Jae's Blog

Recently, Wikipedia has come under a lot of attacks from malicious political entities. Unlike the Wikimedia Foundation, they have much more resources to harass projects such as this one into oblivion.

This is why it is more important than ever to get your own copy of Wikipedia (or any wiki, really) at home.

For this quick HOWTO, we’re gonna need a few things:

• A computer
• About 100Gb of space free on your hard drive
• Some time on your hands (depending on how good your internet is)

My software of choice to have my own Wikipedia copy is Kiwix. It is Free and Open-Source, and has a built-in downloader, allowing you to easily select a language and wiki to download.

My recommended way to download Kiwix is through Flatpak, which makes the process easier. If like me, you want the articles to be downloaded somewhere else, use FlatSeal to allow the application to write in a specific location, a second hard drive for instance.

If you don’t want to use Flatpak, see the options listed on Kiwix’s website, there is probably one that will fit your use case.

When launching the software for the first time, you can change the download location by going in the three buttons on the top right, then “Settings” and finally change the “Download directory”.

Once this is done, time to download some wikis. If it’s not already done, on the left of the main page, select “Online Files”, then select your languages and content types.

Do note that downloading Wikipedia with pictures takes around 100Gb while without it will only take 53Gb (for the English version, being the largest to this day).

Once the downloads are finished, click on “Clear” to remove all your filters, and swap to the “Local files” tab.

From there, you can open a specific wiki, search it and basically use it as it were online.

And this is how you can still access Wikipedia in case your internet randomly decides to stop, or if something worse would happen.

Last Thursday, while being at the radio club OH2K, I built a Pixie radio kit V3 (generously given to me by one of the regulars).

The Pixie radio is a low-power (about 0.4W when we measured), morse only radio that can only operate in the 7MHz (or 40 meters) band. Its main appeal is that you can build it from anywhere from €2 to €5, which makes it a really easy option to get.

The finished thing looks like this:

Given it was my first time building such a thing, it took me around two hours to build. It took that long because I mistook some components for others, and had to de-solder them.

Another issue I ran into was when using it at home. This board takes between 9V and 12V of power, so naturally, I fed it using my switchable power supply.

That’s where the first error came in, this introduced so much noise I thought the board broke during the transport from the club to my place.

Luckily, lazily soldering a wired barrel jack connector to a 9V battery solved the issue, and at night, I can hear really, really faint morse code in the background.

I’ve tried transmitting a bit, but so far, no response yet. I think it’s going to be hard getting anything out of that thing given my conditions aren’t close to ideal either (densely populated area).

I’ve also ordered a V4 board on AliExpress to see if it’s any better (but given the simplicity of the board, I doubt it). In any case, it’ll make for good soldering practice.

At the start of this year, I started looking at replacements for my Apple Watch Series 6.

Smartwatches offer lots of features, for instance, I loved being able to pay with my watch and receive notifications directly, however, one thing was very annoying for me: battery.

I hate things with batteries, I forget to charge them all the time, that’s why all my workstation setup is wired. But hey, can’t really escape that with mobile devices, especially phones and watches.

Enters the Pebble announcement. Pebble is a brand of smartwatches using e-ink screens, and boasting a really long battery life for the features.

The whole thing failed back in 2016, but has been doing a comeback since the start of the year, with the announcement directly falling when I needed a new watch. The older models boasted a battery life of around a week, while the newer ones (still not shipped tho) boast about around a month.

This is already better than the meagre “less than one day” the Apple Watch is capable of.

However, this is not a post about Pebble. Out there, there is an option that is even cheaper than an Apple Watch or Pebble, and that will last far, far longer. I’m talking about dumb Casio watches.

Right around that moment of the year, enters a friend with which I started talking about watches. He promptly recommended I check out Casio watches, and more particularly the Casio AE-1200.

Curious about it, I went to a store the next day to pick one up, the final price being around €50 (VAT included).

The configuring the time and everything was fairly easy, as well, just holding the “adjust” button, and going through all the things one by one.

It might not look like much, but the AE-1200 probably has the most features for the price, including (but not limited to):

• Timezones: if you can literally change on the fly which timezone you are in, meaning you don’t need to adjust the watch manually when you move around
• Daylight savings: you can also change DST settings super easily, once again, avoiding you having to reconfigure the whole thing when that changes
• 10 years of battery!!!
• Stopwatch/Timer
• Auto calendar (with leap years)
• 5 different alarms

The one drawback is the lack of syncing making the watch slowly drift. I usually resync the time every week to make sure it’s exact. If you don’t care about this, the drift is minimal, about a second a week.

Overall, the setup has been working well, because… it just works. I may can’t pay or receive notifications with it, but it shows the correct time when I need it and doesn’t need to be charged at all.

