before TWS bought Gandi, I paid about 11 EUR per year, for a .SE-domain. All domains also came with 3 free e-mail accounts, with 3 GB storage for each account. That all changed when TWS took over. My expenses for my domain and my e-mail, went from 11 EUR per year, to about 75 EUR per year. That’s a 681% (!) price increase.

The 3 free e-mail accounts that used to be included with each domain for free, now costs 4 EUR monthly, per account. Which is a bit pricey for a rather basic e-mail service if you ask me. And my 11 EUR domain, now costs 34 EUR. That’s just not okay.

And yes. I’m well aware that free e-mail was rather generous of them. I would have gladly paid about 1-2 EUR (monthly) for it. If, the domain was still at 11 EUR. TWS took it way too far.

GleSYS is my new home for my domain

First: GleSYS is a sponsor of Linuxkompis! They have sponsored my Swedish project Linuxkompis, with a VPS since the start of Linuxkompis. And that’s it. They have nothing to with me moving my domain to them. And I get nothing for moving my domain to them either. They’re most likely not even aware of the fact that I have moved my domain to them. The domain “linuxkompis.se”, is paid in full by me, with my own money.

GleSYS is a Swedish cloud service provider that uses green and sustainable energy. They also happen to charge a much more reasonable yearly fee at 192 SEK (≈16 EUR) for my domain. And as an added bonus, their user interface is way better than the one that Gandi ever had.

Mailbox.org is now taking care of my e-mail (again)

While GleSYS do provide an e-mail service, they don’t have two-factor-authentication for it, only for the regular cloud account. Which is a big no no for me. It doesn’t matter if they have the most sophisticated e-mail features of all providers out there. If I can’t secure my e-mail account with 2FA, I’m not even going to bother trying them out.

That’s why I went back with Mailbox.org. I used to be a customer at Mailbox.org in the past, before I moved over to Gandi a couple of years ago. I wrote about it here.

I did look around for other alternatives, before settling with Mailbox.org. They seem to be the best option out there today. It should also be noted that, since I wrote my last post about them, they have replaced the Google reCAPTCHA spyware with something called Friendly Captcha. Which is a privacy-first and fully GDPR-compliant service from Germany. They also don’t use cookies or store personal data from the users. A wise move by Mailbox.org.

I have only used Mailbox.org for about two months now. Some things are still the same, like their website, which is still, ehh.. confusing and quirky to use. We’ll have to see about the rest, but I have no complaints about the service in general though. They have always provided me with a reliable and high quality service. And to be fair, it’s not like I’m accessing my account via their website that much anyway.

This is my current list of applications for 2023. Most of them have been with me since the beginning of time. I rarely make any changes to my setup anymore, which probably makes me a bit boring, but I like my setup, and I don’t like changes.

A few notes

I’m a ‘computer first’-person, but I do use a few exclusive Android applications, that makes more sense for me.

Audioblog client

Yes. It’s actually called audioblog. I know that most call it podcast these days, but that’s just the two words “iPod” and “broadcast” mashed together, by some Apple fanboy. I prefer to use neutral names for things.

Shopping list

I use Neovim and a plain-text file for my personal shopping, and basically any type of list that I have. AnyList (for Android) is used exclusively with my partner. It was what she was using when I met her. I haven’t (yet) found a better alternative to it. AnyList lets us create and share lists between us. It also lets us edit lists in real time, at the same time, which is a deal breaker for us. We use it for shopping, weekly meal planning and even for planning and packing for our vacations.

If you’re aware of any alternative to AnyList, that’s open source, works with both Android and iOS, and preferably on the web, let me know!

Budgeting/finances

I used to keep a spreadsheet of my finances, but it’s a lot of work, and I really don’t need it anyway. I don’t have that many expenses to keep track of as of now. That might change when we buy a house, who knows, but until then, I’m not going to spend any time on it.

Password manager

My password manager KeePassC was abandoned about 5 years ago. I still haven’t been able to find a good replacement for it. If you’re aware of any good Vi-like Ncurses clients for KeePass, let me know!

Share your defaults!

Feel free to copy, modify and share my templates! There’s really no ‘rules’ to this. I just thought it could be fun to see what we’re all using, and this is probably a good base to get started with.

If you share your own post, I’ll make sure to add a link to it here. I would also appreciate any feedback about this. Perhaps the list is missing something?

Templates

* Operating system:
* Window manager:
* Web browser:
* Web feed client:
* Search engine:
* Bookmark manager:
* Email client:
* Email provider:
* Calendar:
* Contact book:
* CalDAV/CardDAV provider:
* Instant messaging:
* Audio and video calls:
* Cloud storage:
* Password manager:
* Terminal emulator:
* Shell:
* Text editor:
* Word processing:
* Code editing/IDE:
* Notes:
* To-do application:
* Music player:
* Video player:
* Audioblog client:
* File manager:
* Photo management:
* Camera gear:
* Budgeting/finances:
* Shopping list:
* Meal planning:

| Operating system:                     |
| Window manager:                       |
| Web browser:                          |
| Web feed client:                      |
| Search engine:                        |
| Bookmark manager:                     |
| Email client:                         |
| Email provider:                       |
| Calendar:                             |
| Contact book:                         |
| CalDAV/CardDAV provider:              |
| Instant messaging:                    |
| Audio and video calls:                |
| Cloud storage:                        |
| Password manager:                     |
| Terminal emulator:                    |
| Shell:                                |
| Text editor:                          |
| Word processing:                      |
| Code editing/IDE:                     |
| Notes:                                |
| To-do application:                    |
| Music player:                         |
| Video player:                         |
| Audioblog client:                     |
| File manager:                         |
| Photo management:                     |
| Camera gear:                          |
| Budgeting/finances:                   |
| Shopping list:                        |
| Meal planning:                        |

