It’s been quite some time since I’ve set up my own server and NAS at home. Since then I’ve thought a bit about backups. On the NAS I not only store mine and my partner’s personal files but also a media collection that we share: primarily music and movies. Because the media collection was already significantly bigger than the personal files when I set the whole thing up, I decided to set up backups…
My web server is running on an OpenBSD VM that had to be upgraded from 7.7 to 7.8, but it turned out that the default OpenBSD drive labels created with disklabel(8)’s -A option made the /usr partition on the 16GB big drive too small to automatically update with sysupgrade(8). After having looked around a bit for some way to still do this, I first stumbled upon sysclean(8). While nice, it didn’t…
Last year I built myself a Lily58 split keyboard after already having built a crkbd before. The fact that I never really finished the software is apparent by my local qmk_firmware branch still being called aurora-lily58-test . For the Lily58 I used a Liatris Microcontroller , which is pin-compatible with the Pro Micro . Because I never finished writing any documentation for the keyboard,…
My GPG key expired last month so I renewed it. It’s the same as the old one, except the expiration date was pushed to the very end of 2026. You can find the updated public key on my about page . While at it, I also updated my security.txt .
Since finally moving out of “shared housing” and into “my own” apartment I’ve been thinking about finally setting up a homeserver, something I’ve been wanting to do for quite a few years now. In preparation for this I’ve kept my old workstation when I upgraded to my current one late 2021. It’s one I’ve had since around 2014 and was getting a little slow, but I decided it will be more than enough…
After thinking about this for a few months now, I have made up my mind. Despite all the friends I made and the fun I had 1 , I decided to boycott Twitch for good. I won’t be watching streams on Twitch at all, blocking the site entirely, and I definitely won’t stream on there again. The reasons are actually quite simple: Twitch, owned by Amazon, is exploiting its users on multiple levels such as…
It’s been a few years since I’ve used Reddit myself, but through Louis Rossmann’s videos I’ve been following the current drama a bit. I must say, I’m not the least bit sad or surprised about Reddit’s current situation. Quite the contrary: I’m happy about it. The site has been a shit show at least since they introduced the new Reddit. It became a sluggish, JavaScript ridden mess that I wanted to…
Around half a year ago, I wrote an article about Password Managers . Since then, a few things have changed, so I wanted to write down my reasons for the current situation. If you don’t feel like reading too much of this, my current password manager of choice is KeePassXC . For the people that would like to continue reading, here are my reasons for using it. At the time of my last article about…
With Twitter’s demise and Mastodon’s rise in popularity, I must admit I’ve been feeling drawn towards Mastodon, even though I deleted my Twitter account shortly before this whole fiasco began. The reason was that I posted and browsed Twitter mindlessly, wasting mine and other people’s time, and nothing good became of it. Most of the time I felt like I wasted the past half hour scrolling through my…
While the basic technique used in this article is still used, the exact implementation has since changed and is now available here: https://git.sr.ht/~witcher/backup Quite a while ago I set up a backup solution that works for me but isn’t ideal. I have an external hard drive that I plug into my workstation, run my usual backup command using restic, and disconnect it again. This works, but it’s not…
I’ve had a Nextcloud instance for about a year now and I was always wondering why the Nextcloud client on my workstation starts up so slowly, while it doesn’t even take a second on my laptop. As it turns out, the problem was my local folder synchronisation setting. On my workstation the whole Documents folder is selected to sync, but only a few subfolders actually have synchronisation activated.…
Speedrun.com is the website for all your speedrunning needs. It sports a database of runs grouped by games, with groups of categories per game, a forum, news, and a “streams” section which lists speedrunners that are currently live. It is the most used platform by speedrunning communities and the first stop to building a new one. But I, and many others for that matter, have issues with…
Soju is an IRC bouncer that is easy to host and use. I was introduced to it from chat.sr.ht , Sourcehut ’s hosted IRC bouncer available for paying customers. Recently, Sourcehut had an outage. I didn’t mind this, it didn’t impact my workflow at the time, and it was also a fairly short outage that was addressed and resolved quickly, but it reminded me that other services do have down time from time…
As stated in a recent blog post about Using a OnePlus 5 in 2022 , I had a few issues and decided to choose using a different, newer phone. This new phone is the Google Pixel 6a, produced by a company I despise, bought second-hand to minimise the money it will receive from my purchase. The reason behind choosing a Google Pixel phone was that they are the only phones that GrapheneOS , a…
