Linux

Introduction Earlier this year I looked at switching from Bitwarden (online service) to self hosting Vaultwarden. The post I wrote was fairly high level and focused on different container options. It was a fairly generic deployment that didn’t go into much detail. Configuration and security considerations were woefully neglected in that post. It also didn’t go into detail about how I’d integrate it into the VPS that I use as VPN, DNS, and now password vault server....

Introduction A few months ago I setup a private DNS resolver with ad blocking. At that time I decided to manually update the block file whenever I installed server updates. This works, but it very quickly became tedious. I’m not sure why I initially thought it wouldn’t. I’ve since decided to automate the process. Block File Script The previous script I wrote would download a hosts file based block list and convert it into a format that Unbound can load....

Introduction For about the past 14 years I’ve been using Linode as my preferred personal VPS provider. I started using them at the beginning of November 2008 when I first setup my blog. Other than a short and painful mistake of hosting my blog elsewhere, it has lived on Linode. Recently I had to setup a VPS with DigitalOcean. This was due to needing the VPS in a data center located in a very specific place....

Introduction When Lastpass first came on the scene I jumped on it because of how easy it makes syncing passwords between devices. Previously, I was using a local password manager that was only on my computer. Thankfully, mobile logins weren’t nearly as necessary for daily life back then. However, I still needed my computer to log into anything on my phone. Over the years, Lastpass started having security incidents. This isn’t surprising with how big it became....

Introduction Recently I setup a VPN to so I could get around geo-restrictions for for a specific streaming service I’m using. So far it’s been working well. Now that I have the server, I started thinking about what else I could do with it. One thing that jumped out at me is DNS. I configured my WireGuard client connections to use CloudFlare and fallback to Google’s DNS servers. While this does provide privacy from my ISP and queries originate from the same VPN server, felt like I could do better....

Introduction I was recommended some videos and I’ve been very interested to watch them. However they’re not available outside of a specific country due to geographic restrictions. This is a common problem and pretty much every commercial VPN service advertises this as a major reason to use their VPN. So I embarked on what should have been a simple journey. Sign up for a VPN, choose an end point in the country I need, and watch the videos....

This is part of the Sigil’s website get page. I figured since I was on a roll with Linux and the issues I have with the Linux community I would publish this here too. It explains a lot of my rational as to why I don’t really like or want to be part of the Linux “community”. As stated Sigil will run on Linux. We try to maintain compatibility with Linux mainly because it’s easy to with Sigil supporting both OS X and Windows and it uses a number of technologies that already support Linux....

A bug was opened against KDocker the other day. Now bugs aren’t a bad thing and typically they are user error so they get closed out as invalid. Sometimes they’re real issues which get looked into and fixed. On very rare occasions they’re dictations/demands. I’ve edited the post to include the contents of the bug report here because the move to GitHub makes the link to the original bug unable to be viewed....

The official Linux packages for Sigil are generic packages. They’re bundled in an InstallJammer installer and contain a number of libraries that Sigil depends on. This is not ideal but it’s not possible to provide Linux packages for every distro. I’ve created a wiki page which I’m putting together a list of Linux distributions that have their own Sigil packages. These are the best packages for users to install because they’re smaller and tailored....

FB2 output has been improved. It no longer generated very invalid markup. The output generator still isn’t where I want it to be though. The changes are mostly cleanup and fix long standing issues with the output. One major change is I reverted having <h1> tags work as section and title markers. I don’t like having this hard coded into the generator. As far as I can tell FB2 does not support a true table of contents (TOC)....