linux

Wayland is a modern display server protocol that will eventually replace X11. It is still not quite a hundred percent there, but it has been improving steadily and gaining ground over the past years. It is expected to become the new default display server on Linux systems at some point in the near future… Whatever near means in that context.

This past weekend I had some time to play around with Sway, a window manager and Wayland compositor that mimics i3. How did it go?

These days almost everyone uses services like Dropbox or mega.nz to store their important files and have them accessible wherever and whenever they need them. I’m told it is not uncommon to use these external services to back up all one’s files, from photos to sensitive and private documents. Well, good news. If you actually care about your files and feel uneasy to have them all in other people’s servers, you may want to have a look at Syncthing, an open source and free (as in free beer) continuous file synchronization program that synchronizes your files between your computers without being stored or ever going through third parties. In this post I’ll talk about how it works and how to set it up to sync directories between your computers, laptops and phones.

If you work regularly with remote machines or use online services like Gitlab, you are probably using an SSH key. And if you have not updated it recently, chances are you are using an RSA key, or, god forbid, an ECDSA or DSA key. Well, bad news: in order to be on the safe side, you should probably upgrade. A presentation at BlackHat 2013 reported significant advances in solving the problems on which DSA and some other key types are based. The presentation suggested that keys based on elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) should be used instead: ECDSA or Ed25519. Additionally, ECDSA and DSA have nasty additional issues, so you should probably just stick to Ed25519. Here’s how to upgrade.

I have been using DuckDuckGo as my search engine of choice for the last few years. Howerver, DuckDuckGo seems to have a few problems:

1. It is based in the US, arguably not the most privacy-respecting jurisdiction in the world.
2. Only part of their source code is open.
3. Uses Amazon Web Services (AWS) as a cloud provider and Cloudfare CDS.
4. It looks like their browser was caught tracking visited websites per user.
5. At the end of the day, you can’t really know that they are telling the truth when they promise not to track you.

In this post, I’m discussing Searx, a better alternative to DuckDuckGo that is truly open and driven by the community.

GNU screen is a terminal multiplexer that allows for different virtual windows and panes running different processes within the same terminal session, being it local or remote. This post contains a quick reference to the most used default key bindings of GNU screen. In contrast to other terminal multiplexers like tmux, GNU screen is probably already installed in your server of choice.

A while back I changed my bar from Polybar to i3bar with i3blocks. One of the things I missed about Polybar is its internal CPU module, which can produce a core load graph directly in your bar by adding the right ramp characters. In this post I’m sharing a simple POSIX shell script I’ve written that does the same and can be used with any text-based bar. Here is what it looks like: