Yesterday I got a fresh new Pixel 4a, to replace my dying OnePlus 6. The OnePlus had developed some faults over time: It repeatedly loses connection to the AP and the network, and it got a bunch of scratches and scuffs from falling on various surfaces without any protection over the past year. Why get a Pixel? Camera: OnePlus focuses on stuffing as many sensors as it can into a phone, rather than a good main sensor, resulting in pictures that are mediocre blurry messes - the dreaded oil painting effect. Pixel have some of the best camera in the smartphone world. Sure, other hardware is far more capable, but the Pixels manage consistent results, so you need to take less pictures because they don’t come out blurry half the time, and the post processing is so good that the pictures you get are just great. Other phones can shoot better pictures, sure - on a tripod. ... Read more 》

Sporting a beautiful 10.1" 1920x1200 display, the Lenovo IdeaPad Duet Chromebook or Duet Chromebook, is one of the latest Chromebooks released, and one of the few slate-style tablets, and it’s only about 300 EUR (300 USD). I’ve had one for about 2 weeks now, and here are my thoughts. Build & Accessories The tablet is a fairly Pixel-style affair, in that the back has two components, one softer blue one housing the camera and a metal feeling gray one. Build quality is fairly good. ... Read more 》

Ubuntu “Focal Fossa” 20.04 was released two days ago, so I took the opportunity yesterday and this morning to upgrade my VPS from Ubuntu 18.04 to 20.04. The VPS provides: SMTP via Postfix Spam filtering via rspamd HTTP(S) via nginx and letsencrypt (certbot) Weechat relay OpenVPN server Shadowsocks proxy Unbound recursive DNS resolver, for the spam filtering I rebooted one more time than necessary, though, as my cloud provider Hetzner recently started offering 2nd generation EPYC instances which I upgraded to from my Skylake Xeon based instance. I switched from the CX21 for 5.83€/mo to the CPX11 for 4.15€/mo. This involved a RAM downgrade - from 4GB to 2GB, but that’s fine, the maximum usage I saw was about 1.3 GB when running dose-distcheck (running hourly); and it’s good for everyone that AMD is giving Intel some good competition, I think. ... Read more 》

After brewing in experimental for a while, and getting a first outing in the Ubuntu 19.10 release; both as 1.9, APT 2.0 is now landing in unstable. 1.10 would be a boring, weird number, eh? Compared to the 1.8 series, the APT 2.0 series features several new features, as well as improvements in performance, hardening. A lot of code has been removed as well, reducing the size of the library. ... Read more 》

If you have ever used aptitude a bit more extensively on the command-line, you’ll probably have come across its patterns. This week I spent some time implementing (some) patterns for apt, so you do not need aptitude for that, and I want to let you in on the details of this merge request !74. so, what are patterns? Patterns allow you to specify complex search queries to select the packages you want to install/show. For example, the pattern ?garbage can be used to find all packages that have been automatically installed but are no longer depended upon by manually installed packages. Or the pattern ?automatic allows you find all automatically installed packages. ... Read more 》

In the previous post about setting up a email server, I explained how I setup a forwarder using Postfix. This post will look at setting up Dovecot to store emails (and provide IMAP and authentication) on the server using GPG encryption to make sure intruders can’t read our precious data! Architecture The basic architecture chosen for encrypted storage is that every incoming email is delivered to postfix via LMTP, and then postfix runs a sieve script that invokes a filter that encrypts the email with PGP/MIME using a user-specific key, before processing it further. Or short: ... Read more 》

This week, I’ve been working on rolling out mail services on my server. I started working on a mail server setup at the end of November, while the server was not yet in use, but only for about two days, and then let it rest. As my old shared hosting account expired on January 1, I had to move mail forwarding duties over to the new server. Yes forwarding - I do plan to move hosting the actual email too, but at the moment it’s “just” forwarding to gmail. ... Read more 》

(What follows is an excerpt from my master’s thesis, almost all of section 2.1, quickly introducing Go to people familiar with CS) Go is an imperative programming language for concurrent programming created at and mainly developed by Google, initially mostly by Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, and Ken Thompson. Design of the language started in 2007, and an initial version was released in 2009; with the first stable version, 1.0 released in 2012 1. ... Read more 》

As of today, I migrated various services from shared hosting on uberspace.de to a VPS hosted by hetzner. This includes my weechat client, this blog, and the following other websites: jak-linux.org dep.debian.net redirector mirror.fail Rationale Uberspace runs CentOS 6. This was causing more and more issues for me, as I was trying to run up-to-date weechat binaries. In the final stages, I ran weechat and tmux inside a debian proot. It certainly beat compiling half a system with linuxbrew. ... Read more 》

So, I’ve been using ikiwiki for my website since 2011. At the time, I was hosting the website on a tiny hosting package included in a DSL contract - nothing dynamic possible, so a static site generator seemed like a good idea. ikiwiki was a good social fit at the time, as it was packaged in Debian and developed by a Debian Developer. Today, I finished converting it to Hugo. Why? I did not really have a huge problem with ikiwiki, but I recently converted my blog from wordpress to hugo and it seemed to make sense to have one technology for both, especially since I don’t update the website very often and forget ikiwiki’s special things. ... Read more 》