CJ-Jackson Blog

Using GoCryptFS with QR-Code

Sun, 18 May 2025 19:30:27 +0100

In this tutorial we are going to use the following application.

To get started we need to create the QR-code with a very long password, say around 256 character.

cd /tmp
pwgen -1syv 256 | tr -d '\n' | qrencode -t SVG -o "qr.svg"

This should create a random qr-code saved as qr.svg, upload the QR-code to the phone by any means.

Now to initialized the folder that will store the encrypted data.

mkdir cipher
zbarcam --raw -1 | tr -d '\n' | gocryptfs -init -q -xchacha cipher

Scan the QR-Code from the phone and it should initialized the folder ready for encryption.

To mount

mkdir mnt
zbarcam --raw -1 | tr -d '\n' | gocryptfs cipher mnt

Scan the QR-Code again and it should mount cipher to mnt, to test it add file to mnt folder and than check cipher you should see an encrypted file.

It is useful for encrypting key file for the password manager on the work’s machine that has a webcam, given that it is running Linux.

Use Named Pipe to Unlock Encrypted File With Remote Key

Sun, 16 Mar 2025 10:08:37 +0000

It been awhile since a made the post, anyway it is what the title suggess, I’m going to show you how to unlock a encrypted file with remote key over ssh and named pipe (fifo). You’ll need to open two different terminals to do this.

# Create the named pipe
mkfifo /tmp/pipe

# It should be in a blocked state, until information is recevied.
age -d -i /tmp/pipe < in.age > out

In the other terminal run the following.

ssh username@server "cat /path/to/key.txt" > /tmp/pipe

It should unblock age and decrypt the file. It’s quite a good way to restrict private key exposure to ram, it much more secure than copying the private key to /tmp on MacOS it just like any other folder, while on Linux it tmpfs in lament terms, anything in /tmp does not go to ram on MacOS but does on Linux. So yes I’d say that name pipe are quite secure as you’re also avoiding clipboard, it’s very easy to accidently paste the private key to non-volatile storage, it happened to me but luckily the storage was encrypted. But with named pipe I don’t get into accidents, everything just stay in volatile ram.

I do not recommend using clipboard for private keys for the reason I mentioned above.

I wonder what other experiment we could do with named pipes? 😁

Using QR Code to Unlock Encrypted File Container

Sun, 18 Aug 2024 10:57:49 +0100

I needed a offline solution to keep my key file secure on the work computer where I can’t use the pen drive or any other external storage, but I’m allowed to use the webcam, which requires the password to be at least 500 characters long, which is obviously tedious to write manually, the only solution that came to mind was the QR Code which is capable of holding long passwords.

The tools used in this tutorial are:

zbar-tools, for scanning the QR Code via webcam.
LUKS via cryptsetup, for managing encrypted file container.

Write the script, customise it to your liking, follow the preparation, and finally execute unlock_crypto.sh and scan the QR Code should unlock the encrypted file container.

Script

getpass.sh

#!/bin/dash
cd $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR
touch passwd.txt
chmod 600 passwd.txt
# Scan the QR Code, store password to RAM, always volatile for temporary files.
zbarcam --raw -1 > passwd.txt

open.sh

#!/bin/dash
cryptsetup open --type luks ${1}/.usr/img/crypto.img crypto --key-file /run/${2}/passwd.txt
mount -t ext4 /dev/mapper/crypto ${1}/.key

clearpass.sh

#!/bin/dash
cd $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR
rm -rf /crypt

unlock_crypto.sh

#!/bin/dash
cd /home/cjjackson/.usr/libexec/crypt
./getpass.sh || exit 1
sudo ./open.sh $HOME $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR || exit 1
./clearpass.sh

lock_crypto.sh

#!/bin/dash
umount $HOME/.key
cryptsetup close crypto

Preparation

# Get password
./getpass.sh
# Create the container
dd if=/dev/urandom of=$HOME/.usr/img/crypto.img bs=1G count=1 iflag=fullblock
# Format the container
cryptsetup luksFormat $HOME/.usr/img/crypto.img --key-file $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/passwd.txt
# Open the container
sudo cryptsetup open --type luks $HOME/crypto.img crypto --key-file $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/passwd.txt
# Format to ext4
sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/mapper/crypto
# Close the container
sudo cryptsetup close crypto
# Clear Pass
./clearpass.sh

Note

You may need to change the ownership of the mounted folder.

sudo chown cjjackson:cjjackson /home/cjjackson/.key

I used qrencode to create the QR Code and save it to my phone.

