These days almost everyone uses services like Dropbox or mega.nz to store their important files and have them accessible wherever and whenever they need them. I’m told it is not uncommon to use these external services to back up all one’s files, from photos to sensitive and private documents. Well, good news. If you actually care about your files and feel uneasy to have them all in other people’s servers, you may want to have a look at Syncthing, an open source and free (as in free beer) continuous file synchronization program that synchronizes your files between your computers without being stored or ever going through third parties. In this post I’ll talk about how it works and how to set it up to sync directories between your computers, laptops and phones.
I’ve been using the compact point-and-shoot Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX10 as my main camera of choice for the past few years. Make no mistake, it captures very high-quality pictures taking into account its 1-inch sensor size. My old DSLR, the Canon EOS 40D, still works fairly well, but it’s starting to show its age: The trigger button is hit-or-miss—even after cleaning it thoroughly with isopropyl alcohol, the camera no longer establishes a connection to a PC via USB and downloading the images is quite cumbersome as I need a special card reader for Compact Flash memory cards. Both are ancient technology by today’s standards.
So I decided to treat myself with an early Christmas present and got a mirrorless Fujifilm X-S10 with the Fujinon XC 15-45mm f/3.5-5.6 OIS PZ lens and the Viltrox EF-FX1 adatper, which just came in the mail yesterday afternoon. In this post I’m documenting my very first impressions with the camera and the accessories.
If you work regularly with remote machines or use online services like Gitlab, you are probably using an SSH key. And if you have not updated it recently, chances are you are using an RSA key, or, god forbid, an ECDSA or DSA key. Well, bad news: in order to be on the safe side, you should probably upgrade. A presentation at BlackHat 2013 reported significant advances in solving the problems on which DSA and some other key types are based. The presentation suggested that keys based on elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) should be used instead: ECDSA or Ed25519. Additionally, ECDSA and DSA have nasty additional issues, so you should probably just stick to Ed25519. Here’s how to upgrade.
It is nowadays commonplace to upload your valued photos to online services that don’t respect your rights like Flickr, Google Photos or Instagram. While these sites have a social component that may help you build an audience and have a wider reach, usually their terms and conditions are abusive to end users. In this post I’ll be discussing how to create your own static HTML photo gallery that you can host on your website using thumbsup, a static gallery generator written in Python that produces totally customizable photo galleries. You can host your high resolution photos in your private server and have the gallery link to them. The photo gallery on this very site is generated using this method.
I have been using DuckDuckGo as my search engine of choice for the last few years. Howerver, DuckDuckGo seems to have a few problems:
- It is based in the US, arguably not the most privacy-respecting jurisdiction in the world.
- Only part of their source code is open.
- Uses Amazon Web Services (AWS) as a cloud provider and Cloudfare CDS.
- It looks like their browser was caught tracking visited websites per user.
- At the end of the day, you can’t really know that they are telling the truth when they promise not to track you.
In this post, I’m discussing Searx, a better alternative to DuckDuckGo that is truly open and driven by the community.
A couple of years ago I wrote a blog post about my Linux setup at the time. Well, understandably a lot of things have changed since then, and instead of updating a two year old post, I think writing a new one from scratch with the same principle and using the same template makes more sense. It is always fun to go back and read these old posts, and I fully expect that this one post will be as enjoyable for me in a few years time.