Jae's Blog

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, 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.

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.

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.

The motto of “vibe” coders really is “let the thing do it, don’t check anything ever” because the whole cohort of Cursor users (an IDE with built-in LLMs) really believed a support bot that came up with a fake policy.

Shortly afterward, several users publicly announced their subscription cancellations on Reddit, citing the non-existent policy as their reason. “I literally just cancelled my sub,” wrote the original Reddit poster, adding that their workplace was now “purging it completely.” Others joined in: “Yep, I’m canceling as well, this is asinine.” Soon after, moderators locked the Reddit thread and removed the original post.

This is maybe too much on the nose when talking about LLM users. Vibes-based support is apparently a thing nowadays as well.

You can find the full article on ArsTechnica: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/04/cursor-ai-support-bot-invents-fake-policy-and-triggers-user-uproar/

A friend sent me a link to an interesting blog post talking about making an Open-Source DMR radio using a LimeSDR board and GNU Radio.

Digital Mobile Radio (DMR) is a mobile radio standard created by ETSI, which is very popular within the amateur radio community. […]
A very basic DMR modem (receiver and transmitter), capable of voice calls, that could emulate a subscriber radio using a SDR transceiver as the radio interface is described in this page.
While this modem is just a proof-of-concept interpretation of the DMR standard with no real use-case, there exists at least one open source project which proposes to create an open source DMR transceiver.

You can see the full blog post over there: https://qradiolink.org/open-source-DMR-transceiver-implementation.html

A little known feature of Steam is that it offers RSS feeds for any app/game/whatever shared using it.

The URL is also very simple to use:

https://store.steampowered.com/feeds/news/app/$AppIDCode language: JavaScript (javascript)

You can then replace $AppID by the application ID of your game.

For instance, if we want to monitor Resonite, app ID 2519830, you will need the following URL:

https://store.steampowered.com/feeds/news/app/2519830Code language: JavaScript (javascript)

There, super easy!

At some point, I had some issues converting some files with ffmpeg, most particularly videos on my Fedora install.

Turns out fixing this is really easy with the help of RPMFusion.

If you haven’t enabled it at the system installation, you can do that really easily via a single command which will install the free and nonfree variants of the repository:

sudo dnf install https://mirrors.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-$(rpm -E %fedora).noarch.rpm https://mirrors.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-$(rpm -E %fedora).noarch.rpmCode language: JavaScript (javascript)

Now, you can just swap ffmpeg for the RPMFusion one like so:

sudo dnf swap ffmpeg-free ffmpeg --allowerasing

This will install a bunch of codecs and replace the regular build of ffmpeg by a more permissive one (in terms of what you can do, not licensing).

Keep in mind that if you want to keep your system free (as in freedom), you might not want to do this.

A few weeks ago, I finally did the final switched and completely nuked my Windows 11 install from my workstation.

The last thing that was keeping me on Windows, VR, is now pretty much painless on Linux. All of this thanks to the guides provided by Linux VR Adventures, and most particularly, the software Envision which allows you to set up and start everything is a very painless way.

As I mentioned multiple times in the past, my distro of choice is Fedora, given it’s really easy to install, use and maintain.

This week we also had some great news, a new Fedora version, 42 which brought on a bunch of cool stuff.

As expected the upgrade was painless, and now my workstation is shinier than ever (just ignore my awful PC building skills and the fact that some USB ports might be fried by now).

I also switched RSS readers and now using NewsFlash in combination with MiniFlux.

So far the setup has worked quite well, and I can access all my feeds on all my devices without having to copy config files around which is a big win by my books.