Thanks to this, I decided to prepare rss-email for a 0.2.0 release by replacing Diesel with sqlx , a crate that enables compile-time checked SQL queries. A complete ORM always felt a bit overkill for this, but this was the project I decided to try Diesel on to get familiar with it. Discovering that Diesel is not able to be statically linked was enough of a push to replace it with sqlx. Besides…
I wanted to give a quick update on my current situation and why it is that I’m absent so much, both in FOSS and in private. Besides finishing my full-time Bachelors this semester and my part-time job at the same time, I find it difficult to work on FOSS in my free time. This should clear up mid next year the latest, if not sooner. If projects of mine seem abandoned, this is because I currently…
End of 2017 was once again the time to get a new phone. OnePlus was loved back then for their cheap phones with have comparatively amazing hardware to the more expensive smartphones during that time. This has changed radically since then and their phones are almost the same price as other flagships. I remember paying around 550€ for it and was very happy with my purchase until 3 years later, end…
Signal just recently released a new update adding stories , akin to the feature of the same name found in WhatsApp et al. It sports the usual upsides of Signal: E2E encryption and privacy by default. It even allows you to disable it outright, a feature which I’ve been wishing for forever with WhatsApp, while I still feel little forced to use it for now. 1 Stories are not a feature that I need or…
I’ve been annoyed by the state of smartphones lately, and one of the top contenders in “Most Annoying” is instant messaging. Currently, the options for instant messaging outside of communities like tech (IRC), gaming (Discord, which has a bunch of other problems), etc. is an app. At the top of this list have been WhatsApp, iMessage, Signal, and Telegram, to name a few. What similarities do all of…
I just released the first version of rss-email , 0.1.0, a little program I’ve written about before . It solves my issue of not checking my newsreader often enough. Instead, I’ll get notifications of new posts via E-Mail. It’s easily self hostable and only requires a cron entry as well as a simple config and url file to work. Feel free to check it out! You can find the installation instructions in…
About 1 ½ months ago, I published a post on my microblog about GitHub Copilot and why I decided to leave GitHub for good, switching to SourceHut completely. What I failed to explain in that post is why I decided to go with SourceHut specifically, and not any other git forge. SourceHut is a 100% open source git forge that uses git with E-Mail and patches, the way it worked before GitHub et al. came…
With the launch of GitHub Copilot and the problems that it has, as outlined in the blog post, I decided to pull all my projects from my GitHub profile, leaving only forks and projects I’m a maintainer of behind. I will also remove the link to my GitHub profile from my website. You can find all of my projects here: https://git.sr.ht/~witcher . I’ll close this small post with an excerpt of Drew…
Recently, I published a blog post on password managers , saying I’m looking to switch again. As it turns out, Drew DeVault (and contributors) has been developing a new “secret storage manager” called Himitsu , written in Hare , a new systems programming language also developed by Drew. Himitsu seems very promising (kind of like a better pass ? 1 ) and I might give it a try, although I’ll have to…
Since I’m building and publishing my website via the Sourcehut CI anyways, I figured I could just publish it to Sourcehut pages as well. If, for some reason, my website on https://wiredspace.de/ is down, you can still look at my content elsewhere now where it will be just as up-to-date as on the main website.
I’m thinking about changing password managers yet again… Why? Because I’m not happy with my current one anymore. As of now, the password managers I’ve been using (in order) are: KeePassXC pass Bitwarden When I used KeePass, at some point I felt like I needed to switch to a different one (although I don’t remember the specifics), which is why I used pass. Quickly, I noticed pass doesn’t fit my use…
Like I mentioned in my post about communication channels , E-Mail is a low volume communication channel that I value a lot, which is why I want to remind and urge everyone to send me E-Mails instead of sending a short instant message to me. Use communication channels the way they are intended to and make them serve a purpose. Send me a Signal message if you want to have a chat with me, but please…
Disclaimer At the time of writing I’m still a student, have only relatively minor experience with working in companies and am in no way a trained project manager. I’m solely giving my thoughts on how the following has worked for me so far and describe what problems I’ve had. If you’re reading this and are more qualified to talk about this or think I’m wrong (or right!) in some places, please reach…
I updated my public key to have a subkey for signing git commits. You can find my updated key on the about page and here: PGP key
Recently I got myself a Nextcloud instance, and it’s been absolutely comfy. I didn’t know how useful a cloud can be until I got one that’s not one of the proprietary ones with next to no configuration available. Nextcloud has a lot of apps. Some of the most known apps to non-Nextcloud-users are probably the Contacts and Calendar apps which also support CardDAV and CalDAV, respectively. Some lesser…
