xkcd: To Taste
Today's xkcd is hitting close to home.
Look, recipe, if I knew how much was gonna taste good, I wouldn't need you.
I'm going through Cooking for Geeks now, and every page basically tells me to trust nobody.
Private Tunnel and NetworkManager
Private Tunnel is an OpenVPN-based VPN service provided by OpenVPN Technologies Inc. At some point I signed up for their service and found that while my phone used their Android app without any issues, NetworkManager part on my laptop was not really cooperating.
Eventually I've figured a workaround.
Update: The workaround can be found in Private Tunnel Knowledgebase.
Repeat the steps for the <extra-certs>..</extra-certs> section, and put this content at the end of the file usr.crt you have just saved previously.
OpenVPN connected via NetworkManager on Fedora 23
Yay! Fedora 23 on BeagleBone Black
Before you run dnf update, make sure you have
vm.min_free_kbytes = 8192 in your /etc/sysctl.d/30-smsc.conf
Otherwise you will get:
And if you plow through, eventually you'll get
And then the system will not boot. Well, based on my experience the system will not boot anyway after upgrade, so the post will be continuously updated until I get the system to boot after full update.
I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that.
I decided to upgrade my Lenovo laptop's WiFi card (Intel Centrino Wireless-N 1000), so that I get to experience dual-band 802.11ac instead of cave-grade 2.4GHz 802.11bgn. Additionally, my laptop's bluetooth performance was extremely poor. While my Nexus 5 could talk to the bluetooth speaker across 20m, the laptop struggled to push bytes across the table.
I have already performed a similar upgrade on my wife's Acer eMachines device where a Broadcom-based proprietary weirdness was replaced by Intel's magic hardware with all the drivers already present in the Linux kernel, so I did not anticipate anything going wrong.
8086:08b3 (FCC ID: PD93160H)
The new Intel 3160-based device arrived from Newegg, and within 5 minutes I had it in my laptop. Wires connected, test boot...
1802: Unauthorized network card is plugged in - Power off and remove the miniPCI network card (8086/08B3) System is halted
I'm sorry, what?
My ADEPT Key
Anytime someone puts a lock on something you own, against your wishes, and doesn't give you the key, they're not doing it for your benefit.
I was not explicitly given my key, but I found that if you really look into
your e-reader's .adobe-digital-editions/activation.xml, you
will find something like this:
<adept:privateLicenseKey>MIICeQIBADANBgkqhkiG9w0BAQEFAASCAmMwggJfAgEAAoG BAPseAP4uA2S+fLFK3rLvIoIBRWeh2nNB7ZMLV0ugA/tn6dehF/labF1JgoThUGrauz1lsCP iwL1Q0XJx/XMmOTev83DgN+fJi79jJPD9KHda+T0hOXew6hLb5xm2No/8BJY0mEoqr5QQ0UM M6HBHa0D7KQjFXCitqPsZro/HANr/AgMBAAECgYEAuvWetZ9aZXIw8eqVHVFPNs1td/eX5YH rODQUXTiYXmACSMkmST7aOSYWp4n8zmFlUBPabQ1QhGKcXYGiuk12AJdQrnieIplb8IXism6 xRWAq+B7tStPzOgHjtbudG9qUBMVKn1cukJuMDf0Dqg9Ru5bcDyFt/OPXkKq5BZ/l9KECQQD /cn2BCYVRGE5I+7EBMa9ZGu+j9ezv7waYrjBsWe4vzXLYX+P29TqEpHe00H1wYm1ivcrWUBd wWiTFDPC31C+vAkEA+6kdbBMEV8r+S7r5XhKeopeya3RbsKh0jhKTckG01DeabnHzoxwR4K9 Cku/E8pSbvzQ7Fmgrsap2TghdXyANsQJBAKjVz0XeORNkcTmjwVX8tNy8BO/lt3jODxoS50Z 2GgvWSrXgixfK9aZ93fDQbFg/dfTxZINJ5HQJ4IutBd06jVkCQQDu+St4SiKwn5GVJkrQWww Kx9Rkl4zOF1j+5ILhV6W4c8iRImJCPFB5tNOaJlc2J4oyKg4F/Aup3X4UIXtQ7mYxAkEA2Tg FLQJDwJ/0Hxwxjm2qVo2zcdu8P1C1PxzW9H92UBW/EjkdqRMbWANTq8jI3QkbZQ4ufP09kk5 9lmyUH+D/vg==</adept:privateLicenseKey>
Get your key and guard it, and backup the DRM'd books you've got from Adobe Digital Editions. Knowing this key gives you power to decrypt your books when Adobe Digital Editions finally crumbles.
I rewrote the final paragraph, more information on Adept DRM is coming soon
From Zoho Vault to KeePassX
I am constantly searching for the greener side. Sometimes I find one, sometimes I have to go back to the way I used to do things.
Zoho Vault is like LastPass - you provide your encryption key to the web page and it decrypts your data, you can also use an Android app. It is also completely free for personal use of a single account.
And so, having spent two months using Zoho Vault, I decided to migrate back to using KeePassX, though.
Famous last words
I am making changes to the design of the blog, so many things will not work as expected. As they liked to say in Geocities
The site is under construction
Famous last words.
Contrary to what I expected, the redesign actually happened. Rough edges here and there, missing styles that make images go right or left, but otherwise I am pretty pleased with the result.
Comments are still missing, but I prepare to glue them back in.
Windows 10: I can't believe I am saying this (Part 1)
This article originally appeared in Facebook Notes. And you won't find it through an external search engine, so copying it here.
For reasons beyond my understanding, I decided to switch to Microsoft Windows 10 for a brief time to see how greener the grass on the other side actually is. I left behind the Fedora install I had for the past year (and before that I had had Ubuntu since 2005), so I was mostly exposed to Gnome 3 environment, all the goodies the default Fedora repositories could provide, as well as some packages providing extra multimedia codecs.
So I got a copy of Windows 10 Pro and...
UI I almost saw on my laptop
Not really.
Subpixel rendering in Fedora 22
I've spent last week trying to get subpixel rendering working with fedora's freetype package, and even though it had the patch...
--- freetype-2.5.2/include/config/ftoption.h 2013-12-08 19:40:19.000000000 +0100 +++ freetype-2.5.2-enable-spr/include/config/ftoption.h 2014-01-17 19:17:34.000000000 +0100 @@ -92,7 +92,7 @@ /* This is done to allow FreeType clients to run unmodified, forcing */ /* them to display normal gray-level anti-aliased glyphs. */ /* */ - /* #define FT_CONFIG_OPTION_SUBPIXEL_RENDERING */ + #define FT_CONFIG_OPTION_SUBPIXEL_RENDERING /*************************************************************************/
... the fonts still looked horribly (e.g. this web page)
Today I actually read the spec file, and it started with...
# Patented subpixel rendering disabled by default. # Pass '--with subpixel_rendering' on rpmbuild command-line to enable. %{!?_with_subpixel_rendering: %{!?_without_subpixel_rendering: %define _without_subpixel_rendering --without-subpixel_rendering}}
insert a minute of swearing
Everybody seem to be all hyped about infinality patches, and they do make the fonts look great, but these were already merged.
rpmbuild -bb freetype.spec --with subpixel_rendering
Even Cantarell font looks almost decent now.
ARGH.
Learning from Ubuntu One
Since Ubuntu One file sync server has recently been opensourced, I'd like to highlight some of the historical decisions that led to creation (and, well, demise) of the file synchronization service originally known as Ubuntu One.