Interestingly enough, most of the people doing these videos are female iPhone or Samsung owners who are usually kpop fans, they use tons of social media apps, camera filters, video editors. They’ll even mention the case they’re using, the stickers or pictures of their favorite idol they have on them and stuff like that which I honestly don’t care about. There’s nothing bad about any of this, it’s simply not interesting to me anymore.
Whatever, some of these already are in my uses page but others are not as important, but may be interesting to you. I’ll try to categorize the apps, but let’s start from the top.
I am currently using ArrowOS since its one of not so few official ROMs still supporting my device. It is a great rom with quite a lean set of features, more focused on performance than customization.
Most of my apps are indeed FOSS, but I still have some proprietary apps, I’ll make some keys to mark them a bit more, and also split them in categories. I am completely copying this from Dom Corriveau’s blogpost, which happened to have some great ideas when it comes to organizing this huge list, so there we go.
Categories
Social media, videos and stuff that entertains me, and sometimes annoys me.
The services I use to communicate with friends, family, work and internet strangers.
These app interact with Linux or help me manage my android system how I want
These apps need root access to work.
Whatever can access or create media and files.
What I play sometimes, interactive entertainment.
I like to rice my phone almost as much as I rice my laptop.
Other stuff that is useful to me or needed by the system or hardware I use. Kinda general.
Alright I think this is pretty much it. I skipped some things like banking apps and such because nobody cares.
This is day 62 of #100DaysToOffload
]]>First of all, a friend of mine, Benjamin Hollon has decided to host his own GoToSocial instance in the nearby future. Polymaths Social! He actually has an alpha instance running right now. At the moment submissions are closed but you can join the waitlist, check it out!. I actually have a secondary account there if you wanna see some extra me, by following from your Fediverse account.
GoToSocial is still pretty bare bones, and there are many features missing, the goals of GtS aren’t exactly the same as Mastodon, its just another product that uses ActivityPub, so not everything will be implemented exactly as Mastodon users may expect, but the basics are being worked on and the speed and responsiveness is actually quite great.
I’ve also been discovering quite a few new blogs in town that are currently participating in #100DaysToOffload, such as Noisy Deadlines, Dustin and 82mhz.
I have enjoyed many of their recent blogposts and have also exchanged some emails with some of them, a few nice interactions on the Fediverse has shown me these guys may be pretty fun to have in my feed and maybe get inspiration from, as I also try to complete the challenge again.
I welcome them all with open arms and I hope they manage to complete the challenge, just like a few have done so before. May they succeed on their journey!
Last but not least, I got promoted to the Moderator role at my main instance, Fosstodon, I am even in the team page! now, which makes it official. I shall rule with kindness and honor, and finally be able to show NO MERCY TOWARDS ANYONE WHO DARES DEFY MY AUTHORITY. 😈
Don’t worry guys, I’m kidding, its quite a bit of responsability, and I’ll try to fulfill my role to the best of my abilities. So basically, as long as you wear a Casio watch you are safe. What I really want to show, is that Fosstodon, despite its ups and downs, is still an instance worth being a part of (just ask me for an invite!). 😉
This is day 60 of #100DaysToOffload
]]>Maybe its patented, or something? Or maybe KWGT’s 5 million downloads are quite a low quantity for any developers to feel like there’s no market for this. Still, tools like Conky and Rainmeter still have quite a bit of activity as desktop widgets and monitoring tools, I am just, surprised.
Obviously I don’t want to force any devs to put work in something they don’t care about or whatever, I am just ranting to myself honestly. On yet another tangent, I found quite a nostalgic thread on XDA full of screenshots from people sharing their homescreens since 2009, and, well, its been quite a while since then and a bunch of the early posts are quite outdated. There’s a few people doxxing themselves back when Gallery widgets were a thing, but nowadays not even that is available in a presentable manner. Simple Gallery has a super bare widget, but, its not very good…
Anyways, widgets in general really need to make a comeback. PLEASE!, How is it that there is not a single RSS feed widget built-in on any reader available on F-Droid, why can’t we have a good player for AntennaPod with Material You, or at least make the cover art bigger. How is it that Gallery apps no longer have a single picture or carrousel mode widget? K-9 Mail’s widget is nice but it is still light mode only.
I am probably complaining too much for someone who is doing nothing about it, I know. But I just want this to come back. iOS is honestly winning right now, at least when it comes to quickly displaying information at a glance, all the widgets are cohesive and look nice. Even if they still don’t have the amount of power Android’s can manage, like scrollable content and other features.
After playing around with the proprietary KWGT app, you can actually make a pretty functional RSS widget! So yeah, I feel like there’s no excuse…
Anyway, just so I don’t end with a bunch of complaining, I like some widgets out there that some apps have (or are), such as:
Now that we are at it, allow me to showcase my homescreen, since its kinda nice right now, pretty inspired by old videos from Pro Android’s YouTube channel:
This is day 40 of #100DaysToOffload
]]>All this time, I’ve actually been using FreshRSS’ web UI more often than Newsboat. The reason?