Around September 2021 I built a new PC. I decided this would be my first main machine running Linux, and Linux only 1 , so I also decided I should make it look a little pretty. So, out with dwm and it’s default statusbar and in with bspwm and Polybar. I’ve been using this setup (mirrored on my ThinkPad E470 2 ) since then, but lately I’ve been running into the issue described here . It’s the kind…
Just when I thought the semesters full of horrible Java lectures stopped, another semester gets thrown my way with yet more lectures specifically about Java. And I bet it’s gonna be Java 8 again, none of the newer releases! I understand that Java is still around, but it’s debatable whether 1. it even should still be around (as much as it is) 2. this much time and energy needs to be put into…
The microblog was an alternative blog listing on my website that was meant to only feature short "throaway" posts. Since these posts ended up similar enough to the posts in the normal blog listing I have since merged the two listings into the normal blog listing. Microblog I got a place for microblogging on my website now. You can find it here . Twitter is almost deprecated for me, I guess. I just…
I started working on a thing that, for now, I’ve called rss-email. It’s supposed to check for new RSS posts and send them to a specified E-Mail address. It’s in the very early development stages, and I’m currently struggling a bit to find enough time for it. I’m using http://r-36.net/scm/zs/ as a reference. https://sr.ht/~witcher/rss-email
Keyboard journey Recently, I got sick of my Anne Pro 2 keyboard, which is a 60% keyboard I’ve owned since the end of 2020. Previously I was using the Logitech G810 , an all around horrible keyboard (as expected from Logitech products). 1 Logitech G810 The Logitech G810 was my first mechanical keyboard after a few cheap membrane ones I found lying around. It was a truly horrible introduction to…
Previous state of the server I’ll be honest: my server was a mess. I had quite a few things running, like a PrivateBin instance, ZNC for IRC, searx, discord_covid19 , a lazy instance of a mail server, and some other things. For instance, I actually had no idea how ZNC was running: as a systemd service, in the background, docker, etc.? So, eventually, I thought to myself: You have to clean this…
This post was written in 2021 and is only present for archival purposes. It's written in a very condescending and partially confrontative tone that I would not want to use again. Read at your own discretion. “Arch is a hard distro to {install,maintain,use}” Elitist and meme culture There has been a sentence on the internet for a long time now that I very much hate to hear or see. It’s the…
This post was written in 2021. I don't condone the use of Discord for any purpose whatsoever. Use open platforms that don't censor their user base at will. The article remains online for archival purposes but should not be followed for ethical reasons. Free and open source alternatives that respect the user include, but are not limited to: Matrix Signal IRC XMPP About a month ago I decided to get…
After taking quite a break on working on my website I decided to finally add pagination support for the blog on my website, which you are currently reading. Since I set up my website on blogc it just made sense to keep using that and even though I had quite a hard time figuring stuff out, again, as there is only documentation to work with, I pulled it off. As it is now, the blog shows 1 blog entry…
Introduction to mbsync mbsync is an alternative to offlineimap . I decided to recently switch to mbsync because offlineimap ’s development stopped and I started having problems with SSL/TLS that I wasn’t about to fix. Setting up mbsync is easy and tedious, but I’ll show you how my setup looks like so you have a simpler time than me. Setting up mbsync Configuration file mbsync’s configuration file…
Introduction Up until now I’ve been working on my sites in pure HTML; the only tool I used had been ssg to convert the little “wiki” I put op on GitHub to HTML and use it on my website. Creating a HTML file every time I wanted to post something on my website is not a viable alternative, though, which is why I was looking for an option to make my life easier. I decided to ask people on the webring…
msmtp msmtp is a commandline smtp client that reads the message body from stdin. configuration You need to first install msmtp with the package manager of your choice. After installing, create a confi file. msmtp looks for those in $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/msmtp . The config file simply needs to be called config . Here’s a sample configuration file which you can edit: defaults auth on tls on…
This post was published in 2020 and is only present for archival purposes. The content in this post is heavily outdated, please read it critically. This describes how to setup Arch Linux similar to my setup. This is rarely up-to-date, so be mindful when you type in your commands in the commandline, and be sure to check the Arch Linux Installation guide or the Arch Wiki in general, if you’re unsure…
offlineimap offlineimap is a commandline util allowing you to sync a local repository with an online one via the E-Mail syncing protocol IMAP. configuration After installing offlineimap you will want to create a config file. This is by default located in ~/.offlineimaprc , with further configurations in ~/.offlineimap/ . The configuration syntax of offelineimap ’s config file is pretty simple.…