https://joelchrono12.xyz/2022/06/23/change-urls-without-breaking-old-links-in-jekyll.html

However, by setting a permalink in the yaml metadata, I can simply have something like:

https://joelchrono12.xyz/blog/change-urls-without-breaking-old-links/

Which is shorter and easier to type.

However, before doing my rofi script for automatic post creation I initially created my markdown files by hand, and I didn’t really had a format to follow, some of my posts had /blog/post.title, others had no permalink set at all, and others just had /post.title.

This means that the generated static files are all over the place, and I kinda wanted to clean that up.

The solution is really simple. I just installed the jekyll-redirect-from plugin. After reading the README in their repo, I realized this was exactly what I needed. I won’t really explain it here since its fairly easy to do, but feel free to ask me if you feel like it.

You can test out how the plugin works on my website, here are some of the old URLs that should now redirect you to the new one. You may also find some of those old posts of mine kinda interesting too!

• A comparison on Newpipe and Youtube Vanced
• Privacy focused browsers for Android
• Asking for forgiveness for small things
• Changing my Android custom rom

Even in those old articles I link to some more posts that are still using a different format, which will be redirected too. If you found this useful please let me know!

The distro of choice was of course DietPi, which has proved to be quite powerful thanks to their software installation scripts that just work.

So I downloaded the OS image and flashed it with Raspberry Pi’s Imager since I already had it installed. No real problems at all so far.

The first detail I noticed was that somehow Wi-Fi was not working nicely. This had already happened to me on my own Pi, but I didn’t worry too much, since I connect to it via Ethernet. Which would be the case here too.

The setup was fairly standard, once the system was installed I went ahead and used their dietpi-software tool to install Nextcloud.

It was here were everything got a little annoying. My friend does not live in a very urban area, so the Internet is not of the best quality. There are constant hiccups and I had to re-run the script trying to have no downtime or errors.

DietPi’s scripts can detect when an error shows up and lets you retry the last command, so retrying the install was not difficult, it was just a matter of having to try each step a couple times.

At one point the script downloads the latest version using curl, a perfectly normal procedure. However, the download stopped midway and it looks like there was no check to verify the integrity of the tar file. So the script kept going until its time to extract the file, which led to an error.

So, retrying the latest command this time would not work, since the file is technically there, just broken. So how did I fix this?

Its easy right? just download again and replace the file. So I go ahead and ssh into another terminal, and I proceed to download the file, this time via wget. But for some reason, the download keeps failing or getting stuck.

Because of the bad internet, my friend actually has some different providers and modems. So I connect to another network and try downloading the file on my computer. It worked! although it was kinda slow. I could have connected the pi to such network but the Ethernet cable was not long enough.

So I go ahead, connect to the same network as the pi and scp the file to it.

Yet another failure. I don’t know why would it fail, maybe Dropbear, the SSH server installed on the Pi, is not fully compatible with OpenSSH on my computer. The point is that I had to find another way to send the file.

Using the internet itself was not an option. Thinking back I could have just plugged a USB stick, mount it, place the file where it should be and call it a day. But I like to make things more difficult for myself.

I started a quick server on my computer, where I placed the file I needed, then I used wget to download it, since its the local network there was no problem at all.

Now I just gave the file the right permissions, placed it where it was expected (/tmp/DietPi-software, If I recall correctly) and retried the script. It all worked out and the installation finally finished properly.

Now, there is only one problem. Since there are a lot of available routers, sometimes my friend won’t be able to access the local IP of the pi when connected to a different one. Of course, we already know the solution to that, installing Tailscale! or setting up WireGuard, but I am lazy.

This meant that I would have to download it, and using the internet is not fun. Thankfully I just had to try the installation multiple times until it finally worked out.

Now it was just a matter of installing the Nextcloud Desktop client and Tailscale on his computer, and he got a personal Nextcloud instance for himself and his family. I didn’t have a chance to setup more devices though.

This was quite a nice, challenging experience. I am glad it all worked out in the end and I felt pretty accomplished with what I did.

I have no idea, but on GNOME and most GTK based desktop, this little program known as Seahorse manages all of that, so you don’t have to type your login password every 30 seconds or whatever terrible scenario would actually happen if stuff like this didn’t exist.

Regardless. KWallet is the tool used in KDE Plasma for the same thing, but for some reason it did not store GPG keys.

Now then. when using a key to encrypt, decrypt or sign something you usually get asked to input your password via a Pinentry program. In KDE Plasma the default one is pinentry-qt, while on GTK its pinentry-gtk, but it might depend on your distro. The problem is, since I use pass to manage my passwords, I need to input my gpg passphrase everytime I need to fetch a password, which is very troublesome when you have cronjobs that notify you of new emails or update your calendar events.

I noticed that there was no “Remember password” option showing up in my pinentry. But I ended up on a KDE forum post that had the same problem, which pretty much worked for me and fixed all my problems!

So all you need to do is change the pinentry to on the gpg-agent.conf file to “pinentry-kwallet” which can be installed from the package “kwalletcli”

pinentry-program /usr/bin/pinentry-kwallet

In my case I think I gave it permission to simply unlock after login, which is not ideal since I don’t have to input my gpg password ever again. I should probably change that but I already invested quite a bit of time into fixing this little detail, we’ll see.

New laptop

I’ve used a fairly old laptop for a while, it has served me really well and I don’t really have complaints, other than the hardware being quite damaged. The laptop fell and a corner is pretty much busted, alongside 2 USB ports. I’ve done fine with a dongle, but it was really annoying. The hinge was broken too. It was flimsy and whenever I opened the lid it would turn on by itself, or turn off if I moved the screen a bit too much.

It also used dual graphics (Optimus? I think?) with an Intel integrated graphics card and a discrete NVIDIA GPU, which gave me some problems and it made the device incredibly hot at times. I actually disabled it via the BIOS for a while because the fan was also quite annoying and it never felt right when playing games or doing graphically intensive stuff. It was more laggy than the Intel graphics.

I’ve thought about running Windows on this device again since the NVIDIA drivers worked better there, still undecided, to be honest, since running Intel graphics is just fine most of the time.

I got an ASUS Vivobook S15 The new laptop does not have dual graphics, it has the new Intel Xe graphics that I’ve heard are a lot better than the old integrated HD Graphics (terrible name btw). It has an 11th gen core i5, 8GB of ram and 500GB of nvme storage. Which is a lot more than I need, since I lived with 240GB for the last 4 years.

Its been quite fun to use. It came with Windows 11 installed and I have decided to keep it there since I want to do some gaming and I also depend on some software for school that only runs well with that OS. I have ran some on Linux before, but I always had annoying hiccups. I decided to stop that and just use what they expect me to use. Also I wanted to try a couple games, that seem to be a bit harder to setup on Fedora, the distro I chose to dual boot alongside Windows.

New distro

It’s not as new, since I’ve been using Fedora on my old laptop for a bit more than a month now, I am also trying KDE Plasma with it. I’ll write about all that later in the future.

For the new laptop, I considered running EndeavourOS once again, but it did not support Secure Boot, and while it was easy to disable and run everything fine, Fedora supports it out of the box, and it was just nice to have, even if not really, so I just went with it.

I decided to try out BTRFS and also encrypt my partition. Both things have been going fine, but I’ve only used that for a couple of days, I’ll write about it later, probably.

I also installed GNOME, which I kinda avoided in the past not only due to it being hard to customize, but because it was laggy on my old device. However, in this new hardware, all the animations are perfectly rendered and buttery smooth. I think I’ll stick with Plasma for now.

Another thing I wanted was fingerprint support, since my device has a sensor for that, but it looks like neither DE detected it, which was quite sad. I will look into it another time, probably.

Windows again

I don’t know if I ever mentioned it in a blog, but I had tried for a while to get Linux installed on our family desktop. So I installed Linux Mint on it a few months ago. It worked fine, but unfortunately the graphics drivers were not ideal (It has an NVIDIA Quadro on it, which I would use for CAD and such, but I never did) but other than that it was good.

Sadly my sister was not a fan of LibreOffice, and even tho I installed a virtual machine with the software she wanted, she just would not use it. Instead she would ask my parents to use their laptops whenever she had to do pretty much anything, and basically nobody would use the desktop at all.

That’s why I ended up going back to Windows there, since my parents were annoyed too at having to lend their devices for such simple things. At the device works and will see some more use now.

Finishing up

Its really fun to have the latest software in decent hardware all running like a charm. Its great to have a laptop that feels super solid instead of feeling cheap and plastic. I am really happy with what I got, and I also have a place to fill with cool geeky stickers without the thought of “I will replace this in a few years so why bother” I used to have before.

Thanks for reading, I’ll keep y’all updated

• finish writing
• git add, git commit, git push
• write toot on mastodon sharing my blogpost
• copy toot link
• paste toot link id on original blogpost
• git add, git commit, git push
• comments section now works!

However, I decided to summon the power of the command line and bash scripting once again, and I finally managed to automate pretty much all of it.

It depends on some basic tools such as sed, cut, grep, but it also requires a very simple mastodon client for the command line, toot, you probably have it all installed already, and toot is not hard to setup either way.

There really is not a lot to talk about other than this. Here is the script, its not really super clean or anything (any suggestion are absolutely welcome) but at least its serviceable.

#!/usr/bin/bash

if git rev-parse --git-dir > /dev/null 2>&1; then
    : # This is a valid git repository

    # All markdown files start with YYYY-MM-DD
    lastpost=$(/usr/bin/ls ${markdown_posts_folder}/*.md | sort -r | head -n 1) 
    getdesc=$(grep "description:" $lastpost | cut -d " " -f2-)
    geturl=$(grep "permalink:" $lastpost | cut -d " " -f2-)
    gettags=$(grep "tags:" $lastpost | cut -d " " -f2- | sed -r 's/([^ ]+)/#\1/g')
    post=$(echo -e "${getdesc} 

{{ site.url }}/${geturl} 

${gettags} #blogpost")
    posturl=$(toot post "$post" | cut -d/ -f5)
    echo $posturl
    sed -i "s/commentsid/$posturl/g" "$lastpost"

    git add *
    git commit -m "automatically added comments"
    git push

    exit

# directory may not be the top level.
# Check the output of the git rev-parse command if you care
else
    : # this is not a git repository
    echo "Run this inside of website folder"
    exit

fi

There you go, I hope you find it useful, maybe you can improve it even further. If so, make sure to let me know, I am still learning these things.

In case you didn’t know my old domain was a free .ml one, that I could not renew in time. It ended up being taken over by malware, VPN scams and other random things. Right now it looks like it does nothing bad but the certificates are all messed up.

It feels great to be able to type five letters and hit Enter rather than typing the whole domain (switching my hands to the arrow keys takes longer for me).

Either way, I am free of this hassle and I wanted to write a bit about it. It took around 4 months for Firefox to stop suggesting me my old domain. I wouldn’t have thought it would take this long, but since I typed it for a whole year, I guess it kinda made sense.

In other news, I am trying to write shorter posts too, I realized that sometimes I really don’t have too much to say about a topic, but I don’t really want to make a thread on mastodon either. After all the point of doing #100DaysToOffload last year was not to write meaningful content, but to write something at all.

I recently gained some more inspiration thanks to some posts by Chris Wiegman as well as some people who recently joined the challenge, such as Fury who has been going at it for a few days already. Make sure to give a visit to their sites if they seem interesting to you. I know they both are on my RSS reader. 😉

I switched to Fedora a couple weeks ago, and decided to go with the KDE spin, and use as many KDE apps as I could. I really like Dolphin, now that the dependencies, which can be annoying when using XFCE or a GTK desktop, are not really a problem since they all come built-in.

The only way to change the date format is by changing the System’s region settings, there are a lot of formats but I could not find what I wanted, after some time I had to give up, what a shame.

At a later point I realized that some of my apps were not working properly. Rofi would not launch with my shortcuts, Khard and Khal were showing errors. And it was due to these I realized that my locale settings were a mess. So basically my KDE settings broke my app launcher and email setup, which was pretty annoying.

Of course, all I really had to do to fix this was export the locale environment variables in my .bash_profile file and call it a day. But how is it that simple things like that can still be so messy? The Linux Desktop experience still has a long way to go.

Getting my data back

Google offers a pretty decent way to download an archive of all the data they got on me (and you). However, I decided to go ahead and do this in a more nerdy way, that also allows me to skip a ton of waiting time and unnecessary files I don’t care about.

When retrieving an archive of Google Photos from Google, they will put it all in a certain file structure and they will duplicate files if you got them in an Album or something else. They will also include a .json file that contains metadata related to a picture or video of the same name. I wanted to retrieve these files in a more organized manner, and when I found out about rclone I realized it was pretty good for the job.

Rclone lets me access and manage cloud storage from the terminal, setting it up was not that hard, I used this post as a guide.

So you can pretty much run this command to download all of your photos, structured in folders by year, then by months.

rclone copy --progress GooglePhotos:/media/by-month/ ~/Pictures/google-photos-backup/

Getting rid of duplicates

However, I already had some folder with photos divided by year too locally, and I wanted to merge both folders. For this I went the lazy route and downloaded each folder by year. But anyways, now I can download all of my photos, no problem.

Doing an ls would output something like this:

❯ ls
drwxrwxr-x  - joel  5 Apr 15:42 screenshots
drwxr-xr-x@ - joel  7 Jun 17:49 pics
drwxrwxr-x  - joel  5 Apr 15:41 videos
drwxrwxr-x  - joel  7 Jun 18:50 by-month

All the existing folders probably have duplicated photos that are contained in Google Photos too. So now I got a new problem in my hands.

But not really. Thankfully I am aware of a tool with a kinda hard name to remember.

Czkawka to the rescue

Yeah, Czkawka, I had to read the GitHub repo name while typing to make sure I got it right. Still, this tool is absolutely great at looking for duplicate files. Not only can it find actual duplicated files, it’s also able to look for similar files, and this is quite a blessing. I won’t explain exactly how it works, but the documentation is quite decent and Mental Outlaw made a video about it.

I had already done a similar process before, but while doing so I had compressed most of the files with ImageMagick. However, this messed up the metadata and modification dates, which is not a big deal, but I wanted to try and keep the file as original as possible (even if Google already compressed it somewhat).

The tool (I refuse to type its name again), allows me to look for similar pictures and from all the options, automatically select the oldest one for all the matches it finds, which pretty much means I’ll have the original file always.

That’s the progress so far

By the way, while typing this I noticed an error which is not actually a bad thing for me. Rclone seems to not be downloading shared pictures and videos. And this is fantastic, because at some point in 2018 I followed a Wallpapers shared folder and it got absolutely flooded with thousands of photos that didn’t even fit my style, so that’s great for me, but I can understand if its somewhat annoying, there is probably a way to fix this, but its fine as is for me.

Looks like rclone retried the download and its downloading them just fine. Anyways I had already dealt with that problem before, most of them start in the same way so I can just do an rm start_of_file_* to get rid of most. Well not everything can be how you want it I guess.

According to Google itself, I only use around 2GB of Google Photos, that’s quite interesting, because it means that most of my backup is as big as it is (around 10GB) because of those freaking wallpapers. Also a lot of photos for that one time I logged in to my mom’s phone, quite painful.

I am still downloading things, so I will do another post later, maybe in the same day, I don’t know.

I have a kinda similar problem, in a much smaller scale, I feel like writing a blog so I might do that sometime this week.

– Me

I did, in fact, not write a reply that week.

However, during the following days other people of the Fediverse started answering in their own blogs, so I did not feel the same rush to go ahead and do it at the time.

However, the thought was still floating around in my head, so I sat on my desk and started to just write it down already.

Personally, after reading those responses and stumbling over other older posts on the topic, I have to say I don’t actually have this problem at all; with due respect, I believe a lot of people claiming to have this, simply don’t.

I am not going flat out say Impostor Syndrome is not a thing, although some people do, and I kinda lean towards that opinion. I think a lot of people just doubt of themselves, or fear failing to someone, and since nobody goes to a psychologist just to check if they actually suffer from this, they just assume those emotions mean that they have this syndrome.

Kev started by defining what an expert is, and yeah, according to the definition, he is not. However, if we go and check for the definition of impostor, which is defined as:

“its one that assumes false identity or title for the purpose of deception.”

– Merriam-Webster dictionary,

I really doubt Kev, or any of the people who also wrote about this, are trying to be deceptive, if anything Impostor Syndrome should be used to refer to those compulsive liars who claim to be better at doing things when they really aren’t, which is something I’ve actually been guilty of sometimes, but that’s another topic.

Also, while its true that the first definition of expert refers to a single topic or subject, it can also be defined as:

“having, involving, or displaying special skill or knowledge derived from training or experience.”

– Merriam-Webster dictionary,

More simply said, being experienced.

I think that accepting you are not the best at everything and deciding to just assist where you can be helpful, is not acting as an impostor, but as someone with who knows when to move aside and let others do their jobs. After all, wouldn’t an impostor waste everyone’s time trying to be the smartest person in the room (and utterly failing)?

Maybe some feel like they are pretending to be smart and failing, but that’s not an impostor, that’s just self-doubt.

My experience with self-doubt

I don’t want this to feel like I am attacking anyone in particular so, I will now talk about what I meant when I replied “I had a similar feeling”.

I think that a lot of these feelings of self-doubt and lack of confidence in one’s ability comes from what happened during the pandemic, and in my case it really showed during the first semester that got into online classes only half-way.

With academic performance

That semester we were supposed to learn about Fourier Analysis, Complex Variables, Discrete Math and other complex subjects that are pretty much the core of my career as an aspiring Mechatronics Engineer. However, the terrible planning and lack of experience showcased by most of our teachers meant that what we were taught was just lacking. For example, with Fourier Analysis We only had one hour per week, and our homework was incredibly basic.

This was pretty common among all of the subjects, and getting high grades was also surprisingly easy. This means my scores don’t actually reflect my acquired knowledge. I mean, they already don’t really do that, but now its an even less reliable way to measure it.

So when we returned to the classrooms, I was worried that we would be expected to know a lot more than what we actually learned, and that the next subjects would be a lot harder to comprehend. But, it turned out that I was just fine. I stopped getting perfect grades, but I realized that I could handle most of the topics and learn things on my own when they peaked my interest, I am not an expert at things, but I am clever enough to understand what I am being taught, at least when classes are not online.

With my hobbies

Other instances where I felt like I wasn’t up to the task was when I got into game development. I started just fine and was proud of my work, but there was a point where I started reusing code for a couple projects and just that made me feel like I could not do this from scratch, and I just felt like I was playing dirty.

But, I mean, why rewrite what already works fine? Something as simple as that kinda threw me off, but after some thought I realized its simply not a big deal. I could actually code a player controller or a state machine from scratch, I just don’t really need to.

There is one hobby where I truly think the “Impostor Syndrome” actually applies, and I have not talked about it too much here. Card Magic, and magic in general, with coins or everyday items, its an art form where you have to be deceiving to people, you have to act confident in order to avoid awkwardness while approaching random people, while at the same time being somewhat clueless as to what’s happening with whatever trick is being done (if you actually claim to have some sort of power or mystical abilities, please stop).

I have a hard time approaching people, and nowadays it kinda became even more difficult because of the pandemic. I have been meaning to try this again, but it can be a bit cringe too, so its difficult to go back to actually performing to something other than the mirror. Regardless, I know that after all I am actually pretty good, I have good technique and I just got to gain some more confidence and overcome the fear.

Finishing thoughts

I actually had never heard of Impostor Syndrome until a couple months after the pandemic started, around two years ago, when one of my favorite Gamedev Youtubers at the time claimed to be suffering from it and started to slow down on his projects and be less active.

I don’t want to comment to much on that, but I can see how its pretty difficult for a lot of people. I don’t think my mental health is perfect in any way, but I think that sometimes we just put too much thought into what we want to believe of ourselves, and its just not realistic to fulfill every single one of our expectations, not to talk of what we think others expect from us.

I don’t even know if this is well structured or worth it. I write this mostly for myself. But its out now, and I hope it helps someone somewhere, who is not sure of what to think of themselves.

Keep it up, you are good enough, its good to want to improve, but don’t rush it.

Me, speaking as if I am some sort of wise old man, I guess I am kinda sus after all…

But no! Youngsters like me can teach lessons too!

Stop thinking less of yourself! You all must resist the temptation!

So I thought it was about time I went ahead and wrote about the history of devices I’ve owned and played around with, I thought it would be fun to make a trip down memory lane…

The dark times

First, what did I have before Android was even a thing? Well, I was just a kid back then, so I don’t remember specific models, but I at least know the type of phone and brands I had.

My first cellphone could not do phone calls, it was a Nokia phone that was locked down so it would only work in the US (I didn’t live in the US). It had a green monochrome screen that served me well to play simple games such as Snake and Space Impact. It was a wonderful little thing with tons of battery and fun, it resembled a classic Nokia 3310, but the up and down keys were in the middle (Kinda like the 3510, but I remember the keys being separated). I have not found a picture of it anywhere.

After that, my second device would be a Sony Ericcson, after some googling I was able to find that it was a K300i. I remember playing a Darts game on it, as well as recording a lot of videos of me practicing magic tricks, the quality was not great, but kinda decent back then. Again, I didn’t really had a SIM card, so no phone calls.

There was another phone that I really liked, because it finally had a QWERTY keyboard, it was an LG phone with a Windows Mobile OS, it was really fun. This was one of the first times I tried side-loading stuff, I realized the phone could run java apps, so I found a version of Plants vs Zombies and managed to get it running on it. It didn’t run great, but it was cool nonetheless.

Looks like LG made a ton of phones with QWERTY keyboards, so I couldn’t quite find the model I used to have. I remember its keys were all separated, instead of being like a single grid, they were all a bit spaced out, and it was quite squared, the body was not as rounded as some of the models I saw online.

The rise of Android

When Android came out, I remember the talks about it, one of my most clear memories were a friend who thaught Android apps where pirated versions of iOS, and that’s why they were free on Android’s Marketplace and paid in the App Store.

I really defended Android back then, I remember phones like the Samsung Galaxy Ace taking over the budget market, and stuff like the Galaxy S phones growing in popularity. I also remember the Galaxy Young ripping everyone off with its terrible performance compared to its older brothers.

2012

Back then my dad didn’t really like smartphones, and didn’t feel the need for one, and my mom had a similar sentiment. But one day we ended up at a gas station where they had an electronics store, my dad was buying a FM radio transmitter for the car. I saw some phones there, and I somehow convinced him on the spot to get a phone for mom. It was some terrible chinese knock-off that was super cheap. It ran android 2.3.5 and it kinda sucked, it was already out of date when we got it, I remember around that time learning about Nova Launcher and icons packs, and it all required Android 2.3.6 or 4.0.

It didn’t take long for my mom to give up on the touch keyboard and get another phone. The thing actually had quite a lot of buttons compared to today’s navigation gestures; along the volume and power buttons, there also was a Search, Menu, Home, Back and Overview buttons, which is kinda interesting.

I ended up getting it, and I was very happy, at least it had some things that modern phones lack, like a removable battery, a TV antenna that also worked for FM radio (without needing plugged in headphones) and an SD card slot.

I got Whatsapp, games like Flow Free, Pou, or Zombie Highway, and it was quite great. Sadly, I didn’t have a lot of storage, just updating from the Android Market to the Play Store left me with enough space for a couple other apps. So I was quite limited.

Eventually the battery inflated and I did not bother to look for a replacement it, I wasn’t even aware of stuff like that just yet.

I actually still have the box of this device, but it had another thinner box around it that contained all the information, so the actual container does not say anything.

2013

The next phone I got was once again passed down by my mother. She got an HTC Status, also known as the HTC ChaCha, and it had a QWERTY keyboard and Android 2.3.6, still.

I really liked its interface, it looked really nice, with great animations and a skeumorphic look that rivaled Apple’s. Sadly, the horizontal screen limited the apps that worked on it, they just didn’t look right. It had a direct Facebook button, which I found quite annoying since I didn’t have an account (although I wanted one, back then). The storage was, once again, quite limited so I never really had a chance to explore too much with it. I did try a couple of launchers and icon packs tho, like Smart Launcher 3 and an icon pack called Goolors, which is not available anymore. Most other launchers were vertical only though.

2015

It was not until the Samsung Galaxy S III mini, passed down to me by my father around 2015, that I finally got the chance to play around with root access and custom roms. I remember that I bricked it the first day I got it, I was so eager to mess with it, and I flashed the wrong recovery. Thankfully, Odin was a thing and flashing the stock rom was not hard at all. I decided to wait for a while (only a couple days, actually 😅) to try again. I eventually found out about the rom mantainer’s website of the different roms available for my device, so I stopped relying on specific YouTube tutorials.

I was very happy during this time, I tried a ton of roms, many mods of the stock samsung UI (Touchwiz), stuff like Carbon or Resurrection Remix, with versions like Android KitKat, Lollipop, up to Marshmellow and even Nougat. It was a great time.

Sadly, out of nowhere, my phone died completely, it just stopped turning on. I actually had two Galaxy S III minis, but the second one was locked down, so, again, no phone calls, it worked for a while though, until I managed to fully submerge it in water, and it ended up dying months later, the charging port was also quite messed up, so it wasn’t even charging properly already.

I ended up going back to the HTC Status for a while, with only Whatsapp, Facebook Lite and Geometry Dash installed on it, anything else would not fit, at the time I realized there was a 4.0 custom rom somewhere, but I never bothered trying it out.

2018

It took until now to finally get a new phone, that was actually new. I had saved some money, and my dad would pay half of it, I wanted a Xiaomi Redmi 5A, codename: Riva; it was a really good phone for the price, pretty low end, but good enough for me, since I knew it had good rom support, even today I think it has some Android 12 roms available.

I remember I spent a couple months running MIUI on it, I kinda liked it to be honest, it worked just fine. However the limitations it had on background processes, and the bad support for auto-fill were a bummer. It was around this time that I started to get interested in using FOSS, and since Bitwarden, my password manager at the time, did not work properly, I decided to try out some custom roms.

Once again, I got the wrong recovery for it, I was getting some blurry lines instead of the proper interface, turns out that the recovery to install Android Pie roms or Android 10 was different, but thankfully it was a matter of running an ADB command and flashing the right thing. It did scare me though, so I waited a couple weeks until I tried again, this time I succeded and got into the world of custom roms once again.

This was the first device where I could try pretty much everything without worrying about compatibility. I only had 16 GB of storage, but I learned to live with that just fine.

Sadly, once again the charging port was starting to show its age and quality, becoming looser and faulty. If there was anything that made me want to switch phones, it would be the lack of a fingerprint scanner, and that it still used microUSB for charging, other than that it was pretty awesome, I could probably still use it today, since I kinda like the small form factor too, which is even less common today.

2020

And finally, we arrive at my current phone, the Xiaomi Redmi Note 8, codename: ginkgo. Yet again I saved up half of the price and my dad completed it. I remember being so excited about it, since it would be the biggest step up since the S III mini. I would be having a current gen phone for the first time, even if it would be a mid-range phone, its more than enough.

I have to admit there were not a lot of new things that weren’t possible with my S III mini or my Redmi 5A, but just type C charging and updated hardware is more than enough for me, not to mention the great support for custom firmware.

Its the phone where I’ve managed to go degoogled for the longest time (if you don’t count the ocasional browser logins for Google Classroom and other school shenanigans).

I am still really happy with my current device, and I don’t see myself switching at least for another year. For the future I am looking forward to getting a Google Pixel 6A or 7A, whatever is latest when I have to change. Or I might go with another chinese phone if they still have Snapdragon chips, since they have not been in the Redmi Note series for a while, as far as I’ve seen.

Conclusions

There were other less important dumb phones I used too, but I didn’t see the point on mentioning them since I don’t remember their model or anything interesting I did on them.

It has been fun to write all this, I was remembering stuff on the spot and many fun memories returned to me. It was quite a wordy post this time around, vacations seem to be going quite well.

I hope more people try doing this, I got the idea from a post by Ru, so maybe you’ll be inspired too.

Podcasts

I finally managed to properly listen to the 4th season of The Magnum Archives. This is a fantastic show with horror and suspense like no other. This season has some incredible new concepts and really intriguing statements to listen to. I am still not done yet, but its going great.

I don’t think I’ve mentioned the Trash Taste podcast before, but I really enjoy having it as background noise, the conversations these guys have are always super entertaining and fun, and the few times where they actually talk about anime and manga are really enjoyable. For some reason AntennaPod won’t load its cover though, so I struggle to find it sometimes.

Books

I know I said I would catch up this month, but I did not, sadly. I just can’t choose what to read for some reason. But I have decided that manga counts too!

Manga

I started reading Horimiya, a fantastic rom-com manga that is considered among the best, I am at chapter 70, for now, Its finished, so I will probably end it in a couple of days.

I am caught up with Spy X Family, and anime-only enjoyers are going to have a really fun time. I am at Chapter 62

I started and caught up with Kubo Won’t Let Me be Invisible, its just so wholesome, I think its anime is airing just now, but I don’t think I’ll watch it since its super fresh, I am at chapter 109.

Btw, Komi Can’t Communicate is going through one of the funniest arcs ever so if you are not up to date with the manga, you really should.

I am up to date with the usual stuff.

Anime

I completed Kaguya-sama: Love is War in like, a day, I watched the video on it by Schaffrillas Productions months ago, and I finally decided to give it a watch. This one is so much fun and I was so sad when I realized there were only 12 episodes, thankfully, the next season is airing right now, so I will watch it once its done.

I also watched Record of Ragnarok, a more action-focused anime about a battle one on one between gods and humanity. The greatest humans agains the most powerful gods of different religions and cultures. It honestly makes no sense, but it has some fantastic animation and nerve-wracking moments, I still haven’t watched as much anime of this genre since I got into slice of life, but this one went by really quickly.

I am also watching Spy X Family and Komi-san’s 2nd season.

For some reason I still don’t finish My Dress-Up Darling.

Movies & Series

I gave Uncharted a watch, and it was not as boring as I expected, I have not played the games though, so that might be a reason. There were definitely moments where I was thinking “I wish I could control this right now”.

I also started watching Kenobi, and I am really happy with it, but looking at the community kinda made me sick, so I will stick to watching it and keeping it all to myself, and my sister!, who is also watching it with me, which is awesome.

Music

I have been messing around with local music players, Jellyfin and stuff and I think that I don’t really have good stats this month, but its pretty much the same as the previous one.

I had a bit of a nostalgia hit with some EDM stuff, like Middle by DJ Snake, Runaway (U & I) by Galantis and others.

Screen Time

I actually didn’t expect my usage to be like this, but it happens.

• My Newpipe usage went back up to 69 hours!
• Tachiyomi, my manga reader was a close second with 61 hours.
• Tusky was used for 32 hours, while Infinity for Reddit had 22, RIP productivity.

Desktop is mostly Firefox and Vim, so yeah.

Wrapping up

Somehow, despite having final projects and everything, I managed to do a lot of hobbies and stuff, I folded origami, read manga and I also took the time to distro-hop, this time I went with Fedora 36, and went with KDE instead of a window manager, to change things out a bit.

I hope I read a lot more text-only books during summer, I will have a lot of free time, so I should manage to read 5 or more if I control myself.

I have been working for my University during the last few months, but I don’t really have to do a lot of the time, so I recently picked up on my oldest hobby, origami.

I love origami, and I’ve been meaning to talk about it almost since I started this blog, but I’ve not put much effort into even trying. But since I had done quite a lot of folds lately, and had already taken a bunch of pictures of them, all I had to do was put them together and organize them a little bit.

This is not a tutorial, Jekyll’s documentation is pretty decent on this topic, so I’ll just share the small changes I did for my use case.

My _config.yml file had these lines added

collections:
  origami:
    output: true
feed:
  collections:
    origami:
      path: "/origami.xml"

I am using the jekyll-feed plugin, which should already be used by your blog if you provide RSS feeds!

After doing those changes I created an origami.md file in my website’s root directory that served as a template. It has some metadata that is not really that important but this is the main thing. You can always access my website’s source code too.

{% raw %}

<div>
 <table>
  <tr>
    <th>Model</th>
    <th>Author</th>
    <th>Tutorial</th>
    <th style="text-align: right">Photo</th>
  </tr>
{% for origami in site.origami reversed %}
  <tr>
    <td><a href="{{ origami.url }}">{{ origami.title }}</a></td>
    <td><a href="{{ origami.creator.site }}">{{ origami.creator.name }}</a></td>
    {% if origami.tutorial %}
    <td><a href="{{ origami.tutorial }}">Yes</a></td>
    {% else%}
    <td>No</td>
    {% endif %}
    <td style="text-align: right"><img width="210px" src="{{ origami.image }}"
    alt="{{ origami.description }}" title="{{ origami.description }}"></td>
  </tr>
{% endfor %}
</table>
</div>

{% endraw %}

Now all I had to do was create files inside a directory named _origami, add some metadata in YAML format, in between dashes, and call it a day. Like the following example.

layout: origami
header: Owl by Nguyễn Hùng Cường
title: Owl
creator:
    name: Nguyễn Hùng Cường
    site: https://www.flickr.com/people/blackscorpion/
tutorial: https://youtu.be/DExjwwnKCAY
date: 2022-05-05
description: "An Owl with a great 3D look, really smooth and clean looking."
image: /assets/img/origami/owl_nhc.jpg

So, anyways, its pretty simple to do. I wanted to get back into writing since it had been a while, so this is pretty much it. Thanks for reading!

The name might already tell you what this feature does, but in case you don’t know. Cosmetic filters allows you to hide certain sections of a website. Not only ads, but many other things. Like comment sections, sidebars or annoying pop-ups.

I decided to write this as somewhat of an answer to Ru’s post about using Stylus (a tool to make custom stylesheets for websites) to hide followers and follows in Mastodon. Stylus might be a little too much for such a simple thing. Besides, having less extensions is always good to make fingerprinting more difficult.

UBlock Origin can help a lot for other use cases, I’ll share my filter list at the end to give you some filters you might want to use too.

How to use it

There are many ways to use this feature, the quickest is to simply click on UBlock’s icon. Then select the color picker icon to enter in Element Picker Mode, then click on any part of a website, to block it, you will see the element’s you choose highlighted in red, then you can click on Create to add it to your filters list.

Another way that can help you be more specific or add multiple filters at a time is to go into UBlock’s settings, then go to the “My Filters” tab, where you will see an empty input area, (unless you’ve already added some). Here you can add as many filters as you want.

Here are some of the ones I’ve added to my list.

open.spotify.com##section[aria-label="Fresh Finds"]
open.spotify.com##section[aria-label="Shows you might like"]
open.spotify.com##section[aria-label="Level up"]
open.spotify.com##section[aria-label="15 minutes or less shows"]
open.spotify.com##section[aria-label="Get creative"]
open.spotify.com##section[aria-label="Delve into the news headlines"]
open.spotify.com##section[aria-label="Shows to try"]
open.spotify.com##section[aria-label="What's trending?"]
open.spotify.com##section[aria-label="The Top Podcasts of 2020"]
open.spotify.com##section[aria-label="The Top Podcasts of 2021"]
open.spotify.com##section[aria-label="The Top Podcasts of 2022"]
open.spotify.com##section[aria-label="Episodes for you"]

! 2022-03-04 https://www.youtube.com
www.youtube.com###secondary

! 2022-03-05 https://www.youtube.com
www.youtube.com###header > .ytd-rich-grid-renderer.style-scope

! 2022-05-09 https://benign.town
benign.town##.account__header__extra__links

These filters make Youtube’s UI much more simple, and they also hide all the annoying podcast features from Spotify’s Web UI. So, I hope you find them useful.

That’s all folks, let me know if you find this features useful.

Because of this, I will place a redirect on my Fosstodon account to my new one, which is at [@joel@benign.town](https://benign.town/@joel), I will not migrate all of my followers, I did not feel like doing so, just in case.

Funnily enough, I realized that my University blocks the domain name, I have no idea why, but I can’t access it there. Honestly, it’s not the end of the world, since I shouldn’t use social media when I’m supposed to be learning.

In other news, I just realized that my semester is ending a lot sooner than I expected, but I still have hope that I’ll be able to finish all of my homework and final projects. I have to be honest, I am pretty far behind in a couple of assignments that had no set due date, and a fair amount of those have accumulated. I need to get going and finish all of them, pretty much in less than two weeks.

This will be my last post in Fosstodon for the time being, so if you would like to keep following me make sure to go to my current account.

Also I kinda wanted to add some pictures to my feed, I know its bloated, but its my bloat. Time is running out.

Websites of today are bloated, if you are reading this, you probably know that. If I want to access information from any article, I also have to deal with sidebars full of suggestions, ads and images that I don’t care about, and only try to keep me browsing and wasting my time.

Due to me trying to use the Internet on a more meaningful way, I decided to get most of my text based content, and even videos from Youtube, LBRY or other sites, fetched into a single place that shows me every article I need, this is the biggest strength of the Really Simple Syndication feed.

🗒️ RSS: Really Simple Setup

I have seen a bunch of different ways that people use to sync their feeds, be it with services like Feedly or Inoreader, or just copying and pasting their OPML files. Accordingly, there are a lot of programs and websites that allow you to access your feed, be it minimal, terminal based and with no images, or full featured, offering diverse layouts and customization options.

I have checked many of those programs, but I am going to show you my current choices both for my Android device and my Linux computer

Flym

This is my current choice for android devices. It is completely open source and quite simple to use. It is fairly functional, and I love that it can fetch full websites, even when their RSS are incomplete.

This is how it’s interface looks like, I have the dark AMOLED theme enabled.

The app allows the creation of groups, which helps to categorize stuff according to your needs. This app has a few caveats tho, since sometimes reloading feeds can be a bit of a chore, but, it mostly works correctly. Flym has the basic exporting and importing features too, so it’s a very nice and tidy application. Time to talk about my desktop feed reader.

Newsboat

The website sums everything up > Newsboat is an RSS/Atom feed reader for the text console. It’s an actively maintained fork of Newsbeuter.

So, it is a fork the now dead Newsbeuter, and it offers a fairly similar functionality. Being a terminal based reader, it is keyboard driven, and its great at that. The config file is fairly customizable, although I haven’t played too much with it.

🔄 RSS: Really Simple to Syncthing

Honestly these puns are kind of cringe. Anyways, Syncthing, is such a wonderful tool. Ever since I figured out how to use it, I really loved it with all my heart. The same goes to KDE Connect, which, despite it’s name, works on my window manager wonderfully.

The only relatively bad thing is that I have to press “Export” e “Import” (or input the command), but the good thing is, that I will know for sure that I will get the latest OPML I saved.

This a little screenshot that hopefully helps you understand how it works. I can go into more detail in a later blog if you so wish.