FreshRSS shows me all the posts from all the sources that belong to a category, letting me filter out what I wanted. Newsboat, by default, will start up showing all the sources, and then you would be able to open them one by one, and individually check their feeds. It has a way to see all the tags (which would be categories on FreshRSS), but opening one would, again only open the sources, where I would only be able to navigate one feed at a time.
The thing is, I mostly follow personal blogs, and even if the people I follow were like me and did one post per day, being able to just read their feed would mean that I would only have a couple posts until I stumbled upon an article I already read. I wanted to have all the posts from everyone I followed! I just didn’t know if it was possible…
However, today I learned about Newsboat queries, and its an absolute game changer for me. Using a relatively simple syntax, I can create my own feeds, which are populated by whatever fits a query I can define. This is achieved by adding something like the following to my urls file:
"query:Personal Sites:tags =~ \"Personal sites\"" "Personal sites"
"query:Company Blogs:tags =~ \"Company Blogs\"" "Company Blogs"
You can even use some other parameters to make more specific queries, like filtering based on the article title contents:
"query:1080p Torrents:tags =~ \"Torrents\" and (title =~ \"1080\" ) ""Torrents"
The official documentation I linked has some more examples. And a here’s a video by @gotbletu that explains it a bit more. I had actually already watched one of his other videos about using FreshRSS with Newsboat and mobile apps, but I somehow missed that he was using queries. They are truly awesome.
There are a ton of websites out there, however, not all of them are the same, and not all of them are kind enough to provide an RSS feed. With the release of FreshRSS 1.20, scraping websites using XPath became possible. However I had been lazy and ignorant on what it did, so I didn’t bother trying it out. After all, there are a lot of websites that already have RSS, and if one refused, I am sure there would be others I could use instead.
But I decided to give the feature a try after finding a blogpost on how to do it, which was cited by gotbletu. Just like in that article, I will use a website as an example. Lets go for Casio’s news section, because I quite like Casio watches.
//title
or in this case, //h1
) or set as a string.//a[@class="cmp-newslist__link"]
descendant::div[@class="cmp-newslist-item__title"]
@href
descendant::div[@class="cmp-newslist-item__date"]
Other things such as author, thumbnails and so on can be extrapolated quite easily, or see the blogpost if you need more help. To finish, just hit the Add button and test things out!
Sometimes, like me, you will not fetch the things you intended to. You may have problems and its a matter of experience, trial and error and getting used to how HTML and the XPath syntax work. Some of the problems that may happen are getting the wrong date, having the item link go to the main website instead, or no items showing up at all. Keep trying!
Of course, XPath works to fetch the items and basic metadata from whatever list, feed or archive is used by the website you are scraping. In case you want to learn how to get the full article content too, using FreshRSS’s CSS selector feature, I wrote a tutorial for that too. Since then, a couple extra features, such as ignoring some sections of the contents has been added. So please explore the features of FreshRSS, its fun. Feel free to check other posts I did related to RSS
This one actually feels like a rather nice blog instead of my typical bursts of kinda whatever content I write in a whim. I did put some effort into this one (its actually more than a thousand words 🤯), so I hope you enjoyed it, just like I enjoyed improving my RSS experience and writing this down.
I love RSS, I love FreshRSS, I love Newsboat, and I love you, dear reader!
This is day 30 of #100DaysToOffload
]]>I change roms pretty much every semester, I think I’ve done a lot of posts regarding Android and my tendency to customize it and try out their latest versions using all kinds of roms from MSM Extended, to ArrowOS or CR Droid. I have never even installed LineageOS on this device, simply because I prefer customizability over privacy/security. At this point, I know what I’m looking for, and what I’m doing. I’ll settle for LineageOS once my device is approaching EOL on most of its official roms. Even so, I’ve lived through tons of unofficial roms in previous phones without a ton of trouble. Most of the time devs simply want to keep alive their device, and I choose to trust them.
Anyways, enough justifying myself for no reason. I installed the rom, I restored my apps, I installed some extra stuff and I was pretty happy. I was still a bit annoyed that notifications would not work in certain apps. I’ve known of MicroG for a long time, I even tried them a couple roms ago by installing them on F-Droid as suggested in the mastodon post I linked. It kind of worked. But the functionality was not as great as I thought.
This time, however, I decided to try again, after I found a Magisk Module to install MicroG, and decided to give it a go. I was pleasantly surprised, because it worked wonderfully, and after enabling its Cloud Messaging for push notifications, the apps started to work just fine, unlike last time. It is quite sad that not that many apps rely on open standards such as UnifiedPush just yet.
Regardless, now that notifications work perfectly fine on my proprietary apps, which are also containerized in a Work Profile using Shelter (F-Droid | Play Store). I feel really comfortable with my device.
I also found Iconify an app that lets me customize my phone’s quick settings, volume and notifications panel with absolute ease, its super beautiful!
The only problem right now is a bug in my rom that sometimes freezes it to a black screen after waking up the device. It usually happens while playing audio, but I still don’t find a solution and its bothering me just enough that I am considering switching to ArrowOS or something, which also has an Android 13 rom now.
Anyways, those were some thoughts about the latest update on my device’s rom. Thanks for reading!
This is day 19 of #100DaysToOffload
]]>And that’s pretty much it. Its super fast and minimal, and works pretty much anywhere. There is even a Wayland clone of it, which I don’t use but at least its there.
