I remember many years ago, when I was a Windows user, and even later after I made the switch to Linux, I always struggled to find the perfect music player that would fit my needs perfectly. From time to time I would fantasize about programming my own little, perfect, shiny music player program that would fit my needs perfectly like Cinderella’s shoe. But I was nowhere near naïve enough to actually start the project, let alone finish it. I know how much time and effort it would take. Then I discovered mpd (Music Player Daemon).

It’s been a while since I started trying to decouple myself from big tech companies that sell my data to third parties, give them away freely to governments, or feed them to huge, unsupervised AI systems to target me better with ads – what is commonly known as degoogling. Today I’m taking another step in this process by deleting my personal Twitter account. twitter.com/jumpinglangur is no more!

I found some time to update the Particle Physics Simulator android application (version 3.7.4) in order to fix some bugs and add a hardcoded menu button, since terminals do not have a dedicated physical button these days. Additionally, my merge request to the F-Droid data repository was accepted, so now the app is also available via the F-Droid store.

Tomorrow my parental leave officially starts, so I’ll be off the grid for a little over a couple of months. I’ll be back mid September with (hopefully) recharged batteries. In the mean time, have fun!

These days of coronavirus where a lot of people work from home the number of teleconferences per unit of time has skyrocketed. Most of us are forced to use video conferencing software of dubious privacy practices¹ without having much say in the choice, but that is a story for another day. If you are like me and do not have an external webcam to plug into your PC, don’t run off to the store just yet. There are solutions to make your Android smartphone act as a webcam that work really well. One of them is droidcam from Dev47Apps, which works even if you don’t have Google Services installed. This post quickly discusses how to set this up on your Linux PC using both wifi and ADB.

Edit (2021-11-04): fix terminology mess-up: LUKS on LVM -> LVM on LUKS
Edit (2021-07-01): fix typo in GRUB_CMDLINE: cryptodevice -> cryptdevice
Edit (2020-06-16): use dd to create swap file instead of fallocate

Disclaimer: some of the steps in the Arch Linux installation procedure change from time to time, so I would recommend checking out the awesome Arch Linux installation guide in the Arch wiki to get a fully up-to-date picture of the process.

It is well known that Arch Linux does not have the easiest installation process of all Linux distributions. In my opinion, for technical users this is a big plus, as you get to know your system better simply by having to set it up from scratch. This comes with the perk that you only install the packages you need, leading to a smaller and arguably snappier system.

In this guide, I’m documenting my latest Arch Linux installation on my laptop, where I set up a logical volume with LVM on top of a fully-encrypted disk with LUKS. Encrypting your disk in your mobile devices should be a requirement if you value your security and/or privacy. Nowadays it has almost no performance penalties and it provides countless benefits.