Gratifying vanity with vanity keys

I found out about the Nostr social network a couple months ago. The network is based on public key cryptography. While browsing the feeds, I noticed some people had really nice public keys which contained their username in some form, like Snowden’s npub1sn0wdenkukak0d9dfczzeacvhkrgz92ak56egt7vdgzn8pv2wfqqhrjdv9. My key is still being generated, since my username is quite a mouthful. So I wondered if GPG keys can be generated like this too. And of course, they can.

Ditching the Gmail app

I like the Gmail app. I like its design, simplicity, its features (or lack thereof). I am a fan of KISS philosophy, so it’s all in line with my thinking. I like the iOS Mail app even more for this. But the EAS implementation in Gmail app on Android is full of bad surprises.


How I physically moved my server between locations without outage

This is a story about how I moved my server between locations 250 kilometers apart. The primary reason for making this move was to perform the initial backup to a new off-site storage location on a faster connection than what I have available at home. The second and better reason was, of course, curiosity. The server in this case is my Thinkpad T430. The setup This is what my setup looks like:

Finally on XMPP - via Matrix

I was hesitant to even set up an XMPP account since even Matrix is barely getting any traction. And I really don’t like unnecessary fragmentation. However, the software from XMPP ecosystem is way more lightweight than Matrix so my first steps were to set up Ejabberd and check out what it’s all about. I know it’s not the most lightweight of XMPP servers, but it seemed to have the most features and docker images available by upstream.


My (slightly unethical) RSS setup

I love RSS. I used it way before Fediverse even existed. I mention Fediverse because a lot of people call them out on trying to reinvent the wheel in this sense. Following an independent website is nothing new. Of course, like everyone, I try to make RSS even better and more comfortable to use and the core of my aproach is sending full articles to e-mail I know about the existence of self-hosted RSS readers like FreshRSS.


Self-hosted email absurdities - sending mail

Sending email is hard. Yes, that’s right. If you don’t own or control your whole IP subnet and have built-up reputation on it, you aren’t reaching anything other than the recipient’s spam folder.


Lock the screen automatically when it turns off on Windows

I hate how the lock screen works on Windows. This is perhaps an oversight and for me a security issue, so I’ll share some information on how to make it work better. This applies to pretty much all Windows versions in use today as far as I can tell. By default, when Windows turns off the screen, it won’t lock it. It makes no sense to me why this is the default behavior.

Show Always On Display while charging on Galaxy phones

It is easily possible to show the Always On Display on Galaxy phones while charging through such option in Settings, but then you lose the ability to show it when tapping the display. Here is a quick tutorial on how to make it show up both ways.