Depending on your feed reader of choice, you will have to setup up some things. In my case, I just have an alias for Newsboat in my .bashrc.

alias syncboat="newsboat --export-from-opml /path/to/opml.opml"

And in Flym’s case, well, I can’t do much with it. There are applications that allow you to create shortcuts to certain parts of it. Android has some of this built-in, if you keep pressed the Flym icon on your phone home screen, you can see some shortcuts to open Favorites, Unreads, etc.

Using Nova Launcher, I can have an Activity shortcut, which allows me to do a similar thing, but it is a bit more complicated. Sadly, Flym only has a Main Activity, so no way to import OPMLs from there, I think I can talk about Nova’s Activites later.

As of now, I think it would be nice if the developer added a way to open those files directly from my file manager, be it with the Share menu, or showing up in the Open With options, since I am aware that AntennaPod, a podcast app, shows up there. That way, I can just create a shortcut to the folder, or even the file, and it would be easier to setup.

💭 Wrapping up

This is my second blog, in my #100DaysToOffload challenge. After reading Marc’s post about why he is still using RSS, I decided to do my take on the matter. He goes to different places on his blog, so you should check it out too!

Let me know how do you manage your feeds by @ me on Mastodon, maybe you got a better solution to manage your feeds.

Locally there are many options. Feeder is probably the best we got among the FOSS apps available on F-Droid. It has been going through a UI revamp and its looking pretty good, but it has no way to sync to any APIs, only locally. The developer seems willing to accept a PR that adds this, but so far, no luck. The issue related to this has been open for 4 years.

Apps that can sync with FreshRSS are few and far between. A quick search on F-Droid for “FreshRSS” only shows 3 results, all of them are pretty outdated. There is plain FreshRSS, which looks pretty ugly and is sluggish on my device. There is EasyRSS which looks straight out of Android KitKat. But I have to admit, it’s buttery smooth, and super lightweight too.

Right now, Readrops is the most modern looking of the bunch, and my current choice at the moment, however, it still feels a bit old. And the compatibility is bare, favorites work, but labels don’t, for example. Also, the dark theme is not of my liking.

There is actually another app with a very elegant design, that shows up when looking for “Fresh RSS” on F-Droid: Fluent Reader. However, such design is following Apple’s guidelines, instead of Material design, which makes it not fit at all with the rest of my system. That’s pretty much my only complain.

Sadly, the current best Android client for FreshRSS is FeedMe, it is not FOSS, but it has support for a lot of APIs and pretty much all of the features FreshRSS comes with, its design is great and functional. The only thing I don’t like is the settings page having a sidebar, but that’s about it.

I am a bit conflicted between a great but proprietary product, or a decent FOSS option that mostly works for my needs. My FOSS enthusiast side ended up winning, so I have been stuck between the mobile Web UI and Readrops for a while now.

However, the future is a bright one, I recently stumbled upon a new kid on the block that came out on F-Droid recently. ReadYou has a modern and beautiful UI (unless you don’t like Material You), as well as an awesome list of upcoming features, including support for the APIs supported by FreshRSS, which is exactly what I am looking for.

ReadYou is still implementing some basic features, so FreshRSS and sync support is still not being implemented, but the fact that its planned at all has given me hope. I decided to wait on it for now. However, it works locally just fine, so if you want to give it a go, I encourage you to try it out!

Interestingly, while COVID seems to not have vanished just yet, pretty much nobody wore a mask, but my whole family was already vaccinated, as well as many of the guests. I can’t confirm that everyone was, but thankfully, we didn’t hear any bad news from anyone, thankfully. It was a great time, but very tiring for me and my dad who had to arrange everything. Some friends came over to help make the food, the cake and decorations, it was nice.

So, with that little catch up out of the way, this is how I spent most of my time this month.

Podcasts

This time my favorite podcast of the month was Episode 168 of Criminal: The Magpie.

Also I finally gave a fair chance to Reply All, a pretty famous podcast that I hadn’t gotten into until now, with episode 184, Alex Goldman, Demon Hunter.

Finally, I really got into Season 8 of Command Line Heroes, which focuses on Robots and what they are, focusing on a different aspect each episode.

Books

I only managed to finish the Arc of a Scythe trilogy, with the Toll being the only one missing, it was pretty long compared to the last two, and it had a pretty solid ending, I don’t really know how I feel about it since there were some decisions and events that were a little forced. Overall, I really enjoyed it.

Because of the events that happened during vacation time and other hobbies that took over, I didn’t read anything else, other than manga.

Manga

I caught up to chapter 14 of Alita: Battle Angel.

Caught up to Komi Can’t Communicate, Sakamoto Days, One Punch Man and the like.

I also started Spy X Family and I am at chapter 17, its super fun and not what I expected at all, super wholesome, I will definitely watch the anime.

Anime

I completed Kill la Kill, its quite weird but I have to say its the kinda thing that only japanese media can pull off, I enjoyed it. I also watched the OVA episode.

I watched up until episode 7 of My Dress-Up Darling, pretty fun, It makes me laugh a lot and its pretty faithful to the manga so far.

I also watched the first episode of Attack on Titan’s Final Season: Part 2, it was cool and all, but then I kinda forgot to keep up. I will watch some more episodes during May.

Finally, I started episode 1 of Cowboy Bebop, it was a really strong start, the animation was really good, especially those fight scenes, It really hooked me up.

Movies

I watched Free Guy, it was quite a funny movie, much better than I expected! Some NPC develops a consiousness and the story goes from there.

I also rewatched Spiderman: No Way Home, and I still really liked it.

Music

Top 5 songs

1. Tokai by Taeko Onuki (This ones so cool)
2. Sotsugyou by Yuki Saitou
3. RIDE ON TIME by Rainych, evening cinema
4. Komm, süsser Tod (M-10 Director’s Edit. Version) by ARIANNE (Evangelion yey)
5. 네온 by 유키카 (Idk what this is, maybe it played while I slept)

Top 5 artists

1. Anri
2. Mariya Takeuchi
3. Taeko Onuki
4. Yuki Saitou
5. S. Kiyotaka & Omega Tribe, Kiyotaka Sugiyama

Screen Time

This time there were quite a lot of changes, because I managed to improve on things that were a bit troublesome in previous months, but because Elon Musk and the migration of users, I spent more time than expected on Mastodon.

• I only used Newpipe for 43 hours, more than 20 hours less than before.
• Tusky, my mastodon client of choice, got 30 hours of usage.
• 16 hours were spent reading manga on Tachiyomi.
• Only 5 hours were spent reading this time, I have to catch up this month.

Most of my desktop usage was still tracked but its mostly Firefox, this time I spent a lot of time in different mastodon networks, I am now part of a newly born instance named Benign.Town, so if you wanna join, we got space!

Gaming

This is the first time I have this section, since I had not had time to finish any games the previous months.

I played Metroid: Samus Returns, it took less than 12 hours and I made a review about it

Wrapping up

So, that was pretty much it, not too much to add this time around, I have quite a bit of homework to finish as always, have a good day folks.

Syncthing

This is probably the best syncing tool I know of, and its probably more than enough for a lot of your needs too. Interestingly enough, its the only thing I don’t actually use on my Raspberry Pi, since it doesn’t need a server, it just works in a peer to peer network between the devices, which share folders with each other.

I use it every day, and I will definitely keep going with it, since its so awesome, if a bit hard to understand when presented to new people.

Among other things, I use Syncthing to: - keep my passwords up to date (Currently using KeepassXC on my laptop and KeepassDX on Android). - sync my Arcticons icons with my phone (So I can test them quickly and see how they look). - sync other general files with my devices and family.

Nextcloud

I do use Nextcloud, but it’s not really because of the file server. The only features of Nextcloud I actually use are the Contacts, Calendar, and maybe notes, which I enable and disable quite often (I’ve been looking for note-taking apps lately, Joplin is my current choice).

The thing about Nextcloud is that its main feature is not really that needed for me. I kinda would rather just plug an external hard drive and organize its folders myself in a normal file manager instead of dealing with a web based GUI that is honestly not that fast. The worst thing is that I can’t even share files with others, which would be actually useful, since I can’t open my router ports and I currently run all these services in a private VPN using Tailscale, which is kind of awesome, but makes it impossible to share stuff to people outside my network.

Right now I have been considering switching to Baikal, a DAV server just to get Contacts and Calendar for personal use, or at least OwnCloud, which gives me a web interface to add contacts and events, and seems less “bloated” than its fork. Radicale is another option for a basic DAV server that I’ve used before, but since Vdirsyncer, a terminal utility quite essential for my current setup, does not support it, it’s not an option for me at the moment.

Jellyfin

I run into a similar problem with Jellyfin, yes I get a pretty interface and nice metadata, its honestly quite great, but, I only use this for myself at home, why don’t I just use Kodi and plug the hard drive whenever I actually need it?

The only other thing that would be kinda nice is music streaming, which is honestly quite good, but maybe not enough of a reason to keep it up? I am still considering keeping this one alive for now.

Besides, while I got a Raspberry Pi 4 with 8GB of RAM, which is quite capable, it still takes a while to re-encode stuff, so I have been compressing and re-encoding all of my totally legally obtained media files in my computer first, then using scp to move them to the server once they are ready, which takes quite a long time. I could just enjoy the content stored on my local disk and not worry about stuff, but of course I wanted to host it all there.

Maybe I should just rework the way I do things, its not bad at all, I will keep using it. Maybe I’ll just stick to streaming music or find better ways to rename files without making totally legal torrents stop seeding.

Gitea

I actually didn’t even talk about this on my blog at all, but I installed Gitea on my Raspberry and never actually used it, what’s the point of such a pretty interface if only I use it and I prefer using the terminal instead?

I am going to delete this since it makes no sense for my use-case, if my ports were open it would be different tho, since a couple people might be interested on my dotfiles or something.

Pi-hole

This is great, a local DNS provider that keeps all the devices at home ad-free (for the most part), I am actually really happy with how it works and it made the Raspberry Pi completely worth it, since it was also the main reason I started all of this journey in the first place, due to a Linus Tech Tips video.

Not a lot to talk about here, it works and I will keep it!

FreshRSS

The problem with FreshRSS is that its not as popular or known as I hoped. There are not enough good android clients for it. I currently use Readrops, but it has almost no customization and it has not been updated in a while, other clients are even uglier (with respect to the developers). The only pretty client I know of is Fluent Reader, but its UI looks like iOS and doesn’t fit at all with my device, but its pretty cool and works fine.

Another thing is that FreshRSS support on Newsboat is only on newer versions that are not supported on Linux Mint, and even though I said I didn’t really mind that since the Web GUI was there, its still kinda annoying.

I am thinking about going back to Miniflux even if I have to setup PostgreSQL again alongside the already existing MariaDB.

Calibre Web

Since I got into books again last month, I also got a bit invested into Calibre, a great tool to manage books, metadata and syncing with e-readers and other devices. It is pretty cool, but the web server was kinda bare bones and I didn’t really like it. I found out about Calibre-Web, a web app that can access and display a Calibre database in really good way which looks and feels a lot better than the official version.

Again I don’t really use this too often, but I have to say that when I do, it works pretty nicely. The Calibre desktop program does not seem to work well with network storage though, so I have only stuck with the Web version since I installed it. However, going back is a matter so moving the files around, which is great.

Photoprism

This is a Google Photos kinda thing, but I really don’t think I need it, My photo collection is not that big, I probably have more downloaded wallpapers on my phone compared to actual photos. I’ve been meaning to take pictures of meaningful moments a bit more, but I also like to think I can enjoy something in the time and place it happened and leave it at that.

Anyways I don’t want this to devolve into some existential ramble. The point is, I will be removing this and I kinda hate that I’ve duplicated a bunch of stuff to test it out without actually thinking if I needed it first.

Allow me to ramble a bit about this, I did a couple Google Takeouts in the last few months for different reasons, I also did it for different Google accounts back when I was cleaning up my password manager, and I feel like I have the same pictures in a bunch of different places. At some point I also compressed a ton of pictures with ImageMagick while keeping the duplicates, and I think I did that in a different folder too. Some time later I tried Cryptomator with some of those folders, and since I didn’t trust it fully, I remember I made some duplicates just in case things went wrong. In addition to all this, I distro-hopped like 2 times during last year, which means I probably lost track of some things while backing up others. Its all a terrible mess.

I like the concept of backing stuff up in multiple places, but it sucks when you don’t even know what you backed up and what you didn’t. I have already done some spring cleaning tho, and I decided to go wit Cryptomator again, this time using MEGA, since I got like 50GB for free and I only use like 6GB for those photos and wallpapers.

Wrapping up

So yeah, this was supposed to be a short overview of the services I use and if I really need them but it ended up being a bit more rambley than expected.

I guess I got a little bit too excited about the concept of having everything in my own server, that I didn’t even realize that for most things, a simple hard drive or USB stick is enough. Or Syncthing. Syncthing is fine too.

There is this interesting protocol which I think I’ve mentioned before known as DecSync, which works with Syncthing too and can sync calendars, contacts and RSS with simple folders shared across devices. It has not been updated for a while, but its concept is pretty cool and I have been thinking about giving it a fair chance one of these days.

Well, that’s a problem for future me. Thanks for reading.

Prologue

A friend lent me his Nintendo 3DS XL for the last 4 or so weeks, specifically to play Metroid: Samus Returns properly, but sadly, I didn’t have any time to use it for the first two, every weekend he would ask me how far did I go, and I think I didn’t even got the first 5 Metroids done. However, once I got vacation time, I managed to finish it in quite a crazy week.

You see, the Metroid series is probably my favorite series. It was introduced to me when I was 12 years or so, and while I struggled to finish it until a long time later, I always liked its style and how different it felt to the rest of Nintendo’s IP’s.

I have played AM2R before, but every time I have lost the save file, switched distro or just ran out of time to play it properly. I was going to try it out pretty soon again, but since I got Nintendo’s remake of the game, I decided to play it first. I was already pretty biased towards AM2R due to Nintendo’s behavior against fan-games and emulation. But regardless, I wanted to give its game a fair chance, since I am looking forward to checking out Metroid: Dread sometime soon too.

The review itself

First, let’s start with the gameplay, I really enjoyed it for the most part, the transition to 3D felt nice and I enjoyed most of the combat. The new and most important addition is the counter and the free-aiming. I have to say, countering attacks was really satisfying and I enjoyed it, but I really didn’t like how every enemy turned into a sponge unless you used the counter. The move was something that was never a part of the franchise and it became more of a requirement rather than an option, since normal enemies would frequently use mostly unavoidable attacks, and yeah, while you can still shoot dozes of beams, its not really a good experience. If the amount of shots required to kill enemies remained small too, it would’ve been fine.

I have no complaints about the 360 aiming, It was useful and fun, and I feel like I’ll miss it when replaying older titles of the franchise.

The new abilities are kinda OP, being able to uncover huge zones and stuff was kind of too much, and I think they did it to help the newer audiences from the start, since they are not used to bombing every corner like the average Metroidvania enjoyer.

The bosses

Man, there is not a lot of bosses on this game, unless you count each Metroid as one, but nobody does that. Even in the small portion of AM2R I’ve played there are already more bosses than in the whole of Samus Returns. I still really liked the difficulty of them and dying tons of times still felt OK, because I always learned new patterns and ways to avoid their attacks. There is not a lot of quantity, but the quality is there, and its top notch.

The rest

I liked the music and background sounds, but I have to admit I don’t particularly remember any themes and not a single one got stuck on my head.

The design of and puzzles of the environment were pretty cool, the game felt quite linear but I have to admit I still have not played Super Metroid, which is known as the most open of the bunch (and also the best one) and while Zero Mission can be pretty open too, it being made for handheld, just like Samus Returns, means its more linear than the original too.

So, while I don’t have proper reference of what a non-linear Metroidvania is (other than the few hours I’ve put into Hollow Knight) I didn’t really feel like this particular game needed to be fully open, you are just going to the lower levels of the planet bit by bit, killing Metroids and lowering the level of a purple substance that blocks your path. It makes sense that if you are in a Mission to destroy a whole species you shouldn’t be exploring on the other side of the planet trying to upgrade some missiles.

Finishing thoughts

It was a nice game, I finished it in less than 12 hours on my first playthrough, it gives me hope that I should be able to beat AM2R too, since I was losing a bit of hope on that one due to me getting stuck for a while on a boss last time I played it.

I also managed to play this while the time of a sister’s Quinceañera was coming, so I had to make a lot of stuff, helping with decorations and managing things, but somehow I also played this during the whole thing, so yeah, it was crazy.

I like Metroid, I liked this game and I can’t wait to try out Dread in a decade or so once I get a used Switch or something.

Just like 30 days ago, I will take a look at some of my media consumption and device usage and divide it into categories, and I will also talk about how I felt about it.

Podcasts

Nothing too different this time, I listened to the regular Darknet Diaries and Late Night Linux episodes of the month, which were actually quite great.

A notable mention should go to Tech Over Tea’s episode 108, I don’t listen to it that often , but I did so this time.

My highlight would go to Already Gone and its episode, The disappearance of Cari Farver, one of the weirdest true crime stories I’ve heard in a while. I tend to sleep while listening to these, but I just couldn’t with this one until I finished it completely.

Books

Last month I had mentioned that I wanted to start reading more books, I had read a ton of manga, but I kinda didn’t wanna count them as proper books, still, while I gained a lot of respect for manga lately, I will still differentiate them a bit just for the sake of it.

I finished The Stranger, by Albert Camus, a philosophical novel with a protagonist who kinda doesn’t care about anything, but everything he does ends up being quite important for his future. Its a short read, but really interesting, I think the author won a Nobel prize so there’s that. I found myself identifying more with the main character than I thought, I kinda hated that, but I guess you tend to dislike the features of people that remind you of yourself the most.

I finished Scythe, and the Thunderhead, by Neal Shusterman. This is a trilogy, and I am currently reading the last part. Its a sci-fi novel about a future where humanity achieved immortality, and its governed by a a benevolent (and, so far, actually good) artificial intelligence that makes sure humanity lives on an actually happy and good life, despite how meaningless it has become for new generations that don’t know what mortality feels like. However, the matters of life and death are outside the Thunderhead’s jurisdiction, and in hands of the scythes, humans chosen with the right to kill (a.k.a. glean), permanently, too keep population in check. The story revolves around two scythe apprentices, their adventures and struggles. It’s a really awesome read that will probably be turned into a movie at some point.

I finished Dracula, by Bram Stroker. I had never given classic horror a go before, but this one was a pleasant surprise. The original Dracula story was something I thought I knew, elements like Dracula’s castle and the power possessed by that monster make an appearance here, but despite what you might expect of the original vampire, the book is still filled with great characters and moments that were truly nerve-wracking. I couldn’t help but read faster and faster at times where the tension raised up, hoping for it to end when it was only getting worse. But its not all bad, there is always hope, and the determination of the characters to defend their loved ones and the future of humanity from the reign of the un-dead, is just great, but a few moments of old English were a little hard to read. I listened to different audiobooks while reading, which was quite atmospheric too.

Manga

I didn’t make the time to script anything to get this data via the API, but here is my manually obtained data.

• Shikimori’s Not Just a Cutie. From chapters 1-46. I got introduced to this just like Komi-san, via the anime trailer. Shikimori is pretty cool, and his boyfriend, Izumi, wants to show her that he can be cool too, but he is pretty unlucky, which makes for some fun stuff happening all the time.
• Yankee-kun to Hakujou Girl. From chapters 1-44. This one is about some high-school gangster who falls in love with a blind girl, its also kinda cute and ends up teaching some things about how blind people interact with the world and stuff like that, the art style is not my favorite, but its still quite good.

Other than that, I pretty much kept up to date with other series I’ve mentioned before.

Anime

I didn’t really watch a lot this time, I only watched the first episode of My Dress-Up Darling, which is pretty much like the manga with overkill animation, and I watched until chapter 21 of Kill La Kill, which keeps getting weirder and weirder while somehow having epic moments in between.

Movies

I watched a couple movies this month.

First, Edge of Tomorrow, I heard that this movie is based on a manga, and I decided to watch it first before reading it. It was pretty good, came out a few years ago but I think it holds up.

Last, The Batman. It was quite a fantastic movie, I really enjoyed it a lot, I actually missed the first few minutes but still managed to see Batman’s first appearance in the movie. I actually almost cried at the end, good stuff.

Music

I tend to just shuffle the same City Pop personal playlist, but I recently added Moonset, by Yukika, and kinda liked it, which is why its the first one, clearly. Still, I have a lot more Anri songs, so she got first place.

Top 5 songs

1. Moonset by Yukika, Kim Mi Jeong
2. じゃじゃ馬娘 by Taeko Onuki
3. Street Dancer by Hiromi Iwasaki
4. Forever by Pete Drake
5. AMAI SEIKATSU by Towa Tei

Top 5 artists

1. Anri
2. Yuki Saitou
3. Taeko Onuki
4. Mariya Takeuchi
5. 流線形

Screen Time

Like last month, I don’t really feel like plain old statistics, so I will just mention some interesting details and stuff like that.

• YouTube clients still made it to the top, with 67 hours, three hours less than last month. I can say that I listened to a a few album playlists and more video podcasts than usual, which kind of justifies me since I was doing something else, but still.
• I read manga via Tachiyomi for almost 40 hours, nothing close to February, since I managed to control myself.
• A total of 60 hours were spent in different reading apps that I was testing out, I ended up with Librera Pro, where I read for 38 hours.
• Social media apps took about 26 hours of my month, which is less than an hour per day, I am happy with that, but still looking to reduce it. I spent 13 hours in mobile games, Brawl Stars and Clash Royale, and it was actually during dead time where I had nothing else to do, I could have read some more, but not everything’s possible.

Most of my desktop usage was still tracked but its mostly Firefox and websites, 4 hours of Joplin, a ton in the terminal too.

Wrapping up

I feel a lot less “guilty” about this month, but I have been meaning to not consider my hobbies as a waste of time. I recently started folding origami again, and shared a few pics on my mastodon account, and folding paper takes time too, probably 4 to 6 hours this month.

I entered my community service for university, where, most of the time, I can do as I please as long as I am available when needed, which has allowed me to spend some time reading, folding paper and doing techie stuff.

Overall, a nice month, but I gotta admit, there is still some school work I haven’t finished, I might also have to dual boot Windows again at some point, and I also want to switch my android ROM again, let’s see what happens…

Thanks for reading, I am out.

I have not watched as many videos lately, because I have been reading books and manga quite a lot, and I recently entered my community service at University (basically I work for them for free). But I still decided to take some action to reduce my temptation to lose myself into YouTube rabbit holes, since I know that even if its not a problem now, it is bound to happen in the future, as it has happened many times, despite my previous efforts.

Changing YouTube

The first thing I tried was installing an add-on that I heard of in, well, a YouTube video about distractions and such (I probably kept watching videos about that topic for a while…) named DF YouTube, which allows you to have a distraction free experience by disabling the feed, comments, recommendations, etc. However, the extension has not been updated in a while, and I realized I can just block those elements using UBlock Origin.

My main focus was to look at YouTube as its most essential form: a search engine. I only left a search bar for the main page, and the video frame, description and comments for each video page. It was all looking pretty nice, I also added the Return YouTube Dislike extension, because its nice.

At some point I restored the discover page because I tried another extension that allowed me to group subscriptions and keep track of them without an account, named PocketTube, and it didn’t show its custom feeds if I disabled the whole thing.

Changing Browser settings

Another thing I decided to do a while ago, and came quite handy now, was deleting all cookies and site data from my browser (which is still Firefox) by default, so I only white-list the websites I actually use. I decided to log out and remove YouTube from the white-list, I also assigned a Firefox container for it, so its pretty much unable to track my movements outside of itself.

However, after a couple searches or links clicked on a browser session, I can tell YouTube figures out some stuff and shows things that are actually atractive to me. Restarting the browser session can fix it, but realizing how effective it was at fingerprinting my interests, I decided to take this a step further and stop using youtube.com altogether.

Using an alternative front-end

There are YouTube alternatives such as Odysee and Peertube, but there is just not enough content for my taste, I know the purpose of all of this is to restrain my YouTube consumption, but not to such a degree just yet.

I already knew about Invidious and other YouTube front-end alternatives, but I went for a Piped instance I was already using before. There are also things like Freetube which is a native client available for Linux (and others), but I’d never had any luck with it, since it slowed down when importing my Newpipe subscriptions and was quite buggy for me.

The Piped front-end is quite light, and it worked just fine, so I decided it was worth using instead of a client. There are also some bash scripts, rofi scripts that use mpv and such, but I didn’t feel like going that far.

Also, while writing this, I decided to check out some invidious instances and realized they are not as slow as they were months ago when I first tried it, so I might consider switching to it instead, although as I said, Piped is a lot more minimal.

What about Android?

Well, if you asked that question yesterday, I would have probably told you to go with Youtube Vanced.

But YouTube Vanced is dead. Going back to Newpipe then!, I actually prefer it over Vanced, but it has some problems on Android 12, which I use, so PiP doesn’t work as well and takes over the entire screen, disabling touch for everything under it. There is an adb command I used to fix it (I don’t remember it now):

adb shell settings put global block_untrusted_touches 0

Now I can use it just fine now again, even if its still a bit less polished than Vanced and the official app. Also, keep in mind that this command can leave you vulnerable to malware.

There is another very promising client that uses the proper PiP API and works wonderfully, named SongTube which has an awesome user interface and is a bit more suited for music (as the name implies). Sadly, it doesn’t have a way to import subscriptions, which is the reason I haven’t fully switched to it, but if you don’t mind, I recommend giving it a try.

Wrapping up

YouTube is such an incredible tool, but it had turned into quite a problem for me, with suggestions and tracking that, even though I was aware of it, I chose to bear with it because of how good it is at knowing what I want.

I might still struggle to leave it behind, I know returning to its intended experience (minus the ads, clearly) is just a few clicks away for me, I could just keep using it as is, enjoy it, spend hours on it and tell nobody, but I really want to stop that.

There are tons of Vanced users migrating to Newpipe and asking for ways to log in, leave comments and even get their recommendations tab back. I know I can’t force anyone to stop depending on the algorithm, some might have legitimate reasons. But, regardless, this is what I chose to do, and I hope it helps others who are also struggling with this. Let us be the ones in control instead of delegating our consumption habits to some soulless algorithm.

Podcasts

• Chrono Trigger Bonus Episode, by Into The Aether. This is my favorite game of all time, and a 3 and a half hours long listen to these guys talking about it was such a joy, I don’t favorite a lot of episodes on AntennaPod, but this was one of them. I listened to 4 or so other episodes.
• Avatar: Braving the Elements. A podcast reviewing every episode of this fantastic series, with Korra and Zuko’s voice actors as hosts? What an amazing idea, the episode with Jack De Sena (Sokka’s VA) has been my favorite so far. I listened to 3 or so other episodes.
• Late Night Linux. These guys don’t like to make titles for their episodes, and there was nothing too unique about each, but I listened to the weekly episodes of the month.

Manga

I read quite a lot of manga, especially the last couple weeks ot February, I just scrolled through my anilist feed, but I should be able to automatically get this if I check their API for a bit. This is what I got manually so far.

• Kingdom: Read from chapters 82 to 708 (Caught up). This is an absolute epic. I don’t know how I read so many chapters in a matter of days. The manga covers the period of China’s warring states and follows the dream of a king to unify all of China, and a slave boy who wants to become a Great General of the Heavens, it covers war and strategy in a fantastic way, must read.
• My Dress-Up Darling: I caught up to it. I wanted to watch the anime but decided to go for the manga first, its kinda wholesome and it actually shows a lot of stuff I didn’t know about the cosplayer community, I don’t really like fan-service, but at least it makes sense here.
• Vagabond: Read from chapter 162 to 165. Kingdom took over this one for me, but I still read a few chapters, its about to get interesting now that I am up to date with Kingdom.
• Chainsaw Man: Completed from the start. This is a really interesting read, it was about a dude who hunts devils and ends up becoming one after fusing with Pochita, his devil pet. The way the story went caught me off-guard, but the characters were quite good, It was an emotional roller coaster filled with great action and character moments.
• Sakamoto Days: Read from chapter 55 to 60. I only caught up to what I’ve already read, this series is super fun and action packed, and it looks like its only getting better.
• One-Punch Man: Read from chapter 1 to 79. This needs no introduction, a hero so powerful it gets bored and loses his emotions, and the adventures that happen around him, great character and art, as well as tons of action and interesting takes on superhero tropes.
• Read around 14 chapters of other things.

So, yeah I read quite a lot, but that’s what happens when I start a new hobby, at least for me.

Anime

• Ergo Proxy: Watched from episode 14 to 23 (Completed). I struggled to understand this one, it has a lot of stuff going on while at the same time explaining basically nothing, It can feel a bit pretentious but I don’t think that’s bad. Quite an interesting story, almost as confusing as Evangelion. Also Pino is wholesome.
• Kill la Kill: Watched from episode 1 to 16. While not as deep as Ergo Proxy, this show is just fun and action all the time, It can even get serious at times, so I am liking it so far, made me laugh a lot.
• Akira (1988): This movie classic was nothing like I expected, but it was great to watch, and the animation is top notch, a fantastic piece of animation history.

Music

I didn’t really listened to a lot of music this time, I tend to do so while sleeping, but lately I’ve felt like playing background raining sounds via another podcast that uploads such content (I also wanted to avoid messing up my Spotify stats).

I listened to a bunch of Halo’s soundtrack while reading Kingdom, it fit quite nicely.

For some reason ListenBrainz is down while writing this, so yeah, I also listened to some of Evangelion’s sountrack and Chrono Trigger’s too.

Movies

I rewatched Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse, because its a fantastic movie and I was trying out Jellyfin a bit.

Screen Time

I keep track of these things with ActivityWatch, although it hasn’t been updated in a while, it works just fine.

I’ll only share my phone stats because I still don’t setup my computer properly, but Alacritty and Firefox are at the top there. And I used my computer for 127 hours total, according to the tracker.

I won’t really share all of my phone stats either, because I also don’t really know how to plot them in a graph and such yet. But here are some of the numbers.

• I spent 70 hours in Newpipe (Youtube), which I kinda did not expect, but its a whole month, which I guess is understandable.
• 121 hours reading manga with Tachiyomi. Yeah, not great, but it was fun? I actually feel kinda bad, but I didn’t miss any homework or anything…
• 12 hours of Tusky, which is my Mastodon client, its less than in January, probably because I preferred to read manga.
• 4 hours of AntennaPod. I think it should be more but maybe the tracker doesn’t work with the screen off.

Overall, I spent a total of 293 hours in my phone during February. Which is probably a lot of time, but I hope I can calm down this month.

Wrapping up

I always have a hard time when getting into new hobbies, it happened with Rubik’s cubes, where I spent whole days tracking my speed, when I got into trying out PSP mods and plugins, or the first time I flashed a custom ROM for my phone. This is only normal, at least for me, I know I should try to not interrupt my life that bad, but man, Kingdom was just too good to put aside.

Not once during the previous year did I wrote something that took me more than a day to publish. There were no drafts, no evolution, I just typed what was on my mind and focused on having a decent amount of words. I did not explain things in depth, I did not use perfect grammar, I just wrote, and honestly, I will still do that to a certain degree.

However, I feel like I should add more substance to each post. Another thing I wanted to have is focusing on a certain topic during multiple blogs. Something like what Benjamin Hollon is doing with his Digital Citizenship series, right now some of my ideas would be “videgames that actually changed my life”, “hobbies I got into and why”, and revisit other ideas I wanted to expand such as game development, more android shenanigans, and things.

At the same time I would also like to create simpler posts such as Hund’s monthly links, as well as monthly reviews of my media consumption, app usage, habits and such.

I wanna do some cleanup too, right now I have tags that I assign to each post I write for this blog, but I want to get rid of a few that are kind of repetitive, I still have to think of a way to organize everything and try to find a way to automate it somewhat, since I don’t want to have to change every single post just to delete a tag. Or maybe I just leave it as it is, whatever.

Also, I have to work on a new way to finish each writing, I am not bad at concluding things, at least when it comes to school projects, but I got pretty used to just going with “This is day X of #100DaysToOffload” whenever I felt like I had nothing else to add. Speaking of which, I will not do another round this year, because ending in February feels kinda meh, I’ll just post normal blogs until next year arrives and then I’ll consider giving it another chance!

So, that’s it for the moment, I hope you read me later!

So, I am finally done with this challenge, I was planning on doing some thoughtful, introspective and long post reflecting on how the impact and life changing moments that happened due to doing this for a whole year. However, a weird feeling got inside my head, what if missed a day?, what if I counted wrong? I started to have doubts, but all I needed to do to clear them out was run a quick command on my terminal.

ls *.md | wc -l

I have 2 small posts that don’t really count at all, I just had to take 2 out whatever the command spitted out, and I would know exactly how many posts I’ve done. I run this command almost weekly, so I thought there was no reason to be worried. However, after hitting Enter, this is what I got:

102

I decided to check again, there was just now way…

I curl’d my website, I used grep on the HTML list elementes, piped into another wc -l. The response, once again, 102.

Betrayal

I finished the challenge by mistake?, but how? where did it all go wrong? There were only a few possible reasons my count was incorrect, maybe I skipped a number at one point, realized it, and “fixed” the wrong thing, or I probably just counted the same day twice.

Whatever mistake I had made, it didn’t matter, the important thing now was looking for it, but how do I even find it? I didn’t want to open all of my files and check one by hone. I decided to do a quick search with DuckDuckGo and I found that grep once again has a solution for me, by using this useful command:

grep '#100DaysToOffload' /path/to/_posts/*.md

Eureka!, I got a list of all the strings where I’ve used the hashtag before. I piped it into a file, opened it on vim and read each line carefully, there were some missing days where I did a linebreak, but nothing too hard to check. I was more than halfway through the list, but so far, there was nothing weird. It wasn’t until I got to posts made during these last couple of months that I found it.

I realized a horrible truth, which made me see the cruelty of this world in a way I didn’t want to experience. Despite 90+ posts made and dozens of comments written for a lot of my posts. Nobody actually reads them, I have been betrayed, how can you guys let me down? How did you let me say “This is day 95 of” two times straight??? if it wasn’t because you guys didn’t even notice.

Seriously, I know I don’t write for anyone but myself, but I thought I had a small yet loyal audience, who is quick to point out grammar mistakes and typos. But when it comes to the reason I started this in the first place, none of you notice at all, maybe there was no point to this at all.

I am done…

With the joke!

Don’t worry guys, its not a big deal, if anything, I am annoyed at myself for not noticing, but it also makes for a great final post that makes me stand out a little bit from the competition who only share testimonials of their experiences and such, how boring… (I am joking too!!!).

I was done, and I didn’t even notice it. But you know what? Isn’t that the point of this anyway?, to get to a state where you don’t write out of pressure or because you are commited to it, but because its part of life, as natural as breathing.

Writing a post a week, per month, who cares?, as long as I do it because I feel like it, I could keep going, after all, this is just getting started, it’s my year one, of possibly many, up to how long I get to live I guess. Thank you all so much for this guys.

Well… This is it then. Let’s say it one last time, shall we?

This has been day 101 of #100DaysToOffload. Thanks for reading.

I have a huge respect for Lewis, and I didn’t even know he actually had such material available. Turns out, he was part of quite a few radio shows where he shared his thoughts on multiple topics, so I’ll probably listen to some of them soon, the channel already has a huge compilation for me to watch.

The video is great, I don’t really feel capable of explaining his ideas here, so I recommend you to watch it for yourself. Despite being recorded in 1958, I do believe it holds up quite well for today’s standards, and the video quality is also top notch, the drawings are a perfect complement for what’s being said.

Friendships online are quite different from real life, I wonder how many people I’ve talked to due to this blog or just in other communities that I am a part of I could consider a friend. I, as well as many others, feel pressured to call someone a friend simply because you don’t dislike someone, or enjoy talking with them. But just because you have some ideas in common and are willing to trust someone in someway it doesn’t really mean that you are friends, but simply a companion or part of a group.

I had “friends” in a lot of communities before, be it playing Monster Hunter online for hours, playing Clash of Clans and doing wars together, studying with classmates after school was over, participating in speedcubing competitions with fellow… speedcubers, the list can go on. But I can’t really go ahead and start a chat right now with any of those people. At least not without discomfort. And even if I did, the conversation would probably die out pretty quickly. Maybe its due to me being introverted, but I believe its only natural.

We might have shared an interest (or many) for a while, but I never took the time to know the personality of anyone, and neither did them. We didn’t actually share a friendship, but were simply enjoying a moment in time were our interests aligned or our goals were similar, even needing each other to accomplish them or to enjoy the journey even further.

Of course, friendships don’t need to last a lifetime, they are so volatile, they don’t really need a commitment, there is not real jealousy either (when compared to Eros (sexual love) or Storge (family bonds), and yet, there is affection. True friendships have become so misunderstood today that I think its fair to say most of us can count true friends with a single hand.

Its such a weird thing. If you were to ask me who is my best friend, I truly don’t know who would I name, or how many, if there are any. Its not about knowing everything about a person, no need to know their family or job, but well, I don’t know, I guess its about getting to know their personality, their soul. Be able to stay by their side, not because of commitment or convenience, but because you care for them.

During the time I’ve been part of the Linux and FOSS community, I have had the pleasure of knowing new people and even starting some meaningful conversations with a few of them, but I wonder if I’ll really be able to keep in touch with them for 5 years. I sure wish to maybe be friends with some people in here, after all Proverbs 18:24 says:

There are “friends” who destroy each other, but a real friend sticks closer than a brother.

I wonder if its possible to stick so close to someone purely based on online interactions, its already hard doing it in real life. I guess I should ask who is my friend in a Facebook post or something…

Anyways, too much introspection for today. This has been day 99 of #100DaysToOffload, watch the video! It’s really worth it.

I’ve thought about how cool it is to be able to pick a week, or a date and be able to know what you did in that day. I haven’t really had the time to do journaling or anything like that, but I guess this blog has kind of become that for me, although I don’t really follow any method and go by whatever I feel like writing, which I guess is yet another way of journaling.

I didn’t even know a lot of the software and tools that Edel used to track all of that stuff. So I guess I will take a look at them sometime soon, since I don’t really have such granular control over the things I currently do.

Some programs I use have decent usage statistics though. Like AntennaPod, but it still lacks daily, monthly or yearly metrics, it only keeps track of the time I’ve spent listening to each podcast I follow.

Tachiyomi also tracks my progress reading manga, and the database it keeps is pretty nice, I use Anilist to keep track of both manga and anime in the same place. I also use Backloggd to track the videogames I’ve played, as well as Letterboxd for movies I watch.

I have decided to use ActivityWatch too, I installed my app on my phone, which is sadly not dark themed, as well as the Linux client. I might put some work into the CSS or just wait for the devs to work on it, maybe its already in some setting and I’m just missing it.

