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There is a long story of copying files between disks and flash dongles. Behind more than 15 years of computing experience, I’ve finally found the way.

The Root Cause

What do we do in the past? We have an external USB flash drive which was carried around with us if needed. Usually was used only for certain files to be moved from one to another computer. We have full control of our files and have to manually check what we sync and often do mistakes and overwrite some stuff. There are many solutions on market offering you some kind of synchronizations platforms for all of your stuff, - Calendars, Documents, Photographies I may say it all started with Dropbox and Google Disk, which was later complemented by Evernote, Google Docs, Simple Note, and many others such Notion (very popular these days), and the root cause of it is that you are not own your files, and have no access to it if you have no internet, losing functional control of interface without connection.

All products have nothing to offer as common standards to store and operate with files and this is a big problem, as a marketing feature they usually offer some kind of import from one system to another to make users agree easier to step into the platform.

What are they usually offer?

Synchronization (most people these days have at least 2 devices, iPhone + laptop ) Interface (web application working in browser) All of these services do offer not standardised formats and structures which even differ from computer structure and usually cannot be exported/imported as just files and directories. How you can rely on a system that can be off at any time, or if you are off the internet you need to access your files...

Recently taken a look on this project for automated timetracking based on window titles. There are a lot of solutions for MacOS, and maybe Windows, but since then there was no good solution for Linux, and here it is, fully cross platform project called ActivityWatch

Features

• Tracking: Tracks active application and window title out of the box, more with watchers.
• Categories: Get a better overview of your usage by breaking it down into categories.
• Browser extensions: Track the active tab using the extensions for Chrome and Firefox.
• Editor plugins: Track how you spend time writing code with editor watchers.
• Privacy: Data is stored locally and doesn’t leave your device, we put local and privacy first.
• Cross-platform: Runs on Windows, macOS, Linux, and Android.
• Synchronization: Sync your activity between your devices. (In Progress)

Github: https://github.com/ActivityWatch/activitywatch

Go more for screenshots

There is a services called Fortinet, it is usually been used inside corporate networks and projects who needs private VPN for employees

Problem

• There is now good GUI client for Linux, official client is trial based and will stop work after trial period.
• Official terminal based client is no good too, very unusable
• Cannot see connection status

Solution

Here is a project called OpenfortGUI

• QT based
• Terminal based openfortvpn

Compile from source code

git clone https://github.com/theinvisible/openfortigui

git submodule init && git submodule update

cd openfortigui

git submodule init && git submodule update

qmake openfortigui-project.pro -spec linux-g++ CONFIG+=debug CONFIG+=qml_debug && /usr/bin/make -j4

sudo dnf install qt5-qtbase-devel openssl-devel qtkeychain-qt5-devel -y

qmake && make -j4

/usr/lib64/qt5/bin/qmake && make -j4

Install

sudo cp openfortigui/app-entry/openfortigui.png /usr/share/pixmaps

sudo cp openfortigui/app-entry/openfortigui.desktop /usr/share/applications

sudo cp openfortigui/openfortigui /usr/bin/

Usage

sudo openfortigui

References

• https://github.com/theinvisible/openfortigui
• https://github.com/adrienverge/openfortivpn
• https://hadler.me/linux/openfortigui/

How to manage your [dot] files with git. First of all what is dotfiles ? For those who don’t konw dotfiles is configuration files inside your home directory file names and directories starts with a “.” thats why it’s called dotfiles.

The problem ?

• I want to manage it with a git repositry
• I don’t want to mess with all files inside home directory as untracked git files

Solution

I’ve started search for solution and it gets me to this article Method it self as it mention in article has been proposed on hacker news

it was simple and plain in terms of linux way

Step 1

Choose directory where your repository will be stored for instance ~/Dotfiles

Step 2

Got inside and make git bare repostory

cd ~/Dotfiles

git init --bare .

Bare repository is repository without a working directory so it’s contains of git internals structure itself to store objects added to repostory

You better know what is bare git repository here

Step 3

Setup special alias for git command to work with ~/Dotfiles

alias dotfiles='/usr/bin/git --git-dir=$HOME/Projects/Personal/Dotfiles/ --work-tree=$HOME'

Make this alias permanent by adding it to your .bashrc or .zshrc configuraton

Step 4

Make git stop showing untracked files

dotfiles config status.showUntrackedFiles no

Step 5 Finally

dotfiles add ~/.zshrc

dotfiles -m "Add zsh configuraton"

That’s it. If you want to push to remote add origin before and push it same way

dotfiles add origin URL

dotfiles push origin master

Since dotfiles is special alias for git you can do dotfiles status when editing your configs to see what files have been changed.

