Jae's Blog Creatures and blogs.

Time for the easy blog post that I make every year.
The software I use hasn’t changed much since last year, so allow me to be lazy and list it all.

Starting with the OS, you might already know that Fedora is my go-to Linux distribution nowadays. It’s easy to install and update, and now ships two different desktops (GNOME and KDE) depending on what you prefer to use. In short, what I would consider a good distribution, easy to use, user-friendly. VR also works perfectly fine with my setup (WiVRn + Quest Pro). Of course, Resonite is my privileged online VR platform for obvious reasons.

Special mention of macOS Tahoe which I use at work (with 99% of the cloud stuff disabled) which is very pleasant to use as well.

Code editors remains the same as last year:

• JetBrains Rider: given I write a lot of modern .NET code, Rider does an excellent job. It’s the only purpose-specific editor I use currently.
• Sublime Text: great for general-purpose, costs a bit, but I’m always ready to drop some money on good software.
• Sublime Merge: graphical Git client, same as Sublime Text, works great. Nothing much else to add.

When trying to work on some APIs (notably for a FreePBX add-on), I noticed Insomnia became more and more annoying with their sign-in requests and such. I discovered Yaak to replace it. Not only the interface looks decent, but it has some cool goodies like integrated Git support to sync workspaces and WebSocket support that doesn’t crashes the whole app. Seems it receives updates quite frequently, so grabbed a license for it to support the development.

Now for the most controversial subject: instant messaging apps. As you may have noticed, I’ve decided to leave the past in the past, and nowadays, my only recommendation to contact me is Signal. I may use other apps from time to time to stay in touch with others (Matrix) or to interact with some communities (Discord), but my only recommendation is Signal. I don’t need recommendations either, I don’t have time to fight you over what is the “best” chat app.

Of course, as the whole modern world still relies on it, I still have a bunch of email addresses which I use through Thunderbird. But honestly, I’d rather communicate solely through Signal at this point. Given the headache of email delivery and losing access to various domains or email addresses, I now use Iki‘s “forever email” alias (service aimed at Finnish users or people permanently residing in Finland). With this, my mailbox is basically only storage and I send and receive emails through Iki’s service (as well as making me look more oldskool than I really am).

Don’t ask me either for my GPG key, I don’t have one anymore. If I’m gonna sign Git commits, it’s gonna be through my SSH keys. If I need to encrypt files, it’s gonna be through age. Any GPG key I’ve ever generated and distributed can essentially be considered as compromised nowadays (not because they actually are, but out of caution). Generally, you can find my up-to-date SSH public keys on my GitHub user.

For my personal projects, I’ve also started looking more into Podman out of pure curiosity. Given it works with standard OCI containers, I might switch to it completely (Docker being currently in use). But that’ll be for future me to decide, tho the quadlet files looks like a cool concept. Expect a blog post on this later if it comes to fruition!

Some other software that doesn’t even need an introduction includes: LibreOffice, Borg Backup, Nextcloud, Blender and Vaultwarden.

One last thing: if right now you’re typing an angry comment saying something along the lines of “you're TOTALLY wrong for using <thing>“, stop now. I get it, my workflow might not work for you, and that’s OK. You’re not contractually forced to use any of the software listed here, I’m just another purple creature posting the software she uses on her personal blog. What is said here isn’t that important, I’ll even be impressed if more than ten other creatures see it.

And if it’s that hard to resist, do it anyways. Just know it’ll take me about 10 seconds to read your comment and decide to click on the “delete” button instead of approving the comment.

This is what works for me, thanks for listening to my ramblings.

If we have a few places in common, be it online chats or the virtual worlds of Resonite, you’ve probably noticed that I’m appearing less and less often. There’s a pretty good reason for that: I’m just so tired.

2025 has been something for me, I got a radio license and callsign, joined the Resonite Team, started to hang out more with friends, went to Eurofurence, but most importantly, in December, I finally got diagnosed with ADHD. Funnily enough, it came after seeking advice for something totally different.

