mckinley

twtxt.net

A guy on the internet. https://mckinley.cc/

Recent twts from mckinley
In-reply-to » Another thing that doesnā€™t work anymore after blocking network traffic from my Android phone: Some push notifications.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de People just donā€™t ask these questions. Itā€™s really a serious privacy issue, and I donā€™t see it brought up very often. Not even in privacy-minded circles. If youā€™re using a proprietary operating system on any Internet-connected device, you need to assume that the vendor can see everything you do on it and maybe even what you do on other devices as well..

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In-reply-to » Another thing that doesnā€™t work anymore after blocking network traffic from my Android phone: Some push notifications.

Actually, it looks like notifications using Googleā€™s service can be encrypted end-to-end. I donā€™t know if this is used much in practice or if you can tell if the notifications on your device are encrypted. There seems to be some conflicting information out there.

Even if the content is encrypted, though, youā€™re still giving quite a bit of metadata to Google by using their notification service.

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In-reply-to » Another thing that doesnā€™t work anymore after blocking network traffic from my Android phone: Some push notifications.

It looks like ntfy.sh can work either through the OSā€™s notification service or by maintaining its own connection to the server in the background. For privacy, you definitely want to use ā€œInstant Deliveryā€ and self-host the server.

https://docs.ntfy.sh/faq/#how-much-battery-does-the-android-app-use
https://docs.ntfy.sh/faq/#what-is-instant-delivery

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In-reply-to » Another thing that doesnā€™t work anymore after blocking network traffic from my Android phone: Some push notifications.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I havenā€™t done any app development, but I know notifications on phones are indeed dependent on cloud services run by the OS vendor which talk to servers run by the app vendor on your behalf. This is supposedly better on battery life, but it conveniently lets your OS vendor read all your notifications.

Mobile XMPP clients usually implement notifications using XEP-0537 and it goes like this:

Your XMPP server -> Client vendor's notification server -> Client OS notification server -> User's device

Itā€™s not end-to-end encrypted so servers will usually just send a dummy message through (You received a message from juliet@capulet.lit!) so you have to open the app to see the (hopefully) encrypted message.
Itā€™s a similar flow on both iOS and Android and I assume Matrix clients work the same way.

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In-reply-to » How To Efficiently Copy Files To Multiple Destinations: https://mckinley.cc/notes/20240508-copy-multiple-destinations.xhtml

@prologic@twtxt.net I know, right? Itā€™s a very elegant solution to the problem using standard command line utilities. It was too hard to find. I went through 3 or 4 Stack Exchange threads from my Web search before I found somebody linking to this answer. People were misunderstanding the question and suggesting all kinds of crazy methods including weird, proprietary, GUI Windows software.

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In-reply-to » @mckinley My process hasnā€™t changed. (But the Gopher hole is gone. Hereā€™s the file from 2023: https://movq.de/v/72fddfd8fe/2023-05-31--backups.txt )

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Thatā€™s no fun at all. I donā€™t like to throw away working hardware either, but I wouldnā€™t wait 7 hours (CPU-bound!) for my manual backup to complete if it could be done faster on a 10 year old laptop with AES-NI. How much data did you add?

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In-reply-to » @prologic I agree with @movq. Good documentation is better than an interactive setup process. My difficulties (#isyb2aq) were because I was just doing it for testing and I wanted it running as quickly as possible. If I was running it in a production capacity, I would read through the documentation.

Speaking of which @prologic@twtxt.net, have you heard from @ocdtrekkie@twtxt.net lately? Heā€™s active on mastodon but I havenā€™t seen him around here in a long time.

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In-reply-to » What does a yarnd setup look like to anyone? šŸ¤” Let's say it exists, and it helps you setup a Yarn pod in seconds. What does it do? Of course I'd have to split out yarnd itself into yarnd run to actually run the server/daemon part.