Anyways, I didn’t really have that much to say today. I like the idea of keeping track of things, I hope I get some use out of the data I’m collecting, maybe I will try to make it appear in my website somehow for anyone to see using some API or something.

Another thing that kinda made me think of this is the time I’ve invested into manga reading. The one I am reading like crazy since I finished Solo Leveling is Kingdom, the story is so good and its starting to take away my time from other things, I love the battles and action, its a lot easier to follow and feels much more realistic, despite a few fantasy elements here and there.

I just realized I spent 5 hours reading it today, 6 yesterday, despite having classes today, I got quite distracted this time, which is bad, because I don’t want to end up doing “just enough” to pass, since I know I can do a lot better. I’ll probably read some more before going to sleep, but I have to restrain myself since school is starting to get serious again.

Anyways, this is day 98 of #100DaysToOffload, right on time.

The first manga I read was Attack on Titan, since I had already watched the anime, but I kinda don’t want to count it just because I skipped a bunch of stuff and went to reread episodes I liked, as well as read ahead in some of the things that would come with the now released 4th season. So I decided to make a quick list of the ones I got started with.

Sakamoto Days

The first proper manga I started was Sakamoto Days, because of a recommendation from some YouTube video, and I have to say, I really like it, its pretty fun, the characters are nice and the story is about the best assassin who retired when he found love, only for his pet, a gift from his dying wife, to be kil…

Wait, I got confused, Sakamoto’s family is fine (for now?), but he ends up getting involved again due to reasons, however, he promised his wife to never kill again, which leads to some fun and action packed scenarios with pretty cool scenes. I like it and its still going, there are not that many chapters yet, so you can catch up in no time!

Komi Can’t Communicate

The second manga I started is Komi Can’t Communicate (sorry, I am still not involved in this hobby enough to know how to type the Japanese names) and I got immediately hooked. The anime came out recently and I decided to read the manga first because why not. Its a show about Komi, a beautiful girl who struggles to communicate and make friends, but due to her beauty and behavior, gains an Ice Queen kind of reputation where nobody feels worthy of speaking to her anyways. Tadano is your average guy who somehow manages to actually read her and decided to help her make friends and communicate better with others.

The story is super cute, situations are fun and adorable and each character is a lot more than the typical high school stereotypes (or so I’ve heard, since I’ve not read any other lol). Overall I read its 300+ chapters in like 2 days and its still releasing, which is fun.

Solo Leveling

This is not a manga, but a manhwa, which means its done in South Korea and its also fully colored, more like a webtoon, you don’t read from right to left, but scroll infinitely. This makes it faster and more comfortable to read on a mobile format.

This one I loved and I can say its the first manga I’ve finished, since its no longer releasing new chapters!

The story happens in a world where some gates opened and gave powers to some people, which are called “Hunters”, each has its own rank all the way up to S tier. Those gates also are a path to dungeons, which are also ranked. There they have to fight monsters of all kinds and gather resources, since if they don’t, the beasts will come outside their dimension and invade the world.

Some E rank guy with a lot of courage gets involved in a dungeon of a higher rank than they expected, and after showing his worth, gains the ability to level up and gain access to a game-like interface only he can access. Thanks to this, he manages to make his way up to the top and try his best to save the World and uncover the truth of what’s even happening.

Awesome art, a pretty cool story, if a bit random at times, nice characters and progression, I liked it a lot.

Some more soon

I will probably mention some more mangas I’ve been reading or thinking about starting, but I have to be done for today since, well I want to keep reading some more. I am pretty hooked on Kingdom right now, so maybe later.

This has been day 96 of #100DaysToOffload

The script comes as a request by Ru, or at least this is what I hope she meant when she posted:

Static site users who embed images frequently – what’s your workflow for it? #AskFedi

Well, my previous workflow was simple enough:

1. Take pictures.
2. Move to assets folder.
3. Rename them to something like date−filename_without_spaces.png.
4. Add markdown syntax and type the whole thing.
5. Cry because you messed up the directory path.

So I went ahead and decided to work on a little script I named aijk (Add image to Jekyll), using bash and rofi, tools that I’ve used before with decent success. I am actually really happy of how it turned out.

The script

#!/bin/bash

### AIJK (Add image to Jekyll)
### By joelchrono12

pic=$1
name=$(rofi -l 0 -width 50 -p "Title" -dmenu)
filen=$(echo $name | tr " ,.!" "-"| awk '{print tolower($0)}')
today=$(date +"%Y-%m-%d")
filename=($today-$filen)
path=/path/to/website #without / at the end
imgs=/from/site_root/to/assets/ #example = /assets/img/blogs/
last_post=$(/usr/bin/ls /path/to/markdown/files/*.md | sort -r | head -n 1)

convert $1 -quality 75 ${path}${imgs}${filename}.png

printf "
![${name}](${imgs}${filename}.png)" >> $last_post

How to use

Once added to your $PATH and making it executable, all you need is to change the required paths in the script, I think most of you will be able to figure it out on your own, but reach me out if you need help.

You can run it just by doing this:

aijk file.png

This is how it works:

• Obtain picture file from argument.
• Add a Title to file via a rofi input.
• Create filename for file itself.
• Set paths to different required things (depends on your site).
• Get the latest markdown files from your site.
• Make changes to picture so its smaller or whatever (can be customized, requires ImageMagick).
• Print formatted markdown line to bottom of the latest markdown file.

Adding a Graphical option for mouse users

You can run this script with absolute ease from your terminal, if that’s what you want, but I also figured out a way to do it from a GUI if you are using Thunar as a file manager (might be possible with others, haven’t checked).

1. Open Thunar > Edit > Configure custom actions.
2. Add a new entry for aijk and save it.
3. Set the appearance conditions to images only.
4. Right click on any image to try it out!

Final thoughts

I am not completely happy with how this works. But this is usable and easy to expand, there could be a way to select the destination file instead of just getting the latest one. But I don’t normally add new images to old posts anyways, so I figured most people would be ok with how this works right now.

The script also assumes you want to start all your files with the date, and that your markdown files also start with the dates, since sort will fail to place the line in the latest file, if such file is not the first in its output.

There is also no way to do this with multiple files as of now, I might be able to come up with something, I could just create another script that makes use of this one to make multiple additions at once.

Anyways, this is what I’ll do now to add images, I will simply right click, click again and give them a name!. Or do it properly in the terminal, whatever fits me best.

This has been day 95 of #100DaysToOffload. Make sure to check out Ru’s website, since she single-handedly managed to inspire me to work on this quick script.

Because of this, I decided to just stay in XFCE, the Mint edition I got, for a while, until I figured something out. I could build spectrwm from source, but there is no official guide and, while I think its probably super easy, I figured that if I was going to build a WM from source, it would be dwm.

While I don’t really dislike XFCE, I really wanted to go back to tiling, some things just didn’t work as I wanted them to, and some programs didn’t like to stay where I put them, or couldn’t be resized as easily, and XFCE just lets them be, even if I just want them to be smaller or something. During some free time I got, I decided it was finally time to set dwm up once and for all.

I have switched to dwm in the past, in fact I’ve even made a post about the setup I used back then, but I never wrote something for this blog about it. I guess it was about time.

My patch selection

The patches I’ve decided to use are quite pretty similar to what I would get with spectrwm default keybindings with a few additions. I think its a pretty simple and minimal set.

• attachbottom: This is a really simple patch that I really, really like, I discovered thanks to HexDSL, and I prefer it a lot from the default, since windows appear at the bottom of the stack and don’t move around the rest. Its pretty comfy and easy to apply.
• functionalgapps+pertag: I like this patch because it basically applies two in one. This makes it so each tag (or workspace) can have different modes, like, if you have a tag floating, you can have others in master and stack, or another tag maximized. Of course, I also really like gaps, even if they can be a bit useless sometimes, but I can resize them in real time and stuff like that, it makes my brain feel happy.
• movestack: This is a basic function that should be there by default, changing the position of a window in a stack is something I consider fairly important. Dwm only allows moving something from the stack to the master position, and a lot of people can only live with that, so you might now actually need this, but I do.
• alwayscenter: This makes it so if you have something configured as floating in the config file, it will be centered each time you open it. It does not center stuff you make float manually tho, which fits my needs
• movecenter: This lets me use a keybinding to center whatever window I have floating around, its pretty useful and complements the previous patch nicely.
• shift-tools: Another useful patch that lets me move around tags with something other than MODKEY+number, for example, drag a window an switch tags alongside it, and other nice features. This is a must for me, might as well be the most important patch, I guess I could live without the rest somehow, but I am just too used to this one, which is available in most tiling window managers by default.
• autostart: I decided to have an autostart patch due to some problems I had while using .xinitrc and some programs failing to run properly, but this patch lets me have more control and be completely sure that whatever I want to run will do just do it.

Notes

There is still one patch I have not added, but I used in my previous configuration, and that is status2d, because it lets me use custom colors, which is what I wanted to have in spectrwm in the first place, but I didn’t feel like adding it right now, since I am happy with my current bar.

I also was a bit interested in swallow, but I don’t really need it, I am used to other methods already and the situation where it could be useful isn’t really that common for me.

My bar

There are many ways to customize the bar, from xsetroot, to dwmblocks or slstatus, all of them are pretty good ways to make use of it. However, I went ahead and used aslstatus, which is basically the same as suckless’ original tool, but asynchronous, I can make my volume update in real time, while the weather info is only updated every 30 minutes or so. Its pretty good and I really like it, and it works with status2d and colors, whenever I get the time to set it up properly.

It’s what I used in the mastodon post I shared above, so it works great. Its also the reason I went with an autostart patch, since running it from .xinitrc was not reliable.

Finishing up

There isn’t really a lot else to say, I guess I could share the current config in my git repository. I will probably do it soon enough, there are still some things I want to change but I am pretty happy with how it looks now. I like the simplicity I went for. Sadly, LabVIEW, the program I installed yesterday, hates being told where to stay, so I’ll have to stick with XFCE during those classes.

You can see my configuration file for dwm here, but its nothing too special. My bar is also just using the defaults, and this is at the bottom:

static struct arg_t args[] = {

/* function     format      argument    interval (in ms) */

{ netspeed_rx,  "  %sB/s",     IFC,        2 _SEC, END },
{ netspeed_tx,  " -  %sB/s |", IFC,        2 _SEC, END },
{ disk_free,    " %s |",        "/",        25 _SEC,END },
{ cpu_perc,     "  %3s%% |",   NULL,       1 _SEC, END },
{ vol_perc,     " %s |",        NULL,       0,      END },
{ wifi_perc,    " 直 %3s%% |",   IFC,        2 _SEC, END },
{ battery_perc, "   %3s%% |",  "BAT0",     1 _MIN, END },
{ datetime,     "  %s ",       "%H:%M:%S", 1 _SEC, END },

};

This has been day 95 of #100DaysToOffload

From there to nowadays, a lot of things have changed, I don’t care about features as much as I care about the freedoms that software and services allow me to have over the code, as well as my own data.

When it comes to messaging, there are now a lot more options that can be compelling even for users who don’t particularly care about their privacy (even though they should), since they also provide with most of the features that popular app which don’t respect our freedoms offer.

Telegram

Telegram was the first messaging app I tried that wasn’t Whatsapp, and I really liked how it worked, when I started using it I didn’t really know how important encryption is, I just assumed that the people behind it wouldn’t lie, and since the YouTube channel recommended it, then it must be good.

Of course, there are a lot of opinions regarding how Telegram doesn’t use E2EE by default, and how they have access to all of your messages, but I still give it some benefit of the doubt since I still have to see a news article mentioning a data breach of their servers or anything like it.

The truth is that the features it offers are simply great, I personally now only use it for chat groups (which shouldn’t be considered private anyways), channels and for quick file sharing to myself or family who have it installed.

I don’t know why nobody has tried to fork Telegram’s UI and apply a different protocol or backend to it, it shouldn’t be that hard, right?

Signal

I really like Signal in principle, but I am not a fan of their crypto business. I just can’t get anyone to install it, and that’s probably my fault due to the time I already spent trying to convince my friends and family to switch to Telegram back when I still was trying to use it for personal messaging.

This app really needs usernames, because there is no other reason to use it otherwise, at least in my case. The moment they do, I honestly have no problem ditching Telegram (for personal messaging) and probably sticking to a fork client that doesn’t include any of the crypto nonsense.

Matrix

Matrix is growing more and more, it is actually a protocol that can be used by any software working as a client. I really like it, but the apps that use it are not of my liking, Element, which is the recommended client, is simply too slow and unresponsive for me, and it tries too hard to look and feel like Discord.

The ability to host your own matrix server is awesome, but it comes with some problems too, since you are not only relying in your own server, but also in the server that hosts your friend or family. For all you know they haven’t even enabled HTTPS or something dumb like that. But if they are not self-hosting, then they are probably using matrix.org, just like 99.9% of matrix users, which means that decentralization isn’t really a thing, and there is a lot of metadata that can still be obtained from it.

A lot of its sponsors are also into crypto stuff, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the project starts becoming even more bloated than it already is.

XMPP

I know a lot of people don’t even know this, even among the couple of readers I have, but somehow XMPP is the place where I have had some of the best conversations with people from the Internet. Telegram has always been for groups, I don’t give my phone number so Signal isn’t for Internet people, and Matrix is also mostly for communities. XMPP is really simple and works both with PGP and OMEMO based encryption, there are quite a lot of good clients to choose from, and has great multi-platform support. The only thing about it is that it can be a bit too simple if you want stickers and such, and the protocol is quite old, so the codebase is probably quite patched up.

Nevertheless, if you don’t wanna use PGP encrypted email, I would say this is the best way to chat with me privately, unless…

Briar

This morning I felt quite inspired to try out Briar, a peer to peer communication platform that also works over the Tor network when it needs to. The way it works seems to be incredibly secure, and its also not as invested into the crypto world like Signal and Session, another app which is quite similar and I’ll talk about later.

I decided to do a quick post in Mastodon and invite some people to chat a bit via Briar, and I have to admit, the experiment went a lot better than I thought. I think its fairly clear that this app is the most secure and private one of the bunch, there is nothing stored in any server, simply your device and your friend’s. Of course this comes with some caveats, but at least for most conversations, it is pretty good.

The app is also in continuous development, so a lot of features are going to be implemented in the future.

It has some problems, but they are mostly quality of life improvements and some details that make the user experience a bit clunky, but its a lot better than last time I used it, quite a while ago.

They recently launched a Linux client, which is super alpha software as of now, since it doesn’t support anything but one to one messages, but its a good start!

Some interesting features are Private Groups, where only you can add people, Forums, which are basically private groups where other people can also invite people, and Blogs, which are public posts for everyone to see. You can even add RSS feeds for you to read, and you can “Reblog” them, so your contacts can have access to it, without making any connections to the original website!

I really, really like this app, I will try to use it more often, make sure to reach me out if you want my contact link, or I might post it publicly later in my contact page.

Session

I kinda didn’t feel like talking about Session, mostly because I felt it was less reliable than Briar and they seem to be as involved with crypto currencies as Signal, if not more. The development is also mainly done is Australia, which is not the place you want your private services to come from. Of course, this is all personal opinion, they still work over Tor and the code is still there for everyone to check, I just don’t feel as comfortable recommending this service compared to previous mentions for one reason or another.

Of course, I am not against it, I can still use it just fine and I would love it if you can help me find out why its not as bad as I believe by leaving a reply or sending me an email. I am open to discussion and changing my opinion if that’s the case.

Wrapping up

Se yeah, I feel like this was it, as you can see this is not the biggest dive into what makes each of these apps special, I didn’t mention stuff like Threema, Tox or Jami because I don’t actually use any of them in any degree, and I have had at least some experience with the services I actually talked about.

I guess this was it for today! This is post 93/100 for #100DaysToOffload

Right now I am writing this while following this comment because it seems relatively up-to-date. I am installing the latest community edition for LabVIEW, which is from 2021.

I am literally following the list of commands he explains, so I won’t really add too much, unless I fail, quite a lot of deb files have been generated already, I just have to see if they work once the generation process finishes for all of them.

Having to use these programs pains me, I wish formats like AppImage were used to deal with this nonsense of proprietary software that have bad support, even for Ubuntu. At least MATLAB is relatively sensible and easy to install.

The comment makes use of alien and dpkg, it’s not super hard to follow, if a little repetitive for a bunch of things.

The deb files have been generated, so I proceed to just install them with dpkg. Let’s hope it works.

[…]

Well, it didn’t work, a few of those packages were kinda broken, so I will probably try and install the version used in the tutorials instead and see if I have any luck that way, the teacher is probably using an old version too anyway.

[…]

Ok, my bad, some deb files failed to install, but it looks like the program runs just fine, I just had to edit the desktop file to point to the labviewprofull binary, and somehow I don’t need to authenticate or anything, it just worked. So here is exactly what I think I did, maybe you don’t need to do half of them, but at least what I did made the program open just fine.

• Follow the steps from the already mentioned comment.
  • Instead of installing the deb files one by one, I just used dpkg -i *.deb because why not.
• Set up your default root browser to Midori because Chromium and Firefox don’t like to run as root
• Add a symlink to your PATH that points to /usr/local/natinst/LabVIEW-2021-64/labviewcommunity
• Run from terminal using sudo
• Authenticate, in my case it got stuck loading, but I closed the browser and the program worked…
• Tried again without sudo, didn’t work.
• Tried using labviewprofull binary instead of community.
• Replace the Exec line in LabVIEW’s desktop file with the path to labviewprofull
• Replace the symlink too
• Run LabVIEW and it should be done.

This is an absolute mess, how am I even running the full version anyway without any license? Or maybe it picked up the community license despite the community version refusing to work without sudo?

I have no idea of what I did, but it worked so far. This is an absolute mess, how am I even running the full version anyway without any license? Or possibly it picked up the community license despite the community version refusing to work without sudo?

[…]

So the interface sucks, it looks like Windows 95, it already looked like that in Windows itself though, but I had to change the font size since it was set to 10px, which is not readable at all.

Also, the program barely works in tiling window managers, I will probably stick to using it in floating mode the whole time, whatever.

In the end, I guess it’s installed now, it completely messed up the folders and I don’t even know how to uninstall it once the time comes, but I guess I’ll be ready for that.

This has been day 94 of #100DaysToOffload

The apps

Among the important apps I use, which will not be mentioned here, are AntennaPod and K-9 Mail, since I’ve talked about them previously. Here are some others that I’ve been using for quite a while already, but haven’t got the time, nor idea of adding them to my Uses section. But they’ll probably be included in the future, since I do use them quite a bit.

Readrops

This is the most decent RSS reader app there is for FreshRSS and Nextcloud News, I really like how simple it is, it can sync pretty quickly and it has become the main way I consume news and articles in my phone, since I no longer use a local RSS app like Feeder. The only problem I have with it is the lack of customization and theming, especially because the color of hyperlinks is a little bit too dark, and it can be hard to read when using the dark theme. I hope it gets better integration with Android 12’s theming features, but its pretty decent nonetheless. I believe its the best FOSS client with FreshRSS support for Android. FeedMe its a nice alternative if you want something with more features, but its proprietary software. I still found Readrops more reliable and faster to load.

Tachiyomi

Without a doubt, the best app for reading manga. This is a great project that works amazingly and stays afloat thanks to the use or 3rd party extensions separate from the main app. Its super fast, can be synced with a ton of 3rd party services like MyAnimeList or Anilist to keep track of what you’ve read, comes with a lot of reading modes, offline capabilities and a pretty great interface. I don’t really come here to talk about the morality of apps like this, but it exists, its FOSS and it works. I personally use a fork of it, since there are quite a lot to choose from, so you can go ahead and pick your poison.

Migrate

I have talked about this app before, every time I switch rom, this is my go-to backup strategy, the app requires root access to create a zip file containing all of your selected apps, along with their data and permissions. Once you are done flashing your rom and getting root access with Magisk, you can also flash the zip file generated by Migrate, and after a a reboot, a notification shows up and you can restore all your apps in a matter of minutes. Sometimes a few apps get installed but fail to launch, but the success rate is great, and the app recently went open source! So if you didn’t trust it before, you can now check how it works and maybe give it a try next time.

Solid Explorer

This is the most important proprietary app I use, I just can’t find a replacement for it, its either too good or I just can’t get used to the interface or lack of features present in other FOSS alternatives, Solid has it everything, and I can’t live without its sorting options, the ability to show the size of folders, multiple connections to services like Nextcloud or FTP servers, working as an FTP server itself. I am really happy with it.

It is among the first apps I’ve bought with my own money, back when I had Google on my phone, and Migrate has been doing a great job keeping the license check working since then, a couple roms later.

Tailscale

This service got mentioned a few posts ago when I talked about using DietPi and other self-hosting services, it really deserves its own blog, but its really not that complicated to use, and there is nothing that special with the app itself, it doesn’t even have a dark mode.

Being able to have my own virtual network of devices that can talk and communicate with each other without any struggle at all is truly fantastic, its fast, reliable and works flawlessly. I don’t have to open my ports or do any complicated setup, I just install the client in whatever device I got, authenticate it and I am ready to go, I have my Nextcloud, Jellyfin and FreshRSS whenever I go, as long as my Raspberry Pi doesn’t die on me.

Wrapping up

As always, there are a lot of other apps and services I did not mention such as Syncthing, DAVx5, Infinity for Reddit or SimpleLogin, I just wanted to highlight the ones I did because I think they are great and I use them daily. I also just wanted to talk about something quickly, but I ended up taking quite a while to write this.

Regardless, it is done, this has been day 92 of #100DaysToOffload

I am not really sure if it was just the ROM itself, the recovery I used or maybe I have been doing it wrong all this time, but this time I did not have any bootloops, no need to reboot multiple times, no failures while installing Magisk or graphical glitches and overall bugs. Everything simply worked out.

Yes, I did a couple of reboots because that’s what needs to be done when installing Magisk and restoring Migrate backups, but I did not got stuck watching a logo spin or having apps crashing as soon as I opened them. Maybe its just that my phone is already at such a mature state where roms simply don’t break as easily, or maybe its jut a result of my experience where I didn’t immediately got out of my way to get the first Android 12 rom that came out, but regardless, installing this was a breeze, I did not lost any data, a flawless transition from my previous ROM.

I took quite a lot of measures this time, since I was fairly afraid of doing the jump, it always happens when a few months go by and I stick to the same rom for too long.

I copied my Downloads, Pictures, Podcasts, DCIM and other common folders that contained information I deem worthy of salvation, I did backups of app data, I even did a full backup from my recovery (which is Orange Fox in case you are interested).

But everything was not needed at all. Of course that does not mean I won’t do all of this procedure again next time, since you never know what could happen!

Anyways, everything’s fine, I am having fun, and Android 12 looks nice! So lets go over some of the things about the software itself.

The rom I am using is MSM Extended, it has quite a lot of features. Android 12 has some smooth animations, the theming works great, notifications are a bit bloated but they work, its fine overall.

When it comes to Android privacy and roms, I always see everyone recommending Lineage, but I find it incredibly weird that basically nothing else gets mentioned other than Pixel exclusive roms. Besides, privacy is not the only reason there is to switch roms, if you want features, customization, better defaults and the best Android has to offer, there are a lot of options to use, such as Resurrection Remix, Paranoid, Pixel Experience, Dot OS. The list keeps going.

Privacy and security are important, but they are not Android’s strongest field, at all, so just enjoy the life with the faster, cleaner and most customizable experience smartphones can have. Or well, that’s what I think of this.

This has been day 91 of #100DaysToOffload

Now I want to be honest here, after investigating a little more, due to some information that Kev let me know in the previous blog’s mastodon post, it looks like free *.ml domains can be renewed for free, they will just send me an email two weeks before the expiration date, and I should be able to keep using the domain that way basically forever.

However, the domain itself is not really mine, its just that they let me use it. So I have quite a lot of things I could do, and I still don’t know which path to follow.

I will probably pay to keep this domain properly for myself. I already have a bit of history with it, so, for the sake of keeping it alive, I will own it properly and pay for it, which comes with some more advantages than just renewing it for free each year.

Now, with the amount of money I got I can keep paying for it a few years, but I also plan on getting some other domains for myself, be it for projects I wanna build, maybe a Spanish only website, or a more professional website to show during job interviews, who knows.

I think I can even get a cheap VPS for a couple of years, which would actually be pretty cool, something I never thought I could afford by myself during these times.

Thank you all guys, seriously. Knowing that my website will probably be up for decades fills me with quite a lot of joy, my own little corner in the internet, alive and well for years to come.

Also, while writing this, I realized that there are some old snapshots of the begginings of my website, stored in the Internet Archive, so in case you want to see how it started, the oldest backup is from less than one month after I got started, feel free to take a look!.

I have done blogs before, but nothing like this, I hope this remains for the next decades, I am still young, to think I will be able to see how this evolves over time, it will be simply awesome, I can’t thank you enough for what you all inspired me to do, and all that has happened since I joined Fosstodon, this challenge, and the FOSS movement in general.

This almost feels like the end of the challenge, but it is not, there are still 10 more days to go!

This has been day 90 of the #100DaysToOffload challenge. Thank you for reading, and thank you for helping me out.

I am not really sure of how will I handle the transition yet, so if you have some suggestions about that, please feel free to email me or contact me in any way you like.

I feel like I should archive my stuff, but it will still be online, just under a different url, so I am not completely sure of what to do yet. I will probably add the new URLs as a comment in my previous mastodon toots, just in case people come across those old posts and want to leave a comment there. I assume most people just view my blog and not old posts in my mastodon account, so maybe I don’t really have to do that.

Regardless, the point is, if you are following my RSS feed or something, please make sure your change the url to https://joelchrono12.netlify.app so it does not fail to fetch new articles once the time comes.

At least my mirror at my tilde community will be fine :P

This has been day 89 of #100DaysToOffload, thanks for reading.

No big deal, I decided to just download the tarball provided in their website, and simply use that. It worked fine, but when I tried to add my existing profile folder, the program just crashed, and I was unable to restore my settings, my gpg keys, filters, calendars and so on.

This is what ultimately made me go and try out Neomutt, and I have been using it ever since.

My last post I talked about a terminal application known as khal, and how to integrate it with my Nextcloud server via CalDAV. So i just wanted to say what I’ve done for contacts for neomutt, as well as my android device.

I went ahead and tried khard, a tool that works similarly to khal, integrating with vdirsyncer to keep my contacts synced with Nextcloud, the setup is pretty similar to what I did for my calendars, and you can read their documentation to check out how to do it. Adding a cronjob to automate these updates and checks was no big deal.

I also integrated it with Mutt, so now when filling up the To: in an email I can just hit and get some suggestions, as well as adding a contact email quickly.

When it comes to android, I think I’ve already mentioned it in other posts, but it doesn’t matter, DAVx5 is a fantastic app that allows me to add a DAV account and sync everything, it integrates wonderfully with the contacts and calendar apps I use, it just works.

If you have the Nextcloud app installed, you can also auto-connect to DAVx5 in the settings, so its not even that complicated to setup, just do it once, and forget about it.

So, both vdirsynced and DAVx5 are amazing applications that allow me to easily access my contacts and events in a pretty easy way.

The UNIX philosophy is pretty interesting. Programs and tools dedicated to one thing, able to simply be connected to each other and delegate tasks to whatever does the job best.

I am particularly amazed at how my contacts and calendars are now simply a set of files and folders in my Linux system, that can be integrated with these simple programs without too much trouble. I am really happy with how it works, no longer will I deal with random broken profiles and settings, hopefully. And its pretty easy to backup too!

This has been day 88 of #100DaysToOffload

From there, I went ahead and checked out some posts and blogs written by them in my RSS reader, and I stumbled upon and article by Hyde (aka Lazybear) titled Calendars and Terminal, which really got my attention. It talks about khal and vdirsyncer, a couple of tools that can be used to access my calendars from any CalDAV server, such as my Nextcloud instance, right from my terminal.

I ended up trying it out, and it wasn’t half bad! I basically just followed his tutorial, but I also found a similar post by Hund which shows also how to manage and sync contacts with the same tool.

I haven’t really done the contacts syncing yet, but I might as well try and set it up soon.

I don’t really want this blog to turn into yet another tutorial, so please, if you want to try this out check the couple of links I shared here.

A cool thing that vdirsync has is support for pass, or any other command to get your password without just storing it in plain text, so that’s pretty cool, you can check my rather simple config in my dotfiles

Now I have added my school schedule, since I just started a new semester, and my time is not as much as before. So, this has been day 86 of #100DaysToOffload

There are many clones of it, but they are only profiting off the original game. There is only one word per day, the game is not supposed to be played all day long. So, this is how it works

You can guess 6 real words (You can’t input pure vocals or random letters). The game helps you by showing you if a letter is not in the word (dark grey), if a letter if in the word, but in a different spot (yellow) and if the letter is in the word in the correct spot (green).

The game will generate a simple message containing a set of colored squared emojis, which serve as diagram of words you guessed.

I kinda really enjoy this game, it only takes a few minutes of your day, you can not play it endlessly (or at least, you are not supposed to) and its a nice exercise for the mind, I guess.

I don’t really speak a lot of English in real life, so it even helps me learn a couple of words, which is a nice plus in my opinion.

For today’s wordle, for example, I ended up learning a whole new word since I did not manage to finish it, assuming it was a word I already knew.

The better way to play Wordle is in your mobile device, most browsers, or at least Firefox and Chromium forks will be able to add it to your home screen by going to their 3 dot menu and tapping on either Install or Add to Home Screen, doing this will add an icon to your home screen, and opening it will show the pure website without the browser interface, which is a great plus to make it feel native.

This was today’s wordle for me, I did not manage to complete it this time, but it was quite close!

Wordle 212 X/6

⬛🟨🟨⬛⬛
🟨🟨⬛⬛🟨
🟨⬛🟨🟨⬛
⬛⬛🟨🟨🟩
🟩⬛🟨⬛🟩
🟩⬛🟩🟩🟩

This has been day 86 of #100DaysToOffload, getting closer and closer to the end of this.

First I tried to check the graphics driver settings, the desktop has a low end NVIDIA quadro card, so I assumed it could be having issues of some sort. I looked up some useful information and ideas in a few forums, but nothing seemed to be solving the issue, however, sometimes the screen would just not work even when left alone, and others, it would be fine despite heavy use. I was struggling to find some pattern that could give me any other hints at what was causing the issue.

Then I decided to change the plug. The graphics card uses mini Display Port, which is not really that great of a port, so I finally figured it might as well be the root of the issue.

And voila, the problem was solved, I was just about to try and put something like Solus OS in there, but the problem was not even that.

And I don’t really know why I did not figure it out earlier. The screen didn’t even showed up the monitor logo at boot or anything else, it was just barely keeping itself on.

So, today I learned that you should not jump to conclusions when you have not even tried the simplest solution there is to a problem.

This has been day 85 of #100DaysToOffload

I did not even respond there, I just thought to myself “Huh, cool” and life moved on until the day (today) finally came.

One of my sisters studies outside our city, she usually comes on the weekends, but she sadly let us know she wouldn’t be able to make it, so that left my parents, my little sister and me.

Before going shopping we decided to stop by a mall and eat some food. My sister got a burger, so did my father, but me and mom got Chinese food, I like Chinese food.

After we were done filling up our stomachs, we went ahead to an outlet that sells shoes at a pretty good price, the place is huge, basically a giant shopping mall in León, Guanajuato that only has shoes everywhere.

León in general is a great place to get leather and shoes, in case any of you netizens are ever interested on visiting Mexico, highly recommended.

We walked for a few minutes and entered a Charly footwear store, I went ahead and picked up some gray tennis shoes with some green lines, nothing too fancy, but pretty cool. My dad also chose another pair, this time they were just black.

My little sister was supposed to pick up some white shoes, required for school, but ended up unable to pick something.

Her and my mom went to another store, me and my dad waited outside for quite a while. When they were “ready”, mom sent us their location.

By the time we got there my sister didn’t felt like buying those shoes anymore. We all walked for another while, but after 2 hours there, she did not get anything, and we had to return home.

So, this was supposed to be short, but I guess I had a bit more to say than expected. This has been day 84 of #100DaysToOffload. Thanks for reading!

Because of that, I got access to some nice things, like a website, a gemini capsule and an email address, which is kind of nice. I have been using that site as a place to mirror this very same website in case anything happens. Like losing my current domain or anything like that.

Blop is a pretty nice static site generator that is basically just a bash script that uses other programs such as sed, awk and pandoc to put together a simple site generated from markdown files and simple templates.

However, it had a pretty serious issue, at least for me. The generated html files ended with *.html instead of being a clean url like here in Jekyll.

So I forked the project, put some work into it and I actually managed to do it!

I am not that great of a bash coder, and it was not really a matter of bash but of knowing where to look and using / to search for the right things in Vim.

In the end I now have clean URLs in my alternative site, which is kind of great.

You can take a look at my fork, which is not really that different from the original in my tildegit repository.

This has been day 83 of #100DaysToOffload

Funnily enough, I never got to talk about Thunderbird, but I have recommended it multiple times and you might have seen an email reply of mine, with my signature saying “Sent from Thunderbird” if you ever sent me an email.

I have tried some other terminal clients such as pure mutt, alpine and aerc, but I was not really convinced about any of them.

Regardless, I have decided to test Neomutt once and for all, and in order to make that as easy as possible for myself, I installed mutt-wizard, a program created by Luke Smith that helps you do it, with a nice default config, keybindings, password management with pass (which I already use) and I gotta admit, its pretty good! But I have some points I would like to explain, as well as the changes I had to do to deal with some things.

Encryption problems

Passwords are stored with pass, that’s not a problem for most people, but I am a bit finicky, mw, which is the program you call via the terminal, creates a new pass gpg entry, so I have duplicated things, and yeah I guess I don’t like that. Thankfully it’s a matter of changing the msmtp configuration file, which is used by the program of the same name which is a dependency to actually send the emails I write. it should have something like this:

account mail@example.org
# content
passwordeval "pass mail@example.org"
# other things

account mail2@example.com
# content
passwordeval "pass mail2@example.com"
# more content indeed

So I just have to change the values of the passwordeval of each account, which is not hard to do at all!

Another small detail I was unable to figure out is that I could not encrypt email to send and I also could not self-encrypt it, so once I managed to send one, I was unable to open it.

To fix that, I had to ultimately trust the public keys I tried, I think I could do full trust instead, but I don’t really understand why I can’t just have the keys as they are, I guess its just Neomutt being finicky.

In order to self encrypt email, it looks like there is no real way to adjust that with Neomutt, there is this set pgp_self_encrypt = yes option but it looks like it no longer works, and most variables start with set crypt_*, so maybe it gets re-implemented one day.

I also added these lines to the config file in ~/.config/mutt/muttrc

set crypt_opportunistic_encrypt = yes
set crypt_replysign = yes

There are some other settings and I don’t actually get how the ones I’ve enabled work, but well, encryption works, I just have to trust the keys of people I encrypt messages to.

Email management problems

I had created a few nested folders using Thunderbird, but none of them seemed to work properly. I could probably have made them work but I didn’t want to bother trying, some of those folders were not important or I just moved them to the “root” directory instead of having it under the Inbox.

I had to remove my account and set it up again, but it worked just fine.

Another thing I wanted to fix was setting up Neomutt as default XDG email app, so I could open mailto links with it.

Editing the Neomutt desktop file was necessary, I changed the Exec line to alacritty -e neomutt %u. It all looks like this:

[Desktop Entry]
Categories=Office;Network;Email;
Comment=Simple text-based Mail User Agent
Comment[de]=Einfaches, Text-basiertes Mailprogramm
Exec=alacritty -e neomutt %u
Icon=neomutt
Name=neomutt
Name[de]=Mutt
MimeType=x-scheme-handler/mailto;
NoDisplay=false
# Terminal=true
Type=Application

So far, happy with it, I still have some keybindings to learn, but it worked out just fine.

Mailing lists and formatting

I really like mailing lists, although I kinda hate the archaic interfaces of some web archives (if you know some good looking ones other than source hut’s, let me know via email).

This is another thing that I struggled a bit to understand, but only because I could not find the Reply All keybinding, once I did, it worked out alright.

Another detail was that K-9 was displaying emails wrong, but that’s because the format_flowed option was not set, once I did that, everything turned out fine.

A small Neovim configuration

I created a simple config file specific for email writing and formatting, so I am also sharing it here. I just works. Notice the color set for comments, since quotes were hard to read with the Nord color scheme, so yeah I changed the color of them and its alright.

❯ cat ~/.config/nvim/ftplugin/mail.vim
" ftplugin/mail.vim
setl tw=72
setl nojs
setl nosmartindent
setl noautoindent

" Flowed format
setl fo=watqj
set comments-=fb:-
setl list
set listchars=trail:•

highlight Comment ctermfg=green cterm=italic

Wrapping up

I have to credit Rinzewind for helping out a lot, I found a blog of him talking about the mail formatting, sent an email to ask some questions and gave me a lot of tips and tricks to fix a lot of problems.

I have managed to adapt quite nicely. I still haven’t moved all of my accounts yet, but if it all goes fine, maybe I will try. Quite promising.

This has been day 82 of #100DaysToOffload.

I decided to go with Linux Mint for a couple of reasons, first of all, I already have Linux Mint on my family computer, and I have already used Debian based distributions, such as MX Linux and Pop_OS!, so it’s not like I am diving into totally unknown territory, which would have been the case with Fedora or OpenSUSE, a couple distros I was also considering.

The switch was actually incredibly easy and fast, this is due to me being clever before and having a separate /home partition, which made it so I just had to replace the root partition and everything else would stay the same.

When it comes to configs and such, I didn’t really have any caveats other than Thunderbird’s version being too old in Mint’s repositories, which meant that I had to set up everything again, but nothing too difficult to manage.

Firefox however, worked perfectly, I just left my configured .mozilla folder untouched and my profile got picked up as expected. I guess the new changes made with the collaboration between Linux Mint and Mozilla might have helped with that, or at least it did not interfere.

I ended up having to add quite a few PPA’s for stuff like Inkscape, Tailscale and Alacritty, the only package I wish had a newer version is newsboat, since FreshRSS support was only added in version 2.24, so I can’t really access it easily. However, I realized I don’t really view my feeds from the terminal that often, so I’ll just stick to the Web interface.

I installed Steam and NVIDIA drivers and everything is working just fine so far. All of the games run perfectly without any caveats as far as I could see and the Optimus hybrid graphics things that tend to suck is working decently so far, I can switch between different modes and everything, so I am happy with it.

In case you are interested, I had to leave Void Linux due to the same graphical glitches that I also got the first time I tried it, and also some Steam games did not display correctly either.