As a result, I got a plethora of pills to take in the morning, but that allows me to finally do something. By that I don’t mean groundbreaking stuff, I mean chores, doing the dishes, cleaning the kitchen after a cooking session, etc. Yes, it’s boring, but honestly, it’s been great so far. I don’t need other people to push me to do something anymore, I can just do it.

I was warned about some side effects including possible hypertension, loss of appetite and others; but so far, the only one I’ve encountered happens in the evening. Of course, there’s no such thing as infinite energy, so starting 17:30-18:00, it all comes crashing down. Can’t do much, just really tired.

That’s why I’m not around much anymore. I’m just trying to find a new rhythm, one in which I wouldn’t be as tired as I am now. That translates to going to bed earlier, eating better, cutting back on some things and doing others slower.

While we’re on the subject of sleep, let’s talk a bit about it. Before getting the ADHD medication, my sleeping schedule was usually from around 2AM to 9AM, about 7 hours of sleep, which seems to be an alright amount. Nowadays, I go to bed way earlier, between 21:00 and 22:00, waking up still around 9AM, so more between 11 and 12 hours of sleep. Quite a drastic change which I’m still getting used to. While more sleep doesn’t always translates to more energy, this time, I just feel like it’s necessary. At some point, I gotta learn to listen to my body and get some rest when it needs some.

There’s also the work thing. At the moment, I basically have two sides: the purple thing that makes CI/CD and code for Resonite; and the other, darker, purple thing that writes CI/CD all day for companies and does trainings for GitHub and GitLab amongst other things. Needless to say, work kinda never stops for me, when I’m done with one, the other is here and I keep doing the same things, just for different projects. This is not healthy in any way, do not do this. This is why I started cutting back and setting proper limits starting about a week ago.

For instance, Sundays were always off-limits for me, now all the weekends are. While I was already doing that before, daily walks are now mandatory (from 45 minutes to an hour of just existing outside). Cons as well are strictly off-limits for work stuff (I’m also too lazy to setup proper development environments on my laptop, so complete win). Nowadays, I might answer or open a GitHub issue or two on weekends, but that’s about it, other personal projects and activities take precedence. For instance, I’ve been having lots of fun being a NCO for the World-Wide Check-In on the Brandmeister talkgroup 91 for DMR radio.

I love my job(s), if I could tell my smaller self that I would work on computers and actually enjoy it, I think she would explode with joy. However, it took me some time to understand that as much as I like it, it’s still work. I need to have some downtime, do something else for a bit, otherwise, as I say so often, I might as well just lose it.

So, sorry if your bug patchset or feature request has been lingering for a while; it might take a bit longer, but you’ll at least have the satisfaction that I have a healthier approach to it. If not, well, too bad, I’m not changing these new rules. You’ll also notice my activity is now more concentrated within the day (Helsinki time) instead of being at outrageous hours.

Of course, I’ll blame the Finnish winter for part of this, being in a near-constant state of night is tiring, that’s why I try scheduling my daily walks when there’s some light (originally planned to say “sun”, but weather is mostly grey mush these days around here). Also we’re in that moment in which days are finally getting longer, and soon enough, it’ll finally reach some more reasonable rhythm (at least for me, not being a native of Finland).

As a last thing, if you’ve recently asked me how I’m doing, you probably heard back “Honestly great”, or “Doing good” instead of the usual “Tired”. Well that’s the thing, I’m not tired all the time anymore, just at the times I honestly expected to be. I’m sure the overall situation will improve in the future; hanging out more AFK with friends already does a lot. In any case, that diagnosis was definitely a net positive.

First, some context.
ANFR is France’s equivalent to the OFCOM (in the UK), BNetzA (in Germany) or Traficom (in Finland). They regulate allocations on the radio spectrum and everything related to it.

Last year, they did a public consultation in relation to raising the threshold for “atypical points” from 6V/m to 9V/m. As with anything concerning radio waves, they had a slew of responses from conspiracy theorists, self-proclaimed “hyperelectrosenstive” people (the term coming back fairly often), but also approval from some entities such as SNCF (the national rail system).

