Jae's Blog

Just yesterday, I received my HackRF PortaPack. The HackRF is basically an SDR, or Software-Defined Radio, that allows you to plug it to a computer and have a nice spectrum view of everything (amongst other things).

While the PortaPack integrates its own screen, battery and everything, I find it more convenient to connect it to my computer and use it that way. I can record more easily, have a larger view thanks to my monitor, etc, etc.

First thing I did was to update the firmware. Luckily, it’s really easy to do so, I just had to download the latest version of Mayhem, put it on a micro-SD card, use the internal flash tool, and done, all up-to-date.

Now, a lot of sellers will try to give you some SDR software to use with the HackRF: don’t listen to them. Instead, try SDR++, a Free and Open-Source SDR software, with built-in support for the HackRF. Added bonus: it’s even in the Fedora repositories! As a side note, you might need to add your user to the dialout group before starting to use it.

Once you have SDR++ installed, just head to the top right, in the “Source” section, in the scrolling menu select “HackRF”, and right below, select your HackRF (there should only be one).

Right below, I can recommend setting both the “LNA gain” and “VGA gain” to something like 16, it’ll make sure you can actually hear anything.

Other settings I can recommend tweaking a bit are within the “Display” section, near the bottom on the right. Do note those settings are my own preference:

• FFT Hold: enabled, 60
• FFT Framerate: 40
• FFT Size: 524288 (this avoids having the waterfall look “blocky” when zooming in, but has a performance cost when de-zoomed)
• FFT Window: blackman
• Color map: WebSDR

Those settings basically reproduce the WebSDR look and feel that I’m used to (for instance, from the Twente WebSDR).

Now time to listen! To make things better, I can also recommend playing with the “Squelch” option. You might need to tweak this differently based on which frequency you want to listen to.

In any case, have fun listening to whatever you can find!

I hang out quite a lot in Bellingcat‘s Discord, mainly because there’s cool research being done in there, and being in there is also a good way to stay informed.

Of course, as with any Discord guild, it is inaccessible to anyone without an account, however that’s no the subject of this post.

If you remember a year or two ago, during the slow destruction of Twitter, people flocked en masse to Bluesky, which marketed itself as a better alternative. This is more than ever present in OSINT communities like Bellingcat’s where Bluesky has largely replaced Twitter links.

Fast track to today and Bluesky is owned by cryptobros, cuddles up to dictators to silence political opposition, and has login screens on half the posts (and yes, I know, those are the users selecting the option). Great strides in making content accessible to everybody, right? Nothing is more frustrating than hurting a login wall after seeing a working embed displaying the content of the post.

I’d go as far as to say the “logged in only” setting for a place as public as Bluesky makes no sense at all. If you don’t want people to see your post, then don’t post it or post it in private, not half public, as simple as that.

So, why has this blog been more active than usual lately? Well, simple, as previously mentioned, I swapped blog engines to make it easier for me to write. No need to sync a Git repo any more, I can just log in and start writing.

I also recently made some changes in how I use the internet, and decided to stop using some things altogether. Yup, that means completely blocking YouTube, social media in general (where my presence was already reduced) and going back to a simpler train of life, sort to speak.

In this context, “simpler” doesn’t mean throwing my computer out of the window, quite the contrary, just being smarter about the general use I have of it.

If you’ve known me for a while, you are aware that I’m constantly tired. In fact, I’m more likely to answer “tired” to “how are you doing today?” than anything else. This whole thing in part pushed me of getting rid of stuff I don’t need, such as YouTube, where I was wasting a ton of time, doing basically nothing (and ultimately delaying my sleeping times).

Nowadays, instead of watching videos all day after work, I log on here, and start writing, read books using my e-reader, listen to some web radios.

I’ve also taken upon myself to socialise more while AFK, joining a local radio club, which has been great so far.

Honestly, this has been quite good so far. It feels like I have more time and that everything is more chill. Of course, doing this isolates me a bit more than previously, this blog being my main platform of expression. But that’s alright, I’ve mainly been a hermit for as long as I’ve used the internet, preferring my own stuff than large silos.

I genuinely enjoy creating and using my own creations (that’s called selfdogfooding btw). For instance, the theme you are seeing when loading this website through a web browser was made by myself a few days ago to replace my old one.

So yeah, sometimes it’s good to step back, and say “no”. Overall, I’m returning to a simpler web use, using simpler software, doing simple things, such as blogging. No “AI”, no trackers, no bullshit, only me, my thoughts, and any poor soul who happens to stumble upon this blog.

One of the best things I’ve ever bought is my PocketBook Touch Lux 5. It’s a small, yet quite powerful e-ink book reader. It has quite modest specs with 8Gb of internal storage, though extendable via a micro SD card.

You can even make the reader itself better by replacing the default one with KoReader, an Open-Source one having a tad more features.

So, in this day and age, where do you find books? Well, thanks to the power of the internet, this is easier than ever, and with an added bonus, every single entry in this list is completely DRM-free.

