Kyle Rankin @kyle@librem.one

Something I didn't know I was missing but now use all the time on my #Librem5 is writing a shell script to perform a task along with a local .desktop file to run it from the home screen. Adding notify-send commands gives me feedback as the script runs in the background.

This is a fun story describing the security measures Tiffany used when it moved millions of dollars of jewelry down to street to a new location: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/13/nyregion/tiffanys-store-closing.html

It's refreshing to see a major vulnerability with vanilla advisory pages and no branding. Anyone but the NSA would have registered ecc.fail or ecception.org to pair w/ their BH submission.

If your app wins this war, maybe you won't care, but history tells me tech giant dominance is temporary. All those devs writing proprietary msging apps today are writing tomorrow's abandoned code. We'd all go much farther if we went together. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

We still haven't learned the lesson. The next decade promises even more duplicated effort as each org reinvents proprietary e2e encryption protocols on private networks in the name of privacy, but with the effect of making compatibility almost impossible.

Is it really better that FB has three incompatible msging apps they now have to wrangle into one new proprietary protocol? In the 20 year fight to own the market, all we have to show for it are mountains of abandoned proprietary code, dead networks, wasted efforts.

These companies went fast alone, but they didn't go far. The last 20 yrs show few real innovations in msging. How many attempts has Google made? If they all had worked together, you wouldn't have a half-dozen incompatible messaging apps with similar features on your phone.

The buildings full of devs he references all labored over the past two decades to reinvent the same messaging wheel, but w/ a network they owned. Libpurple plugins serve as a graveyard of proprietary chat protocols--failures to capture the market, wasted dev effort.

There's a well-known African proverb: "If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together." What Moxie's centralization talk misses is that the faults in early decentralized protocols came because dotcoms wanted to capture the market.

https://invidio.us/watch?v=Nj3YFprqAr8

If you want gpodder to integrate with Lollypop for playback, just go into Lollypop and add ~/gPodder/Downloads to Lollypop's list of music directories.

A two-line change to /use/share/gpodder/UI/gtk/gpodder.ui to change two horizontal panes to vertical ones was all it took to make it fit perfectly on the #Librem5 screen. I love #FOSS.

Many Android phone vendors subsidize their cost w/ malware/spyware/adware just like many laptop vendors, but Android lets vendors make it impossible to remove.

In this case, free Android phones the US govt. handed out to the poor contained Chinese malware. #privacy

https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2020/01/09/us-funds-free-android-phones-for-the-poor---but-with-permanent-chinese-malware/

The NSA ran into a similar problem. It's hard for people to avoid the temptation to abuse their power for personal benefit.

For services like this, the best approach is not to collect the data in the first place, or else only give users keys to it. #privacy

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/01/amazons-ring-fired-at-least-four-employees-for-snooping-on-user-videos/

After a few years my #3dprinted shaving stand got bumped on top and the leverage cracked the base. The great thing about #3dprinting is that I noticed it this morning and by this afternoon I had printed the (now much stronger) replacement.

My grandmother passed away two Christmases ago and as I opened my last package of socks from her, my mom assured me that they had worked out before her death that my mom would take over the tradition.

I mention all of this because now with Haynes's cost-cutting measures, these socks are wearing out much more quickly than past designs so I'm starting to wonder whether one package/yr is enough. With a fresh package in my drawer, I guess I can worry about that next year...

You see, Haynes has made tweaks to this sock over the last two decades and I'm in a special position to notice each of these changes since I don't mate my socks.

First they altered how far down the toe the grey goes. Then they extended the grey to run along the full bottom of the sock (an improvement). Most recently, they have followed the cost-cutting trend of making fabric thinner so the last few years of socks have been significantly thinner.

Over 20yrs ago my grandmother started an annual tradition of giving me a new package of socks for Christmas. Each year I would actually look forward to this gift. This steady supply of new socks were more than enough to replenish the socks that wore out, especially with the original sock design.

A thread on one of my biggest #lifehacks and changing SOC(k) compliance standards:

Over 20 yrs ago I decided to standardize on one type of sock: white cotton Haynes with grey toe and heel and red toe stitching. While I own dress and boot socks, 99.9% of the time I wear these socks.

There are many benefits to this approach:
* No need to mate socks
* If a sock has a hole, throw it away and grab another from the drawer
* Due to family, I haven't ever had to buy these socks myself

Since I'm running real Linux on my #Librem5 phone, I'm having thoughts like: should I host NextCloud from it? Maybe a Tor hidden service? OnionShare? My phone *is* always on after all, hosting personal services (optionally w/ a front-end cache on my regular server) might make sense...

6. sudo systemctl start openvpn@client.service
7. sudo systemctl status openvpn@client.service to test
8. sudo systemctl enable openvpn@client.service to persist reboots
9. ip addr on Librem 5 to see what IP it got