Creating an executable TOML

Sun, 14 Apr 2024 10:21:56 +0100

In this rather brief tutorial, I’m going to show you how to create an executable TOML, this works on Mac and Linux, it can also work on Windows using WSL . First you need to write a script, I’m going to use Python to write the script, it can be done in any programming language.

py_toml

#!/usr/bin/env python3
import sys
import tomllib


def open_shebang_toml() -> dict:
    try:
        # Shebang always add the filename of thepy
        # executing script as the last parameter
        with open(sys.argv[1], "rb") as f:
            return tomllib.load(f)
    except IndexError:
        print("Must have one argument", file=sys.stderr)
        exit(1)
    except (OSError, tomllib.TOMLDecodeError):
        print("Unable to read file", file=sys.stderr)
        exit(1)


def print_shebang():
    print(open_shebang_toml())
        

if __name__ == "__main__":
    print_shebang()

I called it py_toml yes that without the file extension, the file needs to be executable chmod 755 py_toml and need to searchable within PATH environment, I use direnv to update the PATH . Now to create the example TOML file.

example.toml

#!/usr/bin/env py_toml
# The trick is to use shebang
forename = "Chris"
surname = "Jackson"
location = "Jersey"

Again the file also needs to be executable, run the following command.

./example.toml

And you should get something like

{'forename': 'Chris', 'surname': 'Jackson', 'location': 'Jersey'}

Random Conclusion

It is quite useful, I used this approach to write my own rest api client for testing and I do use it for work, I could of used something like Postman or Insomnia, but I feel that those kind of client don’t follow the Unix philosophy quite well therefore I ended up writing my own client and yes it is written in Python rather than JavaScript, well because it the obvious choice for data analysis, analysing the output of the API is data analysis, it comes as standard on most Linux distributions as well, based on those two merit alone, I believe I have made the correct decision and performance is irrelevant for data analysis. 🙂

By performance I mean the speed of the programming language 🙂

Preparing a LUKS key file image for usb flash drive on Linux

Sat, 14 Oct 2023 15:54:30 +0100

A few days ago, I was preparing a key drive to unlock the encrypted partition on boot, the process of doing that manually is quite tedious, so I decided to write a script to automate the process.

/usr/local/libexec/script/makeKeyImg

#!/bin/dash
keyName=${1-key}.img

mkdir -p /tmp/sandbox/storage
cd /tmp/sandbox

dd if=/dev/zero of=$keyName bs=1M count=512

devLocation=$(losetup -Pf --show $keyName)

(echo n; echo p; echo 1; echo "\n"; echo "\n"; echo t; echo c; echo w) | fdisk $devLocation

mkfs.vfat ${devLocation}p1
mount ${devLocation}p1 storage

dd bs=512 count=4 if=/dev/random of=storage/key.bin iflag=fullblock

umount ${devLocation}p1

DEVUUID=$(blkid ${devLocation}p1 -s UUID | cut -d '"' -f 2)

losetup -d $devLocation

mv $keyName "${keyName%.*}-${DEVUUID}.${keyName##*.}"

/usr/local/bin/make-key-img

#!/bin/dash
doas /usr/local/libexec/script/makeKeyImg "$@"

If you use sudo replace doas with sudo . Once you run the script it should create a image file with the key.bin inside on a vfat partition, the image file will be located in /tmp/sandbox , the file name should be something like key-ABCD-1234.img (Yes, that the UUID after first hyphen) and run the following to write image to usb-storage.

dd if=key-ABCD-1234.img of=/dev/sdx bs=1M

Now the usb-storage device is ready for decrypting the partition, all you have to do is to configure luks to accept the key, there is already a tutorial on Arch Wiki on how to do that and can be found at https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Dm-crypt/Device_encryption#Configuring_LUKS_to_make_use_of_the_keyfile

Tips

You can prevent the drive from being auto-mounted on boot up and on insert, just add the following line to /etc/fstab quite easy.