Wrapping up, I am quite happy with Linux Mint, I have managed to try and install everything I needed, only a few exceptions showed up, but they are not super important for me. If you are seeing this post, it means Jekyll also got setup flawlessly, which is great.

This has been day 80 of #100DaysToOffload

As I said before, none of the dark themes included with FreshRSS were of my liking, they were a bit too warm, almost sepia, and, as a fan of Nord’s color scheme, I wanted something colder and more blue-ish. I decided I would try and make my own theme, using a similar base to my blog’s CSS.

Due to how FreshRSS works, I couldn’t just slap my CSS file in there, I had to go and edit some classes and id’s from the HTML elements that looked wrong, overlapped each other or I just felt like changing a bit.

I also had to go ahead and edit the icons, which were a but of vector based files, I just changed the fill property according to my needs.

There is still a lot of work that needs to be put into this, but I think the desktop version is already quite good, and there are only some simple glitches that I could not figure out, maybe it will need some refactoring, but I guess I’ll just open source it and let somebody who wishes to put more effort into it help me.

You can find the repository here if you wish to install it yourself or help out too!

If you don’t have GitHub or don’t want to use it, feel free to use git send-email too, I don’t mind. You can see my theme in action here:

If you want to know how to apply it here is a quick guide:

• Go to your public p/ folder
• cd into themes/
• git clone my repository
• Go to FreshRSS’ display settings
• Select my theme and apply it

This has been day 81 of #100DaysToOffload

Nextcloud offers a lot of other things that can be quite useful, such as its own email client or even integration with Office tools, it can really become your own set of Google services if you want to.

However, another thing I would love to see is better integration with, well, everything. Yes, I can use Nextcloud News, but at least at first glance, I could not find any generic RSS app that worked with it, there is no support for the Google Reader API or Fever, which narrows the options quite a bit.

Nextcloud also has its own Password manager kind of service, which is good, but makes me wonder why not just adopt some already existing format like Keepass or integrate with Bitwarden. You could use something like Keeweb, and its fine, but its not supported by most Nextcloud password manager apps, which only support Nextcloud’s own protocol, so it only works inside the browser, and in my experience, it didn’t quite work with keyfile authentication.

Now, switching to something totally different but kinda related, Vivaldi browser is also considered quite feature rich, and even bloated, since it has its own email client, RSS reader and other quite unique features, most of them work quite well, but again, why is the RSS reader not compatible with basically anything other than the Desktop client? It is still in Beta, but why is there no API to begin with, at the very least.

As I said this post is not super well structured, I am basically complaining about software that has a lot of neat features but only work with their own things just because, even when those features are based on open protocols or already have standards that could be adopted in their own services.

Also, I have been considering switching to a selfhosted Bitwarden instance, since DietPi comes with a script that automatically makes it for me, but at the same time I feel a little weird about having too many different services inside a single Raspberry Pi when I could just use a single web service and get into their ecosystem, since such ecosystem is completely under my control anyways.

At the very least if something breaks, having everything separated should make it a bit easier to recover, I don’t know.

What was even the point anyways? I feel like this is nonsense, selfhosting rules, there are too many options sometimes but I still love doing it.

This is day 78 of #100DaysToOffload.

Anyways, this is a tutorial made because one of the small caveats with FreshRSS is the lack of an automatic way to fetch the full content of an article. Sites like Android Police, or of course, Simon’s blog do not give you that, sometimes because they want you to open their site and show ads, others just because they write pure HTML instead of being lazy (in the right ways) and let the machine generate stuff for them.

So, why does FreshRSS not come with this option by default? No idea, but it does have a way to do it, it is just not properly explained anywhere in their docs, I had to find a french comment mentioned in an GitHub thread, so I used DeepL to translate it and, it was actually not that hard to do, but I decided to explain it a bit more here.

The proper tutorial

Open any article from any website that doesn’t let you fetch full, content, I’ll go with this random article.

Now, in your browser find a way to open the HTML source code of such website.

Here, everything will depend on the site’s structure, but it should contain a main body or article HTML element, which has the important stuff inside of it. You should be able to find some id or class that makes it easy to recognize.

In the case of Android Police, we have this line:

<section id="article-body" class="article-body" itemprop="articleBody">

Now, we can go to the management settings of the feed we want, and scroll to the bottom to the Advanced section, there, you should see an option named Article CSS selector on original website. There, you will input the class or id of the HTML element containing the article content. If you got an id, you should input #idname, if its a class, you use .classname, note the use of the # and . to differentiate them. You can see how it would look here:

If the site is super simple or classless, you might want to go with the HTML element itself, or a sequence of nested elements, such as main body, its all up to the site, so make sure to check properly.

Finally, scroll to the bottom of the settings and click the “Reload articles” button, to fetch everything again, now you should see the full content instead of just whatever small portion of text is included in the default feed.

This is how Simon’s website posts look now on my feed:

As you can see, some sites will have small problems like duplicate titles or maybe even a couple ads showing up in there, but hey, its the full article instead of some summary that requires me to click one more time. Yes, you might need to do this whole process with every site you follow that doesn’t have full content in their feeds, but its kinda cool, maybe FreshRSS will add an easier way to do this soon enough.

So, this is the 79th post for #100DaysToOffload challenge, thanks again for the inspiration Simon.

The website that hosts it is still up and running, despite showing a bit of age, you should be able to download it from there.

I discovered this homebrew a few years ago, back when I was playing Monster Hunter Freedom Unite online making use of the now dead EvolveHQ service (A VPN of sorts) and also Hunsterverse, but I had no use for it up until recently.

I was trying my best trying to defeat a boss in Hollow Knight, which I recently acquired, and found myself unable to move quickly enough. I know I am better using a controller, so I went ahead and used this, and, while I knew it worked fine on Windows, I was quite happy to see that it also works perfectly fine on Steam.

I tried it in other games with mixed results, so I guess I’ll have to figure out some more stuff, or maybe just switch to a distro more focused on gaming, I feel more and more tempted by the day, but I want to stay on Void for a little longer.

Anyways, this post is just a quick write up on a fantastic tool I think more people should know, I think I should talk about some other PSP homebrew, sadly, a lot of it is not open source and probably abandonware, since the PSP hacking scene died a while ago.

I think, however that there are still quite a few things being developed for the PSP, besides the already huge library of games and emulators, I think even stuff like Doki Doki Literature Club have been ported to it, and you can also setup a Minecraft server on it!.

So yeah, the PSP is not only a great emulation gaming machine, its also a pretty decent PC controller, at least when certain games properly support it, or maybe its Flatpak being weird, or some other random setting, who knows?.

This has been day 77 of #100DaysToOffload

As time goes on, a lot of other games were also played, but ended up losing interest in them, and never got completed, sometimes because the games were boring, others because I got mad at them.

I recently acquired a couple of PC games that I am enjoying so far, Hollow Knight is quite amazing and challenging, and I am enjoying it quite a bit. Axiom Verge too is going just fine CrossCode remains unplayed because of graphical glitches that I have been unable to solve, but maybe it fixes itself at some point.

Among the games I really hate that I haven’t been able to finish, there is Final Fantasy VI. You’ll see, there is this tower, which is the only thing between me and the final dungeon, and you are only able to use magic, and there is this one move that can kill your whole party, so you have to use this Lazarus move that revives you after dying, and I just was not able to go down the tower and grind with normal enemies to get it, so I just got stuck there. I think I could have won with enough effort, but I lost my save file and I got kinda mad. I might start the game all over again some time soon, but yeah, it really infuriated me.

Another game I haven’t been able to finish despite being basically at the end is Ys Seven, which is an action RPG, pretty epic and fast paced, the last boss (probably? I think there might be another one after it, but I haven’t seen any spoilers) has three phases where I use 3 different parties of characters, I just lose all of my equipment, potions and such, so I think I still have to grind a lot to be able to get it done. Good thing is the game has a decent teleportation system so I think it shouldn’t be that hard.

Yet another game that is stuck in time, is Parasite Eve. This game rocks, I love the battle system, the graphics and everything about it, but I think I mixed the wrong weapons or something, I am stuck at a hospital where I just can’t survive long enough to defeat all the enemies, I run out of mana and health too quickly, I wish I was able to avoid attacks, which is not that hard, I’m just dumb.

Jeanne D’Arc is another game where I got to the final boss (probably) and I think I just went underleveled, the thing is, the game is a tactics game, which means, each playthrough is super long and it takes a while to finish a match. Thankfully, leveling up is not actually that difficult, I just have to get the time and willingness to do so.

The latest game I started that I haven’t gotten around to completing or even playing consistently is Final Fantasy VII, I just can’t really stand the random encounters and the weird controls of each minigame, thankfully I have won most of them in the first try, and the actual battles are really enjoyable, if a bit long because of animations.

However, the one game I really want to finish but I lost the save file alongside FFVI is Terranigma, if you have not played that SNES game, it is one of the better action RPG games I’ve seen, the gameplay is amazing, you can do combos and different kinds of attacks, the dungeons are quite clever and the bosses are also really fun, it’s basically The Legend of Zelda, but harder, better, faster and stronger, at least by SNES standards, it’s not just a simple clone, the story I was able to experience was great, I hope I get the time to finish it soon.

There are a lot of other games I have started, but I have not gone that far on any of them to feel guilty about not completing them, or I am still playing them, just taking it slow. Stuff such as Resident Evil 2 and 3, Xenogears, Cave Story, Suikoden II, Metal Gear Solid, MGS: Peace Walker and others.

I didn’t play some of these because the joystick on my PSP was faulty, but I recently got it fixed, so I can now continue playing them just fine.

Anyways, not a lot of structure this time, but I wanted to have something today, a bit late, but anyways.

This has been day 76 of #100DaysToOffload

For some reason, installing Steam does not install all of the required dependencies, I had to go to check the deprecated wiki and read some kind of hidden README (I mean, they are in /usr/share/doc/*, but still not ideal) files to check all of the required 32bit dependencies and drivers I had to install too.

At first I missed some, and there were some errors making mention of gLX and other graphical things I can’t bother explaining. As soon as I installed all the extra packages, Steam ran fine.

I was finally able to install some things. During these holidays, I finally decided to buy some stuff, I decided to get Axiom Verge, Hollow Knight and CrossCode. The first two are pretty well known games of the Metroidvania genre, and the 3rd one was chosen because I saw it on Linus Tech Tips and it looked like the kind of game I would really enjoy, I am going blind just read the description and looked kinda dope, so I hope I have a good tame with it.

I also installed Splitgate, which had native support (all of the games did) and looked to be quite fun, since I saw it featured in many places such as the Destination Linux podcast.

I have played a few native games before available in my distro’s repositories, Super Tux Kart is awesome, Cave Story is available and runs perfectly, and 0AD is tempting me more and more, so I might install it soon too.

Anyways, back to Steam, I decided to run Axiom Verge, since it looked like the simplest one to run, and well, it worked just fine, no hiccups, sound working, keyboard working, I don’t really have a controller but I wanna think it would have worked too.

Then I ran Hollow Knight, and I was a little disappointed. The game started, but it just closed itself after a few seconds, no splash screen, nothing.

I tried CrossCode, and it crashed too after showing the starting menu. I ran it again, and it crashed even faster.

So, no luck, I go ahead into #voidlinux IRC channel and get some answers, I reboot my laptop, I delete some files, sadly, nothing was working.

In the end, I decided to go ahead and try the Flatpak version of Steam. I did not think it would work since the comments on it were mixed. Thankfully, it worked just fine for me, the install went flawlessly. I had to reinstall everything, but Hollow Knight worked first try, as well as Axiom Verge. I am still not done installing all the games I had, but that’s OK, since I will be able to have some fun in the mean time.

If games start failing again, I might have to consider switching away from Void again, but maybe I will be able to keep it up, unless of course, some teacher makes me install some random Windows software that doesn’t run on Wine.

On a side note, I use Backloggd to keep track of games I am playing, is like Anilist of Letterboxd, but for games, so if you want to keep track of the titles you’ve played, you might want to try it out and also check my profile!,

This has been day 75 of #100DaysToOffload.

So, my battery was dying, I also used the flashlight a lot, so my phone had been through quite a lot that day.

Anyways, while I was editing some metadata, my phone vibrated, and it finally died, without much thought I just plugged it in and went back to work.

After I was done, I had to check my phone again to get ready to sleep. I like to listen to podcasts while I sleep, so I was about to download some. I pick up the phone, press the power button, and realize that there is no charging animation, in fact, the LED light (yes, my phone has one of those) is not on either.

I plug my phone somewhere else, no luck, I got try another charger, no luck, I press the button for 4 seconds or so, nothing happens.

I got terrified, in a matter of minutes, all the apps and data in my phone could be done, I did not try plugging it to my computer, but the fact that no energy seemed to pass through the LED light did not give me any hope either.

It was only then, when I was about to sleep and just hope tomorrow it fixes itself, that I remembered something that might be my only chance to fix this issue.

I decided to plug my phone again, and try to power it on. But this time I used a key combination to go into Recovery mode. One second… two seconds… three seconds… four seconds…

Nothing happened, my phone had died. No luck. This was quite a way for my phone to simply be gone forever.

Years ago I went through a similar situation, I had a Samsung Galaxy S3 mini, a great device with minuscule battery, compared to today’s phones. One of its bad things however, is that battery percentage was all over the place, sometimes it would be at 30% and just die, because it was actually at 5%, just not shown correctly.

A reboot would normally update the percentage properly, but I didn’t want to do that all the time. One day, I was using my phone normally while doing house chores and it powered off, I just plugged it in, and no luck, it just died. Looking back, I probably should have tried another battery, but well, it happens.

So, today was happening, the same thing, out of nowhere, you blink and its gone.

Then it vibrated, and an Orange Fox icon showed up. The recovery menu was working! But the LED light was still off, I decided to try and do a reboot to system, and after watching the boot animation for a while, I finally got my lock screen, and the LED light finally decided to show up. My battery was at 12%, which means it was actually charging.

Turns out, my custom ROM has a bug where there is no charging animation, and it looks like if the Do Not Disturb option is enabled while the phone turns off, it still respects it and the LED light does not turn on. I was probably too impatient to make it power on by force, and maybe it was all just my imagination.

But it also made me think, what would you do if your smartphone stopped working out of nowhere?

This has been day 74 of #100DaysToOffload

I decided to go with Nextcloud, FreshRSS, Jellyfin, Gitea, qBittorrent, and a few others, which I just had to select in a menu, and after a few moments of waiting for the scripts to run, all I had to do was go ahead and access the services from Firefox.

The only problem I had was that the built-in WiFi was not working, but after a bit of research and messing with some scripts and rebooting, it finally worked just fine. I would love to tell you exactly how to fix it, but I was not recording what I did. I just duckduckgo’d stuff, edited scripts, returned back to normal and it somehow fixed itself.

I have been adding stuff to my Jellyfin server, as well as installing apps on Nextcloud and other things. I gotta say, it has been quite fun, and I kinda forgot about the time limit I have to finish my challenge, so I decided to write up something quick, maybe tomorrow I’ll have a more substantial post, but this one is rather short.

Jellyfin is actually amazing, Nextcloud just works, it feels a lot faster now than my previous install too. I also switching from Zerotier to Tailscale, just because Wireguard is kinda cool, and Tailscale is based on it.

Anyways, this has been day 73 of #100DaysToOffload

You see, I am running RaspberryOS 32bit, and for some reason, the News extension for Nextcloud needs a 64bit operating system. So, instead of being clever and changing distro since I will have to do it one day anyway, I just decided to install something else.

At first I wanted to go for Miniflux, since I was already using it, but then I remembered that it required a Postgres database, and while I don’t really have anything against it, I already had MariaDB installed, and I did not felt like having multiple database formats running on my device.

I considered going for TT-RSS or FeedBin but I ultimately went with FreshRSS since it seemed to be the easiest to set up, at least from what I saw.

I initially git cloned the latest release, configured a database and user for FreshRSS and ultimately did the setup with the web interface. Sadly, I was getting a weird Error during context user init! message once everything was supposedly alright.

There was no similar problems online, but I decided to go back one version and instead of git I downloaded the tarball. I kept everything unchanged, and it worked just fine. I realized I can actually update FreshRSS via the web interface, and I it seems to have worked when I did it.

So yeah, I have now switched to a self-hosted RSS provider, and it is actually quite great, I still have to find a good theme tho, since the available dark theme kind of sucks, at least for my taste.

I am still probably going to move to a 64 bit distro, so I’ll keep you updated on that.

This has been day 72 of #100DaysToOffload

After having some time for myself and eating some cereal, we went to a friend’s house to prepare some tamales. You will see, my church goes every Friday to two local hospitals in our town, most of the time we only bring coffee and sandwich for people who are outside, taking care of family members, visiting friends and waiting for news about the state of significant others.

This time we decided to make a special treat and prepare some Tamales, which is one of the best forms of food the Mexican gastronomy has to offer, right behind Tacos al Pastor if I do say so myself. Hand-made tamales are something everyone has to try if you come to Mexico someday.

After we got home me and my little sister watched the first three episodes from Cobra Kai’s 4th season, it started pretty strong, I can’t wait to see the rest!

I write this right after finishing lunch time, we ate some Tostadas de frijoles y queso, nothing too special, but they are always welcome in my belly and I am sure any non-Mexican would enjoy them a lot.

We aren’t going to the hospital until a few hours from this being published but right after that, we will have some Lasagna for dinner. It is not Mexican food, but you can’t have it everything, right? Let us give some credit to the Italian cuisine I guess.

So, yeah, I am grateful with God for this year, it has been rough at times, but we are still going, I am still going, and I pray next year God gives us all the strength to keep it up, whatever comes next.

Have a Happy New Year everyone. This is day 71 of #100DaysToOffload

GB can send heart rate information to FitoTrack, which allows me to get more stats, which are always fun to see.

This will be a short post that is just going to help me fill the bill required for my #100DaysToOffload challenge, so I won’t really fo into any detail or anything.

I don’t know if I will keep running so early, since its pretty cold outside, and I have some trouble getting out of bed since its so comfy during these times of the year, but I will try and keep it up, at least until I give up on it again.

I’ve been considering working out for a while already, but I struggle to commit and actually try to be better. But hey, maybe this year I will finally do it.

I really like how I am able to use my Mi Band 4 without the need of Mi Fit or any other proprietary app, I can even change the watchface and stuff like that, as long as I have the .bin file required for it. I can use AmazFaces website to get them and apply them with the app.

Another cool thing I did not know how to fix was getting weather notifications back. Before my cusomt ROM based on Lineage had native integration, but since I switched, I ended up having some trouble, until I checked out the Wiki and noticing there were apps that allowed me to get the functionality back.

The only thing missing from the official app is a “Find my phone” ring sound. For some reason GadgetBridge only sends a simple notification which does not play if I have muted my device, enabling and disabling sound does not work either, so maybe I should submit an issue on Codeberg.

Anyways, I had a good time, a bit tired, but alright, this has been day 70 of #100DaysToOffload

First of all, I am going to credit every source of inspiration I got this from. The original form of my commenting system was based on GitHub, I got it from an amazing post by Aristath. This is where most of my current code is based on. In this case, however, I am using Mastodon’s API instead of GitHub’s since I think that most of my readers use Mastodon or are part of the Fediverse.

Secondly, is the first iteration of Mastodon’s code system I used, which I read in Carl Schwan’s post about it, this is what I used for a while, with GitHub in the mix too.

After a while, Mastodon comments proved to be a lot more common and easy to set up, and I eventually stopped using GitHub, because it also required quite a lot of steps to setup, compared to just posting in Mastodon.

At some point, I decided to rewrite Mastodon’s commenting code with a structure similat to GitHub’s, and I landed on this.

Jekyll set up

First of all I created a comments.html file inside of the _includes directory which is part of Jekyll’s structure. This way, you could add it to your layouts folder, or any section of your blog, and just add {% raw %}{% include comments.html %}{% endraw %}, to tell Jekyll to insert that bit of code in there.

In order for said code to work, we are also going to need some metadata located inside of the front matter of each blogpost, in this case, we add the this:

host: fosstodon.org
username: joel
com_id: 107526114775171486

Finally, we are going to start writing the HTML file that is going to be called by every post we make!

Front end

Edit comments.html, and place these lines first:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="/assets/css/comments.css">
<div class="article-content">
<div id="comments-list"></div>
<noscript><p>You need JavaScript to view comments here.</p></noscript>
<a id="load-comment">Load comments</a>
<a href="https://{{page.host}}/interact/{{ page.com_id }}?=type=reply">Reply via Mastodon</a><br>
<script src="/assets/js/purify.js"></script>
<script>
    //Here will be the rest of the code
</script>
</div>

The first line will call some specific styling that you should add if you would like to style or make it fit better. You could use mine, but I can’t promise it will work properly on your site.

Secondly, we have some div elements that are not really that important, it is up to your CSS too.

Last, we call a couple of script elements that will contain the main javascript code we’ll use.

The good stuff

Next we are going to add the main code will need to make all of this work as we expect. This bit is going to print the comments by calling a different function that will give format to each element.

Main function

document.getElementById('load-comment').addEventListener("click", async () => {
    document.getElementById('load-comment').remove();
    const response = await fetch('https://{{ page.host }}/api/v1/statuses/{{ page.com_id }}/context');
    const data = await response.json();
    if (data.descendants && data.descendants.length > 0) {
        document.getElementById('comments-list').innerHTML += "<h3>Mastodon Comments</h3>";
        let descendants = data.descendants;
        for (let i = 0; i < descendants.length; i++) {
            document.getElementById('comments-list').appendChild(DOMPurify.sanitize(createCommentEl(descendants[i]), {'RETURN_DOM_FRAGMENT': true}));
        }
    }
    else {
        document.getElementById('comments-list').innerHTML += "<p>⚠️ No Mastodon comments yet ⚠️</p>";
    }
});

As you can see, once the “Load comments” button is pressed, we’re going to call the main function, which will fetch data by calling Mastodon’s API and return a JSON, then we are going to access the descendants object, which should have an array of comments and its properties, which will be processed with the function createCommentEl().

Comment formatting

This function will get the data from the JSON and create HTML elements based on that data. Here is the function:

function createCommentEl(response){
    let user = document.createElement('div');
    user.classList.add('mastodon-comment');
    let userAvatar = document.createElement('img');
    userAvatar.classList.add('avatar');
    userAvatar.setAttribute('height', 60 );
    userAvatar.setAttribute('width', 60 );
    userAvatar.setAttribute('src',response.account.avatar_static);
    user.appendChild(userAvatar);
    let userLink = document.createElement('a');
    userLink.setAttribute('href',response.account.url);
    userLink.classList.add('comment-author');
    for (let j = 0; j < response.account.emojis.length;j++){
        let emoji = response.account.emojis[j];
        response.account.display_name = response.account.display_name.replace(`:${emoji.shortcode}:`, `<img src="${emoji.static_url}" alt="Emoji ${emoji.shortcode}" height="16px" width="16px" />`);
    }
    userLink.innerHTML = response.account.display_name + ' @' + response.account.username;

    let commentDate = document.createElement('a');
    commentDate.classList.add('comment-date'); commentDate.setAttribute('href',response.url); commentDate.innerHTML = response.created_at.substr(0,10);

    let commentContents = document.createElement('div');
    commentContents.classList.add('mastodon-comment-content'); commentContents.innerHTML = response.content;

    let comment = document.createElement('div');
    comment.classList.add( 'comment-content' );

    user.appendChild( comment );
    comment.appendChild( userLink );
    comment.appendChild(commentDate);
    comment.appendChild( commentContents );
    return user;
}

As you can see, we are creating a bunch of HTML elements that will have content from the JSON, we assign classes, child elements, and such.

In fact, the only thing I kept from Schwan’s version is the way to call the API and the basic structure, which I turned into Aristath’s syntax.

I am no expert when it comes to Javascript, but I think this is pretty readable overall. At least a bit more than the code I based this from, or maybe I am now used to this code since I’ve worked on it for a while.

I think this combines the best of the comment systems I have found online, so I think I will stick to this method for quite a while, since I have been using it for months, I just never took the time to explain it properly until now.

You can always check my website’s source code to see how all of this is being applied. And don’t be afraid to leave any question you might have by contacting me in any way you prefer below.

This has been day 69 of #100DaysToOffload

Mentioned sources and posts

• A new comment system for my static Jekyll site (Aristath)
• Adding comments to your static blog with Mastodon (Carl Schwan)
• Previous posts by me talking about GitHub’s and Mastodon’s comment systems.

Touchpad tap to click, natural scrolling

So, for some reason my touchpad was not working properly, since I could not tap it to trigger a click, and I wanted to avoid unnecessary hand movement.

After some research, everything I needed to do was create a new file located in etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/30-touchpad.conf.

The folder itself didn’t exist for me, so I had to use mkdir too. The contents of this file are the following:

Section "InputClass"
    Identifier "touchpad catchall"
    Driver "libinput"
    Option "Tapping" "on"
    Option "NaturalScrolling" "on"
    Option "ClickMethod" "clickfinger"
    MatchIsTouchpad "on"
EndSection

After a system restart, my touchpad was working as expected. It is worth noting that the original files to handle this are in a different location, which is in /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d, but those files should not be edited, because they might be altered in a system update.

Printer drivers

This is one of many problems that made me quit Void Linux the first time I took it for a spin. Now I understand CUPS a little better, and I also know that I am able to install RPM packages with Void Linux, since RPM it’s available in their repositories.

Doing this might not be ideal, since I could write a proper installation script using tools provided by Void itself to turn either deb or rpm to an xbps file.

Basically, my Brother printer has a simple bash script that uses RPM to install everything, I ran it, filled the things that were asked like printer model, IP, terms and conditions, and in the end, it just worked.

Since I am lazy, the package won’t get any updates and I knew it was not as big of a risk, I just went for it, and now I can do wireless printing painlessly.

Switching to Pipewire

Pipewire is kinda awesome now, and I decided to use it once again in Void. I’ve already used it back when I left Void, and I also set it up for Endeavor too, I am confident on it, it has not failed me and it handles audio a lot better than PulseAudio ever did in my experience.

For example, under PulseAudio, some application’s behavior was not as it should be. From time to time, volume changes weren’t applied to current audio devices, or after I muted, I was unable to unmute, and stuff like that.

Now on Pipewire, everything just works so far.

Wrapping up

So, yeah, I have done a few more small changes, like switching to Spectrwm once again or changing my GTK theme, as well as other details, but nothing specific, other than the problems I just mentioned.

This has been day 68 of #100DaysToOffload

Every time there is a new update, they also release one or more new characters, named Brawlers, which you can unlock via Brawl Boxes or gems (their way to make money out of us, to be fair), each of them with a different skillset and way to play. Sometimes, they release a challenge, where you get a few chances to lose, and you have to win a set amount of matches. If you survive, you will get a new Brawler for free.

I’ve played the game since its global release in 2018, and I’ve never been able to win one of those challenges, some of them require 12 wins, others 15, but no matter what, I lose, the most I’ve got before were 7 wins.

Well, yesterday was different. A friend and my sister, which are younger than I am, decided to team up and try to beat the challenge together. It was exciting, but I was worried they would made some mistake, since they are less experienced than me. But since the challenge had been going on for 2 days already, this was our last chance to participate in it, so we decided to do our best.

My friend, fantastic ms as you you can see in the picture below, tends to ruin things at the very last chance somehow. He always celebrates too early, and end up losing. Be it on Super Tux Kart, Super Smash Bros Ultimate, or basically any game ever, this time, he was kinda doing the same, but we told him to not say a word or else he would ruin it for us all.

Sadly, we did not manage to beat it with four lives. However, you’re allowed to buy more chances with gems (1 gem for two lives), if you take into account that paying for a Brawler around 200 gems is a lot more expensive than the 2 gems we paid, we were super happy after we actually managed to get our 9th victory, and obtain a brand new Brawler to play with, completely for free!

This has been day 67 of #100DaysToOffload

While I slowed down a bit during the rest of the year, I think I will still be able to complete the challenge during the next 2 months I still have to write random stuff. So, you can expect to see a lot more of them during the time I still have left.

I have to say, I am very thankful I decided to write a lot of the stuff I did, because I would not even remember a lot of the topics and cool things that happened if it wasn’t because of this blog. So I am going to mentions a couple of things I am proud I did this year, other than this blog.

Leaving text processors for plain text and PDFs

During this year I managed to finally embrace a new way to work with text, using Markdown, Pandoc, Org-Mode, Neovim, Joplin and a lot of other tools that I started using that allowed me to stop writing using Office and other simlar software.

This really allowed me to finish homework a lot quicker and take notes in a comfier way. Thanks to pdf’s I was still able to present my homework in an acceptable way (for my teachers). And Even tho I still have some work to do with templating and other details I still haven’t figured out, taking plain text notes is just great and simple.

Improving my (and my family’s) security online

I managed to start using a better password manager that works for my needs and quirks, I changed a lot of passwords that were duplicates or weak, I deleted dozens of accounts that I no longer used and were just taking space in random servers. Took the time to email terrible services that did not provide easy ways to delete their account. I finally managed to enable 2 factor authentication in every possible place that I managed to find.

Recently, I also managed to do the same thing, admittedly a bit less thoroughly, to my parents and a sibling.

Participating in Ludum Dare 48, venturing into new videogame genres

Lately I have been a lot less involved in the game development world, I am still part of some great communities, but I have not made any significant games or updates.

However, this year I still managed to participate in Ludum Dare, one of the biggest game jam events. The theme was Deeper and deeper, and my game, while not quite complete, still was a blast to game and share with everyone, get some ratings and learn a lot. I think it has quite a lot of potential, but I still haven’t worked more on it like most of the games I’ve done before.

I also got to make a text adventure game for a school project, that I never got to share publicly. It did not really have quite an objective or story to it, but I might release it sometime soon just to have something more in my Itch.io profile.

Programming and Raspberry Pi projects

Outside of game development, this year I also managed to learn a lot of stuff about how computers work. I learned more about bash scripting, doing a script to automate the creation of posts here, adding a template, date and such automatically.

I also took an Embedded Systems class where I got a raspberry pi and did stuff from controlling servomotors to using web servers and building sites with MariaDB databases and other things using a LAMP stack.

Recently, I also managed to host my own Nextcloud instance and using Zerotier to access it from basically anywhere.

Learning Inkscape and contributing to FOSS

Another great thing I managed to do was learning Inkscape and designing a lot of icons for some open source projects, especially the Arcticons Icon pack and, as of late, the Delta Icon pack, which are some of the greatest icons packs for Android that are currently in development.

I have probably made more than 300 icons and I am really happy I am part of this. It has become the main thing I do when I got free time, other than writing blogs or fiddling around with my computer, and the good thing is that it looks a lot more productive to my parents.

The only reason the bug me is that they always ask me how much I get paid, and I always have to say I do it for free. but if you wanna prove me wrong, you can always donate to me via BAT (Brave rewards) or Monero, so check my home page to support me!

Wrapping up

I am really grateful for this year, thank God despite the madness and crazy things that are going on around the world, I managed to have a really good year, outside of school stuff, which is always a little annoying, but not even that was actually bad, since I managed to get excellent grades and if I keep up my current score, I won’t have to do a Thesis or exam to pass uiniversity, which is kinda epic!

I hope your year went great, or hey, if you had a bad time, be hopeful the next year will be better, I know sometimes things seem like they will be terrible, but keep it up, and things will improve.

You can see most of these mentioned topics being talked about in previous posts of my blog, so make sure to check all of them if you are interested and you have the time. Tags could also help you find them faster 😉.

This has been day 65 of #100DaysToOffload

But anyways, I am happy with how things have turned out, since I can still have fun and experiment with what I got today. So since my semester is over and I no longer have an academic use for my Raspi right now, I decided to set it up as a Nextcloud server for my family and personal use.

I have selfhosted a lot of cool services on my Pi in previous times. Stuff like Radicale, Miniflux or Pi-hole. But because of University, I ended up losing all of them because of some problems that made me have to reinstall my OS, I wasn’t happy about it, but I was running a distro that had some missing packages, so I would not be able to do my school projects unless I distro-hopped.

The point is, I decided to follow this tutorial, and after finally figuring out how to enable PHP8 on my apache server, I got it all working just fine. I won’t be able to really explain everything, but the tutorial covers it quite well and the part of enabling modules is a matter of looking it up (a2enmod is the command needed).

The problem now was, how do I access it from outside my LAN? I had already said many times that I could not open my router ports since I am behind a NAT and as such, I can’t really access my public IP and forward ports or stuff like that.

However, I discovered a tool/service called ZeroTier that basically let’s me be own boss and create my own network of devices. I didn’t even need to look up at a tutorial to figure how it works. But if you want one, there you go.

Now all I had to do was download the app for my phone that works like a VPN and gives me access to my Nextcloud instance from anywhere in the world. The app is FOSS, But it isn’t on F-Droid, so I went with the a fork of it, just to have it my way and get it via IzzyOnDroid’s repo.

So yes, I now have my own instance of Nextcloud. Right now I’m only using my SD card to store everything, but I am planning on getting a 2TB external SSD to be able to mount it and get more storage for it.

This is day 66 of #100DaysToOffload

First, it was a school assignment, I would win some extra points and I was already willing to make the move. But also, I was pretty dumb and couldn’t figure out printing, as well as some graphical issues, where the screen would blink and glitch seemingly at random.

Endeavour OS is great

I really enjoyed my time using Endeavour, it was a really easy to use distribution that provided me with everything I needed out of the box. I was finally able to enjoy a pretty minimal, yet usable Arch configuration, I had everything working almost perfectly, and if something was going wrong it was usually just me being dumb and setting some config incorrectly.

I may go back to this distro in the future, or even finally give a change to pure Arch in my machine, since I found it all pretty smooth and it was always fun to have updates waiting for me almost everyday.

The problem

My main problem has nothing to do with Endeavour or Arch itself, its just an AUR package that required an old Python version, and prevented me from updating my system once Python got an update. There where some comments in the AUR website, but it seems like it can’t be easily fixed until the maintainer decides to step up.

Another slight problem was just the amount of stuff I felt was not needed by me. For example, Endeavour OS comes packaged with a lot of small terminal utilities that can do everything from changing wallpapers, checking for updates, making logs and such. All of these had small dependencies that were quite annoying, because I didn’t really use them. A lot of those packages depended on each other too, and it was difficult to get rid of them all.

But, being honest, I guess the main reason I left Endeavour was because I was no longer able to update it, which is kind of the whole point.

Letting go of my early tether

I have went with many distros for a while now. But something they all had in common was that all of them were dual-booted alongside Windows, and of course, all of them had broken bootloaders at least once in their lifetime, because of some random Windows update.

Funnily enough, as soon as I was done backing up my files and config files to a second hard drive, I rebooted to Windows to do the same to the files I had there. Then rebooted once more, for a second check on my Linux site, and voila, my bootloader was gone.

Frustrated, I decided to just go for it and plug my USB drive, change the boot order and install Void alone, once and for all.

Void everywhere

Have you ever heard of Guru Laghima?, he was a wise man, who wrote something I decided to apply here:

“New growth cannot exist without first the destruction of the old.”

I ran the void-install script, an ncurses screen showed up, I configured everything. It was finally the point of no return, the partitions had to be wiped and reset, I also finally made a new, separate /home partition, and wrote the changes.

Endeavour was gone, Windows was gone, and even some files I forgot to back up, were also, gone.

But you know what, that is completely fine, as Guru Laghima once said:

“Let go your earthly tether. Enter the void. Empty and become wind”

With nothing installed, I was finally born again, Void was even more beautiful than I remembered, there were a lot of new things and the packages available have grown quite a bit. There are still some problems here and there, but in the end, I know everything is going to be alright.

This has been day 64 of #100DaysToOffload

I decided to kill two birds with one stone and setup both KeepassXC and Syncthing on his phone and laptop, because not only is it cool, it would also allow me to create and extra synced folder between him and me, since we tend to share a lot of files and its always a pain sending them either via Email or Telegram, which is what we used to do most of the time. Now all he has to do is drag and drop the files and they will be synced to my device in no time.

KeepassXC it the obvious choice if Syncthing is already there, because it means there is no need to store the file in some server. Its also really easy to have an idea of all the passwords you have to change and it gives you some statistics and reports to see how many insecure accounts and duplicate passwords there are. In his Android device I also installed the KeepassDX client, and I enabled multi-factor authentication in a lot of accounts. I still missed quite a few, because a lot of government or public service sites don’t care about security that much here, sadly.

For my mom I decided to go with Bitwarden, for the sake of simplicity. She does not have that many accounts, and she might actually be able to delete a keepass file by mistake just because of the absurd amount of files she has in her laptop. In the end I just changed all her passwords, installed the app in her phone and even recovered some old accounts she had not bothered using.

I also noticed that she actually uses the desktop email client that comes with Windows, which, while kinda decent, is still a Microsoft proprietary product, so I decided to mix it up a bit and install Thunderbird for her.

As far as I could tell she found it pretty nice and the search feature is actually pretty fast and epic. It was quite amazing to see that she had 70,000 emails unread, so I also took care of a lot of those, which were mostly Facebook and Pinterest notifications, because of course they are.

I am considering switching her to something like Solus OS, her laptop is from 2013 and has 4GB of ram, it actually feels pretty fast and smooth for how old it is, but that’s mostly because of the SSD we got for it.

Anyways, this was actually a longer post, but I closed neovim by mistake and I had forgotten to save the file. But hey, if this is what got in, is because its what I considered actually important!

This has been day 63 of #100DaysToOffload

I still went with online classes, but at least I managed to go to the lab a couple times and see some CNC machinery in action, the machines were kinda huge, and all of them were running Windows 95 or 98. It was quite interesting. We had to use Floppy disks to move the G code files from our devices to them. In fact, the mouse and keyboard were not even using a USB connection and their color was beige, just like the ones in old pictures.

Now, talking about my embedded systems class, where my Raspberry Pi was the main focus. I have to say, I had a lot of fun. As soon as the final project got announced and we had the option to do basically whatever we wanted as long as it used the knowledge we gained from class, I had my mind overflowing with ideas and different ways to showcase the power of Linux to everybody!

Just kidding, I actually had a hard time coming up with something to do. It had to be something related to home automation and stuff. I got a few ideas from both Mastodon and Discord, and I settled on a simple security system.

I made a Telegram bot that received notifications every time the system perceived an intruder (An ultrasonic sensor attached to a door which measured a huge distance when opened) and took a picture, it also gave the option to start a video recording, take more pics and stuff.

I also added a simple web interface to access those files, protected in a simple manner via htpasswd, and yeah, it wasn’t really that complicated, but it was still the best project in class (Let’s say most of my classmates didn’t put that much effort, sadly) and I had a lot of fun messing around with Python and the Raspberry itself.