Rofi is so good, I got really fired up when my fellow fedizen @hyde mentioned how rofi isn’t for him, and he will stick to the default AwesomeWM launcher, I couldn’t help myself, and decided to write this post and answer to his complaints.
First of all. This is all written in a jokeful manner, no hard feelings or anything.
Seriously? You use pass as your password manager, you use mutt for email, stuff like fzf and a bunch of other tools, you even got a weekly series of CLI tool recommendations. HOW DARE YOU disrespect rofi like THAT!?
Rofi can be integrated with pretty much all of the above. You can use tools such as rofi-pass to autofill your passwords everywhere (kind of better than KeepassXC Browser extensions tbh). You could create many kinds of things with neomutt, like handling mailto: links
You can pretty much pipe whatever you want on rofi, and create general scripts for a ton of stuff. Compared to some launchers that come built-in in some desktop environments or window managers. Rofi will work on them all and can be customized quite a lot.
The only thing that comes close to rofi is one of its inspirations, dmenu. But given that it is even more bare bones and any additions have to be patched (rather than simply configured with rofi). I find it a little harder to sell for most.
I have a few posts sharing scripts, some of them using rofi and its simply fantastic. I’ve a couple other scripts you may be interested in checking out!
I actually recently changed the script to edit tags to use just rofi. You can see some it, as well as some more of my rofi scripts in my dotfiles
This is day 16 of #100DaysToOffload
]]>After that paragraph, the zip got installed and its playing the boot animation as of right now. I hope it works alright, I have been waiting for a more mature release of my rom to be available. I have not installed Magisk yet, I just did a clean flash and booted from there.
It booted! Its all fine, I will flash Magisk in a moment, I will share a quick list of the things I cared about backing up.
I did not worry much about my Contacts, Calendar, Syncthing, Pictures and RSS feeds, since I have it all synced via DAV or in an external micro SD card.
I backed up stuff such as my AntennaPod database, WhatsApp chats (a must in México), Signal chats, my ActivityWatch buckets and PGP keys (with OpenKeychain).
I actually found a kinda new app that works great for backups. Or at least it did in Android 12. It has a few releases already, even though its still in beta, its also available on the IzzyOnDroid F-Droid repository.
Anyways, that’s it, I will now go play with Android 13 and see if I can restore everything.
This is day 15 of #100DaysToOffload
]]>Now I am on Void Linux though, and even if I have access to the latest and greatest software. I decided to return for dwm for a while. Maybe permanently?
I managed to patch everything I ever wanted. Even if I had to do quite a bit of manual work. What I did was use the patching guide by uoou, which used git branches for every patch you apply, and, in my case as suggested by a comment. A “build” branch where I merge all the branches into one, which leads to less errors? Maybe its a placebo, but its quite easy to do.
In the post I mentioned before, I had already mentioned some of my reasoning behind the patches I’ve used. Here I’ll just list them again in case you are too lazy to check that other post. They can be found in dwm’s website.
For my bar, I went with the default and used aslstatus. Its pretty good! I am using the same configuration I shared in my previous post. Pretty much exactly, even though some more features were added to the tool that you may wanna check out.
Picom, the compositor I use, makes window borders transparent. A couple of lines fix it pretty nicely.
Right now I am still using some systray stuff, like volumeicon
, which kinda duplicates the volume info. I will fix it one of these days…
Regardless, here’s how its looking!
In the end I am quite happy with my current setup. Everything works just fine. I had heard that the systray patch was hard to apply. I don’t know if its the relatively recent patch for dwm 6.4 or if its just that the patching method I mentioned is better. All I did was create a branch with every c+patch applied, then a branch specifically for the systray patch, and I merged them both, there were no errors at all. Thankfully I doubt I’ll add any more patches anytime soon. This is great as it is.
You can find my configuration here. Just build it and it will be good to go.
This is day 13 of #100DaysToOffload
]]>I’ve known about the void-packages repository for a while, it is quite similar to the AUR. Its a place where you can contribute new programs and libraries to be packaged in Void Linux, and its needed if you want to install some non-free packages like Discord.
OpenLP is a free and open source worship presentation software, mainly for churches. Basically, it lets you display Bible verses, lyrics and the like. Its a tool used in my local church and I find it quite great! Its latest stable release just came out a few days ago, and since I noticed Void didn’t have the update yet. I decided to try updating it myself.
I expected to do some complexstuff, but after a quick read of their contributing guide, and after checking the history of commits previously done for the package I was going to work with, I realized it shouldn’t be too difficult.
In my case, I only changed the version and the checksum, I did ./xbps-src pkg OpenLP
and, like magic, I was able to build it and install it without a problems.
However, when I ran some tests (using the -Q
flag in xbps-src) I noticed that it was mostly fine, but a few tests failed to run. I had already submitted a PR, and I decided to try and look for solutions.
I went to the []Libera IRC network](https://libera.chat) to chat in the #openlp
chatroom and ask some questions. I eventually realized that there were some changes done in Python 3.11 that were not accounted for just yet in this latest release. Although a few MRs later they should be fixed.
