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Our site accesses

Published: 2024-08-19

Some considerations: the numbers represent succesfull connections to my server, that is a TLS handshake.

Internet Highlights VII

Published: 2024-07-08

• A nice article about computer games but in the 1960s
• Speaking of which, this a cute text game written in bash
• The software crisis
• Learn how to defend your emails using PGP
• A magazine that features industrial design articles, portfolios, jobs and more

astro: 50 stars!

Published: 2024-04-22

I'd like to reiterate that the astro project is under development, and well maintained by me and open source contributors. Looking ahead I plan to add more features such as:

• Better bookmark management
• Implement the rest of the gemini protocol
• Support downloading capsules
• Add client certificates management

And of course, listen to users' feedback and implement desired features. So if you want a feature feel free to open an issue and comment.

Thank you!

dev log: building my own distro

Published: 2024-02-26

• My disk was full, so I began to think how to use less space
• I want to try musl
• I discovered that the linux kernel can run shell scripts as init
• I like minimal stuff

Turns out there is a cool project called buildroot that makes building a minimal linux system very easy. So I used it to create the linux kernel and userspace programs for a RPi 3B+ I had lying arround.

This system is taking only 22MiB of RAM, which 14 are cache, and 500MiB of disk, which 470MiB are for git binaries. I am very happy. Obviously there are drawbacks: no module hotplugging, this gave me a headache as my keyboard needed a kernel module, it took me a day to figure this out. I tought this was the kernel's job.

So far I'm having a great time learning, turns out there is a lot of details we usually don't need to know. For example, firmware, which for the RPi is a must: in order to load the brcmfmac module its firmware must be present in the correct place. If not whenever you modprobe it you'll get a subtle timeout error.

Luckly buildroot also facilitates this, just select the corresponding option in firmware section. The next steps are now building sbase, ubase and sdhcp. I also included a tiny c compiler so I can compile the rest of the system.

So far this is the init script:

#!/bin/dash

echo "Init started"

export PATH=/usr/bin:/bin:/sbin:/usr/sbin

mount -n -o remount,rw /
mount -t devfs /dev /dev
mount -t proc /proc /proc
mount -t sysfs /sysfs /sys
mount -t tmpfs /tmpfs /run

modprobe hid-apple
modprobe brcmfmac
agetty -n --login-program /bin/dash tty1

shutdown -h
		

There is too much to do, still. I'll keep you posted.

jumentosec

Published: 2024-01-21

These are the links:

• The conference website
• The blog and
• The project's github

Internet Highlights VI

Published: 2023-12-19

• a nice article on tldp about Linux memory management
• this small and unique piece of art website
• a badly drawn goat
• this directory of design websites to please our desire for beauty
• a recipes site but you tell how long you want to make it
• just a funny game
• hands
• internet radio with style

Introducing Bytes

Published: 2023-11-05

I was watching Monk and there is one scene that a boy coughts near Monk. The funny part is that this boy only shows up in that scene, so I wanted to watch the episode's credits just to see that.

This is the scene the coughing boy shines on his participation:

and the credits screen:

another great episode.

So I bought the pinebook pro

Published: 2023-10-19

body

the pinebook pro laptop is lightweight, sleek, compact and pretty; it has a premium feel given by the magnesium shell and a gorgeous display. microSD slot is also very good to find.

battery

it has a decent battery, frequently i can use it all day long without a recharge. i'd only remove the barrel port, as the USBC port can be used for charging, so no real need for it.

touchpad

the touchpad feels a little weird sometimes, it is a little fuzzy and i have difficulties using the right click, i don't get it every time. the website says it's a large one, but i don't think so. i'd have it a little larger and make the click feel the same place everywhere, it clicks only on the bottom.

keyboard

very good one, not the best, the only thing that bothers me is that sometimes i get a doubled key, may be a firmware thing.

camera

people could see me clearly, sometimes it gets really dark i don't know why, may be some misconfiguration on me. the real issue is processing power, when i turn it on the laptop becomes unusable, totally lagged.

CPU/GPU

i think this is the only thing that bothers me everyday, it is slow and there is no hardware acceleration for the graphics driver at this time of writting. i use very light software and it sometimes lags. but software support for most applications is fine, only missing OSS.

misc.

this is very personal: the only design detail that is not what i like is the display being a little bigger than the bottom part, so when it is closed the lid is not aligned, but that's really a manner of taste. the pine website doesn't deliver to brazil and that's a huge bummer, specially because they do not answer any email or support ticket, horrible customer service.

please if you know how to solve any issue i found please reply this post. thanks!

Internet Highlights V

Published: 2023-10-13

this time i'll add descriptions, per my last feedback.

• Ironwood Solar: A solar powered website
• An article about the early days of Linux
• A stylish zine about hacking
• Alef programming language's user guide
• A dev's homepage that looks like a man page
• An interactive visualization of a clock

Internet Highlights IV

Published: 2023-03-31

here we go again...

• https://michaelbach.de/ot/mot-pigeonNeck/index.html
• https://www.gentlydownthe.stream/
• https://fungi.neocities.org/
• https://www.yourworldoftext.com/
• https://www.adelfaure.net/
• https://tilde.town/~severak/town_radio.html
• https://trashloop.com/
• https://www.circumlunar.space/~julienxx/
• https://giantcatco.com/
• https://walledgarden.one/
• https://www.kickscondor.com/
• https://escapetheinter.net/
• http://tilde.town/~troido/cadastre/town.html
• http://textfiles.com/underconstruction/

My blog posting work flux

Published: 2023-03-30

In this post I will talk a little about my workflow for publishing content. I find it quite simple and therefore decided to share it with you.

