Jae's Blog

I have at least 10 posts for this blog in the pipeline, all of which are blocked at the draft stage right now.

So, that’s what it’s like to have writer’s block huh.

Recently, I needed to purchase a new backpack because my old one, some Lenovo one, seriously started tearing and having other issues.

I scoured the web for a bit until I realized HELLOTUX, the ones behind the official Fedora merch, also conveniently make a backpack.

Shipping went really well, it took around a week for the package to arrive to Finland (shipped from Hungary).

Overall, the quality of the backpack is great, and I recommend to anyone wanting to get cool stuff from your favourite distro to get it from HELLOTUX.

As for me, I can finally put the old one to rest, I might have done some horrible things to that poor thing, namely accidentally pouring Pho on it once.

If you’re a Fedora fan, remember that the code FEDORA5 allows you to get €5 off any Fedora item in the basket.

It’s no surprise that I hate how search engines have evolved over the years. Going back 10–15 years, those were really useful and gave you the information you wanted, when you wanted.

Nowadays, results are only slop and ads, which completely defeats the purpose of a search engine.

Well, time to change this. Back a few years ago, I made a small search engine PoC. It never really worked, and the only part that was well-made was the front-end, which someone else made.

I’ve started drafting for a new search engine, that will not be reliant on other indexes, no AI slop, and fully EU-based.

I’ll keep you peeps posted at milestones of development. Expect a proper announcement later, when it is started properly.

I live near the Helsinki airport and can spot planes arriving from the west fairly easily through my window. What I never noticed before is how many planes are arriving during the weekend.

Starting from 06:00 and happening every few hours or so, there’s a whole ballet of planes landing and taking of, way more than I anticipated.

That also means the airband is very active, so that keeps me busy listening to it.

After playing a bit with my HackRF, I managed to receive some stuff.

Every day or so, balloons called “radiosondes” are launched, and I can actually receive those.

The payload you see below contains position data, battery status, altitude, and a bunch of other stuff.

If you’re curious about receiving those, there is a website tracking those, their TX frequency and all the data.

Airband is used by planes to communicate with the ground. Given I live near the Helsinki airport, I’m in a prime location to receive those properly.

For instance, here is small compilation of recordings:

Do note listening to airband might be illegal in some countries, for instance, Germany or North Korea. Always check your local laws (though unenforceable).

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.