Regardless, I now knew that the problems were on their side, and even if the tests failed, the program was working alright.
Then I felt like selhosting my own IRC web client to not miss any messages, just in case. So I went ahead on my Yunohost applications and ended up trying out The Lounge, which can be easily installed. I found it quite good, and its always connected, which was incredibly useful for me. I was initially on Libera’s public Kiwi instance, but I find TL to be quite good, and its also more up to date, relatively speaking.
So anywyays, I got a couple suggestions on my PR’s GitHub thread and ended up updating two other Python dependencies in my PR, I was actually unaware of them, but another mantainer, who is also a fellow Joel, sent me the patch so I could commit them myself without much trouble.
After adding a couple other lines to skip tests that still are not working on Python 3.11, building the package with ./xbps-src pkg -Q OpenLP
is now successful on my end.
By the time I write this, my PR is still not merged just yet. There is also a chance that the OpenLP devs make a new version by tomorrow and I have to update my PR once again.
For now, this was quite a fun project, I kind of wanna look for other simple programs and tools that kinda build themselves just fine, and contribute that way, even if I only change a couple of lines everytime.
I will update this blogpost if my PR is successful or some other news happen.
This is day 10 of #100DaysToOffload
]]>This is why a blogpost by @bbhltz about Claws Mail, made me want to try it out once again, since it’s a graphical email client with a really minimal set of features, as he said:
It does email. It can do some other things, but really, it is all about email.
And ain’t that enough!? I’ve used and enjoyed Thunderbird in the past, but I am not a fan of its current metamorphosis phase, I know its quickly evolving, but right now having a sidebar and tabs in the same view, displaying the same thing, as well as other small UX details, keep me away from it, for now.
Thanks to Claws Mail I can quickly move stuff around and sort it however I please. Its so light and simple, at least with normal IMAP and SMTP accounts.
To organize my email, I mostly just sort by Sender and delete in bulk whatever comes from subjects like “no-reply” emails and the like. I can also drag and drop threads and conversations to some special folders I made for them.
I use Disroot as my email provider, and it lets me create filters using their web interface to automatically categorize my email as I want.
Back to Claws, I had a bit of trouble setting up Google accounts with their OAuth options. But I barely get any emails there anyway, I could go using an App Password, but I don’t feel like logging in to it to be honest. Decent email providers are quite easy to setup, as with any Desktop client.
I think one of my goals this year will be to understand Neomutt more, for stuff such as selecting multiple emails, moving them around and swapping between inboxes. But for now, both programs are extremely light, and I don’t feel too bad about keeping them installed in my system.
In other news, I read a couple of old email threads once again, reliving moments like the first time I sent an encrypted email, that one time I sent an email to Kev and I didn’t refer to him as Kev (mistake), as well as those few times I’ve gotten emails related to my blogposts (and not how borked my website is sometimes).
So yeah, Neomutt, Claws Mail, whatever. Everytime I mention email there’s always someone mentioning its outdated and insecure.
Look. For me, there’s something about reading old threads, with a subject, with a good bottom posting nicely quoted style and a simple plain text view, without feeling forced to reply as soon as I open it, that makes it quite appealing to me from time to time. I know, I know.
You don’t know how many good conversations I’ve lost in my phone, for so long I ignorantly used WhatsApp, still the king of messaging in my country, and many times I ended up losing conversations, that I’ll admit, are probably super cringe for me today, but still memories I would like to have back. Email is just there, and we even got subject lines and stuff. Just plain cool.
This is day of 9 of #100DaysToOffload
]]>It’s so weird. How can I dare to design 400+ icons for free for Arcticons, and then ask for a commission after doing a profile pic that might as well be another icon? How did it cross my mind to give a free icon to an indie dev making an app that isn’t even FOSS but I liked a lot, and then request money from open source projects that just need some graphics for a website?
I feel like a hypocrite.
I struggle because of this. I don’t know how much to ask for. I sometimes feel like I could have asked for more since I put a lot of effort into something, and the client would probably agree with me, but other times I feel like my work isn’t worth it, even if its good, because there are probably some free resources that would do the job just fine, or a designer that would have done it for free somewhere, but they came to me still. Sometimes I even replicate a free resource and just modify it to fit with the customer’s requirements. How much of my work is actually worth paying for?
Yet another thing that bugs me is how different pricing can be in different countries. I know that pretty much no individual in my area would be willing to pay the cheapest price I have offered for a profile picture or a logo, “It only took you an hour to make”, “I could have done it too”, “Won’t you give me a friend’s discount”. Thankfully, the situation has not happened yet, most of the commissions I’ve done are from people in countries where graphic design is more appreciated, so I don’t feel as bad when I ask for more than $15 USD for a single logo.
However, sometimes I start thinking how just a different kind of conversation would have ended up with me doing it for free, if they asked nicely, or they were in X or Y situation, or just because I like the design I did so much I just want them to show it to everyone! regardless of how much time it took me.
On a more positive note, I am quite proud of my work. Yeah its not always the cleanest it could be. Donno, Arcticons’ maintainer knows it better than anyone (thanks for putting up with my mistakes lol). The fact that I am able to make money, out of a hobby, with completely free software, both in price and freedom, its completely mind-blowing. I am so grateful for all that.