@prologic@twtxt.net I agree with @movq@www.uninformativ.de. Good documentation is better than an interactive setup process. My difficulties (#isyb2aq) were because I was just doing it for testing and I wanted it running as quickly as possible. If I was running it in a production capacity, I would read through the documentation.

If youā€™re trying to make non-technical people set up their own Yarn pod, thatā€™s probably (unfortunately) impossible. Management software like Sandstorm make it ā€œas easy as installing apps on your phoneā€ (direct quote from sandstorm.org) and most people still pay Google to store their photos.

I remember you were trying to do paid hosting for Yarn pods in the past. That could work, but as Iā€™m sure you know itā€™s difficult to convince people to use this over X or Facebook, let alone host their own pod. I think itā€™s going to stay a small community of fairly technical people for the foreseeable future.

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In-reply-to » QOTD: How large is your shell history? No history, 500 lines, 10'000, 100'000, something else?

Itā€™s 500. I never changed it, so thatā€™s the default of either Bash or my distro. Itā€™s fine for me.

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In-reply-to » @prologic ZFS is fine but it's out-of-tree and extremely inflexible. If Btrfs RAID5/6 was reliable it would be fantastic. Add and remove drives at will, mix different sizes. I hear it's mostly okay as long as you mirror the metadata (RAID1), scrub frequently, and don't hammer it with too many random reads and writes. However, there are serious performance penalties when running scrubs on the full array and random reads and writes are the entire purpose of a filesystem.

@prologic@twtxt.net Planning it ahead of time is all well and good if you have the money to buy 6 or 8 hard drives at once. I really donā€™t, and I want to mirror the whole thing offsite anyway. Mergerfs will let me do it now, and Iā€™ll buy a drive each for SnapRAID in short order.

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In-reply-to » Come on guys, can't we just do Btrfs RAID5/6 already?

@prologic@twtxt.net ZFS is fine but itā€™s out-of-tree and extremely inflexible. If Btrfs RAID5/6 was reliable it would be fantastic. Add and remove drives at will, mix different sizes. I hear itā€™s mostly okay as long as you mirror the metadata (RAID1), scrub frequently, and donā€™t hammer it with too many random reads and writes. However, there are serious performance penalties when running scrubs on the full array and random reads and writes are the entire purpose of a filesystem.

Bcachefs has similar features (but not all of them, like sending/receiving) and it doesnā€™t have the giant scary warnings in the documentation. I hear itā€™s kind of slow and it was only merged into the kernel in version 6.7. I wouldnā€™t really trust it with my data.

I bought a couple more hard drives recently and Iā€™m trying to figure out how Iā€™m going to allocate them before badblocks completes. I have a few days to decide. :)

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In-reply-to » @bender What would make standing up Yarn even easier? I can think of a few things that people might struggle with: a Domain, Pointing the domain at something valid, Maybe a reverse proxy setup. Running yarnd itself is just downloading a binary and configuring it (which could also be easier)

@prologic@twtxt.net I remember running yarnd for testing on a couple of different occasions and both times I found all the required command line options to be annoying. If I remember correctly, running it with missing options would only tell you the first one that was missing and youā€™d have to keep running it and adding that option before it would work.

This was a couple of years ago, so I donā€™t know if anythingā€™s changed since then. Itā€™s really not a big problem, because it would be run with some kind of preset command line (systemd service, container entrypoint) in a production environment.

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In-reply-to » @bender What would make standing up Yarn even easier? I can think of a few things that people might struggle with: a Domain, Pointing the domain at something valid, Maybe a reverse proxy setup. Running yarnd itself is just downloading a binary and configuring it (which could also be easier)

@bender@twtxt.net I avoid install scripts like the plague. This isnā€™t Windows and theyā€™re usually poorly written. I think itā€™s better to prioritize native packages (or at least AUR, MPR, etc) and container images.

