an antifascist, anarchist cyberpunk with enthusiasm for free software, security, the freetekno-movement, and lost places.
I have three motorised rollerblinds in my flat. They came with cheap 433 MHz remotes and no documentation. Like any reasonable person I wanted them in Home Assistant; like any unreasonable person I decided to do it the hard way. A few years ago I got it working: raw RF captures replayed through a CC1101 transceiver and a Wemos D1 Mini. The blinds moved. The config was 370 lines of YAML, a C++…
Annual transmission : project status logs and miscellaneous noise. Might be useful if you’re running my stuff or following any of my projects. Personal things and professional life The end of 2025 has been a quite interesting period for me, as life wasn’t very easy, but nevertheless I managed to work on a lot of (new and existing) projects, I just did not manage to post that much on…
My laptop isn’t just a tool - it’s my deck. I live for tweaking it, making it run and look exactly how I need it to. Function and form, on my terms.
My current main (Linux) laptop is a ThinkPad T480, which I bought after Coreboot has been ported 1 , to flash it with Heads 2 . It is, in fact, the first “modern” personal ThinkPad after my trusted X230/T430 (the former with classic keyboard mod) - apart from some work laptops from various companies. Initially I have been quite happy with the T480, as all my old ThinkPads were slowly…
quite spontaneously slstatus version 1.1 has been released! notable changes included in this release are: refactored wifi component on Linux (based on nl80211 , wext is now dead for quite some time) new “up” component to check interface status fixes for keymap component on FreeBSD the release-tarball is available for download at dl.suckless.org and (mirrored) also at ftp.drkhsh.at .…
One thing I always wanted to set up, but never found the time for, is volatile logging on remote hosts. No traces should be left on unencrypted servers (or encrypted servers, physically out of my control). Also, centrally storing, querying and visualizing the logs is neat. Additionally, this can also be useful on machines with flash storage, to reduce disk writes. For Linux with systemd, it is…
On my OpenBSD boxes I regularly use the sysutils/checkrestart port after updating my machines. For quite some time I have been using scripts which just run a line like the following for each and every service I am using on that host: [ ... ] checkrestart | grep node_exporter && rcctl restart node_exporter [ ... ] This has proved to be quite inefficient, and annoying to maintain over time. So I…
In my homelab I am running quite a few OpenBSD machines (virtual and physical). For monitoring everything, I have settled on prometheus-style monitoring, specifically VictoriaMetrics. One of the things that were still missing was monitoring failed services on OpenBSD hosts. Usually I do a rcctl ls failed regularly to check if any service may have been crashed. However, that turned out to be quite…
Unfortunately, the widely used tool etckeeper has not been ported to OpenBSD (yet? x-doubt ). After taking a look at the codebase and functionality, I decided that it won’t be worth porting, and there may be simpler, less sucking, solutions to achieve everything the tool should do, at least for me. First, initialize /etc as a git repository. Beware of some binary files in etc: adjust the git…
$$$$. $ . $$$$. $$$$$. $ '$ $ $ $ '$ ' '$ $ ' $ $ 8 8 $$$$$$ $$$$$ $$ $ $$$$$ $$ . $$ $$ $ $$ '' '$$$$ '$$$$ '$ '$ PSA: As you may have noticed, I created a small website to show off all my ASCII/ANSI textart pieces. Way too much unfinished stuff accumulated in various directories over the time. Now I’m trying to finish up all the pieces and sort everything. I’ll try to keep you…
Wish you all a happy new year 2024! 🎉 As you may have noticed, last year ended with fewer blog posts. Not only work kept me really busy, but I also used the time to work on a few personal projects intensively and learn a lot of new skillz. Including but not limited to: a fully fledged homelab rack for compute, storage & network a complete netflow/IDS “SIEM” solution for home network…
some kind of different blog post this time. my kind brother grayhash showed me the underground parts of the city they are currently living in. to be specific, the canalization spanning over a big radius of the city undergrounds, mainly for rain water, sometimes for mixed water too. a very interesting fact is, that the tunnels were re-used for the newly laid telephone cables under the city - at…
i am excited to announce that slstatus 1.0 has finally been released! this long-awaited release comes after a period of code refactoring and intense testing on multiple (operating) systems to ensure stability. for those who are not familiar, slstatus is a lightweight status monitor designed specifically for window managers that utilize wm_name or stdin to display information on the status bar…
Recently, I was forced to switch ISP because of the availability at my new flat. Short after the connection was finally established, I began noticing really strange behaviors on my OpenBSD gateway. On my firewall, I usually run a caching unbound(8) resolver, querying root resolvers directly - or some uncensored public DNS service. The first thing I noticed via this connection, were the…
Recently, I set up the fingerd(8) 1 daemon on my OpenBSD server hosting this site as a unix-like way to fetch my contact details. What is finger you may ask? [!INFO] man fingerd fingerd implements a simple protocol based on RFC 1288 that provides an interface to the Name and Finger programs at several network sites. The program is supposed to return a friendly, human-oriented status report on…
the last few weeks i have done some improvements on the infrastructure behind this site. one of the few things missing was finishing my gopherhole, which i finally found the time for. this means that from now on this blog, all git repositories and everything else is 100 % accessible via gopher as an alternative to the usual http(s) protocols - thanks to awesome warez like geomyidae 1 ,…
Recently I bought a ThinkPad X230 from a friend to use as a lightweight but robust travel laptop. I looked for a simpler and especially more battery-pleasing operating system than Qubes OS (which I use on my main machine) - but without compromising security on the run. So I went with installing OpenBSD (I have been using it on dozens of other machines, especially servers), as it seems to fit my…
Oi, wish you all a happy new year 2023! :smile: At the end of 2022 I was pretty busy, which is why it was pretty silent on here. My days off from work started with a memory and a disk failure, yay. Then I used the time to rest get some stuff done on some private projects. Mainly Qubes OS, my new Gaming PC based on Gentoo and many others. I will probably write something about those projects the…
(This blog post can also be found on sigma-star blog ) Measures to protect firmware, bootloader and operating system from tampering have a long history in embedded development (also Smartphones and Tablets). [In the company I’m working for] we have been deploying such solutions for many different customers. However, our own development machines, which are x86 most of the time, suffer from…
Some years ago, this site was accessible over the uncomplicated Gopher 1 protocol as an alternative to HTTP/HTML, but due to changes in hosting infrastructure and personal interests, I dropped it at some point. Now, in 2022, showing an alternative example on how the Web could look like without all those distracting ads, cookie popups and crappy sites filled to the top with tracking, is becoming…
Some weeks ago I spontaneously started with a little new project. I am writing a Prometheus 1 exporter for the Jellyfin 2 media server. For those of you, who don’t know Jellyfin: It’s an open-source replacement for media servers like Plex or Emby , serving your media collections. For the Plex ecosystem there is a software project called Varken 3 to aggregate and export metrics, which…
Update: official suckless repos updated 1 , 1.0 release and packaging for common distros/BSDs will follow soon! It has been a while since I have touched the slstatus 2 codebase. Nevertheless, the program has been in use a lot, which led to some bugfixes and improvements being sent to the suckless mailing list. So, as my job as the maintainer of slstatus on suckless.org I have started digging…
Once again (lol), welcome to my new, refreshed website. After years, finally I found the time to give it some update. Additionally, this is the return of my blog (which I started many years ago). I hope I find the time to give it some regular updates. Maybe I will also upload some old blog posts. Hello, world!