After all, I did put effort into learning how to work with Inkscape and its quirks, I’ve watched hours of tutorials that could’ve been spent in videogames or books or even “a real job”. So yeah, I do deserve to get paid, most of the time.
Excuse the random ramble, its been a while since I’ve left my feelings go wild in my writing so, thanks for putting up with me.
Also If you have a commission let me know! But please treat me nicely ;)
]]>But I believe this is the first time that I’ve restrained myself to the same ROM for multiple updates, without any factory reset or wipe of my data. Even mantaining encryption enabled for better security, although I still have superuser enabled via Magisk, but its my phone so deal with it.
This update they fixed plenty of bugs, the most annoying of which was one where the SystemUI stopped working if I accessed an app’s info screen from the recents overview. I also noticed a smoother experience and animations, which are always a little sloppy on 3rd party launchers. Yes, I am still rocking Nova Launcher, its just too good, even if its not FOSS. Don’t bother recommending anything, I’ve tried it all and just keep coming back, sorry.
So yeah, I think I am staying on CR Droid for the time being, the support is great and everything works just fine. So I guess my ROM-hopping has ended when it comes to Android 12 roms. Let’s wait for what 13 has to offer…
]]>PolyCal is a calendar widget that does exactly what I want, its just a compact list of events, with the important information laid out in a really minimal way. It does not have a lot of settings, but you can adjust the date format and some other things.
It integrates well with Simple Calendar and most others, since it requires Calendar access and all that. You can even select only certain calendars to show up, which adds a nice bit of privacy.
Just look at that title! if that wasn’t enough to try it out, I don’t know what will. This is a great collection of retro games that can be played solo and even online with your friends. It’s also made with Godot, an open source game engine that I’ve used in the past. it has a great aesthetic and the controls are great, so if you find yourself bored you should give it a go.
This is quite a recent discovery for me. The app just does what it says, you can add a URL from some web radio and play it no problem, what I like about it is that you don’t even have to know the URL of anything, it comes with quite a big list of stations you can just add and forget. I personally found some nice Lo-fi and Videogame music stations that I didn’t even know I needed in my life.
There are no subscriptions and no need to get a local music collection, just choose a station that fits your mood and be free.
This is a really nice Gemini client (remember when that was all the rage?). It works great for the few sites I follow with it. I really enjoy using it, even if its not so common when it happens. I started a Gemini capsule along this website back then, but it has been a second class citizen and it barely functions properly, but you can visit it if you feel like it
If you are a reader like me you are probably aware of Goodreads, a website that lets you keep track of books you read. If you are a Fediverse advocate like me, you probably know about Bookwyrm, the alternative to it.
Openreads is, sadly, not a Bookwyrm client, but it allows you to keep track of the books you’ve read locally on your device. It also has a great UI and smoothness. It would be great if it could sync with Bookwyrm, skipping on the social aspect, like how Tachiyomi syncs progress with MAL or Anilist.
So yeah I just wanted to share some apps that I thought deserved a bit more recognition, they are not in any particular order but this is the end of the post so it doesn’t really matter what I say now.
Anyways, let me know if you would like me to do this again with some other apps or maybe some Linux programs too. Until later.
]]>This happened during the Twitter exodus after it was announced Musk would buy Twitter and turn it into a free-speech platform. During the hype I accepted an invitation from Josias to be part of a new instance since I wanted to feel what it was like.
In the end however it was a little too late, not a lot of people joined and I started to miss the community aspect of Fosstodon’s local timeline.
There was no real problem with staying in Benign.town, let it be clear, and even if there was troublesome people I could have just banned them y’know? I was an admin! I had unlimited power!
So anyways I am back on Fosstodon for the time being, and I won’t be hopping instances for the time being.
I’ve also been thinking about downloading the comments that have been done in my blog. In case any of the instances or posts that I use get lost at some point. So I will try to code something to have static comments, I guess.
]]>I’ve thought about how cool it is to be able to pick a week, or a date and be able to know what you did in that day. I haven’t really had the time to do journaling or anything like that, but I guess this blog has kind of become that for me, although I don’t really follow any method and go by whatever I feel like writing, which I guess is yet another way of journaling.
I didn’t even know a lot of the software and tools that Edel used to track all of that stuff. So I guess I will take a look at them sometime soon, since I don’t really have such granular control over the things I currently do.
Some programs I use have decent usage statistics though. Like AntennaPod, but it still lacks daily, monthly or yearly metrics, it only keeps track of the time I’ve spent listening to each podcast I follow.
Tachiyomi also tracks my progress reading manga, and the database it keeps is pretty nice, I use Anilist to keep track of both manga and anime in the same place. I also use Backloggd to track the videogames I’ve played, as well as Letterboxd for movies I watch.
I have decided to use ActivityWatch too, I installed my app on my phone, which is sadly not dark themed, as well as the Linux client. I might put some work into the CSS or just wait for the devs to work on it, maybe its already in some setting and I’m just missing it.
Anyways, I didn’t really have that much to say today. I like the idea of keeping track of things, I hope I get some use out of the data I’m collecting, maybe I will try to make it appear in my website somehow for anyone to see using some API or something.
