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, 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.

I personally own a few Apple devices, mainly my phone, so at some point, I started looking for a news source to know when updates will be expected, new features to expect, etc.

9to5mac is the one that pops up at the top of search engines, naive me thought it looked alright at first glance.

The facade of this website falls as soon as you add their RSS feed to your reader: you’ll be greeted by what can only be described as just ads and just speculations.

For instance, the following kind of ad is posted quite frequently to pad the content the website offers:

Same with rumours, they claim to have a “release date”, yet this is a nonexistent product that random people online only speculate about. Rumours make up most of the padding 9to5mac has.

I’m not a fan of having slop in my RSS reader, my mistake for trusting a website like that.

Quick post to wish everybody a happy International Workers’ day.

And for the few Finns reading this, happy Vappu as well.

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.