UUID=ABCD-1234  /root/key   vfat    ro,noauto,umask=0377    0 0

The ro means read-only, noauto prevent auto-mounting and umask restrict the permission making it read only for root user and no access for other users and groups.

I also recommend making an encrypted backup copy of the image file.

Have fun 🤩

Replacing Sudo With Doas on Arch Linux

Sun, 09 Jul 2023 12:09:50 +0100

Sudo is a utility that let you run a command with root privileges, but the the issue with sudo is that it has so many lines of code, when the source code is compressed to a zip file it is around 5.6mb whereas opendoas that around 53kb

The more lines of code the bigger the attack vector, now that something I don’t want when running the command with root privileges, so I decided to replace sudo with doas.

On Arch Linux it is quite easy, first run the installation command.

sudo pacman -S opendoas

Create a new file /etc/doas.conf with the following content

permit setenv {PATH=/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin} :wheel

Now test the command by uninstalling sudo, assuming your account is in the wheel group.

doas pacman -R sudo

Than secure the doas.conf file

doas chown -c root:root /etc/doas.conf
doas chmod -c 0400 /etc/doas.conf

Well done you’ve completed setting up doas.

Optional Stuff

Creating `sudo` Symlink to `doas`

ln -s $(which doas) /usr/bin/sudo

Creating a safe environment for editing `doas.conf` similar to `visudo`.

Create /root/script/vidoas and add the following, you may want to replace nvim with your preferred text editor. 🙂

#!/bin/dash

DOASDIR="/tmp/doas-$(date +%s)"
mkdir $DOASDIR
chmod 700 $DOASDIR
DOASFILE="$DOASDIR/doas.conf"

cp /etc/doas.conf $DOASFILE
chmod 600 $DOASFILE

nvim $DOASFILE
sync

doas -C $DOASFILE && echo "valid config" && cp $DOASFILE /etc/doas.conf && chmod 400 /etc/doas.conf || echo "invalid config"
sync

rm -rf $DOASDIR

Than create /usr/local/bin/vidoas and add the following

#!/bin/dash
if [ "$(id -u)" != 0 ]; then
        doas /root/script/vidoas
else
        /root/script/vidoas
fi

Change the permission of both files.

doas chmod 700 /root/script/vidoas
doas chmod 755 /usr/local/bin/vidoas

Then test it by running vidoas it should should create a temporary file inside the preferred text editor, on exit it will apply the changes if there is no errors.

Good reads

doas - ArchWiki
doas - Wikipedia

I’ve Been a Victim of the Pig-Butchering Scam

Mon, 23 Jan 2023 19:29:44 +0000

During November last year 2022, I’ve been contacted by someone of the name ‘Alice’ on Instagram, she introduce me to short-term crypto trading, at first I invested around £100, I got around a 5% return on investment (which turned out to be a scam) so I was convinced into investing more money into the the system I went up to £3,000 and I almost took out a loan with my bank, which I’ve manage to cancel.

She got me onto WhatApps, she was contacting me every morning and every night, it was quite exhausting at times, she pretended to be rich and wealthy, at first I thought she had comprehensive knowledge but in reality she was reading from a script. She was doing what she can to stop me from thinking for myself and doing my own research, fortunately she failed to do that, I did do my research and I came across the site called Global Anti-Scam Org and from there I realised I was being scammed, the first thing I did was contact the bank and successfully cancelled the loan, if the loan money went into the scam, I’d of been in debt for about a year. I got in contact with Global Anti-Scam Org and than the Police.

She also tried to get me to borrow money from other people, which I choose not to do, I just don’t like being a burden to other people, so I don’t borrow money from others, not even for a penny.