Looking at the pricing of new Pebble watches as well, I’ll stay with my cheap one.

Debugging GitLab Pages on a self-managed instance can be a hassle, especially if you’re only getting nebulous messages without any further information.

Do note, for this to work, you’ll need to have an admin access to the machine hosting the main Rails app.

To find out exactly why Let’s Encrypt is failing to get a certificate, use the following command:

docker compose exec gitlab gitlab-ctl tail gitlab-rails --follow | grep -i "encrypt\|acme\|certificate"Code language: JavaScript (javascript)

It should output the exact log of Let’s Encrypt and tell you if it’s hurting a wall somewhere. If you have a bare-metal instance, just remove the docker part of the command, and only use gitlab-ctl.

While listening to a WebSDR yesterday, I managed to catch a numbers station transmitting a message.

This was recorded at around 19:03:00 UTC, on 7317.0kHz

Looking around, this station seems to be named E11 “Oblique” and is apparently one of the most active. It is operated by an unknown agency, broadcasting from Warsaw.

I didn’t manage to record the whole message, but a good part is there, you can hear a group of numbers being started using the word “ATTENTION”, repeated multiple times.

From the documentation available on Priyom, this is the second part of the message, the first part being a three-digit ID, the word “oblique”, then a count, all of this happening over the course of around three minutes.

The full transcription of what I got (this may contain some errors):

ATTENTION 67438 67438 67860 67860 04039 04039 69177 69177 63054 63054 46049 46049 02736 02736 94777 94777 36055 36055 73069 73069 20594 20594 96622 96622 83251 83251 12182 12182 51324 51324 51379 51379 59126 59126 61168 61168 03718 03718 28981 28981 77820 77820 66222 66222 41823 41823 62573 62573 19825 19825 58059 58059 57872 57872 80128 80128 50473 50473 20071 20071 01721 01721 32356 32356 88691 88691 54694 54694 77204 77204 28423 28423 98119 98119 02337 02337 ATTENTION 67438 67860 04039 69177 63054 46049 02736 94777 36055 73069 20594 96622 83251 12182 51324 51379 59126 61168 03718 28981 77820 66222 41823 62573 19825 58059 57872 80128 50473 20071 01721 32356 88691 54694 77204 28423 98119 02337 OUT

The message, of course, ending at the “OUT”.

Someone out there probably has a better recording (with the full thing), well hopefully. That was just an interesting thing I wanted to share.

Back a few years ago, my personal ID number changed. Just to sum up for people who don’t know, in Finland, the personal ID number is used for everything. It basically identifies you to government and banking services.

Given the data debacle I talked about previously, I decided it would probably be good to request my own Posti data, as GDPR allows me to do so.

You can imagine my surprise when clicking the request link and hurting a wall saying I don’t exist:

After talking to some people, it turns out the way of fixing this is quite easy. You just need to log into the Moving Notification site of Posti (muuttoilmoitus.fi) with your bank details.

After doing so, I can finally access the data request page, as simple as that!

I previously enabled comments again on this blog, and it seems to have attracted the attention of bots trying to sell drugs through the comment section.

As a result, I ended up implementing FriendlyCaptcha, a small Open-Source PoW (Proof-of-Work) captcha solution made in Germany.

Fear not for your data, it is using a self-hosted instance as well, and ActivityPub is exempt from this restriction.

Next on the list is modifying the captcha itself to include all creatures, and not just humans.

About half an hour ago, Servo re-affirmed their ban of LLM tools laid out in their contribution policies:

Contributions must not include content generated by large language models or other probabilistic tools, including but not limited to Copilot or ChatGPT. This policy covers code, documentation, pull requests, issues, comments, and any other contributions to the Servo project.

This is honestly great to hear, as it cements the longevity of the project, avoiding the many headaches associated with AI code generation amongst others.

A little known feature of Git is that you can have conditions, for instance, to have a work and personal name and email.

First, the ~/.gitconfig file:

[includeIf "gitdir:~/src/personal/"]
  path = ~/.gitconfig.personal

[includeIf "gitdir:~/src/work/"]
  path = ~/.gitconfig.work
Code language: PHP (php)

After specifying this, you can then create two files, ~/.gitconfig.personal and ~/.gitconfig.work, containing:

[user]
    email = email@something.com
    name = MyName

and

[user]
    email = jae@consoso.com
    name = Very serious business person

Now, when you are in ~/src/personal/, the personal email and name will be used, and when in ~/src/work/, the work one will be.

As I previously mentioned, I’m currently playing through Yakuza Kiwami 2 again.

There’s a different way to experience the game with the Silly Mod.

This mod basically adds/replaces a ton of animations, models, etc to make the game… as you might have guessed, more silly.

I can definitely recommend giving it a try as it’s a really different experience from the base game. The modder really did a good job on that one.