Finally, I still have some final projects to deliver, but they are nothing as complicated, and they are also done in teams. I have to say I dislike to work with teams but it does take a lot of the pressure from me, and in a weird way I have more people to blame other than me if it goes wrong, although deep inside me I know I could have done better. We are doing just fine tho, so its only a matter of time until I am done with everything.

There was only one class where everything could have gone wrong, I still had 3 assignments to do, and even one exam. But all of a sudden, during today’s class, the teacher told us that he was going to cancel everything except for one of them, which was the easiest of the bunch!

You’ll see, he never actually mentioned any of the homework, it was just there in the calendar and we assumed we had to do it, but he recognized he didn’t actually taught us any of the topics of those assignments at the right time, so he decided to let us free, and I am really, really grateful for that.

All I have left is a single class, the one class I actually never managed to completely understand, but I will pass, or that’s what I hope. Just a final project, and exam, and I am done! Let the holidays begin!

This has been day 62 of #100DaysToOffload

This started as a response to Kev’s latest post, about what’s wrong with the Linux community. His posts are always quite enjoyable, but this time I felt like I got something to say

If I understood correctly, one of the main problems with the Linux community, is the tendency of promoting overly complicated solutions for different problems and software utilities. However, I don’t really think that’s completely true.

I kinda think most of the software that Linux nerds like to use is just hard to explain, but that’s just because we like to complicate our own lives for the sake of having an easier time later. Of course, most of the time we are infinitely looking for ways to optimize our workflow and we end up never actually working

Lets look at the Email clients example, one of the main reasons they are useful is because they allow to manage multiple accounts at a time. The average user seems to have less than 2 email addresses.

Of course a feature rich native client will make not sense for them!, but its going to be worth it for a lot of advanced users, I personally have 6 email accounts logged in with Thunderbird, and I can’t see myself using a web client for each, it’s one of the reasons using Protonmail kinda sucks, because the free tier doesn’t allow the use of IMAP clients.

So yeah, there is no problem here, the complexity of the solution exists because of the complexity of the problem, a problem that an average user would probably never have anyways.

Of course, Kev’s point might still be valid when it comes to people that actually just need a single email account and just want to setup their own server to feel cool, but that’s more of a personal thing, not a problem with the community itself.

Simple solutions exist too

Besides, if you look at it that way, any email client, or even RoundCube, is not that complex of a solution for managing dozens of accounts at once!

Outside of email, there are countless tools that do make life easier while still being user friendly.

• Syncthing is still one of my favorite tools, and its extremely simple to setup compared to similar solutions, and its probably the best tool for the job.
• KDE Connect, while a little buggy, is also a really cool program that mostly works and its awesome, its also, the best tool for the job.
• Bitwarden, while not used by me, is still the best solution for most people. And I am kinda tempted to return to it.
• OBS Studio, while a little complex, is the one and only streaming/recording solution worth using, and while there are some FFMPEG elitists out there, they don’t count.
• Czkawka, while not as well known, its the best thing I’ve found to find duplicates, similar images and the like, it has saved me a lot of storage

While typing this, I realized that these are simple solutions for complex problems, but most people still don’t want to deal with them.

Final thoughts

Yes, there is a a lot of elitism in the Linux community, I kinda feel like an elitist while writing this, but I still believe that there is something to be said about the simplicity of open source tools that are still being ignored by the average guy.

Despite the effort, people will still use the same password everywhere, people will still send files via email to themselves, people will keep logging into 4 different web clients to check their mail and they won’t even bother cleaning up their system from unnecessary files.

I know that we might be at fault sometimes, because of the way we present these tools, some people think they are too good to be true, or that its still not worth the hassle.

Sometimes a small pebble is enough of an excuse to avoid the easier way. People like to stay with what they know, and yes, we should not force them to change. In the end, what works for you is fine, I guess.

This has been day 61 of #100DaysToOffload

It’s funny to see how the same topics come back and forth every time, there is no right answer, the Fediverse is unable to find that balance point. One day everybody has their own Gemini capsule, the next one everybody loves Vivaldi’s feature-rich browser. One day people hate on Signal, the next Matrix is considered an FBI honeypot!

And here we are once again. While JavaScript has always had a bunch of people against it, this is the first time where I see CSS thrown into the mix too. This is understandable due to Uglyduck’s background as a web developer and designer, I am quite novice on this world, but I still have something to say, even if its not as meaningful or thought provoking.

As you might have noticed, I recently went into a bit of a website overhaul (I always am tbh), I added a side bar to show what used to be placed at the site’s footer section, just because I wanted to see if I could accomplish that without much trouble. Of course, I managed to do it, and I feel like there is a lot of stuff I could add.

I tend to have this feeling, where I want to fix this little detail, add some transition or animation, and its always constantly changing. In a World where there are no such options, there is time to focus on the important thing, the content, sure…

While I can see how this view is controversial, I wonder why is it controversial here, and nowhere else?

Think about it, I have went to school for years, and every time there is an assignment, I have to follow the same basic guidelines. Arial 12, bold titles, 1.25 line spacing, the school logo, the school cover, that’s it. There are proper ways to do work all around us, and somehow the web has managed to be the only place where you can express yourself via your website, unless you can draw, play music, write, paint, and yeah maybe this makes no sense and school just sucks.

Honestly, there is probably no reason to try and relate these points but I have to fill this post somehow you know?. I believe that each website should be able to have its own personality and such, so yeah, as long as it doesn’t get to the point where there is no way to have a reading mode, its fine by me.

Now, speaking of JavaScript, I mean, I use it, but not willingly! Ok, I use it because I want comments, and I don’t really need those but they do be kinda nice.

In conclusion, I like CSS because it allows me to have bad posts like this one while still having something pleasant to look at that makes me feel good, just look at my color palette, its awesome and I love it so its worth it for me.

This is day 60 of #100DaysToOffload

Post inspired by:

• https://uglyduck.ca/css-js-mistake/
• https://kevq.uk/reality-without-css-javascript
• https://degruchy.org/2021/11/08/a-world-without-css-or-javascript/

I also got quite invested into watching anime, I was never a huge fan of it. As a kid, the only anime I kind of watched was Captain Tsubasa, known as “Super Campeones” here in Mexico, since it aired Saturday morning and was entertaining enough. Despite this, I never watched Dragon Ball or Naruto or anything else.

Anyways, I will probably talk about anime in the future, but I have to say it was not the main reason I didn’t update my blog. In fact, I only watched it during the night right before going to sleep, and I don’t really feel like writing at such time anyways.

I guess I just got quite lazy at writing for this. I feel like I actually lost some of my typing speed because of it, I haven’t made any typing sessions lately either.

Lately my Embedded Systems class showed us a bunch of PHP and Web dev stuff, and we got the task of improving upon our Parking Lot project on my Raspberry Pi. This time we had to make a user database and be able to reserve parking spots, generate a way to validate the reservation, like a QR Code, and have a web interface for it all.

I had already made a web interface, but not all of it, so I got quite inspired to work on it, and it took quite a lot of time, I am still not done with it since there are some little details to fix in the way my database gets updated, but at this point is a matter of creating the right queries.

This post is going to end up being quite short but I don’t really have a lot of things to say. Facebook has a new name, some GTA games will be remade and the 3D character models look terrible, Firefox decided to add some colors to its version 94, which are kind of ugly looking; I have been listening to a lot of podcasts lately and I am starting to get addicted to have them as background noise. I recently watched the Evangelion Rebuild movies and I am having a mental breakdown that at least is more happy than depressed, I am struggling to find something to fill the void.

Well that’s a nice amount of lines I guess, this has been day 59 of #100DaysToOffload, I hope you enjoyed your read even if it is kind of pointless, I promise I’ll make some worthy content soon enough!.

By now its old news, but the Twitch leak happened the same day I was getting my vaccine, and while waiting I talked a friend who was worried about the security of his account, turns out, both of us as soon as we woke up changed our passwords and got ready to get the shot (Astra Zeneca btw).

Regardless, because of this and other conversations in the Fediverse, I decided to check my accounts once again, change some passwords and enable multi-factor authentication everywhere I could. I already had a ton of accounts with it, but I knew I had ignored some sites since I didn’t care enough back then, or I didn’t bother to find the option.

Basically, MFA allows you to get a unique code that changes over time. This means that even if someone gets access to your password, they only have 30 seconds to try and guess the code until it changes. Sadly, not every website implements this feature properly. Twitch for example, requires you to add your phone number first, even if you don’t use MFA via SMS and use an authenticator app, the most recommended way of getting the codes.

I was sad to see that less than a third of all my online accounts provided good MFA support. I have like 150 accounts total, and I used to have a lot more, and while some don’t really need it (local accounts, router passwords), there are is a big amount of sites that don’t even bother for some reason.

Some interesting places that do not offer Multi-Factor authentication are the following:

• Vivaldi: While I really like this browser, the lack of OTP based MFA was a little annoying, they have an Encryption password that is just a second password apart from the one you set yourself, however, both are of the something your know type (which is not enough, at all), while MFA is something you have. It looks like there is a thread about implementing MFA in their forums, so hopefully the devs work on it soon.
• Matrix: I kinda want to give Matrix a pass, even tho there is no TOTP based authentication, it still requires something you have, in this case, another device, to authenticate your session and gain access to encrypted chats. Still, there is a lot of metadata still accessible, which can be very very compromising.
• Spotify: It does not surprise me at all, this streaming service is getting more and more problematic as time goes on. I still use it, because it is convenient, and I can’t afford to pay for music in something like Bandcamp. Still, no way to secure an account.
• HackerNews: This is a news aggregator that is quite similar to Reddit. To me, all the data here is basically worthless, I do use it but I don’t comment often. Still, it would be sad to have to remove the email alias I assigned to it in case there is some leak.
• Wikipedia: Well, this is the place I get my homework from. Everyone can contribute, there are a lot of articles about basically everything. As far as I could tell, while this account is not important for me either, no MFA still sucks. Fandom, another Wiki used to create sites for specific topics, comics, movies, etc does not support it either.

There are many other sites that don’t have MFA and there are also some that surprisingly delivered. Stuff like the WCA, which is a site that keeps tracks of speedcubing competitions and world records is the kind of website that I would expect to not have the highest security, and yet, they actually did it. Mathworks and Autodesk also have it, which is quite surprising, especially taking into account that National Instruments nor Texas Instruments offer the option (Yes, I study Engineering btw)

Anyways, this is a friendly reminder to check if you have MFA enabled in all of your accounts that support it, and its important to encourage the developers of every account you log into, so they get to work on it.

This has been day 58 of #100DaysToOffload. I once again took a while to post something, but that’s how it is sometimes. Anyways, have a good day!

Last week our teacher showed us how to create databases using mariadb and how to manipulate it with Python and the PyMySQL library, so I got working on it and created my own database.

We had to make some sort of parking lot with 15 spaces to be used by vehicles, and all I had to do was keep track of which ones were being used or freed. I did this with a simple database with 15 slots and a state.

I also had to move a servo-motor so it works as the entrance, it goes up and down to let cars in and out. I even made it go smoother by making a for loop and changing the work frequency grade by grade with a timer.

Keeping track of the cars and making sure there are no weird errors was kinda fun. This project allowed me to experiment with Python, using stuff that I don’t really do when using other languages, like try and exceptions to detect stuff.

For example, when a car exits, I need to know the space it used, and I don’t want the code to fail when the user inputs “18” or “-4”. Although I could just make a few conditional statements, I decided to add an exception to the IndexError from PyMySQL and take care of stuff that way.

It was quite a nice experience, I also had to help half a dozen of classmates who are still not used to the Raspberry Pi and are unwilling to learn Vim for some weird reason. Anyways, I have had a lot of homework and a new exam coming up pretty soon, which will be quite a nightmare for me, since it looks like this semester I am only good at Embedded Systems…

Anyways, this was post number 56 for #100DaysToOffload, I hope you enjoyed this quick post which almost feels like a mastodon thread, but anyways, have a nice day!

Switching to dwm

First, I switched to DWM as my tilling window manager of choice. Yeah, right after I upload my blog showcasing my dotfiles and my spectrwm configuration, I pick up my stuff, git clone the dwm repo and start learning how to patch this thing so it does the stuff I want. And guess what, I couldn’t be any happier right now. DWM is not the window manager I wanted, but the one I needed.

Seriously, once its all setup and ready to go, it looks exactly like my previous spectrwm configuration. However, the bar is better, the tags are clickable (I know, I am sorry), and (again, I am sorry) I can change my gaps size on the fly.

I no longer have access to a config file that can be changed on the fly. But it is still quite easy to read, and building from source is not slow at all. Besides that, the bar (which I spent most of the time customizing) is a separate program (aslstatus btw), so I don’t need to reboot the WM to see the changes.¹

Overall, I am really happy with DWM, and I will probably talk more about it in the future.

More services for my Raspberry Pi

Since my Pi is confined to my local network, I decided to keep playing around with it and using programs that can be used despite said limitation.

I already mentioned Pi-hole, which is an ad blocking program that works in the whole local network. Since then I added radicale, which is a contact and calendar server that uses CalDAV protocol, I can just save my contacts on my phone, and using DAVx5 it gets synced as soon as I am connected to my network.

Rethinking my RSS setup

Another program I decided to try was an RSS server. Something that I could use and would work with Newsboat, a terminal-based RSS reader that I believed was local only. But after reading the documentation, I realized it was able to work with multiple services like Newsblur, Tiny Tiny Rss, FreshRSS and Miniflux.

At first I tried and enjoyed Newsblur, but after I found the limitations of the free tier, I decided to use my Pi and find some server to use. I chose Miniflux, and I am pretty happy with how it turned out.

While the integration with Newsboat was fine. There are not a lot of apps compatible with Miniflux, at least on F-Droid, the only one available was Fluent Reader, which looks like an iOS app, and while functional, didn’t really fit my style. After some digging on Reddit, I found out about Miniflutt, which is available on GitHub and, while a little bare bones, works fine enough. I really like having my read and starred articles synced across my devices, the kind of feature I didn’t know I needed!

Designing some more icons on Inkscape

Of course, I am also making icons for the Arcticons icon pack, while I don’t have as much time during school, I have still managed to create a few icons for some apps, including the Miniflux RSS readers I found. You can see the pull request here.²

Finishing up

So yeah, just a quick catch up, Here is a quick list of another quick things I did: - I followed a bunch of new RSS feeds from sites that appear on the Tech News videos from Techquickie. - I am using Emacs and org mode to take notes for school, because it has a feature to copy and paste screenshots easily! - I might switch to Vim again because HexDSL has a script I could modify to do the same thing! - I posted a meme on Fosstodon and its getting more attention than I expected, I also decided to make my account locked, so you have to send a follow request. - I am learning some fun robotics stuff at University, but the site feels like something made for kids (Visual scripting), I wish they taught us some real coding.

Anyways, I wrote more than I expected to! This has been day 55 of #100DaysToOffload. I hope you have a great day.

That works fine, but it’s not the best way to backup the constant changes I usually do to customize the way my programs look or act, and as a customization freak, that happens quite often.

I had seen many different ways to backup dotfiles: git bare repos, yadm, symlinking scripts, and of course, GNU Stow.

All of these methods have their up and downs, but in the end, stow convinced me, and I decided to give it a try. According to their home page:

GNU Stow is a symlink farm manager which takes distinct packages of software and/or data located in separate directories on the filesystem, and makes them appear to be installed in the same place.

If you don’t really understand it yet, don’t worry, I don’t either! But in this blog, I will do my best to show you the steps to backup your current config files, I hope whoever reads this finds it useful.

Creating a dotfiles repository

The first step to backup your dotfiles, is to create an empty repository in some hosting service, such as GitHub, Codeberg or SourceHut. This is optional if you only want to see how stow works, but necessary to have an external backup outside your computer. Once you are done, clone the empty repo to your home directory, or in any place you want. (This tutorial will be using the home directory).

To clone a repo, just do:

git clone https://site.com/link/to/repo

In my case, I use Tildegit, a Gitea instance, so my command looks like this.

git clone https://tildegit.org/chrono/dotfiles.git

You can clone my dotfiles if you want to use them, here they are if you are interested.

Using stow to backup your configuration

Before actually backing something up, we need to install stow, depending on your distribution, you can install it with your package manager of choice. In my case, Endeavor is based on Arch, so I do:

$ sudo pacman -S stow

Lets start by backing up the configuration of a single program. While we can backup our whole .config folder, that’s not a good idea, since some programs store important information that should stay private, and I think its better to only backup what we have actually configured. For this example, I will backup my picom configurations.

The first step is to create a new directory to use as a base (if you cloned your empty repo, you’ll be using that). You also have to create a folder structure, depending on where you want the configuration to be stored, this depends on the location the program will read its configuration from. We’ll refer to this folder as dotfiles.

If you want to add a README file or other stuff that you is not a config files, you can create another directory inside of dotfiles, in my case, I have made a stow_home folder, which will be where we’ll run the stow command.

Lets explain how stow works. Picom expects its config file in ~/.config/picom/picom.conf, so, inside of the new home_stow directory, we recreate that folder structure, but using the program name (picom) instead of the tilde (~), which usually refers to the home folder.

Lets put all of this together in the terminal.

$ mkdir dotfiles && cd dotfiles # mkdir only if you didn't clone it
$ touch README.md other_file.txt # optional
$ mkdir -p ~/dotfiles/stow_home/picom/.config/picom/
$ mv ~/.config/picom/ ~/dotfiles/stow_home/picom/.config/

Once you do that, your picom folder is no longer in the .config directory, but inside of dotfiles/home_stow, following the same folder structure, as if home_stow was the /home directory, followed by the user picom and the path to the picom configuration files.

Now we repeat this process with all of the files and directories we want to back up. Once done, the behavior of the programs you use, such as vim, should revert to their default configurations, since the user config files are no longer there. So, now its time to fix that! Inside of stow_home, run the following command:

$ stow -vt ~ *

This will symlink everything inside of stow_home, targetting ~ as the starting point. The -v flag will let you know of everything being done, so you should see an output like this, depending on the programs you backed up:

$ stow -vt ~ *
LINK: .config/awesome => ../dotfiles/stow_home/awesome/.config/awesome
LINK: .config/bat => ../dotfiles/stow_home/bat/.config/bat
LINK: .config/dunst => ../dotfiles/stow_home/dunst/.config/dunst
LINK: .config/nvim => ../dotfiles/stow_home/nvim/.config/nvim
LINK: .config/picom => ../dotfiles/stow_home/picom/.config/picom
LINK: .config/rofi => ../dotfiles/stow_home/rofi/.config/rofi
LINK: .config/spectrwm => ../dotfiles/stow_home/spectrwm/.config/spectrwm

File versioning with git

If you stumbled upon this guide, you probably know the necesary git commands to backup everything to the service you chose at the beginning of this guide.

Generally, everytime you do changes you only need to follow these three commands, inside of your dotfiles folder.

$ git add *
$ git commit -m "Added config files"
$ git push

Remember that the last command will not work if you don’t have an external repository.

The manual of GNU Stow contains a lot more than what I mentioned here, like unlinking and other flags that can be used and might be useful for your use case.

Finishing up

Anyways, that’s all folks, this has been day 54 of #100DaysToOffload, you can check out my dotfiles if you want to see how stow looks once setup, besides, my Spectrwm configuration is quite sick if I do say so myself.

If you feel like a step is not clear enough, please let me know in the comments or via e-mail.

Secret bonus script!

So, if you read until the end of this blog. I actually did a pretty decent bash script to automate everything here.

All you need to do is configure it to your liking and run it like this

dotstow file_or_folder

The script is as follows, it uses basic tools like cut and of course, stow

#!/usr/bin/bash
# Dotstow - Backup your chosen dotfiles in one go using stow.
# Run it outside of the folder/file you want to back up
# $ dotstow file-or-program
# This program was made by joelchrono12

STOW_DIR=$HOME/dotfiles/stow_home
DIR=$(pwd | cut -d '/' -f4-)
NEW_DIR=$STOW_DIR/$1/$DIR
mkdir -pv $NEW_DIR
mv -v $1 $NEW_DIR
cd $STOW_DIR
stow -vt ~ $1

The program does not check if a folder already exists or anything like that. So feel free to send any suggestions and changes to it in a comment or using git send-email to my email address.

Extra notes (important)

• You can just use dotfiles as is without a folder inside it, but if you want to be able to quickly deploy everything using *, you must make a folder where README and other files you don’t want to symlink won’t interfere .
• Other files, like .bashrc, are not in the .config folder, keep in mind that the path to use depends on where the program needs it to be. In this case, it would have to be placed in ~/dotfiles/stow_home/bash/.bashrc.
• If you are unsure about the paths you created, you can run the -n flag to simulate the output and see exactly where each symlink would be placed. That way you dont end up symlinking in the wrong place and doing weird stuff to your filesystem.
• You can also move specific files of a configuration folder. For example, tut, a mastodon client, saves the account data (passwords, etc) inside of another file in its configuration folder. if thats the case. You should move only the files you want, instead of the whole directory. stow should manage the rest.

But of course, I had to get a Raspberry Pi, and I just cannot stop being distracted by it. During the first couple of days I decided to try and move my website to it, self host a few things and try some new programs.

Sadly, despite my best efforts, I was unable to open the necessary ports to the world, so I wont be able to self host at the moment. Thankfully, it looks like the network in the area we live will be updated to fiber. We will get some new modems and maybe the software and configuration allow me to have it working before this year ends.

Setting up a pi-hole

After failing to use my Pi as a web server, I decided to at least use it as an local ad blocker, so everyone at my house can enjoy an ad-free experience. To do this easily, I used a software known as pi-hole.

Setting it up was extremely simple, I only had to run a simple script and then configure my router to use my Raspi as its main DNS. I added a few more host lists, blocked some specific domains, set up dark mode for the web UI, and voilá!

It has worked quite well for me and my family, from time to time an ad will appear, but I just had to add it to the blacklist and say I won’t see it again!

I have to use this device for a a University class, but I will only have to access it via ssh, since we’ll probably do code for it and I already know how to live in VIM and of course, the terminal. I will love to teach my classmates a little bit about how Linux works thanks to this class, the teacher is a bit too strict tho, and does not like interruptions, so I am going to try and behave instead of correcting him everytime he pronounces commands in a weird way…

This has been day 53 of #100DaysToOffload

So, social media has been quite useful for humanity, however, it has also become a big problem among people of all ages and demographics. Personally, I have been affected by it differently as I grow up and develop my thoughts and lifestyle.

The first contact I had with social media, was MSN Live Messenger, I used to talk to people I knew, play online games and of course, ping them constantly until I had an answer from them!

But I was just a little kid, and I only talked to family or friends from school. I was still inside this little bubble where I had no real idea of how big the internet could be. I also had a Club Penguin, but despite being in a multiplayer environment, the social aspect of it flew over my head at the time.

It was not until middle school, that I got an android device, I got Whatsapp, and got engaged into looking for apps and customization. At one point, I created a Facebook account. I was not allowed to have one, and I felt incredibly guilty the moment I did it, so I actually did not use it for years.

However, after I got permission to use it, I ended up pretty addicted to it, I joined different groups and follow random pages that were popular or that I heard from classmates at school. Some of them were fine, others were a little bit to edgy, and I was constantly distracted by memes and mostly useless posts. As I grew up, I started to delete old groups and follow more meaningful topics for me. And of course, due to all of this, I was feeding Facebook with personal data and ad revenue.

At some point I realized how problematic this was for my life. I managed to stay with good grades and keep up with real life shenanigans. But I still felt attracted to my phone and to Facebook.

I would like to say I stopped using Facebook because I started to use my phone and social media less. But no, looking back, the reason I did, was because I started to learn English, and I joined Reddit. I had heard of it for a long time, and it was actually pretty amazing. I started to see how most of the memes I saw in Facebook where born there, I got interested by the sense of anonymity and separation. How nobody cares about you, but the content being shared in the subreddits.

I joined a few communities related to my interests, Doctor Who, Origami, but I also joined a bunch of places full of toxicity and gossip. Yeah it was nice to see how news and memes came out here first, seeing how Youtubers got ideas for their videos and stuff like that. But at the same time, I started to be surrounded by politics, debates, conspiracies and a lot of weird things that I was not really interested in seeing, and yet, there I was. I am probably going to clean up my subreddit list one of these days, or just start from scratch with a new account. It is kinda amazing how powerful reddit’s Karma can be, I have a decent amount, and only because of that I have doubts about getting rid of my account, even though it has no real value.

At some point I also had a Twitter account, but I successfully deleted it. I have to say I only had it to participate in Giveaways of app codes and such, and I actually won a couple times, but well.

Anyways, after I grew aware of how most of social media disrespects my privacy, I ended up looking for alternatives, and I found Mastodon, which a social media app similar to Twitter, which can be self-hosted, so all of your data stays with you. Or you can join instances hosted by people you are willing to trust. The point is, there is no single centralized server where everything you do is tracked. At first, I decided to join a bunch of instances, since I did not know how federation actually worked back then. I have found some nice people, and I have been inspired to do things to improve my life, like making this website! Thanks to it, I have a way to share my thoughts without having unwanted eyes all over my data. Of course, anyone could scrap this and make some profile to identify me, but well, I am saying this willingly, without having to abide to any terms of service. Even if Netlify or GitHub, where this is site is hosted, have anything against me, I can at least keep all of my information locally and host it somewhere else.

Detox Day Log

Anyways, the original reasoning I made this post was to share what I was going to do during this day. Besides writing this blog, I have spent quite some time contributing some icons to the Arcticons Icon pack, while listening to podcasts on YouTube and AntennaPod.

Being honest, I opened Mastodon for about 4 minutes until I remembered which day it was, and I also opened Reddit for 8 minutes because I forgot again. But other than that, I have avoided social media, enabled Do not disturb, deleted some apps. I even decided to leave Nova Launcher, which has been my choice for years, and tried out Olauncher once again! I hid all of my those distracting app icons and ended up with a pretty sick looking setup, if I do say so myself.

After some though, I’ve also requested my data from Reddit. There is no way to export my data from the usual settings menu, but it can requested via this link. I’ve decided to finally delete my account. Having a history and social media points is not that important, and some peace of mind should be quite good.

After listening to the latest episode of Darknet Diaries, which is about the problems someone got because of having a good Instagram username. The fact that an account can be that valuable is mind-blowing! Thankfully none of the usernames I’ve used are worthy enough for someone to harass me because of them.

Finishing thoughts

So, I started writing all of this yesterday, during Detox Day, and this final words are done a day after. I hope this movement takes off, in my case, I did not found a lot of movement in my country and language, although that might be because Facebook and other common social media I don’t use are more common here. Anyways, I found myself having a decent time, but I have to admit I spend quite a lot of it on YouTube, but it was not that bad, since I mostly use it as background sound and, as previously stated, to listen to a few podcasts and long videos that are only available there.

I deleted my Reddit account, funnily enough, the exported data only occupies a couple megabytes, since it does not include the images and videos, just csv files and hyperlinks. I think I will keep most of the posts and comments there since they don’t contain any compromising information. This is mostly about getting rid of social media and less about gaining privacy, although it is a nice plus. I’ve also exported my Instagram data, and I might delete it sometime soon.

The journey has been difficult, but I am happy with my progress. This has been day 51 of #100DaysToOffload

In my previous blog, I talked about what I did during social media detox day, and I mentioned how most of the things I did were done while also listening to Podcasts. In a matter of months I discovered some new shows with a bunch of episodes to listen to. And I decided to share some of those here!

Suspense, Crime and mistery

So yeah, most of the stuff I listen too is quite focused on these topics, but I only listen to these at nights right before going to sleep. I think I might have some problems in my head…

Unexplained

I started listening to this just a few weeks after my previous post. It is simply amazing, as the name implies, the podcast shares stories and events that don’t seem to have a logical explanation, from haunted houses to UFO’s, the voice and narration by Richard MacLean Smith is simply incredibly. The only thing I dislike about it is the ads located in the middle of the show that manage to break the atmosphere quite heavily. Maybe if he kept the creepy background music and tone, as well as a nice segway it would be a lot more acceptable. Nonetheless, I’ve listened to 63 hours of this show, and it must be for a good reason!

Website RSS Link

Already Gone

This true crime podcast is amazing, a solo, female host with a super smooth voice describing events in a great manner and a good structure, While the voice got me hooked, the quality of each episode kept me going. I had listened to a lot of Crime Junkie and I started to get tired of the same structure of making questions and short “huh’s?” and that deal, is good to have simple narrations without filler. The episodes are also quite shorter, around 40 minutes, but you’ll have to skip a couple ads in the middle of each episode.

Website RSS Link

The Video Palace

At first, I though I would not like this show, but the short and concise episodes, along with the great voice acting made me stay. This is a single story about a young couple who decides to investigate a mistery after watching a VHS tape with an unknown origin, it is really short, with only 10 or so episodes, and the story is worth it, I hope there another season gets made.

Website RSS Link

The Phenomenon

This one is amazing, this audio drama tells the story of how almost all of humanity extinguished just by looking up, and how the try to find a way to stay alive. The mistery is strong on this one, each episode follows the events of different survivors that interconnect in a bigger story. I don’t wanna spoil it, so all I can say is this. Do not look outside, do not look at the sky, do not make noise.

Website RSS Link

The Magnus Archives

I just started listening to this, it shares multiple fiction stories of horror and suspense. The ads don’t interrupt at all, since they are located at the beginning or end of each episode, it seems to have some interconnection but each story can be enjoyed separately. Sometimes the audio is a bit bad but that only adds to the experience of low quality recordings being archived, as the title implies. Another great thing about this podcast is that it is licensed under a Creative Commons license, which is actually really cool!

Website RSS Link

Gaming, tech and Linux

If you are not a fan of being unable to sleep (Although I actually listen to all of the above while in bed), you might enjoy these other lighter, more tech focused podcasts. I listen to these across the day, while cleaning my room or doing the dishes and stuff like that.

Retro Game Time Machine

As the name implies, this is a small podcast where two friends travel back in time and talk about their experiences playing an old videogame, from Super Mario Kart to Halo: Combat Evolved. This show is quite enjoyable, the audio quality is great and it also starts with current news to stay up to date with the gaming world. I wish it went deeper into the significance and importance of the games being played, since a few times it feels a bit rushed. Overall it is pretty good!

Website RSS Link

Waveform

This is the podcast hosted by Marques Brownlee, tech talk at its best with some nice sections, the audio quality is spectacular, it is not too focused on software, but it is still a nice addition to have. The episodes are less than an hour most of the time too, and its easy to listen to at 2x speed. Not my favorite, but is quite enjoyable and has a great video format if you care about that.

No Website RSS Link

Command Line Heroes

This podcast became an instant favorite, different stories narrating the creation of programming language, the evolution of open source and technologies used all around us today, the host has a great personality and there is many interviews with experts of their field. This means that some sections have lower quality audio, which might be a bit annoying, but I have learned a lot from this podcast. Its also short and sweet, around 30 minutes per episode, and quite easy to listen at 2x.

Website RSS Link

Into the Aether

This is another gaming variety podcast, it is somewhat similar to RGTM, but quite more general and also with better quality audio. It has no significant structure and its quite rambly, but that’s what I like about this podcast so much. You can get started with any episode and binge it all the way, this one is a bit harder to listen to quickly because the hosts have a faster pace, but it is still really enjoyable.

Website RSS Link

Destination Linux

I had a bit of an adversion against most of Linux focused podcasts, I felt that they would talk about the same things over and over, and I was already quite repetitive with the Linux content I watch on video format. But DL proved me wrong! There are multiple hosts who talk about their Linux Journey week after week, and they have formed quite a big community, a network of fans and Linux enthusiasts, the podcast is quite cozy and the audio quality is fantastic, I find the intro music super cringe, but its tolerable enough. I really recommend this one if you are a fan of Linux and FOSS.

Website RSS Link

The WAN Show

You can think whatever you want about Linus Media Group, but this podcast is just great. Listening to the hot takes of Linus against whatever dumb thing a company does each week is super fun, and these guys really know how to make ad segways seamless, I don’t even like the idea of skipping them because of how integrated they are with inside jokes and charisma. Luke feels like an audience mirror most of the time eager to see Linus rant about whatever is going on. It is a great show and I absolutely love it.

Website RSS Link

Wrapping up

I have quite a list of new podcasts compared to the last time I talked about the topic. I have started to enjoy this format a lot more, right now I am listening to DL while writing all of this, I gotta admit its not the best podcast to listen to while writing, but I can deal with it.

If you have not given podcasts a chance, I recommend you to just embrace them. You can take a look at my previous blog about it if you’d like to read some more of my suggestions, I did not went into a lot of detail there, but I think that I got a bit repetitive here, but I write whatever I want!

This has been day 52 of #100DaysToOffload

For some reason I have been offline from some communities I used to visit more frequently, when it comes to game development or web design. If I do it, I only say hi, exchange a couple messages and then leave and go do something else.

I also started to wake up a little later. I am not really that lazy, I wake up at 7 am or 8 at most, but thats quite a difference from how I used to wake up at 5:30 am a few months ago. I think that I just wanted to completely rest and start over with my routines. Almost like how I used to factory reset my phone every now and then. I hope next semester I manage to stay on a good schedule, avoid procrastination and I keep giving proper attention to my classes, instead of losing time on the web.

All of this was kinda normal, I have been through similar phases before, however, something else happened.

I lost two dogs in a matter of days, the first one was a puppy we adopted, but we found out she had a contagious disease and was starting to suffer convultions and vomit, and we had to put her to rest. Her name was Navi, like the fairy from Ocarina of Time, only a couple months old. She was pretty playful and it never really looked that sick most of the time, I did not really managed to train her or built a strong attachment to her, but its still sad to think she is not here now.

The second dog is Chicharito (Little Pea in English, which sounds kinda fun). He is a little Chihuahua, around 9 years old, and he got scared during a storm while he was in our front yard, where we usually let him go from time to time, altough he stays inside for most of the time. This happened a day later after Navi died, which made it even worse for us.

I was busy getting ready for going out with some friends, and I forgot he was not in, and when I realized, I took an umbrella and went out to look for him. The whole family started looking for him, and we actually got stuck outside because nobody took the keys. I had to get myself dirty climbing to the roof and then jumping to a patio behind our house, where the backdoor was still open.

Back to the search for the dog. Some kids were looking for him too, they told me that my dog was inside their house looking for shelter, but runned away after a while. We looked for him a couple hours with no luck.

We placed some posters in the streets and the colony’s Whatsapp group. I walked at least an couple hours every day looking for him, many times a day. One night I had difficulty to sleep, I got really sentimental thinking about how scared he was and how lost he must be. I am not really the expressive even in times like this, I find it kinda ridiculous to be losing my mind when I could be looking for him. But well, this happened during the night, so it gets a pass.

In the morning of the next day I received a phone call, a neighbour saw him in front of his house, me and my dad went running there, three blocks from our place. Sadly, we were unable to locate him, and I started to lose hope.

Thankfully, after just two days. That same neighbour called again. I was already in my bed about to sleep, and my sisters asked me if I knew where our parents where. I woke up from bed and waited for them, since I had a good feeling about this. Minutes later, they returned, and, as I thought, they bringed Chicharito back!, it looks like he was inside the neighbourg’s house hidden under a chair. I got really happy, and slept pretty nicely that night.

I think this is not the most exciting story ever, but well, its part of life. This is day 50 of #100DaysToOffload

Last week, a some family friends had to go out of the city for medical reasons, they have a little chicken farm and a couple of pretty active dogs, and they asked me to take care of them all for a couple days.

Both of the dogs are really great trained so it was pretty easy to take care of them, they let me know when they need to go outside and “fulfill their needs”, they eat in order and they even know their schedule when I had to give them treats or take them for a while. All I had to do was be there and pay attention when they stared at me for a while xD.

One of the dogs is a little puppy, and she liked to bite stuff, but she had a couple of chewing toys, and it never represented a big problem. Even when sleeping, all I had to do was leave the bathroom door open, and they would go there if they needed to.

Now, our friends got some chickens too, they actually sell eggs, and they are pretty great, since they feed them with a good mix of corn and other natural seeds. I picked up more than a dozen eggs during the days I was there. It was quite an interesting experience.

I also had to cook for myself. Having parents who cook is quite epic, it is one of the things I enjoy about my culture, families still gather around almost daily to eat together, at least once a day in my case. But of course, this time I was alone, although there were some goodies waiting for me there, like some homemade chocolate cookies and stuff.

In the end it was quite a nice experience, I actually got a nice amount of time to be by myself and think, which is always a good thing, I did not even felt the need to write a post or anything until today, a couple days later.

The last day when the house owners arrived we all ate some burguers together.

A Black Widow mini-Review, finally going to a movie theater

While I was still taking care of our friends house, I got a message from the family group, asking me when will I be done. Turns out that they wanted to go to the movies, for the first time since the pandemic started. We ended up unable to do so that day, but we were all free tomorrow, so we all got ready to got right after lunch (and doing the dishes).

The only movie we decided to watch was Black Widow. It was quite an interesting movie, while not a masterpiece, I still had a great time watching it and we even got some popcorn, which is quite a privilege for us in our economical situation. If you don’t wanna be spoiled, just stop reading already, because that’s the rest of this post.

I kinda really liked Yelena’s personality, almost like a female spiderman who happens to be used to kill people. She is basically being set up as the next Black Widow, and I am OK with that.

I kinda not liked that the OG Natasha Romanoff got carried into all of this in a not so natural way. Also she got into a lot of situations that should not be survivable by a normal human being, of course she also fought with aliens, so its fair enough.

Honestly, most of the protagonist companions were pretty good, compared to other movies where they have no depth at all. The Red Guardian got pretty mistreated tho, I wish we could have seen a more serious side of him without being ridiculed.

I am sorry, but nowadays most people are saying to men to share their feelings and to not hide their emotions, that it is OK to cry and stuff like that. Yet, the Red Guardian gets the role of a caring but dumb father who is treated like a clown every time he opens up their feelings towards his family. Actually, most men in the movie are ridiculed one way or another. Except for the one who gets Romanoff a place to hide.

Lets not talk about Taskmaster, seriously, I am not qualified for that since I was unaware of his story on the comics, or in this case, her.

The final villain is quite interesting, but of course they had to protect him with some incredibly dumb pheromone shield because he is just a regular guy who happened to create an army of Black Widows under his control. And of course that such protection can be broken, by actually breaking your nose.

The last grand action scene is quite epic, not gonna lie, although a huge incredibly impossible mess, but that’s how it is in the Marvel universe, and I am here for it!

When it comes to political stuff, I am a bit annoyed by movies that follow a feminist agenda just for the sake of it, but I would say this movie is not one of those, and its approach is better than stuff like Captain Marvel or Charlie’s Angles, which is a good thing.

