If you lock your 2008-2010-era Thinkpad with a supervisor password and forget it, there is not much you can do. Unplugging the battery won’t help (although I have heard that supervisor password on some models can be removed this way) and getting Lenovo to fix it for you can be time-consuming, especially compared to how easy to service and how well documented these machines are.

After trying out different ACME clients, like dehydrated or getssl, I always came back to certbot. But now, I have finally switched to acme.sh, which, as a simple shell script, is compatible with my KISS ideology. It is used by some big projects like FreeBSD and Proxmox, for their SSL needs.

Recently Google started rolling out this new feature to Windows users and apparently it is possible on Android as well. It has been in the Chrome for Android Beta for quite some time. You can follow this tutorial to guide you through the process.

With ZFS on Linux, it often happens that zpool is created using disk identifiers such as /dev/sda. While this is fine for most scenarios, the recommended practice is to use the more guaranteed disk identifiers such as the ones found in /dev/disk/by-id. This blog post describes 3 methods how to change the disk identifiers in such zpool after it has been created. All this without migrating data, adding disks or having physical access to the machine.

So I have decided to go Void Linux on all my machines. One of the advantages for me was the absence of systemd and the presence of musl libc, my admiration for which I shared in a recent blog post about Alpine Linux. I was trying to find a tutorial on how to make an encrypted root partition work with Raspberry Pi. I have a strong belief that all offline storage should be encrypted today.

Alpine Linux is an interesting Linux distribution meant for embedded devices. Its key ability is running on a diskless system. Unlike other embedded distributions, it remains very usable for desktop use. The recommended, standard edition, runs a hardened Linux kernel with grsec and PaX patchsets. This strengthens the security of an already secure operating system. I will explain why I chose Alpine as my daily driver and share my opinion on its package management, memory footprint and shortcomings.

I have picked a blogging engine, played around with it, published this initial blog and now it’s time to start writing. Or tomorrow. Or later.