Another thing that kinda made me think of this is the time I’ve invested into manga reading. The one I am reading like crazy since I finished Solo Leveling is Kingdom, the story is so good and its starting to take away my time from other things, I love the battles and action, its a lot easier to follow and feels much more realistic, despite a few fantasy elements here and there.
I just realized I spent 5 hours reading it today, 6 yesterday, despite having classes today, I got quite distracted this time, which is bad, because I don’t want to end up doing “just enough” to pass, since I know I can do a lot better. I’ll probably read some more before going to sleep, but I have to restrain myself since school is starting to get serious again.
Anyways, this is day 98 of #100DaysToOffload, right on time.
]]>Because of this, I decided to just stay in XFCE, the Mint edition I got, for a while, until I figured something out. I could build spectrwm from source, but there is no official guide and, while I think its probably super easy, I figured that if I was going to build a WM from source, it would be dwm.
While I don’t really dislike XFCE, I really wanted to go back to tiling, some things just didn’t work as I wanted them to, and some programs didn’t like to stay where I put them, or couldn’t be resized as easily, and XFCE just lets them be, even if I just want them to be smaller or something. During some free time I got, I decided it was finally time to set dwm up once and for all.
I have switched to dwm in the past, in fact I’ve even made a post about the setup I used back then, but I never wrote something for this blog about it. I guess it was about time.
The patches I’ve decided to use are quite pretty similar to what I would get with spectrwm default keybindings with a few additions. I think its a pretty simple and minimal set.
There is still one patch I have not added, but I used in my previous configuration, and that is status2d, because it lets me use custom colors, which is what I wanted to have in spectrwm in the first place, but I didn’t feel like adding it right now, since I am happy with my current bar.
I also was a bit interested in swallow, but I don’t really need it, I am used to other methods already and the situation where it could be useful isn’t really that common for me.
There are many ways to customize the bar, from xsetroot
, to dwmblocks
or slstatus, all of them are pretty good ways to make use of it. However, I went ahead and used aslstatus, which is basically the same as suckless’ original tool, but asynchronous, I can make my volume update in real time, while the weather info is only updated every 30 minutes or so. Its pretty good and I really like it, and it works with status2d and colors, whenever I get the time to set it up properly.
It’s what I used in the mastodon post I shared above, so it works great. Its also the reason I went with an autostart patch, since running it from .xinitrc was not reliable.
There isn’t really a lot else to say, I guess I could share the current config in my git repository. I will probably do it soon enough, there are still some things I want to change but I am pretty happy with how it looks now. I like the simplicity I went for. Sadly, LabVIEW, the program I installed yesterday, hates being told where to stay, so I’ll have to stick with XFCE during those classes.
You can see my configuration file for dwm here, but its nothing too special. My bar is also just using the defaults, and this is at the bottom:
static struct arg_t args[] = {
/* function format argument interval (in ms) */
{ netspeed_rx, " %sB/s", IFC, 2 _SEC, END },
{ netspeed_tx, " - %sB/s |", IFC, 2 _SEC, END },
{ disk_free, " %s |", "/", 25 _SEC,END },
{ cpu_perc, " %3s%% |", NULL, 1 _SEC, END },
{ vol_perc, " %s |", NULL, 0, END },
{ wifi_perc, " 直 %3s%% |", IFC, 2 _SEC, END },
{ battery_perc, " %3s%% |", "BAT0", 1 _MIN, END },
{ datetime, " %s ", "%H:%M:%S", 1 _SEC, END },
};
This has been day 95 of #100DaysToOffload
]]>From there to nowadays, a lot of things have changed, I don’t care about features as much as I care about the freedoms that software and services allow me to have over the code, as well as my own data.
When it comes to messaging, there are now a lot more options that can be compelling even for users who don’t particularly care about their privacy (even though they should), since they also provide with most of the features that popular app which don’t respect our freedoms offer.
Telegram was the first messaging app I tried that wasn’t Whatsapp, and I really liked how it worked, when I started using it I didn’t really know how important encryption is, I just assumed that the people behind it wouldn’t lie, and since the YouTube channel recommended it, then it must be good.
Of course, there are a lot of opinions regarding how Telegram doesn’t use E2EE by default, and how they have access to all of your messages, but I still give it some benefit of the doubt since I still have to see a news article mentioning a data breach of their servers or anything like it.
The truth is that the features it offers are simply great, I personally now only use it for chat groups (which shouldn’t be considered private anyways), channels and for quick file sharing to myself or family who have it installed.
I don’t know why nobody has tried to fork Telegram’s UI and apply a different protocol or backend to it, it shouldn’t be that hard, right?
I really like Signal in principle, but I am not a fan of their crypto business. I just can’t get anyone to install it, and that’s probably my fault due to the time I already spent trying to convince my friends and family to switch to Telegram back when I still was trying to use it for personal messaging.
This app really needs usernames, because there is no other reason to use it otherwise, at least in my case. The moment they do, I honestly have no problem ditching Telegram (for personal messaging) and probably sticking to a fork client that doesn’t include any of the crypto nonsense.