The first part is to know the infrastructure that I built for my server. My blog and homepage resides on my Raspberry Pi Zero W which is connected to my router with a small USB cable to receive power. And the router is connected to a UPS. This part was done this way because I wanted to venture into the world of hosting. And I liked the results, but it is much easier to pay for a VM in any cloud.

Router configuration

Some optional things that I decided to have, and with great difficulty, were:

• Business internet plan: to have ports 25, 80 and 443 unlocked. The block is illegal in Brazil, but anyway. Without this unlock, the only way is to use VPN.
• Static IP: together with the business plan it was the most difficult, at least 3 months talking to the operators, horrible service, unprepared staff.

The server

In the server, I decided to use static pages, so servrian only works for that case. For the articles, I just write them in HTML.

Adding content

1. Write the content
2. Update index page
3. Update feed and sitemap
4. Run scp

Conclusion

The code part is not complicated and can be even easier when using ready-made projects or pre-configured Docker images. Here I wanted to do everything from scratch for two reasons: 1. to learn how the many parts work internally, and 2. to create a lighter version than current projects.

It's this second point that I'm most proud of, everything is very light and efficient: the blog's homepage has 2700 bytes and loads in 80ms, it's valid and simple HTML, my portfolio, the page above the blog, has 575 bytes; this allows the project to be served from my Raspberry Pi Zero W, which only needs 5V to operate. In addition, it still loads other projects like my Git and email server.

These are the difficulties you may encounter if you decide to venture down this path, at least here in Brazil. I hope I've helped in some way. I say it's worth it if you value extreme simplicity, like to do things your way, and want to get away from the dependence of the infamous big techs, libraries or frameworks, and above all, learn a lot.

Future plans

• Use a solar panel and battery to save energy.

Hosting your git repositories

Published: 2023-02-21

Setting up a git server is easy, and involves only common shell commands, this post will show you how I started my very first self-hosted git server. find one extra computer and set up a SSH connection to it, then you are ready to start. here I used my raspiberry pi, which is always up [1].

To setup the git server you should do the following on the server machine:

1. Create git user
2. Add sshd keys
3. Create projects dir
4. Create empty git repo
5. Using the git shell

Create git user

This step is just sudo useradd -m git, no secret here. now log in this user.

Add SSHD keys

This part is the creation of the authorized_keys, so you can SSH in with this user. Basically you just add the allowed public keys here. In my case I just copied from my main user, but the ideal case is creating another key and adding that to the git server.

mkdir .ssh
cat new-key.pub > .ssh/authorized_keys
chmod 600 .ssh/authorized_keys 

Now you should be able for SSH into your git machine using the key you added.

Create projects dir

This step is optional but I like creating a dedicated folder for my projects, so I ran: mkdir git, and entered it.

Another cool thing to do is to change the default git branch:

git config --global init.defaultBranch main

Create empty git repo

This is the command that creates a repo on the server, so you can push to this repo. To create it first create a folder, and then issue the init command:

mkdir project
cd project
git init --bare

At this stage you have a fully functional git repository, to use it you proceed as you do for new repos.

Using you new repo

Now in your other machine you can init a repo and push:

cd project
git init
git add .
git commit -m 'Initial commit'
git remote add origin git@:git/project
git push origin main 

You can stop here if you want, but in this state there are some anoying things on the server that can drive you nuts, for example:

• You have full access through SSH and SSH forwarding, that can be a security concern in some environments
• To create new repos you'll need to log in the server and run the git init command

The next section will deal with these issues using the git shell and some configurations.

Using the git shell

First thing to improve is to remove port forwarding, so add this to the start of each entry in the ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file:

no-port-forwarding,no-X11-forwarding,no-agent-forwarding,no-pty 

Now SSH users cannot get a login shell, only the non-interactive shell we are going to configure will be available.

The we must set the git shell to be used on login. so log in your server machine, now check if the git-shell is listed on the /etc/shells file with: cat /etc/shells, if you do not see git-shell there, you can add it:

sudo echo "$(which git-shell)" >> /etc/shells 

But I advise you to use an editor. Now make it the login shell for the git user:

sudo chsh git -s $(which git-shell) 

Now you will not be able to get a shell on a log in. So this user is useless for anything else than git stuff. You can only run git commands like pull, push and clone, plus the commands we created on git-shell-commands.

Setup up greeting and commands

The git-shell can be customized by creating the folder git-shell-commands on the git home, the first and funnier thing to do it to just show a message when a login is atempted.

You can present a greeting to users connecting via SSH by creating a file named no-interactive-login in the folder we just created. It's funny, e.g.:

#!/bin/sh
echo "welcome to your git server!" 

So when git tries to log in your server this message is shown.

Adding programs to this folder will let users run them. There are some convenient commands to add, for example, creating a new repository, deleting one and listing all repos. To make them available don't forget to let them be executable:

chmod +x git-shell-commands/program 

A good starting point is [2].

Conclusion

I think this is a good configuration, it is safe and let's you fully interact with git, even creating and deleting repos.

At the same time this configuration is flexible as you can keep adding new commands. But there is room for improvements, for example, your repositories have zero visibility, there is no colaboration.

Adding public access can be done using git-daemon, or setting up the git HTTP. But those are subjects for other articles.

References

1. My rpi, in the future it will have a PoE HAT.
2. git-shell-commands repo

Notes

• git book