These are the channels on YouTube, that I’m currently, as of December 01, 2023, is subscribed to. All categories and channels, are ordered in an alphabethical order.

This list will be updated from time to time. I’ll make sure to include some kind of changelog for it.

Biking

• Always Another Adventure
• Backwoods Bikepacking
• Berm Peak Express
• Berm Peak
• BIKEPACKING.com
• BKXC
• CYCLINGABOUT
• Cykelmagasinet (Sv)
• Fabio Wibmer
• Gee Milner
• Iohan Gueorguiev
• Keep Smiling Adventures
• Liam Garrison
• MatthewNorway
• Mitch Boyer
• Park Tool
• Ryan Van Duzer
• Shifter
• Tristan Ridley
• VanCan
• Velofil

DIY

• Drew Builds Stuff

Entertainment

• Abroad in Japan
• Dashcam Academy
• Dashcam Nation
• Dutch Dashcam
• FailArmy

Food & Lifestyle

• Babish Culinary Universe
• BeardMeatsFood
• James Hoffmann
• My Name Is Andong

Gaming

• EthosLab
• jackfrags

Graffiti

• SMOE NOVA

Outdoors

• Justin Outdoors
• MyLifeOutdoors
• Peter Persson (Sv)
• TA Outdoors

Technology

• ExplainingComputers
• Jeff Geerling
• Marques Brownlee
• The 8-Bit Guy
• This Does Not Compute

Tiny houses

• Exploring Alternatives
• Living Big In A Tiny House

After several years of service, my trustworthy Raspberry Pi 2 with Alpine Linux, is now retired.

My Raspberry Pi 2, was mainly used for running WeeChat with BitlBee. WeeChat is a text-based IRC-client, and BitlBee brings instant messaging to IRC-clients. This meant that I could use my IRC-client for XMPP. Which is my go-to instant messaging platform, since the dawn of times.

The good thing with this setup, was that I could simply use my IRC-client for XMPP. WeeChat is my all-time favourite client. It’s something that I’m comfortable with, and it happens to be a fairly advanced client. You can customize to your liking in any way possible, with the large repository of plugins, that’s available for it. The bad thing with this setup, was the fact that the latest release of BitlBee is more than 4 years old. And even back then, the support for XMPP was lacking, at best. BitlBee, doesn’t support things like OMEMO (end-to-end encryption), MAM (Message Archive Management) or simply sending/receiving files.

No support for MAM, means that any message that I receive while offline, is lost forever. Well. For BitlBee at least. Any client that does support MAM, would have fetched the messages and showed them to me, the next time I would have logged in.

That’s why I was running it on a Raspberry Pi. It’s tiny and it doesn’t draw any power at all. Which meant that could always have it running 24/7, without ever worrying about an expensive electricity bill.

While it wasn’t a perfect setup, I was okay enough with it. It was actually a setup, that I used for almost a decade. The reason I decided to retire the setup, was for the fact that I currently don’t spend much time with my computer. And I don’t see that changing in the near future. The time I do spend with my computer, isn’t really spent on IRC or XMPP anyway.

Alpine Linux

I also have to give Alpine Linux, some love here. Alpine Linux is an “independent, non-commercial, general purpose Linux distribution designed for power users who appreciate security, simplicity and resource efficiency”. I quoted their website.

Alpine Linux is built around musl libc and busybox. Which makes it small and resource efficient. I think the base installation weights in at about 120 MB disk usage. Another neat thing with the ARM-version, is the fact that I only runs from RAM. This means that your poor SD-card is saved from constant abuse, and could potentially last forever.

My new setup

My new setup is simply running a client on my desktop computer. I choose Gajim, which supports both OMEMO, MAM and other fancy things. It’s a pure XMPP client, which means that it doesn’t support the IRC protocol, but the only IRC-channel that I’m still active on these days, are bridged to an XMPP-room anyway.

And yes. Gajim is a graphical client. It’s not usually what I use. It was actually quite difficult, switching to something graphical, but I’m slowly getting used to it. I also don’t like the fact that it’s trying to be ‘modern’, with bloat like “workspaces”, that you can’t even disable… It seems to be the least bad client right now though.

I’ve been using Pidgin in the past, but they lack modern XMPP features like BitlBee as well, but the new major upcoming version of Pidgin, looks promising though! I’m patiently waiting for that to happen.

And the reason that I didn’t choose a text-based client like Profanity or Poezio—that both have good support for XMPP—was for the simple fact that this old dog, don’t have the time or motivation to learn new tricks. At least not right now.