Matrix is growing more and more, it is actually a protocol that can be used by any software working as a client. I really like it, but the apps that use it are not of my liking, Element, which is the recommended client, is simply too slow and unresponsive for me, and it tries too hard to look and feel like Discord.
The ability to host your own matrix server is awesome, but it comes with some problems too, since you are not only relying in your own server, but also in the server that hosts your friend or family. For all you know they haven’t even enabled HTTPS or something dumb like that. But if they are not self-hosting, then they are probably using matrix.org, just like 99.9% of matrix users, which means that decentralization isn’t really a thing, and there is a lot of metadata that can still be obtained from it.
A lot of its sponsors are also into crypto stuff, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the project starts becoming even more bloated than it already is.
I know a lot of people don’t even know this, even among the couple of readers I have, but somehow XMPP is the place where I have had some of the best conversations with people from the Internet. Telegram has always been for groups, I don’t give my phone number so Signal isn’t for Internet people, and Matrix is also mostly for communities. XMPP is really simple and works both with PGP and OMEMO based encryption, there are quite a lot of good clients to choose from, and has great multi-platform support. The only thing about it is that it can be a bit too simple if you want stickers and such, and the protocol is quite old, so the codebase is probably quite patched up.
Nevertheless, if you don’t wanna use PGP encrypted email, I would say this is the best way to chat with me privately, unless…
This morning I felt quite inspired to try out Briar, a peer to peer communication platform that also works over the Tor network when it needs to. The way it works seems to be incredibly secure, and its also not as invested into the crypto world like Signal and Session, another app which is quite similar and I’ll talk about later.
I decided to do a quick post in Mastodon and invite some people to chat a bit via Briar, and I have to admit, the experiment went a lot better than I thought. I think its fairly clear that this app is the most secure and private one of the bunch, there is nothing stored in any server, simply your device and your friend’s. Of course this comes with some caveats, but at least for most conversations, it is pretty good.
The app is also in continuous development, so a lot of features are going to be implemented in the future.
It has some problems, but they are mostly quality of life improvements and some details that make the user experience a bit clunky, but its a lot better than last time I used it, quite a while ago.
They recently launched a Linux client, which is super alpha software as of now, since it doesn’t support anything but one to one messages, but its a good start!
Some interesting features are Private Groups, where only you can add people, Forums, which are basically private groups where other people can also invite people, and Blogs, which are public posts for everyone to see. You can even add RSS feeds for you to read, and you can “Reblog” them, so your contacts can have access to it, without making any connections to the original website!
I really, really like this app, I will try to use it more often, make sure to reach me out if you want my contact link, or I might post it publicly later in my contact page.
I kinda didn’t feel like talking about Session, mostly because I felt it was less reliable than Briar and they seem to be as involved with crypto currencies as Signal, if not more. The development is also mainly done is Australia, which is not the place you want your private services to come from. Of course, this is all personal opinion, they still work over Tor and the code is still there for everyone to check, I just don’t feel as comfortable recommending this service compared to previous mentions for one reason or another.
Of course, I am not against it, I can still use it just fine and I would love it if you can help me find out why its not as bad as I believe by leaving a reply or sending me an email. I am open to discussion and changing my opinion if that’s the case.
Se yeah, I feel like this was it, as you can see this is not the biggest dive into what makes each of these apps special, I didn’t mention stuff like Threema, Tox or Jami because I don’t actually use any of them in any degree, and I have had at least some experience with the services I actually talked about.
I guess this was it for today! This is post 93/100 for #100DaysToOffload
]]>Among the important apps I use, which will not be mentioned here, are AntennaPod and K-9 Mail, since I’ve talked about them previously. Here are some others that I’ve been using for quite a while already, but haven’t got the time, nor idea of adding them to my Uses section. But they’ll probably be included in the future, since I do use them quite a bit.
This is the most decent RSS reader app there is for FreshRSS and Nextcloud News, I really like how simple it is, it can sync pretty quickly and it has become the main way I consume news and articles in my phone, since I no longer use a local RSS app like Feeder. The only problem I have with it is the lack of customization and theming, especially because the color of hyperlinks is a little bit too dark, and it can be hard to read when using the dark theme. I hope it gets better integration with Android 12’s theming features, but its pretty decent nonetheless. I believe its the best FOSS client with FreshRSS support for Android. FeedMe its a nice alternative if you want something with more features, but its proprietary software. I still found Readrops more reliable and faster to load.
Without a doubt, the best app for reading manga. This is a great project that works amazingly and stays afloat thanks to the use or 3rd party extensions separate from the main app. Its super fast, can be synced with a ton of 3rd party services like MyAnimeList or Anilist to keep track of what you’ve read, comes with a lot of reading modes, offline capabilities and a pretty great interface. I don’t really come here to talk about the morality of apps like this, but it exists, its FOSS and it works. I personally use a fork of it, since there are quite a lot to choose from, so you can go ahead and pick your poison.
I have talked about this app before, every time I switch rom, this is my go-to backup strategy, the app requires root access to create a zip file containing all of your selected apps, along with their data and permissions. Once you are done flashing your rom and getting root access with Magisk, you can also flash the zip file generated by Migrate, and after a a reboot, a notification shows up and you can restore all your apps in a matter of minutes. Sometimes a few apps get installed but fail to launch, but the success rate is great, and the app recently went open source! So if you didn’t trust it before, you can now check how it works and maybe give it a try next time.
