Rubenerd

This post was originally written on the 12th of April, but wasn’t pushed for some reason.

1Password is the best password manager available. It’s the most user friendly, auto-fills the most intelligently, and has the cleanest interface. It’s also from Canada, where they pay millions for our shared royal family to tour around as well. God save the Queen, who lives somewhere else!

It’s also not cross-platform. Their support team said they’d never say “never” to a Linux port, and therefore the potential to run it on FreeBSD without Wine, but that was eight years ago. Now that I use FreeBSD on the desktop again, I’m after alternatives.

KeePassXC fits the bill. KeePass is the defacto standard now, and KeePassXC is broadly the latest maintained version. In short, they’ve done a great job.

What’s particularly nice about KeePassXC is its official Firefox plugin that negates the need for KeePassHTTP for password auto-fill. You:

1. unlock your KeePassXC database;
2. enable the Firefox browser integration;
3. install the Firefox plugin;
4. go to a site in Firefox and authorise it; and
5. henceforth, choose your login from a dropdown on forms. Boom!

On the FreeBSD side, it’s available in the ports tree and only really brings in some Qt dependencies. That would have bugged me a decade ago when I was trying to keep my desktop environments limited to Qt on KDE or GTK on Xfce, but ain’t nobody got time for that now. If YubiKey support is needed, you’ll need to make config and build.

There seems to be growing interest in migrating from 1Password Vaults to KeePass databases, based on blog posts and Github projects. For now I’ve been manually migrating things across as an excuse to clear out old cruft.

If it works well over the next month or so, I’ll channel the licence fee or a few months of subscription eels I would have spent buying 1Password for my dad on a donation to them instead :).

This throwaway line on my recent post about replacing social networks with RSS generated some interest:

And maybe… I need to re-enable blog post comments again.

But not for the reasons I thought. Re-enabling something again sounds like something Yogi Berra would say. It’s completely superfluous to mention, unless I had disabled blog comments once before. Which I hadn’t. So why am I even bothering to

@Georgina posted this comment on The Twitters:

@Rubenerd If you did enable comments on your blog again you’ll definitely see my face there on occasion 😉 Funnily enough I was reading a friend’s blog and she was not too chuffed about the growing number of monetised blogs, missing the days when people actually wrote about life.

That’s a good point, I hadn’t even considered all those paid blogs regurgitating the same stuff everywhere. In my head those aren’t blogs, they’re something else.

As for enabling comments, it raises a key concern: I statically generate my site, like a gentleman. It means my posts, themes, and other site assets are all in version control. I don’t need databases or an interpreter or server-side caching to limit hits to the software; the pages themselves are the cache. But it limits what I can do.

If I wanted to enable blog comments again, there are really only two choices:

1. Implement something like Disqus on my static pages, which is reasonably the only game in town. I don’t like this because I dislike JS, and I’m concerned about tracking.

2. Run a CMS again. This is a big jump in terms of server requirements, and negates all the convenience and performance of static sites, but puts the code server-side where it belongs.

I’m torn. I’m leaning towards 2, but 1 would let me flip the switch today. Maybe I’d include 1, but have instructions on how to block it? Or research Disqus alternatives?

Or if I went with 2, what would I do? I’d want something that runs on Postgres at a minimum, but none of the popular blog platforms support it without potentially breakable shims. Or do I roll my own?

Loyal Rubenerd readers, whaddya reckon?

You’ve heard of vapourwave, but have some Vertel Etherwave which:

comes with QoS guarantees around packet loss, latency and jitter and provide organisations with control and management options that just don’t exist in Layer 3 VPNs.

Through no fault of theirs, I liked that Firefox took their guarantees around jitter and did that to the PDF! It’s as if Firefox has a sense of humour boolean in about:config.

If you’ve got a Xen domU misbehaving, you can force an ACPI shutdown with the -F option.

For example, say you have the following:

Name                  ID   Mem VCPUs  State Time(s)

location: sydney

location: sydney

To force shutdown domain 32:

# xl shutdown -F 32  
==> /usr/lib/xen-4.9/bin/xl: invalid option -- 'F'
==> unknown global option

Or at least, I thought we could. Since when was -F an invalid option? Surely it wasn’t a regression, or compatibility issue between the xm and xl toolstacks. I thought xl was broadly a drop-in replacement?

Hey, wait a minute:

# xl -F shutdown 32
==> Shutting down domain 32

I swear half my problems stem from misordered parameters. You should see me with dd when I’m alone at night, it’s late, and the decaf coffee failed to placebo effectavise. I’m fairly sure that isn’t a word.

In my defence, force is an action to be applied to shutdown, so it looks like it should follow. There’s also precedent for this order, for example:

# diskutil unmount force
# zfs umount -f
# luxadm remove_device -F enclosurename,[f|r]slot#
# ruben-moose.pl birdistheword --force

Speaking of eBay learnings, TiL that Iomega made a beige 5.25" Zip Insider drive. From stevencasteel’s PowerComputing tower auction:

It was either made without bromides, or was added later to the machine, or it just aged much better than the original bezel did!

The vast majority of Zip drives were 3.5 inch beige IDE units. Iomega briefly made rather handsome 5.25 inch blue SCSI units to match their external drives, which I was super lucky to grab at auction this time last year:

But I had no idea that larger unit also came in beige. I suppose it makes sense; the blue was fetching but didn’t match the cases at all at the time. Or today’s modern PC cases, which like the Model T come in any colour you want as long as its black.

I didn’t know Shaun Michallef’s Mad as Hell had clips on YouTube! Though I’m not sure if they’re geoblocked outside Australia.