Although the overall package is kinda clumsy. Yeah I will give it a 6/10, would not watch again unless I am on a Marvel movie marathon, since I think watching it in chronological order would feel better.

It was a good bit of family time outside of our home. Also, its worth mentioning that, most of my “complaints” did not come up while watching the movie, I really don’t mind to just enjoy the action and the popcorn most of the time, and I did so successfully in this case, which means the movie is pretty goot to me. Also, the tickets here cost the equivalent of 3 US dollars, so that’s epic, I’ve heard that going to the movies in the US is quite expensive.

Anyways, this has been day 49 of #100DaysToOffload

If you have visited my tilde website (or if you are in it right now), you will notice how simple the site looks, and I decided to finally translate that to my main website.

I have enjoyed Simple.css a lot, I really like it, and I did everything in my power to customize my site using it as a base, after all, the tutorial I followed to get started on this site recommended it, since both are made by Kev after all. But as time went by, I started to develop my own ideas, create my own little pieces and I finally decided to scrap it all and just go for something more minimal and decluttered.

I still kept some things, like the navigation var on top, which is fairly similar to the old one, as well as readapted some parts like my projects section or my comments.

I guess I have some more changes to do, but I like it so far and I am pretty happy with it. I have felt quite inspired to do a bunch of changes, buying some vps and a domain that is not one of the free ones, but maybe its just the moment and tomorrow all of this will only be a memory.

Anyways, I saved a screenshot of the old site just to keep it alive somehow, Simple.css is awesome and if you wanna get started on your own site, check it our here!

This is day 48 of #100DaysToOffload, RIP old stylesheet, you will live as a comment in my html website source.

The terminal is a place that I have enjoyed for months now, and I really like being on it. But there were a lot of things that I didn’t really do on a terminal, simply because I was already used to other ways. Like downloading files, or transferring it from a computer to my phone.

Since I joined a tilde, a public UNIX server that is accessed via ssh, I had to learn a few more things, or do them in different ways.

Getting familiar with ssh

I had been using ssh with my website’s git repo for a while now, in fact, I have my local repos all connected to GitHub via ssh, and I had had no problems with it. However, when I created my tilde account, I got access to tildegit.org, and I decided to give it a try!

Tildegit is a Gitea instance, and its pretty good. It allows me to export my GH repos with ease (at least the public ones), and I am considering to make it my primary Git service. But right now, I would like to keep both. But how am I supposed to do so? There is a “This repo is a mirror” checkmark, but I decided to make the sync from my local repo.

I read this gist guide and set up my git to push to both services, I also learned about the ssh config file, from this blog by Drew, so I setup my ssh config for something like this:

Host cafe
    Hostname tilde.cafe
    User chrono
    Identityfile ~/.ssh/cafe
    PubkeyAuthentication yes

Host tildegit
    Hostname tildegit.org
    Identityfile ~/.ssh/tildegit
    User git
    PubkeyAuthentication yes

Host github
    Hostname github.com
    Identityfile ~/.ssh/id_ed25519
    User git
    PubkeyAuthentication yes

So, as far as I knew, everything should have worked, except it didn’t, the Tildegit ssh connection did not work. I could go on and on, but the trick was simple.

Running ssh -vT git@tildegit.org did not work, that command does some tests to try and login to the server, but its output was

git@tildegit.org: Permission denied (publickey).

Why wasn’t it picking up my tildegit key? I don’t know, but my repo’s git config had this:

# repo/.git/config
...
[remote "origin"]
    url = git@github.com:joelchrono12/joelchrono12.ml.git
    fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*
    pushurl = git@tildegit.org:chrono/joelchrono12.ml.git
    pushurl = git@github.com:joelchrono12/joelchrono12.ml.git
...

So I tried something. My ~/ssh/config file names the Host as tildegit and nothing else. So I decided to run ssh -vT tildegit, and after typing my passphrase autotyping my passphrase with rofi-pass, this was the output.

Hi there, chrono! You've successfully authenticated with the key named tilde.cafe, but Gitea does not provide shell access.

And so, after countless useless commits and failed pushes, I got it, I just changed the pushurl to tildegit:username/repo and it all worked out fine! I did the same for GH.

Using ssh-agent

Its worth noting that all this time, I knew I could use the ssh-agent, but I didn’t really feel like it. I don’t think its bad, but for some reason it does not autostart on my system and while it would probably be easy to set it up, I use pass to store my passwords, and I decided to just use that and autotype it every time.

Some script fixing

Now, in my previous blog I mentioned that I started using Blop to produce a simple, more minimal mirror of this website on my tilde here. However, the script uses sed to change a bunch of stuff, and after reading it, I found a few things I could apply to my current rofi scripts, so I renewed it and made it better, I also removed some blank spaces that were getting added and caused some weird behavior, like having my HTML end with a dash like this-file-.html and other things.

Now it looks like this!

#! /bin/bash
path=/home/joelchrono12/git/joelchrono12.ml/_posts/
title=$(rofi -l 0 -width 50 -p "Title:" -dmenu)
filen=$(echo $title | tr " ,.!" "-"| awk '{print tolower($0)}')
if [ -z $title ]; then
    exit
fi
today=$(date +"%Y-%m-%d")
filename=($today-$filen)
description=$(rofi -l 0 -width 60 -height 20 -p "Description:" -dmenu)
tags=$(rofi -l 0 -width 45 -p "Tags:" -dmenu)
num=0
while [ $num = 0 ]; do
    choice=$(echo -e "Edit file
Edit title
Edit description
Edit tags
Cancel" | rofi -width 15 -l 5-p "Now?:" -dmenu)

    if [[ $choice = "Edit file" ]]; then
    touch $path/$filename.md
    echo -e "---
title: $title
header: $title
description: $description
tags: $tags
permalink: /blog/$filen/
layout: post
date: $today $(date +"%T") -0500
">> $path/$filename.md
        num=1
        alacritty -e nvim $path/$filename.md & disown
        #cp $path/$filename.md ~/Documents
    elif [[ $choice = "Edit title" ]]; then
        title=$(rofi -l 0 -width 50 -p "Title:" -dmenu)
    elif [[ $choice = "Edit description" ]]; then
        description=$(rofi -l 0 -width 60 -height 20 -p "Description:" -dmenu)
    elif [[ $choice = "Edit tags" ]]; then
        tags=$(rofi -l 0 -width 45 -p "Tags:" -dmenu)
    else
        num=1
    fi
done

The end

Remember all of the metadata is adapted to work with Jekyll, but it is easy to edit the script for whatever you need. I am using sed and tr to remove commas and dots from the filename, and to add dashes instead of spaces, it will duplicate some dashes sometimes, but that’s fine. In the end I managed to learn a bit more about how computers work and stuff like that.

Also, I am almost done with school, I did a couple more icons for the Arcticons icon pack, and I should be cleaning up my room today, I have visits soon and its quite a mess!

This is day 47 of #100DaysToOffload

I have been playing around with blop, a static site generator written in bash that uses pandoc, sed and other simple utilities to generate a blog. I have decided to give it a chance in a new site I got because I joined a tilde pubnix.

What even is a pubnix or a tilde you might ask? Well, its kinda like a shared computer where you can log into using SSH. There are a lot of communities like that and you can checkout some of them by visiting the Tildeverse website.

Tildeverse Main Page

I decided to join to tilde.cafe. I got accepted a few days after I made my request, and it has been a great experience so far.

Coming back to the mistake I mentioned before, neovim offers some neat syntax highlighting by default, and I enjoy to have it not only for Markdown but most other programming and markup languages that I use every now and then.

But Markdown was not working somehow, and I did not know why, it was kinda working, but headers were showing up as if they were comments, with a gray coloring since I use the Nord color scheme, which made them harder to read.

But I just thought I had some weird plugin and I never really tried to fix it, since the rest of things worked as intended for the most part.

It was not until I used blop to with my current posts that I noticed that most of them were not working. There is some simple templating, and only the header and footer showed up without any of the content. I spent a lot of time messing around with the metadata on top of it, which is kinda different from Jekyll. Like this:

author: Me
title: Title
summary: A summary
date: YY-MM-DD HH:MM

But there is something that is not noticeable at all, an extra space at the end of the last dash, which came from my good old rofi script, that has a line like this:

echo -e "# Previous metadata ...  
--- ">> $path/$filename.md

And as you can see, that little space in the end was messing it all up. The sed command used in the bash script was not finding the last "---" and it just went through the whole blog. After removing all of those spaces, everything started to work as intended, and now I have a new website, which is a mirror of this one, using my tilde.cafe domain, and you can visit it here!

My new tilde.cafe website

I am actually quite happy of how much icons I managed to do during the days before my previous blog, since the following days after that were quite tiresome. I wonder if spending that time playing around on Inkscape affected the amount of work I got after, but there was no hurry at the time, and while there was work and projects I could have done instead, in the end there would have been no difference.

One of the assignments I got was from a teacher who is a bit of a Linux evangelist. He asked us to install a Linux distro and showcase how it works, as well as how to install a program on it. It was just an optional thing that would only score a few more points to the final grades, but since I was already using Linux, I couldn’t help but going the extra mile

Switching to EndeavourOS

Obviously, I already knew how to do all of the requirements, and the teacher said we could do it on a Virtual Machine if we wanted. However I decided to take the opportunity and switch my distro once again.

I was also having a few caveats with Void, there were some random graphical glitches, almost as if the display connector was not working anymore, sometimes the screen became just glitchy lines and I had to close my current window or switch workspace in my window manager (so it was not a hardware issue, and it has not happened since I switched).

Another “problem” was that I just could not figure out how to make cups work with my printer and stuff. In the end I realized that I was just dumb and managed to make it work, but I was already on EndeavourOS, and as I plus I managed to use the AUR to get scanning working too!

I ended up choosing EndeavourOS mostly because I wanted to experience Arch without the hassle of installing it. In the end I was quite happy, because Endeavor is almost as light as Void, it only had around 800 packages installed, which is quite less than I thought compared with the ISO’s weight.

The installation had no problems, but the online installer took a lot of time to finish up since my internet connection is not that great.

Overall I am pretty happy with how it turned out and despite a few hiccups getting Jekyll running again, I managed to make it all work and it has been wonderful.

Delivering final projects

So, somehow, I managed to go overkill on all of my projects despite my severe lack of confidence on the knowledge I have acquired during this semester. I really struggled with most of the subjects and professors. I felt like most of them were lackluster in the content given each class, or maybe its just me not paying enough attention in class.

I am not really that sure of whats the best way to learn for me. I thought I would like to have online classes this time, that my teachers would learn how to manage Google Classroom, how to setup their meetings on Google Calendar, or something like that. Instead, we had to wait for their message sharing a photo taken from their phone showing the Google Meet link.

Anyways, the point is, I had to deliver two pretty big projects, one of them consists on simulating the production process of something, in my case,chose Yogurt. The second one was about the text adventure game I had to do for my Discrete Math class.

I felt quite dissapointed by having to do the first project as a simulation only. I learned about LabVIEW, a proprietary software that uses a graphical programming language known as G We learned a bit about DAQ cards, PLC’s and other protocols related to human-machine interfaces. But in the end, I only used basic algebra, booleans, event structures and for loops to “simulate” the whole process, and I didn’t know if I should be proud or sad, because it looks like my block diagram was the most complex one in the class.

I felt like I should have learned more, that I should have actually connected some PLC to my computer or setup a server somewhere. I have learned more about computers and communication protocols just by switching to Linux and setting up a blog!

Now, the second project was a bit more exciting for me. I had to make a text adventure game for my Discrete Math class. I wanted to go with full force and use Godot Engine as my working environment. I followed a tutorial series to understand the basics, but since at this moment it’s still incomplete, I had to keep going by myself, I am used to that so that was no big deal.

Most of my companions had games based on predefined choices and a small story to tell. That is alright, but I wanted to make stuff like command processing and an actual room layout where you can move, pick stuff up and unlock pathways.

I managed to get it all working just in time, and you can get the source code and binaries here. The game is in Spanish and its also quite short. But let me know what do you think of it, if you manage to complete it. I wanted to have some kinda story but I just managed to do simple descriptions and hints.

The only thing I am a bit upset about is everyone has their python and C++ binaries which are around 200kb and my files are around 40mb, but well, that’s how Godot works, and I have a full graphical interface there too.

Finishing up

After all, I managed to get this two big projects. I will talk more later about the second one, since I am quite happy and I have a lot to tell about it.

This was quite a long post, and I didn’t expect to write this much, so I am gonna call it here. I still have a lot of work to do for other final projects, but they have to be delivered next week, so I still have some time. Endeavor is awesome, my projects were great and I am cant wait to finish this semester.

This has been day 45 of #100DaystoOffload

This means that, outside of pixel art, I was never really that interested in graphical design outside of doing stuff for my videogames. But the past couple of days might be changing my views on it, and I am not sure of what to do now.

You see, I first learned about Inkscape when I got interested in the process of designing origami diagrams; Jo Nakashima, one of the biggest origami YouTube channels at the time, made a whole playlist of origami diagramming, I saw a few minutes of it, and was really interested in the process, but I didn’t understand English yet, and I also believed that Inkscape was for Mac or something dumb like that. The point is, that was the first time I heard about the program.

As time went by, I started blogging and I was reintroduced to the concept of .svg files and vector based graphics, I messed around with them when I did a blog redesign and I also added some nice icons that served as links to get in touch with me. However, all of the interaction I had with these files was using CSS, Neovim and some HTML. I actually did one icon using GIMP, I got the path, simplified it with SVGOMG and called it a day, didn’t touch Inkscape at all.

So, this week I downloaded the program and saw a couple tutorials online, and I decided to bring to life some icons that were not available in the Arcticons icon pack which is an open source project where you can submit your own designs, and since the whole thing is made out of lines, I figured it would be a nice way to get started with some actual work. I told myself I would do a couple icons just to dip my toes in the water.

I had no idea what I had gotten myself into.

The Aftermath

It has been 3 days, and I have already done 30+ icons for different applications, some of which I use, some that were requested. The last update had 33 new icons added from different contributors, the next update will have more icons provided by me, so that’s a thing.

It has been super fun, and pretty crazy, but somehow I managed to get myself into another hobby and keep working decently as a son and a University student, I even did a blog in the middle of everything. So yeah, my whole workflow might tumble as soon as a new crazy school assignment arrives, but so far, no problem, I actually felt pretty productive yesterday during class, since I didn’t open Inkscape during the whole thing!

Here are some of the icons I’ve done so far, you wont see all of them in the next release because a few were duplicates that had the wrong metadata, if you feel like Inkscape is too scary or complicated, you should give it a chance, it is not as complicated as you think, and contributing some icons to Frost or Arcticons is always welcome. I will probably redo all of my icons at the bottom section of my website soon enough.

This has been day 44 of #100DaystoOffload

There is a thing that has existed for a while already, open standards and protocols, basically, ways for devices to stay communicate with each other, so every device understands whats going on. The internet, HTTP, or USB are examples of these, and companies and programmers make sure a USB cable can communicate with a computer once plugged.

We all know about how Apple tends to add “new” features that already existed on Android and on separate programs, Marques recognized that , but then he proceeds to say

…It seems like everytime the iPhone gets new features, they’ve been somewhere in some Android phone before. So why? Its not like Apple is choosing to be later all the time There’s good reasons for it…

One of the arguments he brings up is the focus on the Ecosystem, which isn’t that eco-friendly to be honest. Of course Apple wants their software to work seamlessly with each other, since that way people will use it all even if they only like certain parts of it, so that’s why they take so long to come up with this stuff.

I don’t think so. Why would it be harder to come up with these features that can only be understood by so few devices using operative systems specifically made for them? Where is the difficulty? I am not trying to undermine the complexity of Apple’s software, I am just saying that things like Nearby Share work regardless of the device as long as it runs Android (with Google Services), and the feature is coming to Chromium browsers too!

Apple is not innovating, they are just reinventing the wheel; but limiting it to roll only under their own terms.

Later, the video talks about some features such as Focus mode, which enables different profiles that you set up across all your devices as long as they are Apple’s. And of course, the elephant in the room, “Universal Control”. Why is such a “universal” feature, limited to their ecosystem? Well, I don’t really care, in the end is their stuff and its up to them, but I have been wondering, why do tools like this one are baked into the OS? I think the answer is pretty simple, because they limited themselves.

Think about it, couldn’t a lot of the features here be decently implemented just by installing an app and a desktop client? I know it would probably be slower than something below userspace. But why do we actually need this to be so integrated, if such integration means that its going to be so difficult to port over to something that isn’t Apple?

For some reason, people is eager to get these features, to get an ecosystem where everything is available out of the box, and while I understand the appeal, I am not really into it, I would like my system to be light and fast, and of course, Apple manages to achieve a smooth feel thanks to how cherry-picked their hardware is.

Honestly this is probably being more of a rant rather than a proper argument, a workflow like Apple’s might be great for some people, I just don’t think they should appropriate everything they do as if it was unique.

I stopped halfway because I felt like doing some icons with Inkscape and I kinda lost my own train of thought in some places, my apologies.

This has been day 43 of #100DaystoOffload

I had felt a bit bored of my current websites design, it was fun to mess around with svg’s and I still have some in the “Get in touch” section at the bottom of my website.

So I wanted to get rid of that, but I also wanted something that I noticed in a few sites, where the section you are visiting is being highlighted in a different way, compared to rest of sections.

However, for some reason, most tutorials using jekyll had some really extensive code that I was unable to figure out. So I decided to try stuff out and came up with my own solution.

Despite the solutions online didn’t work right away, I still got some inspiration from them, so I will leave a footnote to them if you wanna check them out. ^{1 2}

So this is my current navigation bar, I decided to add my recent profile picture, and the navbar is closer to the title, you can also see that my sections are all the same color.

In Jekyll, if you followed Kev’s tutorial about how to make a blog, you might already have the file ~/_data/navigation.yml, with a structure similar to this:

- name: Blog
  link: /blog/
- name: About
  link: /about/
- name: Contact
  link: /contact/
- name: Uses
  link: /uses/
- name: Tags
  link: /tags/

If that is the case, you only have to change your file in ~/_include/navigation.html To have the following contents: {% raw %}

<nav>
    {% for item in site.data.navigation %}
        {% if item.link == page.url %}
        <a class="nav-current" href="{{ item.link }}">{{ item.name }}</a>
        {% elsif page.url != item.link %}
        <a href="{{ item.link }}">{{ item.name }}</a>
        {% endif %}
    {% endfor %}
</nav>

{% endraw %}

The key of all of this is the class nav-current, which can be used to customize the CSS of your element in any way you prefer. In my case, the webiste ended up looking like this:

I decided to simplify the design, get rid of the svg separators and change the color of the site’s title, as well as the obvious changes to the nav items.

Not every webiste will have the same styling as mine, so I don’t think sharing exactly how to configure each CSS property is necessary, but at least you now know how to separate your current section from the rest usilng Jekyll.

It is worth noting that if you are looking for a minimal website with minimal CSS, you could just add the style attribute to the code included in navigation.html which would make it so you dont need to configure a separate CSS file.

This is day 42 of #100DaystoOffload

You’ll see, I am not in a position where I can acquire a lot of games and spend money on consoles or even a decent computer, so, when a friend gifted a PSP to me on my birthday back in 2012. I was really, really happy. It was my second console, since I already had a Gameboy Advance SP where I only had a couple decent games, and a pretty low chance of getting more.

One PSP game that affected me quite a lot was Monster Hunter Freedom Unite. I played it for hundreds of hours, and I really enjoyed it. However, my joystick stopped working properly, and I was unable to play it on my PSP. That unfortunate event, opened the way to a world of older games and emulators that didn’t required an analog stick, a topic that I will explore in later blogs.

Back to today’s topic, I discovered that I could not only play Monster Hunter again, thanks to PPSSPP, but also enjoy hunting online for the first time, thanks to a platform known as Evolve HQ. This tool allowed the creation of parties and chatrooms where I could interact with other hunters and help each other out. All I had to do was start my copy of the game using the PPSSPP emulator and configure the networking settings to the one provided by Evolve, visible in the GUI. Back then I was playing on Windows using a cheap Xbox-styled controller.

However, by the end of 2018, Evolve HQ closed its servers (archive), and I stopped playing for a while. Before that, I was already looking for different ways to play, and I found out about the HunsterVerse, a P2P (player 2 player) network that is used to play different PSP games online, mainly the Monster Hunter franchise. So after Evolve HQ died, I moved there for a few weeks until, for school reasons, I had to leave the game again, with a few hunts sparsed here and there.

Until now.

During the whole pandemic, it never once crossed my head the idea to spent some time playing there. I wouldn’t want it any other way though, since I learned a lot about other things such as Linux and Game development, which one could argue are better ways to spend the time instead of infinitely grinding trying to get the part I need to complete my armor set.

Anyways, I had been cleaning up my emails the last couple days, and while doing that I found the email I received when signing up for the HunsterVerse, it contained my OpenVPN profile, which is the tool used by the HunsterVerse network. And I told myself “Why not give it a try?”, I installed OpenVPN from F-Droid, imported the file and copy pasted my game and savedata to my android device, and voila!, back at it again!

Just kidding, after 2017, the profile certificate had to be fixed with some new changes, and I had downloaded the previous one, so I checked my email again and found a more recent email that contained the new configuration, since I had asked for it back in 2019 for some quick hunts I did that year.

I downloaded the file, forwarded the emails to a more email address and got to play! I just re-installed OpenVPN (The F-Droid version didn’t work for some reason, so Play Store had to be open) and joined a quick match with my small account, unaware of the new enemy I had to face.

I was barely able to move, I was so used to playing using my controller, that using touch controls on my phone was painful. I am aware that some players deal with that and have set their own layouts and custom buttons.

Despite that, I decided to join a room and set up a quick low ranked mission. I didn’t even had to ask, and a group of hunters joined and after getting ready, we parted to hunt a Velocidrome, one of the easiest monsters in the game.

The camera controls have always been known for needing a “claw” grip that would kill your hand over time. I was pretty used to it, but the lack of a tactile feel made it even harder, along with accidental touches, and a lack of vision due to my fingers being all over the screen, made it so my teammates had already killed the monster in 4 minutes, and I didn’t even manage to find the corpse to carve some goodies.

Anyways, it was a fun first hunt after a couple years without playing, and since Summer vacations are coming up soon, I am planning to get myself a controller to properly play this game and enjoy it like the good old times.

If you didn’t know about the HunsterVerse, I really recommend joining its Discord server, even if you don’t play those old games online, they also have chatrooms for the newer games, such as Monster Hunter Rise that came out this year.

This has been day 41 of #100DaystoOffload

Inspired by PsychoLama and by Ru Singh, who have a “Recommendations” and a “Uses” section respectively on their sites. I wanted to do the same, and decided to get started on it as quick as possible.

Right now its still fairly incomplete, but I can update it when deemed necessary, not only for new software I discover, but for the programs I stop using.

This idea came out of the blue, I did not have a school class and decided to go for it. It might as well be the most unplanned post yet.

I want to add some new sections in the future, a blogroll, a reading list, a Now section, so many things to do. I will make a post whenever that happens.

Besides, the last couple months have been quite short on content, and I wanted to add some extra entries to keep up with the #100DaysToOffload challenge. Although at this rate I feel confident I will complete it in less than a year!.

This has been day 40, almost halfway there!

During those days, while working and thinking, a lot of ideas crossed my mind, and I am a little sad, because I already forgot most of them, some of which could have been nice blogs, but I was unable to write them down, at least on paper or a quick note.

Yesterday, and today, I spent some of my free time to do some cleanup of my Hotmail account’s Inbox. There were hundreds, if not thousands of emails coming from old accounts, old forums, Facebook notifications, YouTube uploads, Blogger newsletters, email chains and spam, and a lot of other trash that was there stored in some random Microsoft server. And among those emails, there were a few conversations I had back in the day, some old friends threads of chatting and sharing stuff we missed out on, it brought some nostalgia for older times.

Also, reading some article or post shared on Mastodon, I ended up reading a PDF, dating from the 1800’s (or maybe it was a website?) and I realized how important and amazing writing stuff down is. Somebody somewhere, took the time to record these thoughts, store them and share them to the world.

I have no idea of what will happen to those old conversations I had on email in 2013, what about the chats and threads I have in Forums, Matrix servers or Fosstodon? Don’t even get me started on MSN Messenger and the stuff I used back then, before advocating for FOSS.

I recently started to use PGP encryption for my emails, and to think that I am probably the only person who has the key to read the contents of them, is amusing.

I write these posts in plain markdown text, which is then converted to HTML thanks to Jekyll, but, how will it be in the future? Yeah, plain text files might still be readable in 50 years, but, just like that PDF file, or those old books, will someone be reprinting these words in new formats? new languages? will somebody even read this a week from now?

I have some tracking enabled on this site, using GoatCounter, but I only visit it like once a month, and I don’t really get more than 20 or so visits. I don’t really mind, in the end, I am writing it for me.

I doubt that a way to recover those lost thoughts will ever exist, all I can do is write what I currently think, and maybe hope for a trigger word to bring back those memories, preferably in front of a keyboard.

This is day 39 or #100DaystoOffload

After watching some YouTube videos, like Ali Abdaal’s video as an experienced typist with a speed of ~145 wpm, as well as Kalle Hallden’s journey trying to learn and get to at least 80 wpm, I decided to start learning once and for all. I used to type with at least 5 or 6 fingers total, since I am a pianist, I was already used to using many fingers, but I still lacked the proper technique of using all my fingers, placing them in the home row and keeping them there.

For my first test at 10fastfingers.com I did 19 wpm, which was terrible compared to my 55 wpm with my previous, lackluster technique mess. I started practicing finger placement and muscle memory on keybr.com and learned the positioning of every letter.

Now, after three days, my current record is 52 wpm, which is quite great, although my average is still on the low 40s. I am starting to catch up to my previous speed, and I hope I manage to get to at least 80 wpm with more weeks of practice. I still have a lot of trouble with punctuation, and my typing is not that precise, but I hope that some more practice allows me to improve and also to find my own style, since I also feel quite robotic sometimes. It feel pretty cool to know I am using all of my fingers, and its also epic when somehow I get one of those rushes where I get like 10 or so words typed without mistakes or pauses, which are still quite common.

This was a bit of a shorter post, but I don’t have a lot of time today, but I still wanted to publish something soon enough, since my time could be even more limited the following weeks.

This was day 38 of #100DaystoOffload

Pass is an extremely simple tool to manage your passwords by using GPG encryption on plain text files, allowing fairly customizable folder structure.

It follows the Unix philosophy of doing one thing and doing it right. It can be extended with different clients and plugins that expand its functionality and allow features like auto-typing, otp support and filename encryption, which is kinda nice.

Pass functionality

I am going to assume you know how to make and deal with gpg keys. But I will leave some sources if you wanna deal with that. So, all I did was run

pass init <gpg-id>

Where you use the id of a preexisting gpg key you have. After that, to save a password you use

> pass insert personal/example.com/account-name
Enter password for account-name: account-password

If you’re creating a new account, you can use: pass generate <account-name> which will make a random password and save it automatically.

Pass uses the first line of a file as password, and you can add extra lines to it if you so wish. Therefore you can use the -m flag to continue adding lines when creating a new entry.

I set up my files like this:

password
url: example.com
login: account@example.com
otpauth: otp_url_thing
autotype: login :tab pass :enter :delay :otp :enter
comment: whatever

I already explained enough of Pass itself, but this is not an in-depth tutorial, so if you wanna know more about pass itself you can visit its website

My personal setup

Coming from Keepass, I used pass-import and the following command

pass import keepass keepass_file.kdbx

This means I dont need to risk a plain text file such as CSV, which is kinda cool.

But, how do I actually use it?, well, on Linux I use rofi-pass, a great utility that makes use of rofi and has support for a lot of features, including auto-typing and otp support if you have the extension pass-otp installed. These tools read the lines I showcased before, which is pretty practical. I am quite a fan of how simple it is to configure and extend pass, and the amount of existing tools that make use of it is great.

There are some browser extensions. I tried PassFF, but in the end I decided to only depend on rofi, since its simpler and safer than a plugin in my opinion.

Pass on Android

On my android device I decided to install Password Store which is a great client that supports auto-fill and other things.

However, how do I sync everything up?. The answer is pretty simple. Syncthing, a program that need no presentation.

I just shared my password-store folder to android and called it a day.

Password store needs OpenKeychain to gain access to your gpg keys. To export your private key you have to run this command from your terminal:

# In my case is gpg2, your distro might just use gpg
gpg2 --output secret_key.gpg --armor --export-secret-key <gpg-id>

Just copy it to your device and import it from the OpenKeychain app. it should prompt you to input your passphrase and now you can use it on Password Store.

The app works surprisingly well on browsers, compared to other password managers for Android, although its not as good on some apps, of course your mileage may vary, most of them should work just fine.

Pass on Windows

I again used Syncthing to keep everything up to date. I installed gpg4win to get everything gpg needs to work and I imported my key using Kleopatra, which gets installed automatically. You could also use the command line but I didn’t know it was available when I did it.

I was unable to find a working solution similar to rofi-pass, I am a fan of Wox launcher, but it didn’t have a plugin for pass, and it hasn’t been updated in a while so I decided to go for browser-pass which is a browser plugin. I would have preferred a native program to do it but it is what it is.

There is actually a native program, QtPass. But it doesn’t have some pop-up shortcut and I didn’t feel like finding out how to do keyboard shortcuts on Windows.

Browserpass is wonderful though, and it is still being updated, so I will still use it, and I will use QtPass for native applications.

Some Troubleshooting

During my experimentation, I faced many problems. Sometimes saving new passwords or edited changes on existing entries would not work. This happened because the .gpg-id file used by pass was trying to encrypt the files with a non existent key, since, Password Storeoverwrote it (I assume that it is a subkey that only existed on android and the rest of my devices are not aware of it).

Another problem is getting the password-store folder location to be found by both of these programs. The plugin settings provide a way to set a custom folder, and so does QtPass, I placed my folder in C:\Users\my-user\password-store and managed to use it quite easily.

Final thoughts

I am really liking this setup, pass supports using git to manage branches and that kinda stuff. But I decided to keep it simple and just use Syncthing as mentioned before, I dont really have a secure git instance or somthing like that, and since the filenames are not encrypted this can be a bit of leaked metadata, but that isnt really a problem locally, and its probably no big deal if I make a private repo on Codeberg or something like that.

I kinda wanted to make this blog a bit longer, but its honestly not that difficult to do the switch and I just provided a few sources across this post that could can be helpful if you need something more.

This is day 37 of #100DaystoOffload

I am quite a FOSS advocate, but I am also a bit pragmatic. I still use Google services often, a lot more than I would like to admit. So if I was already using them, why wouldnt I give away more of my freedom for the sake of convenience, right?

Yeah, that’s the train of thought I have sometimes. But other times, like today, I am feeling a more privacy conscious, and I decided to look for an alternative email client. I had already tried Fairemail a fairly decent app that works wonderfully. However, it contains unobtrusive, privacy friendly ads, which are not bad at all and are completely understandable, but I didn’t want to deal with them, besides, I had already tried it, and I wanted something new.

And here is where K-9 Mail comes to the rescue. The app was a bit dead, but last year, the app got a visual redesign that caught my attention and convinced me to give it a chance. I knew about the app for years, but just by looking at its icon and the screenshots showcased on F-Droid, I never installed it.

Setting up my accounts

I was pleasantly surprised, setting up my Gmail account was as simple as Google lets you, using the so called “App Passwords” needed for anything that doesn’t wanna use their login authentication methods.

Adding the rest of my accounts was a piece of cake, I had to add my school account with IMAP because the domain was weird and unable to be automatically setup like my personal one, however, it was no big deal.

A Microsoft account I got had no trouble at all, although I should add 2FA to it, since it’s not active.

The User experience

K-9 Mail pretty much looks like the Gmail app before they changed to Material Design 2.0 a couple years ago. And that’s a good thing for me. It has a bit of similarity to Fairemail, but I liked K-9 a bit more since its more simplistic and a bit less cluttered. Besides, the starting screen of Fairemail its their settings, and its really overwhelming, which was a reason I wanted to avoid K-9, since I thought it would be even worse. But I am quite happy with how it is.

There is a really good Dark Theme, a nice amount of settings and customization and it even applies a dark mode to the email contents, which is good for those nasty non-plain text emails that have their own styling.

Overall

It is a pretty great experience! so nice and comfy I did a whole blog about it. Like, I can’t believe I spent so many years not using this (being fair, it looked terrible 2 years ago, but still).

The only thing I disliked for a bit was the non-instant arrival of emails, which is normal for most email clients that once again don’t depend on Google immediately. I wonder if there is some way to trigger the update, but at the same time, I don’t really need email to be instant.

With this setup, I am very happy again with my FOSS mindset. It has reinspired me to check out even more alternative, free software applications. This is day 36 of #100DaystoOffload

So, I was watching Distrotube’s latest video, where he talks about Nitrux, a pretty new distro, that has some really interesting concepts, one of which caught my attention inmediately.

Nitrux uses some really unique programs as default, Index, their file manager, Nota (notes), Station (terminal), Vvave (music player) and others,which are built with a framework named MauiKit. This tool is similar to GTK or Qt, but it seems to be quite faster to work with, but I am not expert. But I found out that they have android versions for some of their applications, and I decided to give them a try just for fun.

I was really weirded out by these apps, they look so different from the apps following the Material Design used by Android. They are not available on F-Droid nor Google Play. I was only able to find them in some KDE’s random repo.

The apps are still quite broken sometimes, the music app was unable to detect most of the album art on my songs, and for some reason was unable to display “Daft Punk” correctly (only showed “Da”).

There were some nice transitions and animations. But simple stuff, like hitting play and pause, invoking the weird bottom hamburger menu, or switching directories looked pretty plain. However, I am not going to complain, I have never heard of these apps before, so I think that they are still quite new, and I hope they improve and get noticed a lot more in the future. Its nice to see more alternatives to the default applications, I have always enjoyed to test them out.

Utterly failing an exam, at least everyone else did too!

Today I got an exam to complete. I was getting ready for it for days. And I was quite confident on being able to figure it out. However, right after I opened the file containing the questions, I realized it wouldnt be as easy as I thought.

The first 5 questions where problems that required using Inverse Laplace transforms and using the partial fractions method to solve differential equations. This might sound complicated to some, but it really isn’t that hard. However, it takes a lot of time to solve the problems. And while I understood the concepts and studied them, I didn’t actually solved any proper problems myself, and I got stuck for a while solving some basic things. I ended up taking an hour to solve the first 2 problems.

Thankfully, the last three were easier now that I found myself in the flow state. The problems were more complex, but it took me less time to solve them. The problem was. By the end I still had 5 more problems to solve. These problems were about Block Diagram reduction. Which is a technique used for the design of Controllers, System Dynamics and stuff like that.

Once again, I found myself in trouble, I had to show every step of the reduction process, and I would lose more time drawing the diagrams rather than actually solving them.

With 15 minutes left, I managed to solve the easiest of the bunch, after drawing and solving the couple steps to get the Transfer function. The time left was spent taking the pictures with a Doc Scanner app (I am looking for some FOSS alternative, but I use Notebloc because its the lightest of the bunch, and doesn’t seem to have any controversial things, like Cam Scanner and such).

Backing up apps and changing my rom once again

So, I have already done a similar blog talking about this topic, so check it out if you want to read a bit more about the topic. I said it before, and here I am again. I love android’s customization. ArrowOS, my previous rom, was alright, it was simple and minimal, pretty customizable, but it still lacked a few things I wanted. ## First impressions

I am now on crDroid. And just by checking its Recents screen, I noticed it comes already with a pretty distinct style to stock android. It reminds me of Resurrection Remix, which I had used before, but has not been updated in a while. So that’s great for me, since I got the CRT effect back for my screen off animation!

Syncthing, details and annoyances

After restoring my Migrate backup, reinstalling Magisk Manager and rebooting, I was ready to go. The default look and feel, as well as the wallpaper were beautiful, some apps were glitchy so I had to reinstall them. But that’s not the rom’s fault.

Syncthing, the backup program I use, doesn’t play nice when the folders that used to exist no longer do, but after resharing my folders from my computer, everything worked great, I was once again surprised at how quick the syncing process is, and wondered once again why this tool is not used by absolutely everyone.

Ending the day

So yeah, I have everything back on track. No real problems for me, since I am quite used to dealing with everything I had. School was a bit tiresome, but nothing too difficult really, I believe the teacher is going to be understanding of the situation, since most classmates also lacked enough time to finish.

There was one person, who actually did it all and got a 10/10. I would have been surprised if it wasn’t for the fact that some friends realized that ~3 of the problems were already solved from previous classes. In the end I got 5.5 out of the 6 questions I solved, its not ideal, but I also got some encouragement from my teacher, assuring me that I could have had a better score if I had more time, so I felt better, and I hope justice is made.

In the end, Android lives on, school moves on and I forgot to backup the MauiKit apps, I hope they improve and get published in a F-Droid or something!

This is day 35 of #100DaystoOffload

🪟 Leaving Spectrwm, embracing Awesome, considering DWM

I really, really liked Spectrwm, I might as well go back to it in a few days, since the main reason I am moving away from it might not be that hard to fix. I find the system tray to be quite useful to me, my choice was trayer, since it was good enough. However, I had some problems that made it feel pretty clunky.

• I can only show tag numbers,or numbers + name. I want to display only the names, which are Nerd Font glyphs.
• The systray will overlap with the bar content, at least on the position I want it to be.
• The systray wont follow me when switching workspace, but I have a script that moves it using wmctrl
• When trayer gets moved to my current workspace, it steals focus, if I close every window, it steals focus
• If trayer gets mouse focus, I cannot do anything, no keybindings will work. The only thing that works is clicking an icon that opens a window (like Discord) or killing Spectrwm from a TTY

Honestly, most of these problems are not a big deal most of the time. But as I said, I am doing this mainly out of boredom, so let me be.

Installing dwm also came to mind, and I decided to give it a try, but right now I can’t wrap my head around it, but I might check it out later.

🌐 Changing Firefox, checking out Qutebrowser

For quite some time, I have heard good things about Qutebrowser. So I have decided to give it a try. I actually loved it, I really liked the way it works and I found myself extremely comfortable using Vim keybindings on it. I really enjoyed how smooth it was and the keyboard driven workflow.

Its engine is now based on Chromium, which is a bit annoying since I support Firefox’s Gecko. However it now will display most websites better than when it was using WebKit as a base.

So right now I decided to go back to Firefox, and set it up in a similar manner to HexDSL’s configuration, which has tabs on the left side and gets rid of most of the GUI, making it pretty nice looking to me. I will change to Qutebrowser once I set it up properly and get ad-blocking on it.