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In-reply-to » Hah šŸ¤£ @dfaria Your @dfaria.eu feed really does consume about >50% of a "Discover" search with filters "Without replies" and "Hide my posts". šŸ¤£ Media 36/2 = 18 at 25 Twts per page, that's about ~72% of the search/view real estate you're taking up! wow šŸ¤© -- I'd be very interested to hear what ideas you have to improve this? Those search filters were created so you could sift through either your own Timeline or the Discover view easily.

@prologic@twtxt.net I think this would be solved in the short to mid-term by fixing the mute function. Or, maybe, adding a ā€œHide this user from Discoverā€ button.

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In-reply-to » @bender Standard twtxt is a microblog in its purest form. A blog, but smaller. It's just a list of posts to read, and that's an echochamber in the same way my regular blog is an echochamber. I don't think there's anything wrong with that.

@bender@twtxt.net Makes sense. We definitely need the ability to mute feeds from the Discover feed.

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In-reply-to » QOTD: How do you back up your files?

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I remember your solution. Itā€™s very simple, I like it.

Yes, my backup target is my home server. I have a hard drive dedicated to Restic repositories. Itā€™s still not a real backup as I donā€™t have anything offsite but itā€™s better than my previous solution. I had two very old hard drives I kept plugged in to my desktop PC and I would (on very rare occasion) plug in another hard drive and copy all the files over to it. Luckily, Iā€™ve never suffered any significant data loss and I would rather not start now. Once I have automated backups on each of my machines, the next project is getting those backups offsite.

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In-reply-to » @bendwr and I discussing something along the lines of: Media I.e: How to deal with or reduce noise from legacy feeds.

@prologic@twtxt.net I think one-way feeds are okay and we shouldnā€™t discourage them so strongly. On the other hand, I think itā€™s the duty of a poderator to filter out feeds that are just noise from the Discover feed. I definitely consider a truckload of one-way posts mostly in another language to be noise. Did you get rid of Gopher Chat too? Iā€™d call that noise, for sure.

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In-reply-to » @prologic Your position doesn't make any sense: it's closing down and arbitrarily limiting the use of the Twtxt protocol. One more reason not to use https://twtxt.net/

@bender@twtxt.net Standard twtxt is a microblog in its purest form. A blog, but smaller. Itā€™s just a list of posts to read, and thatā€™s an echochamber in the same way my regular blog is an echochamber. I donā€™t think thereā€™s anything wrong with that.

@prologic@twtxt.net I support the delisting of ciberlandia.pt in the Discover feed due to the sheer volume of posts from there and the fact that most of them are in Portuguese with this being a predominantly English-language pod.

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In-reply-to » @bendwr and I discussing something along the lines of: Media I.e: How to deal with or reduce noise from legacy feeds.

@prologic@twtxt.net Why do we need to avoid posting to the void? Thatā€™s pretty much what twtxt was made for. I donā€™t like the ā€œLegacy feedā€ terminology, either. I support the delisting of ciberlandia.pt but I think this change is heading in a bad direction.

I like @sorenpeter@darch.dk ā€™s suggestion. It gives the users the information and lets them make their own decision instead of putting a big scary warning in their face. Thatā€™s what Microsoft does, and we shouldnā€™t be Microsoft.

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QOTD: How do you back up your files?

I asked this one almost a year ago and I started using Restic shortly after that. When I started, I was only backing up my home folder to the repository over NFS. Now, Iā€™m backing up the entire root filesystem to a repository using the REST backend so I can run Restic as root without breaking the permissions.

Iā€™m working on automating it now and Iā€™m trying to come up with something using pinentry but my proof-of-concept is getting pretty obtuse. It will be spread out in a shell script, of course, but still.

systemd-inhibit --what=handle-lid-switch restic --password-command='su -c "printf '"'"'GETPIN\n\'"'"' | WAYLAND_DISPLAY=wayland-1 pinentry-qt5 | grep ^D | sed '"'"'s/^D //'"'"'" mckinley' --repository-file /root/restic-repo backup --exclude-file /root/restic-excludes --exclude-caches --one-file-system /

Iā€™m curious to see how everyoneā€™s backup solutions have changed since last year.

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