This is the most important proprietary app I use, I just can’t find a replacement for it, its either too good or I just can’t get used to the interface or lack of features present in other FOSS alternatives, Solid has it everything, and I can’t live without its sorting options, the ability to show the size of folders, multiple connections to services like Nextcloud or FTP servers, working as an FTP server itself. I am really happy with it.
It is among the first apps I’ve bought with my own money, back when I had Google on my phone, and Migrate has been doing a great job keeping the license check working since then, a couple roms later.
This service got mentioned a few posts ago when I talked about using DietPi and other self-hosting services, it really deserves its own blog, but its really not that complicated to use, and there is nothing that special with the app itself, it doesn’t even have a dark mode.
Being able to have my own virtual network of devices that can talk and communicate with each other without any struggle at all is truly fantastic, its fast, reliable and works flawlessly. I don’t have to open my ports or do any complicated setup, I just install the client in whatever device I got, authenticate it and I am ready to go, I have my Nextcloud, Jellyfin and FreshRSS whenever I go, as long as my Raspberry Pi doesn’t die on me.
As always, there are a lot of other apps and services I did not mention such as Syncthing, DAVx5, Infinity for Reddit or SimpleLogin, I just wanted to highlight the ones I did because I think they are great and I use them daily. I also just wanted to talk about something quickly, but I ended up taking quite a while to write this.
Regardless, it is done, this has been day 92 of #100DaysToOffload
]]>Now I want to be honest here, after investigating a little more, due to some information that Kev let me know in the previous blog’s mastodon post, it looks like free *.ml domains can be renewed for free, they will just send me an email two weeks before the expiration date, and I should be able to keep using the domain that way basically forever.
However, the domain itself is not really mine, its just that they let me use it. So I have quite a lot of things I could do, and I still don’t know which path to follow.
I will probably pay to keep this domain properly for myself. I already have a bit of history with it, so, for the sake of keeping it alive, I will own it properly and pay for it, which comes with some more advantages than just renewing it for free each year.
Now, with the amount of money I got I can keep paying for it a few years, but I also plan on getting some other domains for myself, be it for projects I wanna build, maybe a Spanish only website, or a more professional website to show during job interviews, who knows.
I think I can even get a cheap VPS for a couple of years, which would actually be pretty cool, something I never thought I could afford by myself during these times.
Thank you all guys, seriously. Knowing that my website will probably be up for decades fills me with quite a lot of joy, my own little corner in the internet, alive and well for years to come.
Also, while writing this, I realized that there are some old snapshots of the begginings of my website, stored in the Internet Archive, so in case you want to see how it started, the oldest backup is from less than one month after I got started, feel free to take a look!.
I have done blogs before, but nothing like this, I hope this remains for the next decades, I am still young, to think I will be able to see how this evolves over time, it will be simply awesome, I can’t thank you enough for what you all inspired me to do, and all that has happened since I joined Fosstodon, this challenge, and the FOSS movement in general.
This almost feels like the end of the challenge, but it is not, there are still 10 more days to go!
This has been day 90 of the #100DaysToOffload challenge. Thank you for reading, and thank you for helping me out.
]]>/home
partition, I was unable to restore the Thunderbird profile I used to have.
No big deal, I decided to just download the tarball provided in their website, and simply use that. It worked fine, but when I tried to add my existing profile folder, the program just crashed, and I was unable to restore my settings, my gpg keys, filters, calendars and so on.
This is what ultimately made me go and try out Neomutt, and I have been using it ever since.
My last post I talked about a terminal application known as khal
, and how to integrate it with my Nextcloud server via CalDAV. So i just wanted to say what I’ve done for contacts for neomutt, as well as my android device.
I went ahead and tried khard
, a tool that works similarly to khal
, integrating with vdirsyncer
to keep my contacts synced with Nextcloud, the setup is pretty similar to what I did for my calendars, and you can read their documentation to check out how to do it. Adding a cronjob to automate these updates and checks was no big deal.
I also integrated it with Mutt, so now when filling up the To:
in an email I can just hit
When it comes to android, I think I’ve already mentioned it in other posts, but it doesn’t matter, DAVx5 is a fantastic app that allows me to add a DAV account and sync everything, it integrates wonderfully with the contacts and calendar apps I use, it just works.
If you have the Nextcloud app installed, you can also auto-connect to DAVx5 in the settings, so its not even that complicated to setup, just do it once, and forget about it.
So, both vdirsynced
and DAVx5 are amazing applications that allow me to easily access my contacts and events in a pretty easy way.
The UNIX philosophy is pretty interesting. Programs and tools dedicated to one thing, able to simply be connected to each other and delegate tasks to whatever does the job best.
I am particularly amazed at how my contacts and calendars are now simply a set of files and folders in my Linux system, that can be integrated with these simple programs without too much trouble. I am really happy with how it works, no longer will I deal with random broken profiles and settings, hopefully. And its pretty easy to backup too!
This has been day 88 of #100DaysToOffload
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