Why this is good solution...

More

People asked me ofthe what I use to draw diagrams and schemes ?

Answer is Camunda Modeler, - it is a tool for drawing BPMN notation, but it is also fits good for fast drawing and prototyping anything

Can be downloaded Here

Modern computer games became very heavyweight these days. Here are the top10 games by size on disk.

1. Quantum Break – 178GB.
2. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare – 175GB.
3. Destiny 2: Shadowkeep – 165GB.
4. Red Dead Redemption 2 – 150GB.
5. Final Fantasy XV – 148GB.
6. Call of Duty: Black Ops III – 113GB.
7. Gears of War 4 – 112.3GB.
8. Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare – 101GB.
9. Middle Earth: Shadow Of War – 95GB
10. Deus Ex: Mankind Divided – 77GB

This is a list of AAA grade games(high-quality graphics and other game assets that weigh more than average). SSD price today is about ~50$-~100$ for 250GB-500GB, so it’s almost clear that one SSD disk can fit one game + OS. For end-user, it’s almost nonsense to have a computer that can handle only one game per time, rather than have a console.

My prediction is that publishers will switch to SSD as carrying storage for games, they will invent a universal proprietary crossplatform cartridge format based on M.2 SATA interface.

Installing Fedora distribution Brave browser be aware of it, - default plugin is changing User-Agent header to track that you’re using Fedora. Same suitable for fedora’s Firefox, but you can’t change it, it’s compiled in. Details under cut.

Modern Internet is bloated. But it is possible to make it less bloated. You have to install those programs:

• PiHole - will be your dns manager with black and white lists;
• dnscrypt-proxy - will be your safe dnsscrypt proxy to encrypted dns servers;

Setup suitable for GNU/Linux and MacOS

Installing PiHole

• Run curl -sSL https://install.pi-hole.net | bash

Installing dnscrypt-proxy

Follow this https://github.com/dnscrypt/dnscrypt-proxy/wiki/Installation-linux

After that you have to say to PiHole to use your dnscrypt-proxy

• Setup your DNS server to the address which you’re install PiHole
• Go To https://pi.hole (only resolves if you’re setup your dns IP properly)
• Settings -> DNS (Tab) -> Upstream DSN Servers uncheck everything here
• Settings -> DNS (Tab) -> Upstream DNS Servers -> Custom 1, put here your dnsscrypt-proxy address#port string

Next, goto to your current computer and other devices network connection settings, and set DNS to your pi.hole IP address, (127.0.0.1 if you did it locally).

Done. You’re now using much safer and less bloated internet.

Hints:

• Your daily dns traffic will be cleaner from 10% to 25%

• Very rare some sites or rich web applications may not working, be aware of that.

• Better to install it on seprate raspberry-pi.

How do you read modern internet ? Dunno, but I do it with Newsboat, - is a RSS/Atom reader for text console and It’s written with C++ so you can have a lot of fun to learn.

Main features:

• Simple feed list stored in textfile
• Tagging
• Support for ATOM
• Support for 3dparty RSS systems authentication and password for external APIs

Take a look below to understand how it looks

Step here into documentation

This blog is made with Jekyll. Jekyll is static site generator. It never have good commenting mechanism, there are few options like integration of 3dparty javascript code, or write some logic with database, or search for plugin. I wrote my own with ruby, without any javascript code nor database invovled. Program take your emails from IMAP directory and generate tree based comments page for Jekyll. User can reply by answering to my email with specific subject. This is a good old way for full-fledged conversations without so called “likes” and “reactions”. It is also premoderated by design, - until you run fetch procedure no comments will be added to your Jekyll site. Comments stored in special json formatted data files, which are compatible with the Jekyll’s Data files mechanism.

I made it as a ruby Gem package option, check it out here https://github.com/noroot/jekyll-mail-comments

Undercut contains README file from repository, and comments.

Feel free to comment, I’ve already installed it onto this blog, go ahead to try.