• Project Gutenberg: probably the most well-known online library. It has thousands upon thousands of books over a great variety of subjects. Lots of the books loaded on my e-reader are from there.
• HumbleBundle: yup, the same ones that usually do games. Though the offers rotate periodically, it is a good source of books. Usual subjects are software development and other technical subjects.
• StoryBundle: one I wasn’t familiar with at the time of writing this post. A bit like HumbleBundle, StoryBundle offers curated e-books packages at a really decent price. If you pay over a certain price (20USD for instance), you’ll even get bonus books. Given most of the money goes back to the writers, this is an excellent way of getting books.
• Anna’s Archive: probably the largest aggregator of shadow libraries. Sadly downloads are really slow if you don’t pay, so I’d recommend going for shadow libraries directly. Though this aggregator is really useful when needed to find some exotic stuff.

Do note that some options listed above might not be available in your country. For instance, Anna’s Archive is being actively blocked in Italy, the Netherlands, and the UK.

In any case, I hope you’re having as much fun as I do reading books. At some point, I’ll look into either swapping the current micro-USB port of my reader for a USB-C one, or try to find a completely Open-Source e-ink reader.

Micro-USB in this day and age is kinda annoying to use given it’s not as common as 10 years ago.

As I previously talked about, I started playing Starbound again. Well good news, OpenStarbound 0.1.9 released a few days ago with a bunch of bug fixes.

I’m heavily looking into getting a server up and running at some point, though I’d need to look into transferring my own universe onto it.

I usually play without mods, but I might make an exception soon. If anybody has suggestions, I’m open for those now.

I’ve seen that Frackin’ Universe is fairly popular, so I might start with that one.

If you haven’t been keeping up with the news lately, after the whole Signal fiasco, it appeared that USA government officials are using some fork called “Telemessage”.

That app claims to offer backup solutions for popular messengers including Signal, to comply with government directives. Funnily enough, their website got completely wiped, a large change from what it was a few months ago.

Putting aside all the issues that using a Signal fork exposes you to, it appears that despite their marketing, they could access plaintext messages.

Even better, according to 404 Media, the entire thing is now under investigation thanks to their reporting on the matter.

Edit: a senator asked for an investigation, my bad.

If you’re interested, I’ve archived the source code of both the Android and iOS apps on my GitLab instance (tho those aren’t rare):

• https://g.j4.lc/backups/TM-SGNL-iOS
• https://g.j4.lc/backups/TM-SGNL-Android

Overall, it’s quite fun to look at this from the outside, but also a bit worrying.

And remember, if you switch to Signal, use the official version and don’t add random journalists to your convos.

Recently, the French ISP Bouygues decided to add a €5 fee to cancel your landline. Free.fr, another major ISP in France decided “well, we’re going to pay for that if you move to us”:

On a dedicated page, the ISP says that “the cancelling fees of your old provider will be taken care of up to €10 (including tracked letters) when subscribing to a Free subscription.”

Free.fr was already one of the best ISPs around given they generally offer hardware better than the others (in the sense that it’s not as restrictive as others), and have been supporting IPv6 since 2006!!

On another note, the ZDNET article (in French) in which I saw this calls the new fee “innovation”. “Parasitic rent seeking” would probably be a fairer assessment.

Back before discovering Matrix, I mainly used IRC to talk with friends. Those were simple times, mainly spent using either mIRC or WeeChat.

Recently, I needed some help getting BIRD working on the latest version, which meant I had to go on Libera Chat, and ask there. I then searched “IRC” in my Flatpak browser and found out about Halloy.

Halloy is a free and Open-Source IRC client created in 2022, with its first version being released in june 2023, written in Rust and licensed under the GPLv3.0 licence.

So far, using this client has been a breeze. It looks good by default, has support for IRCv3 features, and receives updates really frequently (about once a month at the time of writing). Early on, I had some questions about configuring some aspects of Halloy and the people in the Libera Chat channel (including the main developer) were quick and really helpful.

If you still use IRC for whatever, consider giving Halloy a try, it works nicely.

As I previously mentioned, I use Miniflux to sync all my RSS feeds around.

Today, I discovered NetNewsWire, a free and Open-Source app allowing you to read, and sync, RSS feeds on iOS. One issue: when opening the app, going in the settings, and trying to add an account, Miniflux is nowhere to be seen.

It’s actually really easy to sync your feeds there. For that, you want first to log into your Miniflux account and head to the settings.

Head to “Integrations” and scroll down until you see the “Google Reader” section. There, enable it, then set a username and password. Don’t forget to click “update” when this is done.

When this is done, open NetNewsWire on your iPhone, go in the settings and in the “Accounts” section, click on “Add account”. In the list that opens, select “FreshRSS”.

There, put the username and password you set, and as the URL, https://reader.miniflux.app.

Once this is done, just hit “Add Account” and you should be all set.

As an additional step, I can recommend turning off “On my iPhone” in the accounts section to avoid the clutter of the default feeds being added.

You now have all your feeds synced to your phone.

With summer just around the corner, it still surprises me that we still have snow here.

Not sure what they are doing over there, but Yle reported 30 cm of snow around the northeast of the country.

Quite honestly, I wish we still had snow here, in the south (and I know people around here will hate me for saying this). Summer is probably my most hated season.