All those responses are published on their website: https://www.anfr.fr/REPONSES/
Given that URL is publicly accessible, PII such as names, family names, phone numbers and addresses were redacted via black boxes on the documents.

While reading the responses in my web browser, Firefox, I noticed that I could click on some of those boxes, switch to edition mode, press DEL and completely de-obfuscate the PII.
I’m not a security expert by any means, and even I can say that’s pretty bad for an agency supposed to regulate frequencies.

So, what to do in this situation? I discovered this on Thursday 25 of December 2025.
On Friday 26 of December 2025, I decided to give them a call, as their website stated they would be open. Of course, no response at this point.

On Monday 29 of December 2025, I called once again, and this time, got someone over the phone. After explaining the issue, I was just told, “that sounds bad, I’m going to transfer you to someone else” (paraphrased).
After waiting for a bit, I ended up on someone who sounded confused and just thanked me for the report before quickly ending the call.

At this point, I wasn’t sure the issue would be even resolved from this phone call, so I waited for a bit, checking on the website now and then.

As of today, Friday 09 of January 2026, the issue has finally been fixed. While in a browser, the redaction boxes can’t be moved or deleted. When loading the PDF into Inkscape, you can move and remove the redaction boxes, but what’s under it is gone.

I’m also shooting a message to the CNIL (governmental data privacy agency) as ANFR didn’t publicly disclose that there was a possible leak of PII from their website, even if as simple as this.
In my opinion, this does reach the threshold to be a personal data breach, and as the European Commission themselves says, ANFR would have had to disclose it within 72 hours.

A quick blog post to announced that I archived a bunch of Yealink-related software on Archive.org, including firmware, manuals, and configuration tools.
This is due to Yealink’s support just removing things after updating their website.

You can find the files at:

• Yealink Configuration Generator Tool 2.0.0.16 V 83
• Yealink phone firmware & resources collection
• Yealink Logo Converter
• Collection of firmwares for the Yealink T42s

Happy hacking :)

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Small update: I was curious about the firmware 3CX published on their website, being T4XS-66.86.0.180. This firmware not appearing on any official Yealink documentation, I sent them the following email:

Hey, I see that you are offering a T4XS-66.86.0.180 firmware for the Yealink T42s.
I wonder, what are the changes from the official one?
For instance, does the firmware lock the phone into 3cx or is it just bug fixes?
Thanks,
// jae

Today, I received the following response from 3CX:

Hello Jae,
Thank you for your message, The firmware versions you see on the 3CX website are official Yealink firmware build which are simply Tested, certified, and recommended by 3CX for use with 3CX systems
3CX does not modify or “custom-code” Yealink firmware. 
​For further information or comparisons of the firmwares, please contact Yealink directly. 
​Let me know if you require further assistance from our end. 

This firmware has therefore been added to the archive.

Happy new year again dear reader, hopefully you had wonderful holidays.
Me? I spent my holidays getting increasingly frustrated by a small software named FreePBX.

FreePBX, as its name suggest, is… a PBX… manager, PBX meaning Private Branch Exchange, or to do simple, your very own VoIP and telephony server.
As mentioned, FreePBX is only a front-end for another software called Asterisk, which does the real phone stuff in the background.

While both software are Open-Source, FreePBX being under (A)GPL v3 (for the most part, more on that later), and Asterisk GPLv2, there is a giant gap in quality between the two.
While Asterisk generally works like you would expect it to, FreePBX has been a hassle at all level, all the more exacerbated by the current documentation, being one of the worst I’ve seen in recent times.

More than that, the default FreePBX installation script installs a plethora of proprietary “commercial” modules, which has the tendency to show you ads on login.
It’s because of that poor documentation that I’m starting this small series of tutorial on how to make your own phone system using FreePBX.