Here are a couple of my recent favourites on International Women’s Day, and who’s posterior Australia should be favouring now now that Trump is steering the great ship of state:

The imitable Screenbeard over at The Geekorium wrote a post in response to my farewell to Digg Reader last week. I’ll admit, it was fun reading someone’s response like this; it reminded me of the blogosphere of old. Yes the term was a bit cringe, but it described something real.

And that was a large part of the thrust of his post. Having given up on Facebook and Twitter, he’s now left with the prospect of what to do next. Like my beloved Digg Reader, he found Fever has been retired, and his mobile reader Press is de-facto abandonware.

To the first point about social networks, I find myself in a similar situation. It’s a grim situation, and I share his distaste and lack of patience for self hosted services that don’t function nicely.

I was one of the first Aussies and Singaporeans on Twitter; bit of a humble brag, but it means I have so many varied people from everywhere on there that continue to make my life a delight. For conferences like AsiaBSDCon, it was invaluable.

Facebook was easier to abstain from precisely because it never got its claws in me. I have all my high school and university friends on there, but they know if they want to contact me, they email or tweet. Or poke me on LinkedIn, another site I log into maybe twice a year.

(I first wrote about going away from Facebook a decade ago, though back then it was as much because of oneupsmanship as privacy. I’ve barely touched my account since, but I haven’t deleted it. Wonder why I can’t?)

Which gets to the crux of the issue: it’s all about people and stories. The Screenbearded gentleman mentioned he’d been trying RSS which satisfies the latter, but how do we address the former?

I feel a sense of kinship among bloggers now, perhaps because so many of our former compatriots have stopped writing, shrinking the pool further. It does feel lonely being outside the wall sometimes; Facebook sure sounds like they’re having lively discussions and fun sometimes.

Screenbeard used the term federated. I like this. Decentralised alternatives are a step in the right direction, but we need distributed networks. And in a small way that’s what blogs are; a federated network of self-maintained, self-controlled sites.

In the words of Sheryl Crow, I have the feeling, I’m not the only one.

In the meantime, I’m going to fire up Ansible and a Joviam FreeBSD VM to get Tiny Tiny RSS going again. It may not be the prettiest around, but it does have a certain classic Google Reader look going which I like, and works with my mobile apps. It also has the largest install base among self-hosters, which I’m hoping will ensure its long term survival and viability. Bonus points for Postgres. If I like it, you bet I’ll be becoming a Patron.

And maybe… I need to re-enable blog post comments again.

From his episode How to change the brake pads of your car. His deadpan delivery is almost as good as his shocks :).

Sydney came late to the game with its Opal card system, speaking of public transport! Through a series of legal, state government, and financial battles, the original Tcard system was eventually sold by its developers in Hong Kong, leaving Sydney languishing for almost a decade before finally getting it.

Granted it made travel more expensive—despite the predictably shallow promises of certain politicians—but it sure made the system easier to understand for this recently-repatriated Sydneysider.

The concept is simple: store a value on the card, then tap on/off when you arrive/exit from a train/bus/ferry/whatever. No need to keep track of whether you still have rides left on a piece of paper, or calculating the cost of a trip in advance.

There are privacy implications, not least because the state government grants access to travel logs without a warrant. But concerned citizens can procure the cards and top up with cash, or regularly rotate cards. Not ideal, but better than when it first launched.

BEEP! Too many cards!

It also didn’t take long to realise that the Opal card readers aren’t intelligent enough to disambiguate different contactless cards. If you have a MasterCard PayPass card next to your Opal in your wallet, like a gentleman, the reader doth protest too much.

There are several solutions to this problem. One can:

• sandwich multiple cards together in a wallet with a sheet of foil to block signals from opposing cards. This breaks down if you have multiple cards, such as a debit, credit, and Opal cards;

• or keep cards in opposing sides of a wallet, and open it up to the correct side as you walk past the reader;

• or keep it in a separate wallet altogether. I use the flap on my phone case. But then you risk losing it if its not in as protected a place as a wallet..

The forth option: negating the need for a separate Opal card.

When Clara and I were in Japan, we saw ads for their Suica card being compatible with Apple Pay. In that way, you could just flash your mobile as you walk past, which we all have. This is genius, because how much more often these days do we have phones in our hands instead of our wallets?

It could happen in Australia; our uptake of contactless credit cards was one of the fastest in the world, and lots of us use Apple Pay or other such systems.

What about consolidation?

Which finally leads us to the news that greeted my inbox from Amex this morning:

You can now use your American Express Card to pay for one Adult Opal single trip ticket fare on Sydney Ferries and L1 Dulwich Hill Light Rail services, and earn points as normal.

This sounds great. I’m all for consolidating cards to reduce what I have to carry, and it makes pragmatic sense for these wireless protocols to work together. Granted it’s only on the ferries and glorified electric buses, but eventually it could come to trains.

But there’s a catch. From their FAQs:

There are no discounted fares or concession fares and use does not count towards Opal Daily Travel caps or Weekly Travel Rewards.

Each tap is valid for one Adult Opal single trip ticket and there are no transfer discounts so if you board another mode of public transport you will need to buy another ticket.

This is consistent with a single trip ticket, but shows your Amex isn’t a replacement for a standard stored-value Opal card.

Perhaps some people will be willing to pay for the convenience of one fewer card, but as it stands not being able to switch transport modes for free, or accumulate your free trips, only renders this useful for occasional public transit users. Which maybe Amex cardholders are.

In the meantime, I hope this indicates wider Opal-compatibility is on the horizon.