For now, Firefox + VimVixen will do to give me that Vim-like workflow. I actually can’t believe how handy and nice it is.

💻 Maybe distro hopping, changing rom again

After all this, I have also been thinking about changing my distro once again. I have enjoyed void for quite a while, and its great, with no doubt, I might just be a bit inspired while writing this and I might end up not switching after all.

I have been considering something like EndeavourOS, or maybe reinstalling Void, but base only, we will see. I am a bit tempted by the “terminal driven” workflow the claim to have, I already have that on Void, but I am still curious.

Also, I will change my Android rom soon. I haven’t updated it in a while, and I have been looking for a bit more customization than what I already have. I have downloaded CrDroid, which has an official rom available for my Redmi Note 8, so I will give it a try later today.

Syncthing and Migrate are great tools for making backups, and I think I will have to install minimal Gapps due to school stuff, and because I got some paid apps I can’t live without, such as Nova Launcher or Typing Hero. I am working towards changing that, but not right now.

I always feel quite dirty when I have to change rom and reinstall the Google apps, especially when I try to defend FOSS and Android in general, but well, you gotta do what you gotta do.

Wrapping up

Anyways, after all of this I gotta say I am quite happy with the changes I’ve done, and I hope the ones I still have to make will be good too. I have had some problems with time management, and I know that it’s kind of a meme the amount of time you invest on setting everything up on Linux to get actual work done. But well, I enjoy it, and I still managed to deliver all of my homework! So I consider this a win. I have exams next week, so let’s see what happens with that.

This has been day 34 of #100DaystoOffload

I got some homework that has accumulated over time and I have new homework to do too as well as some exams to take. That’s only one of the reasons I stopped writing here, but there are a lot of other ones that caused me to miss so many days.

It all started when I decided to make some housecleaning and make the comment systems currently implemented in my website work together more seamlessly. Since both scripts for GitHub and Mastodon have different styles and work with different things. I wanted to rewrite them. By the time I post this, you will see how that work is going. I have 2 different functions that work depending on the service being used. But I know I should be able to simplify it even more with a bit more thought put into it, since I could use a single function for both.

However, after working on JavaScript for a while, I got interested in learning some programming language, besides the bits I already knew from C++, JS and GDScript. And I decided to go with Go. It has been fun, but I ended up leaving it a little bit because of the unexpected inspiration to work on quite a big event.

Ludum Dare, one of the biggest game development events, was about to start, LD is a Game Jam, which is a contest of sorts, where game developers around the world set a time limit and try to create a videogame from scratch. This is usually done by following a theme chosen by voting in rounds where different options are given. By the end, the worst possible outcome happens, and everyone has to deal with making something decent out of it.

This time, the theme was “Deeper and Deeper”, and I decided to participate after a bunch of friend on a Discord server decided to join too. I will make a full blog about it after the Jam ends, since the participants are still rating and playing each other’s game, and the rating period will end in a couple more weeks.

Of course, I also could not help my excitement of sharing my work, and decided to join a lot of streamers on places like Twitch, where you can usually submit your game to be played and rated by them, and I can proudly say that I ended up featuring my game on around 14 streams, watching everyone of them. Sometimes it feels a bit unfair, but I had to wait in the queue like everyone else, in fact, I waited in 14 queues :P

And that’s how these days went by. Homework, programming, game development and game promotion. Which used up quite a lot time from me. I also have had some chatting about developing my jam game further, since I did not even do a main menu and some of the assets were quite rushed. I am, however, quite happy with my results.

You can play my game here as well as rate it if you wish to try it out. I will expand it later in the future if I have the time. There is only a Web version at the moment. But I will export native versions for desktop once I develop it further.

This was day 33 of #100DaystoOffload

However, I have decided to not listen to those thoughts of mine. And talk about whatever I want. This is my blog after all, so I should not be that invested in what others think of me. I don’t really talk about controversial topics anyways, but I think I got to the point where I convinced myself that I only wanted to talk about things that caught the attention of the broader audience.

Not anymore, I talk about whatever I want. There were some excuses and ideas floating around in my mind. But there I was, thinking excuses such as:

• Too many people already talked about that.
• I would need to investigate a lot in order to cover the theme properly.
• I can’t expand this theme to have a decent length.
• It’s Saturday, nobody will read it.
• I already started writing about something else.
• I will get in trouble if I think the wrong thing.

Guess what?. Nobody actually cares, the people who care will read what I said, and that’s what matters, kinda.

Anyways, I have many ideas right now, and although I won’t expand them all on this post, but I can do a brief description of what’s to come. Maybe not everything will end up coming to existence, but hey, I do the blogs I want.

• Some talking about Chrono Trigger, my favorite game of all time.
• Talking about how much I enjoy videogame soundtracks.
• How I developed my first game for a week long game jam.
• How I have been going running and cycling more often.
• I kinda switched to Emacs and I have a crisis between it and Vim.
• Talk about Rubik’s cubes or magic as hobbies.
• Promote some of my favorite YouTube channels that ain’t related to Linux.
• Continue to talk about my text adventure game.
• Some other ideas to come.

So yeah. Not a lot of content in this post per se, but hey, I am working on it 😉.

This has been day 32 of #100DaystoOffload, I hope you enjoyed the quick read. I want to be done with this challenge sooner than later, and I am glad I noticed this insecurity of mine, hopefully it doesn’t come back anytime soon. Until the next post.

I decided to try and do the same. Streaming my own music has been something I’ve wanted for a while. I looked around for ways to achieve it and I found a blog by Joran Schrijver² where he shares the solution I chose to follow, and that I am going to share here, as well as some troubleshooting I had to go to get this working. You don’t even need to have MPD installed on your desktop!

Install an android client

Now, we first need to install MPD itself, you can find it here. We also need a client to play our music from. There are many options, MPDroid is one of them, it has not been updated in a while, but its interface is still decent if you want it. MAFA is the solution suggested by Joran, but it is paid, and I am not sure if it’s FOSS, but if you don’t mind, go for it. HexDSL however, suggested M.A.L.P and it’s actually a really good FOSS option too, which is a little more recent, since its last update was 4 months ago.

Satellite setup on your desktop

So, before we configure MPD on your client device, we have to setup a server. The way Joram did is with a quick Python command.

python -m http.server --directory ~/music 8000

I assume you can setup any other way you like.

Configuring your Android device

Up until now, you could say I am just stealing Joram’s blog, but here is where things change just a little bit. By following it, I got a bit stuck, so I went to the Arch Wiki³ for help with this problem.

Setting up MPD on Android

First things first, create a text file and name it mdp.conf and put it in Android’s home directory (/storage/emulated/0/mdp.conf).

After that, you have to add the following lines to it. I got this additions from the wiki

# located at /storage/emulated/0/mpd.conf
music_directory "http://desktop_ip_address:8000/"

database {
  plugin "proxy"
  host "desktop_ip_address"
}

audio_output {
  type "sles"
  name "Any name you want"
}

In order to know your PC’s IP address, just run ip address on your terminal and look for it, It should be something like 192.168.0.x

Now just run the MPD app, there might be some exceptions or things that look like errors on the log, but as far as I can tell, it should be nothing serious. Make sure to look for a line mentioning the loading of the config file, you might have not placed it correctly, or have some mistake.

Setting up your MPD Client

Now, you have to set up the Music player. Depending on your app, there might be some different paths to take. These are the settings that show up by default (and it works), so I just want to share them to make sure we are on the same page. ### MPDroid

Go to Settings -> Connection Settings -> Default Connection Settings. - Make sure your host is 127.0.0.1 (I assume it could be any localhost address). - Your port should be 6600 - Password is up to you and your own settings. - Streaming host is blank for me, I assume it can be kept that way. - Streaming port is 8000

You can play around with the settings. Also, there is a dark theme and you must enable it.

M.A.L.P

You can go to Profiles, and set up the same things. However, there might be one already setup for you.

In both cases you will be able to see the output with the same name as the one you gave to it in mpd.conf

In case something doesn’t work

• Check your internet connection.
• ping the IP address and see if it is there.
• Try to enter from your browser and see if its there.
• Delete and add your network (Seriously, I was unable to find my host address, I even ran nmap with Termux on Android and it still didn’t show up until I added the network again).
• Force close MPD and check your config.

Now play some music!, and finish this up

If you did everything correctly, your music app of choice should begin to load your music library, and you should be able to play it with no problems.

Once again, I am not here to guarantee that this will work. You can check the footnotes for more help if you still did not manage to get your MPD streaming working.

The caveat of this, is that you have to keep your machine running that pyhton command. But you could figure out a way to make this better, the Arch wiki has some suggestions that you might want to take a look at.

This has been day 31 of #100DaystoOffload

Everything started with Simple.css as a base, you can go to that website to see how it looks by default. The first changes I did were pretty simple. Since I love the Nord color scheme, I just implemented those colors, then I modified some other values, and some more, then added classes, and id’s, and I ended up with the current design!.

Adding new details to my site

I did all of this to keep myself entertained and to challenge myself trying to understand CSS and HTML better, so I could eventually figure out problems by myself (and with the Internet’s guidance) and design the stuff I liked.

I also have played around with the way Jekyll works, I have added tags and some HTML snippets, making use of the _include folder to avoid cluttering my layouts and that kind of things.

So for a few days I started checking out some blogs and websites to borrow inspiration from, and I ended up with a new footer section, as well as a new showcase area in my front page. And don’t forget the new SVG icons and dividers that look awesome.

Due to the rush in inspiration, I decided to go ahead and change something I have been meaning to do for a while.

Revamping the comments section

While GitHub comments worked nicely, I wasn’t really getting a lot of activity lately. I think that happened because I didn’t set them up. You see, for every new post, I had to create a new issue, and honestly, I didn’t feel like it. So I just stopped having comments. Besides, most of the people who keep track of this blog are aware of Mastodon. Therefore, the path to follow was clear.

Instead of trying to actually learn some JavaScript. I decided to search for some already existing solution. so it didn’t took a lot of time to find Carl Schwan’s blog, who already blessed me with a script that did exactly what I needed. I just had to do some changes so it works with Jekyll’s syntax, so I basically changed the {% raw %}{{ .stuff }}{% endraw %} with {% raw %}{{ page.stuff }}{% endraw%}.

I also had to add those new variables to my blog metadata, which was not hard to do, since I just modified my already existing rofi script to setup my blog’s metadata with a few new lines. I still have to setup the id, like on GitHub, but its easier since I already create the Fosstodon post anyways.

Conclusion

In the end, I am very happy with the results, I am quite surprised with how my blogging journey has been. Sometimes I don’t have time to do blogs, and sometimes I have too much time and do everything but blogs. But hey, today I decided to do a blog and implement some new features, yay!

This has been day 30 of #100DaystoOffload, thanks for reading! And don’t forget to try out the new comment system, I didn’t really worked too hard for it, but I still had to setup some CSS to make it look good!

Nevertheless, it had been a while since I’ve been so invested reading a new story. Don’t get me wrong, I still reread some pages of old favorites. But in all honesty, I just felt like I did not have the time to read something from start to finish.

However, the Easter vacation period started, and we traveled to visit some family. Obviously, due to COVID, we would not be able to go out anywhere, and most of the time was spent watching movies or YouTube videos with my cousin.

🚀 Discovering a new Universe

Because of this new free time, I decided to read something, I am not sure why, but I remembered a series recommended to me by a friend: Bobiverse.

So I decided to give it a try. I had not read anything about it, I did not look for any reviews, all I knew was that my friend’s nickname was Bobiverse too, so he had to like it quite a lot (Just like how I love Chrono Trigger, best SNES game indeed, @ me I don’t care).

The series is about a nerdy developer who gets his head frozen and turned into an AI 100+ years into the future. It feels quite grounded in reality and I really recommend it a lot. However, this is not a review, I might do one in the future, once I read the whole thing and let it process and bit more.

According to my Screen Time, during my first week of vacation, I spent 30+ hours reading, completing 3 of the 4 books of the Bobiverse series, totaling around 700 pages. And this week I will keep reading the 4th book, which has around 400 pages.

I am not saying all of this to brag or anything, I know people who read more as well as people who don’t care. The point is, I had never read so much in such a short amount of time.

🖊️ My favorite genre

I already knew what was my favorite genre, but I really never stopped to contemplate about how the huge ratio between it and the rest of the bunch. Is it Fantasy?, bibliographies?, essays? Self-help?, Wrong!, the answer is…

Science Fiction

What a surprise huh? Bobiverse is sci-fi, but I had never realized, that basically everything else I’ve read is, too. I used to think “I like sci-fi, but I have read a lot of other genres and kinds of books!”. But while trying to remember all those “other” books, I ended up with The Mangy Parrot, The Pilgrim’s Progress and Narnia.

Of course, I have read a few pages of books from school, biographies and such, but I can’t really name any right now. Yet I still remember Star Wars books, Halo books, 20000 Leagues Under the Sea, Ready Player One, The Time Machine… you know the drill.

There is something about sci-fi, reading and imagining things that could become true, realizing some of them became true. Admiring the descriptions of imaginary concepts and locations, and loosely used scientific terms, from the center of the Earth, to Virtual reality worlds. From submarines and telegraphs to Slip-Space traveling and Von Neumann probes. Infinite places, infinite concepts, infinite possibilities.

Some, if not all of them usually have characters that I really like and that I can relate to, or understand. Be it the nerdy programmer Robert Johansson, the epic engineer Cyrus Smith, or the complex and intriguing Captain Nemo.

The genre also allows the expansion of existing universes of movies and video games. Reading the origins of the first contact between Humanity and The Covenant, or the (sadly non-canon) secret Apprentice of Darth Vader. You learn lore and stories at a level that no other medium is able to convey.

It’s so much fun.

The best thing for me, is that it looks like I haven’t even started. If I look for lists of “The Best Sci-Fi Books”, Only some of the ones I have mentioned show up. I guess my taste is more “classic”, Jules Verne and H.G. Wells are only a small fraction of the genre. I still haven’t touched Dune, or anything done by Asimov or Huxley. So I still have a lot of material to read, I just hope that my previous experiences don’t ruin the new ones to come.

⌛ Finding time for Reading

Regardless of the genre, I think that reading is something that can be enjoyed by everyone. Some people say that they don’t like it, some say they can’t fit it into their agendas, just excuses.

I have talked about how great audiobooks and especially podcasts can be before, since they allow you to do other things while still enjoying a good talk or story.

Nonetheless, there is something about being able to focus on written, simple text, give your own voices to different characters, building whole worlds (and universes) in your mind and just let the time fly by.

Admit it, if you are reading this blog, you have time. Get an agenda, wake up early, stop being lazy!. I am writing this to myself but you probably relate to this too.

If you don’t know how to start, any of the mentioned books here are good choices, you can always search how many pages or words a book has, but recently I’ve realized that the important thing is not the length, but the enjoyment you get out of it. I haven’t really read anything longer than 500 pages or so. But if I the amount of time I spent reading 3 books in a week tells me something, is that as long and you get invested in the story, the number of pages doesn’t matter.

🗞 Wrapping up

I think this is the first blog I have done where I spent more than a day writing. Expressing my thoughts on this subject was quite challenging but also very fun. I found myself very surprised at the amount of reading I did, and I was so compelled by the accomplishment that I decided to write all of this.

I hope you try and find some time to read something soon too, and if you still think you don’t have it, at least exercise your mind in other ways.

This has been day 29 of #100DaystoOffload. I hope you enjoyed the blog, have a nice day.

Drink a lot of water, stay safe out there, read.

I have been an huge fan of Bitwarden, which Wikipedia page states:

Bitwarden is a free and open-source password management service that stores sensitive information such as website credentials in an encrypted vault. The Bitwarden platform offers a variety of client applications including a web interface, desktop applications, browser extensions, mobile apps, and a CLI. Bitwarden offers a cloud-hosted service as well as the ability to deploy the solution on-premises.

Not only it offers a pretty great free option, it completely decimates most of the competition besides LP when it comes to security, privacy and transparency.

I can only think of a couple of options when that can be better. Pass, a pretty minimal option that follows the UNIX philosophy (and might be a bit too extreme), and KeepassXC. I chose the latter, and to be honest, I am quite happy with the results. Bitwarden allowed me to export my database as a .csv file, and importing it to my .kdbx (not to be confused with xkcd) database.

But honestly, I am not here to tell you which password manager to use, if you are switching to a new one, or if you just have some time. you should do some house keeping.

🔑 Get rid of weak passwords

One of the features Bitwarden locks behind a paywall, is the ability to look for duplicated passwords. I was aware of the existence of multiple accounts sharing the same passwords. Back when I switched to Bitwarden, I was using my browser’s built-in autofill feature (don’t do that please), but I still used the same password everywhere. And I had been living with that for years.

You are probably doing that too for some of your accounts, I suggest you to do yourself a favor and change those passwords as soon as you can. Luckily, KeepassXC can show me duplicated passwords, and if you are self-hosting or paying for Bitwarden, you can have that functionality too.

There is something important to keep in mind. If you come from LastPass (or any other proprietary manager), you should consider changing all of your passwords. You really have no idea of what they are doing behind the curtains. For all you know, they might release all of your information to the Web the moment you stopped using their service (or even if you still are).

💀 Get rid of your old accounts

Funnily enough, the moment I started going through all of those accounts with repeated passwords, I realized I had a bunch of accounts that were deactivated, breached or were from a dead website/forum.

I have been deleting accounts I don’t need, changing the passwords of those I have to keep, and requesting the deletion of some that don’t offer any way to delete them myself. So far, my recycle bin contains 64 accounts and counting, which will get automatically deleted after a certain time (quite handy if I require to get some back).

✨ Enjoy a cleaner, private and epic setup

Maybe you have heard of Inbox Zero, the digital minimalism practice where you get rid of all of your old emails that you won’t really read. Well I have never really done that. But I assure you that it does not feel as great as having a completely tidy and well organized database of passwords and accounts.

This was not a matter of clicking a “Delete All” button or using some magic script, but the product of 4+ hours (in my case, your mileage may vary) of going through bloated menus, sending/replying emails, logging to multiple accounts, checking if they still exist, taking the time to debloat my database and have only the accounts I need in there.

Wrapping up

I am quite happy with how everything turned out. I really can’t encourage you enough to try and do this, even if you are already using KeepassXC or any other manager. This has been day 28 of #100DaystoOffload, I guess I should give this a hashtag huh?

Are you ready for a #PasswordDebloat ?

I have made some changes to the CSS, as well as modifying some pages, such as the tags and blogs one. Up until the creation of this post, the blog archive has been a relatively small list of all of the blogs I’ve made. However, thinking about the future, I wanted to split all of this into sections, divided by year and month. To do that, a asked for suggestions on Mastodon. And of course, I got some replies. I ended up on Stack Overflow and found some ways to do what I wanted.

After a check there, I added the following lines to my blog.md file (located on my site’s root directory). {% raw %}

{% assign postsByYear = site.posts | group_by_exp:"post", "post.date | date: '%Y'" %}
{% for year in postsByYear %}
  <h1>{{ year.name }}</h1>
{% assign postsByMonth = year.items | group_by_exp:"post", "post.date | date: '%B'" %}
{% for month in postsByMonth %}
<details><summary>{{ month.name }}</summary>
<ul>
  {% for post in month.items %}
   <li>
   <a href="{{ post.url }}">{{ post.title }}</a><br>
     {% for tag in post.tags %}
    <a class="posttag" href="/tags/{{ tag }}">{{ tag }}</a>
     {% endfor %}
        📅 {{ post.date | date: "%Y-%m-%d" }} <br>{{ post.description }}
    </li>
  {% endfor %}
    </ul>
    </details>
{% endfor %}
{% endfor %}

{% endraw %}

I made use of the nice <details> HTML element which is quite pretty thanks to Simple.css, the CSS framework I am using right now. I also used them to the tags page, which has a similar structure to the blog, although is quite simpler.

{% raw %}

{% for tag in site.tags %}
  <details>
  <summary>{{ tag[0] }}</summary>
    {% for post in tag[1] limit:3 %}
      <p><a href="{{ post.url }}">{{ post.title }}</a> - 📅 {{post.date | date_to_string}} </p>
    {% endfor %}
  <a href="/tags/{{ tag[0] }}/" class="button">All posts</a> <a class="button" href="/feeds/{{ tag[0] }}.xml/">RSS</a>
  </details>
{% endfor %}

{% endraw %}

Of course all of this might be quite weird and I am not going to pretend that I understand it all! I added tags a while ago and it took me some time to get the grasp of it. Remember that as a Jekyll SSG user it is my duty to let you all know of every little piece of liquid, HTML or ruby code I add to it!.

This was day 27 of #100DaysToOffload. Dont you love it when most of your blog consists of copy pasting already existing text and avoiding to explain most of it assuming your audience will understand it? I hope you did because I am done with this. I hope you read next one (and I hope its not as lazy)

If you want you can check more about this here: * How to display raw Jekyll code in a Jekyll site * How to split posts by year and date

The previous script was working great, but it had a few problems that I really did not like. - I needed to run it from the terminal (or to execute a terminal first then run it) - I had to input all of the metadata in their place. So some more inputs needed to be made - I actually forgot to put it in the $PATH or keybinding it, so I had to type the direction - Yeah that’s pretty much it

So, I had to get working on something quicker and better. I decided to use Rofi, a pretty epic application launcher that can be scripted, fairly similar to Dmenu, since it even includes a Dmenu mode out of the box!

Using rofi to input everything! ⌨

I started with the previous script as a base, but honestly it barely resembles it anymore. All I had to do is create variables and set them to rofi, similar to this.

variable=$(rofi -dmenu)

Of course, I used some flags to make it all look better, but honestly, it was super easy to store those vars. It even allowed me to make files without the need of dashes (which was a requirement on the previous script, since read doesn’t work with spaces that easily, but you can use "" if you so wish, I didn’t wish that).

Using rofi to make menus! 🗒

Anyways, I had to make this for the filename, title, description and tags. I took care of the date using the same command as the previous script. But I wanted to make this one a little bit more usable. What if I messed up one of those strings? do I just edit them once I am on Neovim? Of course not! I wanted a final menu that let me edit those variables or proceed to the editing, as well as cancel everything if I changed my opinion!

So, I had to make some if statements!, I am not a total noob when it comes to programming, so I only had to get used to the syntax used by bash to get this going.

First, I had to make a rofi menu, to do that, it was as simple as piping an echo of the options into rofi, like this:

choice=$(echo -e "Edit file
Edit title
Edit description
Edit tags
Cancel" | rofi -p "Now?:" -dmenu)

That would output a pretty nice looking interface!:

Making sure the script doesn’t break 🔧

I faced quite a lot of errors that I eventually managed to fix.I am using a while to stay inside of that last menu until I select edit the file. But I of course forgot to add a final else in case I choose to cancel the operation. This meant that I was completely unable to leave Rofi, so I had to go into the TTY and kill the session, kind of a mess.

Also, there was a bit of an annoyance when I called the script, since I could only cancel it until the menu appeared, and if I did the keybinding by mistake, I would have to press ESC 4 times in order to exit. So I decided to check if the first input (the title) was empty. I could have done it for the rest, but its enough as is…

The kinda final script 📜

So, this is the final script! I am very proud of getting a bit better at automating the simple things. I am pretty happy with this.

#! /bin/bash
path=/path/to/blogposts
name=$(rofi -l 0 -width 40 -p "Filename (ESC to quit):" -dmenu)
if [ -z $name ]; then
    exit
fi
today=$(date +"%Y-%m-%d")
filename=($today-$name)
title=$(rofi -l 0 -width 50 -p "Title:" -dmenu)
description=$(rofi -l 0 -width 60 -height 20 -p "Description:" -dmenu)
tags=$(rofi -l 0 -width 45 -p "Tags:" -dmenu)
num=0
while [ $num = 0 ]; do
    choice=$(echo -e "Edit file
Edit title
Edit description
Edit tags
Cancel" | rofi -width 15 -l 5-p "Now?:" -dmenu)

    if [[ $choice = "Edit file" ]]; then
    touch $path/$filename.md
    echo -e "---
title: $title 
header: $title 
description: $description 
tags: $tags 
permalink: /blog/$name/ 
layout: post 
date: \"$today $(date +"%T") -0600\" 
--- ">> $path/$filename.md
        num=1
        alacritty -e nvim $path/$filename.md & disown
    elif [[ $choice = "Edit title" ]]; then
        title=$(rofi -l 0 -width 50 -p "Title:" -dmenu)
    elif [[ $choice = "Edit description" ]]; then
        description=$(rofi -l 0 -width 60 -height 20 -p "Description:" -dmenu)
    elif [[ $choice = "Edit tags" ]]; then
        tags=$(rofi -l 0 -width 45 -p "Tags:" -dmenu)
    else
        num=1
    fi
done

Now, the script might look a bit weird here because of the kinda broken CSS (working on it), so if you wanna take a better look at it, check here

This has been day 25 of #100DaystoOffload

A lot of walking (and a bit of biking!)

Yesterday I went downtown. The workshop is like 15 minutes walking from my house. But I actually used my bike most of the way, since its only problem is that I cant change the gears, so it works, but it feels extremely light, which is good when going uphill, but you don’t get a lot of power out of each pedal (is that the right verb? my Spanish speaking mind is confused).

Anyways, once there, I only had to pay 105 pesos (around 6 USD) to get the needed parts and their installation, I felt like it was extremely cheap even for Mexican standards, I wonder how much it would cost in other countries.

However, I had to walk back to my house, since I only had 100 pesos with me (oof), the good thing is, I am actually pretty used to walking, and I enjoy it quite a lot. So I came back home while listening some Daft Punk (RIP), took the money and went back since the bike would be ready in 30 minutes (basically I arrived at the right time!).

So yeah, I went back home with a pretty epic fixed bicycle. It felt quite nice, because it had been a while since I tried a functional bike, and it was a lot of fun.

The next day… (Today)

I had quite a lot of homework, but I really kinda wanted to go out and bike for a little bit. However, distractions, procrastination, YouTube and a bunch of excuses where clouding my mind. And I ended up doing absolutely nothing worthy of being called “work”. I started doing some homework, but I didn’t even finish it. I started getting my bike ready, but I didn’t go out and used it. I even started the first Uni class of the day, and the teacher didn’t even taught us anything!.

It wasn’t so bad after all

At the end of the day, at least I managed to do a couple of nice things. I finished my other class Analysis and Design of Mechanisms, which was actually extremely nice and I would say I learned a lot. And I did most of one of the homework I had to deliver this week! (I still have some more tho, sadly).

However, I know I can do better, tomorrow I will try and do some proper biking, as well as finishing most (if not all) of my homework. I feel so bad about what I didn’t do today, because I know homework is easy, but I struggle to get started. And biking is great, yet I made excuses not to go out.

Well, this felt like some kind of journal, but its my blog, I do whatever. This was day 24 of #100DaystoOffload

But that blog helped me to see, and recognize some of problems and annoyances I have with my current workflow.

Recently, I started to use Neovim to make my blogs, like the one you are reading right now. And since I am already trying to be as minimal as possible, I decided to make a script that helped me do the following things

1. Create a post file
2. Name it and add its date
3. Add the metadata to it
4. Open it to start editing

Doing scripting stuff (Not a tutorial tbh)

So, doing a script on linux is kinda easy, because of the way UNIX like systems work, I can make use of small utilities that can do small things and wrap everything together to make new useful scripts to automate the little things. In my case, I made something like this.

#! /bin/bash
echo "Type filename"
read name
filename=$(date +"%Y-%m-%d"-$name)
touch /path/to/_posts/$filename.md
printf '%b
' "$(cat /path/to/_template.md)" >> /path/to/_posts/$filename.md
alacritty -e nvim /path/to/_posts/$filename.md

A quick explanation

• In this case, echo allows me to print text, just like printf, to keep the format of my template.md file, containing the metadata of the blog, sp I only have to fill it out (I could probably automate this too, honestly).

• I used date to create the and format the filename of the post, as well as add the given title using read (I cannot use spaces, but I always use dashes - anyways).

• I used touch to create the markdown file and place it in the right locations.

• Finally, I open the file on Neovim in a new terminal window (my choice is alacritty).

Wrapping up

And that was it! I actually managed to do it. I am not sure if I could make it even simpler, but I am happy with the result. I can now start my blogs in a better way than before, where I copied and pasted everything from a previous file, that I had to open and close and I also had to be type the path of the file and make it and all of the usual stuff. But hey, now it’s everything automated for me!

Also! I also made some changes to the font sizes of this blog, and other CSS things, just because I felt that everything was a little too big, and I didn’t feel like scrolling that much just to get past the title. I think I still have to tweak it a little bit, but it is a good start.

This was day 23 of #100DaystoOffload, let me know if you found this kinda useful for you too. Or if you have a better script or anything that you use to make your blog workflow better!

During vacations, this kind of behavior was not really bad because I did not have anything to actually do. Still, just because I don’t have anything to do, I should stay doing nothing, therefore, if I know I have stuff to do, I should be doing them first.

A few weeks ago I mentioned how I did what I felt that I needed to do, even if nobody was forcing me to do so. But these past few days, I have had some problems with that. I can make use of a lot of excuses, honestly.

I can say that online classes are terrible, for example, most teachers don’t even have a proper Google meet link, they create a different one for each session, and they send it like 5 minutes before the meeting starts. Some teachers are pretty care-free about the format of each assignment they give us. Others want us to make use of PowerPoint or templates that only work on MS Word, or some will even make us do diagrams and maps and tables by hand. I don’t even have proper notebooks, because I take notes on my laptop, but I have to make use of one just for those few moments, and it is so annoying.

In 3 minutes I have another class, and I don’t even have the link to join the meeting. I guess that I just don’t feel like doing my homework (or anything productive at all) when I can feel the people around me doing no real effort to be productive either.

However, now that I started talking about this, I think that I should make an effort and stop this procrastination. Anyways, this has been day 22 of #100DaystoOffload, and don’t forget to drink water!.

By the way! Seriously, I have started to bring a water bottle to my study area, by my side, and it is great, you drink a lot more, which is good, you pay more attention when you are hydrated, and you don’t leave as often, because water is already there and you don’t need anything else!, Unless you need to use the bathroom because of the amount of water you drank).

Anyways, have a good day. I will try to be a bit more consistent again hopefully.

Most other editors, like Gedit, which is the GUI editor I use for most simple things, doesn’t really offer any way to check for errors, and even though I try to type correctly, sometimes I just miss a letter, or an accent (Especially because I do most of my homework and note taking in Spanish, English is too easy in comparison).

So anyways, I have decided to try and do this blog using Neovim and only that, with the help of a few external programs to help me deal with the caveats that using terminal editor brings.

Some plugins and external programs later…

I installed a few plugins that I saw in some videos, such as Goyo and Limelight, that are supposed to help focus on typing and only that (I am struggling to get Limelight to work with the Nord color scheme, I will sort it out later). But I have seen a few others that can do more powerful stuff, like prettifying tables made with pipes and such, as well as automatically hiding markdown elements like *italics* and __boldness__, as well as [hyperlinks](https://example.com). But I am currently seeing all of this pretty clearly.

Also, I found a pretty epic terminal utility called Aspell, which is quite a life-saver, since, as its name implies, it is pretty useful to check for mistakes and errors in this text.

All I have to do is install the right dictionaries, and run the following command:

$ aspell -l en_US --mode markdown -c file.md

And that will look for mistakes and correct them in case there are any, as you can see in this screenshot:

To be honest, I just wanted to have something to type right now. Since I have been a little busy with University and was struggling to keep up with my blog.

Now I am going to share a little screenshot of how this setup looks, because why not?

So, yeah this was not that hard to do, there are still some things I have to figure out, luckily, most of these tools will also be useful for my homework workflow so, that’s a win for me! This has been day 21 of #100DaystoOffload

My Markdown + Pandoc needs.

So, there are quite a lot of great tutorials mentioning different commands, different tips, tricks and ways to use Markdown. However, none of them are really mentioning every single one of my needs (which is understandable). I am not talking about the simple syntax that markdown provides, I will share a few of the ways I found to solve the following needs, that were spread on different videos from different people.

• Add citations, without the need of R Markdown or other programs such as Zotero, using APA formatting.
• Display images on a desired size, without the need of previous editing.
• Change the page margins as desired.
• Change the language of the text.
• Doing page breaks, or new pages.

Citations

The first one was the hardest to fix. Because most videos mentioned and showed citations working on their examples, but only one of them showed the commands, and none of them showed how to change the citation style. So I am going to share it here in a quick manner.

First of all you will need to have a .bib file. This file deals with all of your bibliography. I only have a single one, but you could have many if you so wish (I don’t think that you can use many of them on a single file tho). I use a Firefox extension to create this citations called BibItNow!, I previously used it to get the APA citation, but now I only get the Bibtex one. Each entry looks something like this:

@BOOK{DUMMY:1,
AUTHOR="John Doe",
TITLE="The Book without Title",
PUBLISHER="Dummy Publisher",
YEAR="2100",
}

After that you just add bibliography: /path/to/file.bib to the YAML section of the markdown file.

To add a citations, you just do add @idofcite or you can also do [@idofcite,p.number] and then, run this command, which will turn those texts into corresponding citations, and add them to the end of your file (You should add an empty # References to the end, so it will fill automatically).

pandoc file.md -o file.pdf --filter pandoc-siteproc

Finally, to add the desired formatting (APA in my case), I found a website that contains the .csl files that you need so Pandoc can use its templates. I just added csl: /path/to/file.csl to the YAML metadata

Image sizing

This is a quick one, I was tired of editing images so they looked nice on my pages (they always kept their original resolution, which sometimes looks terrible)

I just had to add this formatting to them, and that fixed it quickly:

![Image](/path/to/image.png){width=any}

Where any is the pixels I want the image to be. This does not work on my website for some reason, but it does for the Pandoc output, which is enough for me.

Page margins

I got this from Brodie’s video on his Pandoc markdown workflow, its as simple as adding this to the YAML section of the file.

geometry:
- top=25mm
- left=20mm
- right=20mm
- bottom=25mm

Of course, you can customize the size to fit your needs.

Change language, new pages, other LATEX goodies

I actually figured out how to change the language on my own. There is a way to do it using a latex package called Babel (or something like that), but I tried adding lang: es for Spanish, and it actually worked!

In order to make a new page, or add a page break, you only have to add ewpage or \pagebreak in any section of your text file, and it should be good to go.

You can also add a table of contents using ableofcontents in the place you want it to be in.

Finishing up

In the end, my complete YAML section looks something like this:

title: Title
author: Joel Chrono 12
lang: es
date: 	oday
theme: Copenhagen
geometry:
- top=25mm
- left=20mm
- right=20mm
- bottom=25mm
bibliography: ../../uni.bib
csl: ../../apa.csl

The theme is only useful for doing Beamer presentations, but I will have to make another blog to speak about that, since I found some things that others don’t mention.

This has been day 20 of #100DaysToOffload.

The description summed it up pretty quickly. I have to make a game, and it will work as a final project. I decided to start once and for all. It has to be a text-based adventure game, which is something I have been wanting to do for a while, and now I will be able to do what I want, while also earning points for doing it.

I decided to use the Godot Engine, which is a free and open source engine that I have mentioned before. I know that at the end of the day I could make something using bash or a simpler language, but I want to be able to use some simple graphical effects to achieve a retro look. This can be considered the first devlog of this little series, where I will describe how I ended up where I am.

Watching tutorials

So, Godot is not known for its huge library of video tutorials and guides, but it has been growing exponentially, and it is pretty easy to find help in forums or Discord servers. I found two tutorials that deal with simple problems. The first one is a stand alone simple tutorial that shows a simple way to make it, link here.

It proved to be useful mostly because it shows me code of some things that will be great to me, and gave me some ideas of how I will expand my version.

The next tutorial is actually an ongoing series that has currently 3 videos, but it looks pretty promision and its very beginner friendly, so if you are looking to get into Godot, its actually quite a nice way to start.

My current progress

So I decided to get started with the UI, it is kinda basic, but it looks pretty minimal and nice, if I do say so myself. I added some glyphs, rounded corners, and of course, the nord color scheme

I also decided to make some simple commands which can be seen on the picture. They work in quite a simple way. Here you can see how they work. The text language is in Spanish (and some English because my mind is weird) since thats the language we speak here. But you can get the idea, and I might translate it all anyways.

I will keep you updated

As of now, that’s basically it, I am going to make a repo and I will also share my progress as I go on with this adventure. This was day 19 of #100DaysToOffload

I have decided to use Markdown and Pandoc to deliver both assignments I had today, and I am quite impressed with the results. I watched a few videos about how to do some stuff like formatting, using Beamer to do slide shows and that kind of thing. I really think I might be able to not need to use any Office Suite, if I manage to learn enough LATEX to do my math equations and those problems.

One of my teachers is also quite a Linux user, he roasted Windows quite hard in the first class we took, mentioning how their users need to look up for software on websites and how superior the FOSS philosophy is, he even mentioned how bad is Chrome compared to Firefox.

Anyways, it looks like this year could be not so terrible at all, it’s only a matter of time to see how the rest of teachers are like in the following week. I might talk more about my school workflow this weekend.

Day 18 of #100DaysToOffload

But in reality, most people are living their lives without using facemasks, unless they are working or going to the grocery store, its simply no big deal and they go outside almost as if these times are normal. I even got a haircut a couple of days ago, and besides the people working there, everyone waiting for their turn was maskless, thankfully, it was only a couple of people, so I took the risk. Honestly, nobody really cared. And I was unable to wear a mask while my hair was being cut, yes, it’s not ideal, but it is what it is here.

Honestly, I am okay with that, it is amusing how simple the lifestyle is here. You don’t see crazy people feeling like slaves just because they are “forced” to wear a facemask inside of places that aren’t even their property. And at the same time, I don’t see people complaining about those not wearing a facemask when they should. Everybody lives their lives and let others alone, and its up to you to take care of yourself. Even old people keep working, some can’t really afford to do otherwise.

You can think whatever you want about the situation, I am just describing what I see, I personally wear a facemask whenever I go outside (if I am not getting a haircut), and I see it as a challenge to see if my physical condition is decent (seriously if you have difficulty to breath just because of a facemask, I think you should do more exercise).

So right now I am finishing this blog while being on a Quinceañera of a family friend, which is quite a dangerous place to be in during these difficult times. To be honest I am not a party person, but here I am, surrounded by many different people, teenagers, adults, grandparents, and they seem to be having a nice time, there are some regulations, every table has a different family (or two families), but well, you can’t control everybody.

I am finishing this already at home, we left early, I wonder what will happen. My family already got sick a couple months ago, we didn’t suffered too much, so we will probably be fine, and if that’s not the case, it is what it is.