“But Jae”, some might say, “why don’t you just contribute to the project instead”? The answer is simple: I’m not signing no damn SLA.

The installation

Of course, we have to start somewhere, and I actually think installing FreePBX is a good one.
There are two ways to install FreePBX:

• The distribution version, which is a modified Debian 12 ISO that ships FreePBX by default
• The automated installation script hosted on GitHub

In this tutorial, we’re gonna focus on the script version, as I have no idea how you’re getting servers, been provisioning them via a public cloud or having a spare machine.
So we’re going to make a few assumptions:

• You have a running Debian 12 server, freshly installed
• You know how to follow instructions
• The domain we’ll use is example.com (of course, replace with your domain)
• Your server is equivalent or above of a Hetzner CPX22 (4Gb RAM, 80Gb disk 2vCPU)
  

So SSH into your server, and let’s start the installation by:

# Get the actual script
$ wget https://github.com/FreePBX/sng_freepbx_debian_install/raw/master/sng_freepbx_debian_install.sh -O /tmp/sng_freepbx_debian_install.sh

# Don't forget to audit it :)
$ less /tmp/sng_freepbx_debian_install.sh

# And start the install
$ bash /tmp/sng_freepbx_debian_install.shCode language: Bash (bash)

This will take a while, go fill your bottle of water and get hydrated properly in the meanwhile.

Once this is done, our first step will be getting rid of most of the proprietary modules; sadly, some provide functionality that is needed to not have the worst experience in the world.
This step will throw errors, but don’t worry, in the FreePBX world, that’s normal.

# First, we get rid of everything
$ for x in $( fwconsole ma list | grep Commercial | awk '{print $2}' ); do fwconsole ma delete $x; done

# Install some dependencies
$ apt install build-essential

# Now we re-add the admin tools add-on
$ fwconsole ma install sysadmin

# Upgrade the rest
$ fwconsole ma upgradeall

# Double check for any remaining commercial modules
$ fwconsole ma list

# Small note: do NOT uninstall the sysadmin module since it's one of the essentials. The following is also an example.
$ fwconsole ma remove endpointCode language: Bash (bash)

Now, let’s head to the web interface using the IP displayed after the installation. There, you will have to set up basics such as the admin user and password.

Congrats, you now have a FreePBX instance! Beware, you’ll need to skip a few ads.

Once you have done this step, log into the FreePBX dashboard.
Make sure to enable the smart firewall when prompted, this is critical as bots will instantly hammer your server.

This will have the side effect of terminating your SSH connection, get your IP address (or even better, prefix), on the navigation bar, go in “Connectivity” then “Firewall”.
There, in the “Networks” tab, add your prefixes by clicking the small green “+”, hit “Save” in the bottom right and finally, hit “Apply config” in the top right.

You’ll see that “Apply config” button a lot, as most actions will require you to press it.

Configuring the basics

Now, we’re going to give the only concession we’ll ever give to FreePBX. Find some temporary email address and mailbox, it’ll be important in a few lines.

In the navigation bar, head to “Admin”, then “System Admin” near the bottom. On this page, click “Activate” (on the bottom right), and follow the prompts on screen, giving the add-on your fake email.
Don’t forget to put fake phone numbers as well.

Once you have an installation ID on screen, copy it, it’s faster to activate through the command line interface like so:

$ fwconsole sysadmin activate <deployment ID>
Code language: Bash (bash)

Thereafter, refresh the page, and you’ll see new options on the right.
In those new options, click on “HTTPS Setup” and open the “Here” hyperlink in a new tab.

On this new page, hit “New certificate”, then “Generate Let’s Encrypt Certificate”, and fill in the info with what you have. When you’re done, hit “Generate certificate” in the bottom-right corner.

You can now close this tab and come back to the one we left open. Refresh the page, then head into “Settings”, select your certificate in the dropdown and hit “Install”.
Congrats, now you can access your PBX admin panel via HTTPS.

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… and that’s it for today.

Don’t miss the next tutorial, in which we’ll start adding extensions and configure emails.