Or maybe everyone is actually taking extreme care of themselves and its just me who only goes out like 10 hours per month and it just so happens that when I am outside everyone becomes careless, I don’t know what’s happening anymore

Day 17 of #100DaysToOffload

So, back when I started caring about Android, I remember how different the “Power user” community was (at least the one I was exposed to on Youtube videos). I remember watching those old videos of “Best android browsers”, “Best music players”, “Best twitter clients” and so on, and learning about apps such as the old Dolphin Browser, Rocket Player, Fenix and others.

I also remember channels all around Youtube recommending apps such as Aptoide to get pirated software or provide links to them (I am glad this is not that big of a thing anymore, but I can’t say I did not benefit from this a few times).

I have seen that the Android community has been pretty accepting of non-FOSS applications. When it comes to customization, we still welcome Icon packs, KWGT, the now dead Zooper Widgets and other apps.

Not only when it comes to customization. Root apps too!, I still remember when Titanium Backup was the gold standard (even just months ago, when it got banned, the community rised up to bring it back), same thing with Lucky Patcher, and even Tasker, the most powerful automation tool available for Android , all of these are NOT free software!

Even today, the Android community is still willing to accept apps such as Bouncer, Naptime and others that are still being developed and could be dangerous if it wasn’t because of the developer’s reputation.

Does FOSS have a place in the Google Play Store?

Recently I have seen more and more awareness towards FOSS, and I have seen more people defending small independent devs and paying for their work. But I have some controversial opinions about it.

I really don’t think that apps like Tasker, Typing Hero or Bouncer should become open source. Not in an ecosystem that barely controls what apps get added to the Play Store.

If you go right now to the store, and search for “Gallery”, you will quite a lot of Simple Gallery based clones, that don’t even change anything about the source code, besides the icons, and the addition of advertisement and other things that we can’t even see because those clones are not FOSS.

Despite the license, there will always be people who will simply not care. And will look to make money out of the work of others.

The worst thing about it, is that I remember seeing some posts on r/androidapps asking to report those copycats, and you could still find a couple of comments not caring at all about the situation, paraphrasing “It is open source, what did you expect?”.

So, yeah, most of this adware is going to be allowed on the Play Store, and if apps such as Tasker become open source, people with bad intentions will be able to take advantage of it, and who knows what kind of terrible things will happen.

This is not the fault of those apps, of course, this happens because the Play Store is flawed by design. So yeah, unless that changes, I don’t think that making such powerful apps FOSS will be a good thing, at least right now.

This was day 16 of #100DaystoOffload.

I will be going back to University this Monday, I am still going to be in quarantine, but now I will have to study, assist to online classes, do assignments and other things in order to continue my studies. And I sometimes feel like I am doing this blogs just to deliver something even if the quality does not compare with stuff that actually takes time to and effort to complete.

Everytime I have to do essays for school, especially when they ask for a certain amount of pages or words, I always try to expand the simplest topics into full paragraphs, and over-explain some things. Thats exactly what I am doing right now in an attempt to deliver a not so short blog post.

Of course, I don’t want this to be a waste of your time either, so I am going to share some quick apps I have checked this morning, and that I am using to help me deal with distractions and use my time better, or make my phone look epic or just because they are open source and I like them.

DetoxDroid

So I have been looking for a way to be less distracted by my phone, to be a bit more of a digital minimalist. Before I was using Google’s Downtime mode, as well as other of their Digital Wellbeing functions. Honestly I just wanted to have the ability to change to monochrome and whitelist only a few apps like Newpipe or my Gallery. And so, DetoxDroid managed to get it right, and it was also able to control Do not Disturb mode with ease. It was all working as expected, until I tried to turn it off, and the screen did not go back to normal. So, this app is still a little bit buggy, and I stopped using it, but I will keep an eye on it. At the moment, I found Monochromatic to work as expected, it just requires an adb command to get it working (DetoxDroid can use root, which I used to enable it).

DarQ

After putting my phone screen in black and white, I checked many of my apps to see how they looked like, and one of those apps was the Protonmail android client, which still does not have a dark theme. And after many months since I’ve known of this app, I decided to finally give it a go, and checked Protonmail among a few others that don’t offer dark mode either, and it all worked fine!, so yeah, DarQ is another fine addition to this little app list.

Lemmur

So, I have been quite interested on Lemmy, a decentralized social media similar to Reddit, and I wanted to give it a go. So I have used it for a while, and one of its mobile clients made its way to F-Droid. Lemmur is quite fantastic, still in its infancy, but already pretty complete, and it does work great. It is just a pretty young mobile client for an also young social media, so I don’t have nothing to say, but I hope that both keep growing in the internet space.

QuickTiles

Back on android 4.X, one of the coolest things you could do was add notifications that allowed you to launch many different programs from your status bar. With the arrival of the quick settings on Android 7 (I think?), devs were able to create their own tiles, and a bunch of apps arrived that allowed you to do that. Launch apps from a quick setting, or access shortcuts and so on. This is one of those apps, I found it while looking for a way to do my screen monochrome, and while I did not found that function, it still offered me some useful tiles, all open source (and to think there are some paid options for this).

Share to Clipboard

So, this one is really interesting, for some reason, F-Droid’s has a custom Share menu which does not offer a quick “Copy to Clipboard” option, and other clients, such as Foxy Droid, don’t even have a Share menu!, I did not try F-Droid Classic, nor Aurora Droid, but the point is, that to make most of the hyper-links shown in this post, I used this app, and then shared my clipboard using KDEConnect. So yeah, most apps use the default Share menu, but I guess that I am going to use this until F-Droid put their stuff together and add the option to their app.

It looks like I had more time than expected

But yeah, this weekend has been kinda busy and I hope I manage to do everything I have to, and to be ready to go back to school. I shared a lot more than I expected, and I hope you find a good use to these apps, just like I did. This is day 15 of #100DaystoOffload.

All of these have some things in common, but sometimes the way current technology has evolved makes them hard to combine. I don’t really have an organized way to talk about this, but I will do my best.

Digital minimalism

This is one of those topics that got big on Youtube and other places last year, and is still going strong. Applying a minimalist mindset to the technology around me is supposed to help achieve a simpler digital life, have less distractions and more time to focus on what actually matters. Some of the ways to become a digital minimalist, are these ones.

• Get rid of unnecessary applications
• Disable notifications
• Enable downtime mode (black & white screen)
• Limit social media and app usage
• Use Cloud storage, organize folders, etc.

Privacy and Security

I have started to care about this more and more. Ever since beginnings of last year that I installed Linux, as well as started to use alternative social media such as Mastodon. I cared about new and interesting topics that are starting to get a bit more recognized, but also get some backlash.

Decentralization, Free and Open Source Software, avoiding Google and big companies, avoiding mainstream social media, etc.

All of these factors have shaped the way I see society and the Internet today, and it is quite a big reason to why I made this blog.

Customization

Ever since I got my first android phone, I started caring about this, I learned about Icon packs, about android launchers, rooting, custom roms, custom kernels.

The abilities to change almost everything I wanted about my phone, is something I’ve loved from android since I got one.

It is also a good reason I started to care about FOSS too, since I also like to find alternatives to common apps, like Gmail, Facebook, the default gallery and so on. Thanks to that I found out about 3rd party clients (Frost, Twidere,) and alternative apps (Simple Gallery, Bromite) that were more customizable, and better overall.

Side note: I actually just remembered that I started customizing Windows XP quite a lot even before I got a phone, I also remember changing my MSN Messenger themes or how my Hotmail account was organized, so yeah, I have liked customization quite a lot.

Social media

I first started a Facebook account because I needed it on order to play a mobile game, I did it in secret, since I was not allowed to have one at the time (I hid the secret for 3 or so years, I felt so bad during that time, that I actually didn’t use it and I stopped playing the game after a week).

Thats how everything started, but years ago, after I confessed what I did, there was this time I wanted to be using social media to get attention and stuff (like every teenager), you know, uploading photos of my origami figures, or videos doing magic tricks and stuff that I liked. I was in groups of other people sharing their own videos and photos and stuff like that. After a while I realized how terrible Facebook was for my own good, since I spent so much time there and it wasn’t worth it.

However, after leaving Facebook behind, I started using Reddit, Instagram, Twitter, and Youtube even more, until I adopted a more minimal digital life (kinda?).

What was my point again?

I think this got a bit convoluted and I don’t really remember what I wanted to say at this point. I have been thinking about this and I kinda wanted to let it out.

I think I just wanted to spread the cards and see the way I am currently working. I am still trying to get a better workflow. For example, I still rely on services such as Google Docs or Google Drive (Digital minimalism, decluttering, etc), at the same time, I don’t want to use Google apps on my device in favor of F-Droid and FOSS (security and privacy), however, I like to have my phone rooted and with a custom rom (customization, freedom). All of this while I worry about how people around me still don’t switch from WhatsApp, even tho I still don’t delete Facebook nor Instagram, but maybe I should not and just use them in a different manner?.

Sometimes I just want to not care about anything and do whatever I want to do, as well as let other go on. But at the same time I don’t want to look like a victim, or as if I am suffering because of taking this path. I want more people to know about this, not to stay away from it. I dont even know what I am saying now. This has been day 14 of #100DaystoOffload, and I hope that I talk about some of these topics at some point in a way that makes better sense.

Honestly, after a few days I just forgot about it and uninstalled the app, but thats how I got interested in them (Thanks Google).

Months later, I tried AntennaPod, a free and open source app that allowed me to do the same thing, and I liked it a lot, it just had quite an ugly interface, but I was willing to give it a try.

They recently got a very nice redesign that gets rid of the Holo interface for something based on current Material design guidelines (still a bit rough around the edges, as most FOSS projects). And I have been listening to more podcasts lately, so I wanted to share this app because it is quite fantastic.

I keep a backup of the full database thanks to Syncthing, similarly of how I manage my RSS feeds. but it allows to export to simple OPML files too, but I like the stats it gives me, so saving them for everytime I reboot my phone is quite nice.

Some podcasts suggestions. 📻

I have a lot of subbed podcasts that I listen from time to time, but these are a few that I consistently listen to, or that are finished shows that I enjoyed.

• Wolf 359: A broadcast from space, full of humor at first, maybe a bit too relaxed at the beginning, but the mystery builds up quite nicely, listened to it last year, really worth it if you like sci-fi and pop references.
• Phoebe Reads a Mystery: I listen to this sometimes before sleeping, quite a relaxing voice, and the novels available at the moment are great, right now I am listening to 20000 Leagues Under the Sea, which Ive read before but in Spanish.
• Darknet Diaries: Hackers, viruses and cyber-security stuff, quite entertaining to listen to if you like that kind of stuff, not too technical.
• The Great Detectives of Old Time Radio: I also like to listen to this before going to sleep, these are recordings from radio shows from the 1940s, sometimes the music is a bit loud (listen to the intro and you will get it), but I really like them.
• Archive 81: The contents of tapes from an old archive, which contains some pretty weird stuff. Currently listening to this one, the first season is great, I listened to all of it in a single day, I am currently going through the second one which has longer episodes.
• Welcome to Night Vale: The radio from a weird town, very mysterious but kinda fun. It’s very easy to binge listen.
• Destination Linux: Linux news and FOSS news, But I usually watch it on its video format.
• Crime Junkie: I listen to this one from time to time, but not a lot lately. The first episode I listened of it was too good though.
• The Bright Sessions: A psychologist who treats special people who have powers, a bit too dramatical for me sometimes, and I am a bit stuck due to lack of time. But pretty good.

Finishing up

There is another FOSS podcasts app that I quite like, named Tsacdop, this one is not developed by a whole community like Antennapod, so it is still quite in its early stages, but you can still try it out, since it has a very unique feel to it, I really love its layout.

Anways, Antennapod is a very good app, they also have their own forums where you can leave suggestions and bug reports, and contribute in any way you want. It is still quite active in development, and is one of those FOSS apps that can have a fair fight against their non-free (as in freedom) competitors, such as Podcast Addict and others (Google Podcasts is not even close by the way).

If you have any other podcasts that I should listen to, please let me know, this has been day 13 of #100DaystoOffload

Last month I was using MSM Extended, with minimal Gapps and stuff like that. However, today a new update for a different ROM happened. And I could not contain myself, so I decided to give ArrowOS a try.

LineageOS is known for being the main custom ROM out there, but besides privacy and such, I also want to have a nice level of customization, so most of the time Lineage its not enough for my needs.

Now, the ROM is not really that important if you are still using Google services, so I have decided to go almost googleless this time, and I decided to share with you the main applications I am going to be using this time.

I was quite happy to see that Simple Gallery and DuckDuckGo were preinstalled, two great open source apps, Although I have a different browser choice.

Migrate is the tool of choice to do backups of contacts, SMS messages and app data. So I fired it up to get a few of my previously installed apps back. Most of the times I backup absolutely every app I have installed, but honestly, I wanted to go for something not only googleless, but less distracting and more minimal.

Apps I wont install

In my previous ROM a lot of apps were installed that I really wanted to get rid of and survive without them. These is a list with some of them.

• Spotify
• Youtube Vanced
• Google Apps and Services
• Solid Explorer

Apps I am keeping

These are a few apps that are not really open source, but I am keeping for the sake of entertainment, or are actually necessary, or are simply trustworthy for me:

• Nova Launcher
• Twisty Timer
• WhatsApp

School is coming, Google is approaching…

In my country, we will be back to University classes in a few days (Yes I have been on vacation up until now, kinda cool at first, but not really anymore, this blog is one of the few things keeping me sane). This means that I will have to use applications such as Google Classroom and Meet, and their Calendar too, but I am going to try and keep all of those Google programs away from my device, and in their own Firefox container (what a great add-on to be honest) from my laptop, since sadly they are unavoidable.

So yeah!, this has been day 12 of #100DaysToOffload, please let me know if you are using any FOSS applications to stay away from Google and such, thanks for reading!

Like, if you think about it, there is this weird middleground of actions between drawing a stickman in the corner of a sheet of a friend’s essay, to breaking somebody’s smartphone in anger.

Both of these actions are wrong, but the severity of the latter, can really upset the victim of such thing, or make them seek revenge against you, and if you did not really meant it, you feel bad, and look for ways to pay for what you did. But on the first example, the action can be ignored after a while, and the problem is fixed pretty quickly, and usually everyone just forgets about it.

I just lived trough one of those moments. I did something wrong. The other person got mad at what my action caused, then we kept driving on silence for the next couple of minutes.

I got this weird feeling, the urge to ask for forgiveness, but at the same time, I feel like my words would be answered by laughter, or just be ignored since it was not a big deal at all.

Maybe it’s just the guilt building up within me. I start to think about every little thing I have done in a similar manner, that seems to have no importance on the grand scheme of things, and yet, I can remember them now. I also can remember some (but not all) of those moments people have done things wrong towards me recently, and I nor they said anything.

So I decided to do it, I could not keep shut, I asked for forgiveness, and guess what? Nobody even remembered what I did, and we all laughed at the idea.

I am still glad of having done that, I was forgiven, maybe such little things are not that important after all, but if you have that feeling, maybe just getting it out there is the best way to deal with it and let it go.

This was day 11 of #100DaystoOffload

By the way, I am using UEFI, so go somewhere else if you are using BIOS

Booting from a Live USB 🛠

This is the obvious next step if you have dealt with this kinds of problems before, still I am typing it to make this at least a decent, ordered read. I am using an image with Void Linux XCFE, the first thing I did was go into the terminal and become root. I accomplished it by using su and typing the password, which in Void is voidlinux

Mount your Linux partition

After doing that you have to mount your partition, firs run lsblk or fdisk -l and look for the partition that contains Linux in it. In my case, that partition is usually /dev/sdX5 where X is usually a or b depending on my boot order and that kind of stuff. So, to mount it in the /mnt folder, I do:

# mount /dev/sdX5 /mnt

Mount EFI Partition

After that, I need to mount the partition that contains the EFI System, in this case, that partition is usually /dev/sdX2. It is important to always check lsblk though, just in case something you had deleted some partition or renamed something.

# mount /dev/sdX2 /mnt/boot/efi

Run this weird command

I have to do a couple of commands, first of all:

# for i in dev sys run proc; do mount -v --rbind /$i /mnt/$i; done

I am not exactly sure of what happens exactly, but if you try to do the next steps, you will end up failing to install GRUB or rEFInd because they cannot see the folder where the EFI System is (or something like that, I am not sure). Now we are ready to chroot and do the final step.

Chrooting into your Linux system

Now you execute this command:

# chroot /mnt

Now your interface might not change at all, but by doing ls, or running a command not available in the Live USB, like neofetch, you can know that you are inside of your Linux, and access all of those folders and programs.

Do a quick ls /boot/efi and check if the folders there match with your system (there is usually a void-grub folder or something like that).

Fix GRUB

Now that you know everything is where it should, it is time to install grub once again. Reminder: this guide is more for personal use than anything, there might be some utilities like grub-prober or whatever that I already had installed and you don’t, nonetheless if thats the case, following this guide should fail without doing any major harm. Run:

# grub-install --target=x86_64-efi --efi-directory=/boot/efi --bootloader-id=GRUB --recheck

Remember that all this time, you were chrooted in /mnt which is your SSD’s root partition.

Using rEFInd instead 🛑

I have followed these steps many times, and I always install grub, however, after booting I end up doing refind-install to get rEFInd back, I believe that I could just run it on the Live Environment, I just always end up forgetting about it.

Reboot, and check whats is up 🔃

This method has not failed me up until the couple of times I have had to check telegram to remember these commands. I remind you that this might not work for you but if nothing else did, you can always give it a try.

In my case, I am typing this from Linux, so I survived, and I hope you do too. # Finishing thoughts 💭

So yeah, Windows ends up being terrible with its updates, I really needed to do this little guide once and for all. I hope it helped you or at least entertained you or I have no idea of why you would be reading a guide about something that still has not happened to you.

Anyways. this was my 10th blog for #100DaystoOffload, I it serves you well, since it did for me.

I was already sitting in front of the keyboard and writing the first paragraph of some random theme that came to mind, until I remembered that I still had some stuff to do.

Every day I like to wake up pretty early, today the time was 5:40 am, however, I don’t get out of bed. I know I could be getting work done, or just doing something else that isn’t losing my time. But no, the bed is too comfy and I just lay there doing nothing but scroll my phone screen under the sheets of my bed, I blame it on the season, but its not a valid excuse, since the place where I live is not really that cold.

At 7:12 am, I finally get out of bed, take a shower, get ready for my day, turn on my computer, and do some work. After that, I have some free time (or at least, time that is not being ruled by others who tell me what to do), but then I remember, I have not cleaned the floor, nor the dishes. I already had my text editor open, the metadata set up to start writing. But I just can’t. I have responsibilities, and I don’t want anyone but myself reminding me to do those chores.

And so I did, I swept the entire floor and then mopped it, washed the dishes, and dried them. Now I am free, and I can have all the time I need.

I find it really important to get stuff done and clear my mind, Right now I don’t know what else to say. Some people manage to not do their duty before their hobbies, and sometimes I do, when I really don’t feel like actually working, and I know its no big deal. I am glad I have this sense of responsibility though, even tho I wanted to do something else, and there was nobody expecting me to fulfill those actions, I still had me, and I am okay with that, because I am still here writing, I still did what I wanted to do, and now I am done.

This is day 9 of #100DaystoOffload

This utility allows me to keep in sync my phone with my laptop. It can show my notifications between them, send and receive files or access complete folders.

I kinda liked how it worked, so I used it for a while, but then I changed my distro, as well as my desktop environment, in favor of a tiling window manager.

Using KDEConnect on a Spectrwm (or any window manager)

After that, I stopped using it for a while, because I thought it wasn’t possible to use on something other than KDE or GNOME. But I was wrong. I saw Brodie’s video on it, decided to search it on the repos, and after some setting up, it worked almost flawlessly.

I added it to my config file, so it runs when the WM opens for the first time, and despite some hiccups where it sometimes does not connect automatically, it is almost flawless and as useful as in any full DE. I want to note that if you want to get an applet on your systray you have to start the kdconnect-indicator command.

Adding to this, I recently found a very interesting browser add-on that allows me to share my browser tabs to my phone with only a couple of clicks, and I found that extremely useful too, the only caveat with it, it that it is not updated anymore, but I don’t think it needs to.

Setting it up on my android device

In order to sync my laptop with the phone, I needed to install the app, which is available on F-Droid. after that, setting it up is quite simple.

The android client comes with many features, like the ability to perform any command you wish, from your phone to the computer, This is extremely useful (but could also be very dangerous), so, like most of the functions, you can choose to disable them, and you can enable or disable the functions you want to be able to perform, in case you have some concerns with them.

Should you use it?

Initially, this was one of those applications I didn’t use that often, but the few moments I did, were super useful. But ever since I rediscovered it, and found that add-on to share tabs. I wanted to share it here. If you have not used it before, give it a try! It’s a really useful tool.

This has been day 8 of #100DaystoOffload, A little rushed, but honest work.

If you are reading this, let me know if you are using KDEConnect, or if you have found programs that work better for your workflow. I am willing to try more stuff out for this, especially the tab sync since I feel like there should be a way to do it that doesn’t require kdeconnect and its also browser independent

I don’t have comments on this site as they’re difficult to manage and take up too much time. I’d rather concentrate on producing content than managing comments.

Instead of leaving a comment, feel free to contact me ✉️ instead.

And yeah, I was happy with that, but after sharing my blog in a Discord server where I talk to some friends, they kept demanding comments, not in a serious way, but just to troll me and annoy me (At least that’s what I hope lol).

But after that, one of them sent me a link to a guide on how to do comments using GitHub issues API (so yeah, you will need to have one if you want to comment here, but at least it serves as a way to not have absolutely everyone doing so, limiting a bit).

Customizing CSS classes 🎨

And so, I decided to give it a try. I have to admit I just copy pasted everything in it at first, but after doing so, I realized that it had some conflicts with the Simple.css framework, which I used to make this site look as it does. The profile pictures looked huge, and the formatting was all wrong, so I did not like the look of it. I decided to keep working on it. To fix the avatar pictures, I added this to my custom.css file:

.avatar{
    opacity: 0.9;
    width: 2.5rem;
    border-radius: 30%;
    padding: 2px 2px;
}

Where the avatar class is included inside of the comments.html file that I took from the guide, as well as other classes that I had to customize myself so they don’t use the default properties provided by simple.css. Said classes are here:

.comment-url{
   line-height: 1px;
   font-size: 0.7rem;
   color: var(--border);
}

.comment-content{
  text-decoration: none;
  margin: 0 1rem ;
  padding: 0.15rem;
  font-size: 0.9rem;
  border-radius: 5px;
  line-height: var(--line-height);
  background: var(--code-bg);
}

Getting comments to look good ✨

Markdown can be used inside of comments too, so you can have headers, lists, and everything markdown can (I think). This meant that I had to limit and change letter sizes of them, so more CSS needed to be done. At the beginning I had no idea of how to do it, but after reading the simple.css file, I realized how some of the syntax worked. After some attempts because I forget semi-colons exist and had to test different values, it worked! So this is a snippet of how I limited the image file size first.

.comment-content img{
    margin-left: 2rem;
    border-radius: 5px;
    max-width: 40%;
}

So I did the same thing for the headers, and quotes, and everything that came to mind. In the end, comments were looking kinda nice, with a decent looking layout.

Despite what my description said, I think there might still be something you can break on this approach, but well, please don’t. If you want to take a look at the source code of this blog, feel free to do so, since I changed it quite a bit from the original.

So this was everything I did to add comments to my site. Once again, huge thanks to Aristath, for sharing quite a great resource, and Abhinav, who let me know of it.

This was day 7 of #100DaystoOffload, and I am quite happy with the final results. Let me know what do you think in the comments! (I was eager to write that, and I hope you can stop whining about this marrero171)

• RPG Maker
• Game Maker Studio
• Unity

I chose Unity and I was kinda confused about its interface, but willing to give it a try. But I guess I was kind of dumb, and instead of looking for guides on how to get started, I was looking for pretty specific things, “How to shoot on an FPS”, “How to make 3D trees”, “How to not fall from the map borders”, etc.

I eventually gave up on Unity, because I realized I would need to do some coding if I wanted something decent, and I did not know how to do so. I switched to Game Maker, and started some kind of Pac-man clone, but only made the enemies and player movement, no collisions, scores, or anything.

I lost interest, and years passed where I didn’t do any efforts to make a game at all.

How I actually got started on game development 🎮

At the beginning of February 2020, my interest on Game development was starting to grow more. I was already at Uni, and was familiar with C++ and a bit of Python, although not an expert in any of them (I was among the best of the class though, I think that it was not necessary to get a lot of experience on it for my career).

But it was thanks to channels like GMTK and Design Doc, The Geek Critique, and a bunch of others, that I started to get a sense of appreciation for the design and effort behind videogames.

Also, I was aware of the FOSS community, and about to start using Linux. This led me to the Godot engine. This is its description on Steam.

Godot Engine is a feature-packed, cross-platform game engine to create 2D and 3D games from a unified interface. It provides a comprehensive set of common tools, so that you can focus on making games without having to reinvent the wheel.

The pandemic, the discovering of the FOSS community, of Godot, all this was an omen, a sign, that this would be my new hobby.

So I decided to try it out, I was more aware of how videogames work, so after a quick Google search (Yeah, I still used it, sorry) on “How to make a platformer in Godot Engine”, I found a couple of video tutorials by GDQuest. It was quite long,but simple enough to follow, although I also faced a couple of problems, which weren’t really that hard (I forgot that the Y axis is inverted in Godot, as well most graphical interfaces), but I the end, I was actually learning, and started to work on some quick small projects with help from other videos and the great documentation.

Wrapping up 💭

I know this is not really a proper starting guide, and I if you were expecting that, I am sorry, I might do something like that in the future, but if you want to try game development too, these are my recommendations to get started using Godot or in game development in general.

• Games from Scratch: Great for tutorials and reviews of game development software.
• KidsCanCode: Don’t get fooled by the name, adults can learn too, tutorials for many different engines, and some for Godot too, like their Godot Recipes, which are epic.
• Game Endeavor: Devlogs, a great channel to get inspiration from, that also has some old tutorials that work as of now (He also loves tweens, and you should too).
• GDQuest: Great tutorials for general game development as well as Godot focused, it offers the source code of everything they share.
• HeartBeast: Amazing channel with a lot of tutorials, devlogs and a pretty nice guy. His Action RPG series is my favorite
• UmaiPixel: Godot development and other things, but has not uploaded in a while.
• Brackeys: Does not do videos anymore, but has a lot of Unity and general game development tutorials
• Don’t forget to checkout the channels mentioned at the beginning of the blog too, wich are more general!

This has been day 6, of #100DaystoOffload. Eventually, I did my first “complete” game in a game jam. but thats a story for another day ;)

Because of that, if you want to be safe on the internet, there are only a few trustworthy options: Bromite, and Fennec. Some other options are Brave or Vivaldi, but they are a bit more more controversial (still good in my opinion), so you probably would want to choose one of the first two for the maximum amount of security and control.

🔒 Light yet private browsers?

However, in my experience, all of these browsers have a problem, they are too heavy for my needs, They are fine if I want to use the browser to explore the web or do online shopping, but most of the time, using an app that takes over 100 Mb just to display an article I visit through links from social media or Youtube videos, its kind of bloated.

Therefore, I started looking for lighter browsers that were better for my usage, while still providing some privacy, and decided to share them with you.

Via Browser

Since I am using a custom ROM, my device comes with Via preinstalled, a very lightweight and powerful browser, I have used it from time to time. It offers built-in ad blocking, tons of customization and features, a very minimal interface, custom scripts and a lot of other things. The only gripe I have with it is that it’s Chinese, and even though I don’t think the developer is doing anything sketchy, I would rather avoid any trouble, if you don’t mind (Like I do sometimes), it is a very good choice.

DuckDuckGo Privacy Browser

This is a good one, it is available on F-Droid, which is the link I provided, so it is open source, and quite a decent option. I love the fact that it triggers the private mode on my keyboard by default, a feature that might be available in some others, but you would have to enable it manually. It also offers a quick button to delete all of the data used in the browsing session. which is quite nice feature.

Firefox Klar / Focus

I don’t have a lot to say about this one, I have used it before, but I was unable to find it on the F-Droid repos, however, at the time of this blog, the Google Play version was last updated January 19th of 2021, so I assume its still in development. I would not really use this one, because it is a lot heavier than the rest (around 50), since its using its own engine. It offers a button to delete everything just like DDG browser, but it is not as customizable.

Smart Cookie Web

My current favorite, it is extremely lightweight, as customizable as Via, and more, it offers tabs (like on desktop browsers) and a lot of privacy features, it also has its own set of add-ons that you can install, a built-in reader mode, and so much more. I chose this browser because it feels super complete, while still being less than 5 Mb of download. It might totally replace Bromite or Fennec, at least for me.

Just go with what you like

Each and everyone of this browsers are nothing but one more option, and is up to you to choose, in fact, you can simply not install any of them and continue with you current one. But each of these has been used by me and they also look kinda nice :D

This is the 5th blog for the #100DaystoOffload challenge, this time it was quite hard to start, but in the end, I think it turned out right, and I hope it’s helpful for you. If you have any other browser recommendations, make sure to share them with me!

I still find it difficult to stay loyal to one browser or another, to be honest, I have only been using SCW for half a week or so, and I factory reset my phone quite often. I have been browsing less and less in favor of RSS readers. So as I said, I quite prefer these lighter, simpler options for browsing quick questions or open links. And not so much for more personal or important browsing.

A bit of back story

The first one I tried was Awesome, back when I was using Pop OS, which was my first distro. I used it for months, and I really liked it, but I didn’t really understand it. The config file of this WM is written in Lua, and is extremely customizable, allowing for theming, widgets creation and so much more. But, since I didn’t know the language, I copy-pasted code from the internet until I got something I liked. However, loading times got huge, and I did not know how to troubleshoot it, maybe a missing library or some code that was too resource heavy. The point is, that only the default themes worked fast enough for my liking. Ultimately, I decided to try something else.

Making the change

I had heard about Spectrwm for a while, and tried it a couple of times, but I never managed to customize my bar panel successfully. But after watching Distrotube’s video on Spectrwm, I noticed that I made a pretty dumb mistake, I did not make the bar script an executable (yeah, I know, pretty obvious once you realize).

Customizing my bar

The bar can be configured in different ways, I just use a bash script, I named it baraction.sh and it is located in ~/.config/spectrwm/, I followed Distrotube’s config, and took some ideas from r/unixporn I had to setup some colors inside my .spectrwm.conf file, which looks something like this:

# Bar Settings
bar_enabled         = 1
bar_action          = ~/.config/spectrwm/baraction.sh
bar_action_expand           = 1
bar_border_width            = 1
bar_border[1]               = rgb:18/18/18
bar_border_unfocus[1]       = rgb:18/18/18
bar_color[1]                = rgb:2e/34/40,rgb:eb/cb/8b,rgb:a3/be/8c,rgb:bf/61/6a,rgb:b4/8e/ad,rgb:88/c0/d0,rgb:d0/87/70,rgb:3b/42/52,rgb:4c/56/6a
bar_color_selected[1]       = rgb:88/c0/d0
bar_font_color[1]       = rgb:ec/ef/f4,rgb:2e/34/40
bar_font            = mononoki Nerd Font:pixelsize=15:antialias=true
bar_justify         = right
bar_format          = +|L +@bg=0;+S +L +@bg=0; +@bg=8; +C +@fg=0; +|2R +A +@bg=0;+@fg=0; %a, %b %d %R +<    +<

Scripts with wmctrl and other configurations

Spectrwm is can be controlled with a little program named wmctrl, wich interacts with EWMH compatible X window managers, and I can use it to make some interesting things. For example, Spectrwm does not play nice with polybar, trayer and similar tools. Since I use the default bar, I dont really have a problem with this for the most part. Nonetheless, I made a script that moves my systray to my current workspace, it looks like this:

#!/bin/bash
current_ws="$(wmctrl -d | grep '*' | awk '{print $1}')"
wmctrl -r panel -t $current_ws

I just run it inside of the bar script, so it updates at the same time.

My current setup (constantly evolving)

I really love how spectrwm is so easy to configure in general, as you saw with the little snippet I shared, Spectrwm does not need any specific programming language to understand what is going on, just a bit of text formatting and some help from the manpage, and everything ends up working out. In the end, I have this is my current setup.

There is still work to do, but I am really happy with the results, I am stilll playing around with other scripts and things. If you wanna get my current dotfiles, you can do so here.

Day 4 of #100DaystoOffload

On my journey towards being googleless, there is one service that has no match: Youtube. This site has the biggest catalog of videos. But, as great as it is, it also represents one of the main ways for Google to get revenue, serve ads and collect data from it’s users, which is big problem for people like me, looking for a way to stop them from getting every bit they can about my life.

Even if you don’t consume its content with entertainment purposes, you will probably need it for tutorials, or streaming events, or to sub to your friend’s channel.

I need Youtube, that’s how I learn stuff, that’s where my teachers upload their homework videos. And in times like these, it’s honestly the primary way of entertainment I have. That’s one of the reasons I made this blog too. To use my time for something more productive, growing this site of mine and making it as nice as I can. At the very least, I am typing a lot more and with better grammar (don’t @ me).

Moving to Newpipe ▶️

When I discovered Youtube Vanced, I was really happy, I had a way to consume Youtube without ads and, recently, without Sponsors. And yes, that was pretty convenient for me, but I still needed an account linked to the app if I wanted access to my Subscriptions.

So yeah, I was still being watched by Google, and it was not until a week ago, that I decided to do the full switch, and I installed Newpipe due to some interactions on my Mastodon instance.

So, when I did the switch, I started from scratch. A few years ago, Youtube offered a way to get your subscriptions on a OPML file, but they made it harder recently. Newpipe provides you with instructions to recover them if you so choose. However, I decided not to do it.

Decluttering my subscriptions 🗑️

I have used Youtube for years. Last time I exported my subscriptions, I had 1000+ subscriptions, some channels did not even exist anymore, and I did not recognize most of them. Back then I removed my subscription from a lot of channels, but I am probably reaching the same amount today.

I decided to look up every channel I actually remembered, and “subscribing” to them (you don’t really subscribe since the subs number doesn’t go up) and ended up with around 60 channels, which I currently follow. After that, I decided to categorize them. Newpipe currently has a limited support on custom tabs, but it shows the groups in little icons at the top of the subscriptions page.

No more notifications 🔔

Newpipe offers many functions that Vanced does not, it allows you to download videos and playlists, listen to the audio of videos, etc. However, you also lose certain things, the ability to like and comment on videos. And more importantly for me (at least apparently), notifications.

To deal with this, I just kept Vanced installed, and I get notifications that way, however, I I realized that most of the time I would open Newpipe and update the video feed, and watch whatever video I wanted, and some hours later I would get the notification of said content. This means that Youtube notifications suck, and that I don’t need them anymore

I guess this ended up helping me manage my time better, I would rather watch videos whenever I have the time, instead of receving a notification and having the urge of paying attention to it. Newpipe also allows me to get the RSS of any channel I want with ease, so if I really wanted to get notifications, I could probably work with that if I really had to know if something gets posted.

Finishing up

This was my third entry for #100DaystoOffload , I have been working on this site quite a lot, if you even remember how it looked just a few days ago. I am quite happy with the results I have.

Maybe you could try doing a website too, you would spend less time on Youtube by doing so, just like me!

I have always liked the freedom that Android can give u as an operating system, ever since I got that first weird Chinese phone my mother got from a random store with no warranty at all and a battery that was about to explode, I fell in love with how different I could make my phone look compared to everyone else’s just by installing a few apps in those 512 Mb of storage.

At the time, I watched videos from the Spanish youtube channel Pro Android which showcased different launchers and apps to customize my device. However, I had Android 2.3, which was already old at the time, and even tho I rooted my device (or I thought I did, I probably got a virus or something) most launchers, including Nova Launcher, did not run at all. so I had to settle on Holo Launcher.

It was not until my third phone, where I finally managed to get wild with the customization I got, a Samsung Galaxy s3 mini, with ROM support and every app I wanted working because of that. I might talk about that in future.

📱 Android customization today

I want to focus my first blog on a poll I did, that is still going on Mastodon here and talk about my opinions on some of the launchers I’ve used over the years.

Nova Launcher

Everyone should know this one, it has been my go-to ever since I got it, as a teenager I was unable to buy it, and my family wasn’t willing to pay for apps, but it was the first thing I got when I finally got some money from Google Rewards. It has every function you can imagine. It’s gesture system is like no other, and the new gestures on icons and folders, allows me to have run up to three apps, from a single icon, by tapping it, or swiping up or down. I can make it even better if I apply the same gestures to a folder, so with a single icon, I get to access any app I want.

KISS Launcher

Now, this is another launcher that I use sometimes, in fact, after the mentioned poll, I decided to give it another try, and I am quite happy with the results. It is very lightweight and customizable, it’s tags feature works great and allows me to categorize my apps as I want (If only I didn’t have to setup every app individually) and once it’s done, there is nothing as cool as typing a category and getting the results you need.

This is how I am rocking it today, as you can see, pretty minimalistic

Microsoft Launcher

Back when I was not as privacy-aware, I used Microsoft Launcher, and I really, really, liked it. it had a lot of the same features Nova provided, completely free, and I could have everything linked up between my Windows computer, and my device.

I am not currently using it, but seriously, the amount of customization and ease of use was amazing.

Other launchers

Some launchers I have used before are here, I am skipping some tho.

• Lawnchair: This is promising, but it has stopped development (it is said that it’s just a break, so let’s see) and Nova is already catching up in their betas (which are more stable than Lawnchair’s), but it offers a lot of unique functionality, like using multiple icon packs at the same time, if you want the latest updates, join their telegram channel.
• Niagara Launcher: Very minimal and with some pretty animations. similar to kiss, but feels a lot more polished (KISS is more functional, snappy, less eye-candy), it has paid features that might get your attention, like folders and such.
• Posidon Launcher: A very unique launcher that features an RSS feed on it’s home screen, I have been testing it and it has worked before, but currently it is crashing on me quite often, but seriously, it is a great FOSS application that you should try if you have not, the dev got a telegram channel too.

💭 Final thoughts

This is my first proper blogpost here, and I want it to take part of the #100DaysToOffload challenge. I might go into more detail about some launcher, or just focus on new discoverings I make along the way.

Besides launchers, I have also used different icon packs, gesture applications, android themes and root applications. So I hope I get to talk about those in the future

If you have some launcher, or topic you want me to talk about, feel free to @ me on my Mastodon

This is just a simple attempt at doing a blog, it’s not really something I understand completely, but I wanted to try it out anyways

You can ignore this post since its just a test, and hey, if you are seeing it, it worked!