I lost around £3,100, in the long term, I think I got off quite lightly, I’d say I was on the raising stage of the scam, there are four stages of the scam, I heard of other victims losing a lot more, up to a £1m, so I’ve decided to cut my loses. But still I would not wish any of this on my worst enemy.

I will admit, I still live with my parent, I had desires to move out and basically I wanted a better life for myself, sadly that what got me deep into the scam. She took advantage of my desire and that how she got me into the scam.

From this point forward, I won’t be doing any investment with people I haven’t met in reality. If someone send you a message and all of a sudden they are talking about cryptocurrency, I’d say just don’t go any further otherwise you might get scammed.

I’m very thankful I caught on quite early, it could of been a lot worse.

What do I have to say to anyone who been scammed?

I’d say don’t feel embarrassed about that, speak your mind about it, explain how you got caught up in the scam in much detail as you possibly can. The more you speak about it, the more other will become aware of it. Never suffer in silence, the scammer will use your silence to their advantage.

I’d also suggest you get in contact with the Police, but I’ll say the chances of you getting your money back is very slim. It best to get on with your normal life, that is what I’m doing right now.

Don’t think that it was your fault, it was their job to scam you and you did not deserve that, no one deserved to be scammed.

Also don’t get in contact with cryptocurrency recovery, that probably a scam as well, it better to cut your loses, I know that can be a bitter pill to swallow.

Got question to ask me? just ask in the comment section.

File Encryption with Disposable Keys Using QR Code

Tue, 03 Jan 2023 21:40:45 +0000

I’ve been experimenting with QR Codes lately and came up with a solution that is a lot safer than carrying pen drive with you and does not require you to use your cloud storage username and password on someone else’s machine neither.

So I have written a script that encrypt the file and sends the private key to the printer in the form of a QR code, so here is the script.

#!/bin/dash

# Grab first parameter and create a time stamp.
srcPath=$1
stamp=$(date +%s)

# Generate Private and Public Key
privateKey=$(age-keygen 2>/dev/null | sed 's:#.*$::g' | tr -d '\n')
publicKey=$(echo $privateKey | age-keygen -y)

dstPath=/path/to/$stamp-${srcPath:t}.age

# Dump the URL
echo "https://www.example.com/$stamp-${srcPath:t}.age"

# Encrypt the file to dstPath,
# on success send the QR Code (containing the private key) to the default printer.
age -e -r $publicKey -o $dstPath $srcPath && echo $privateKey | qrencode -t EPS | lpr

The only two external dependencies are age file encryption and qrencode.

After running the script, it just the case of downloading the file onto the target machine and also scanning the QR code either by using the phone, webcam or a 2D scanner, than it should reveal the private key.

Once you’re done, you can destroy that piece of paper that has the QR code on, so it can not be used again, it a lot easier than trying to destroy the pen drive. After all it a piece of paper, you can shred it, you can set it alight quite easily, heck you can even swallow it, but I would not recommend doing that. 😂

In my humble opinion it better to store a piece of paper in the wallet than to carry the pen drive with you, as the piece of paper is safer as long as you don’t put full url on there.

Modern encryption key are quite short nowadays, they fit quite nicely onto a small QR code, without much fuss.

If you want me to write other kinds of script, let me know in the comments section.

2023 New Year Resolution?

Mon, 02 Jan 2023 20:34:13 +0000

I don’t usually keep New Year’s resolution, but I’m going try my best to be a bit more proactive about making and saving money, I’m thinking about starting a new business in the near future but I’m honestly not quite sure when to start yet, but I’ll figure it out, I just have to keep learning continuously.

Late last year, I’ve been reading a few thought-provoking books, like ‘Rich Dad, Poor Dad’ by Robert Kiyosaki and ‘Think Like a Freak’ by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, so I’ll definitely be reading more of those kind of book in 2023. I think I set a target of 30 books this year, I believe I can do that.

I’d love to go on holiday this year, but unfortunately late last year, I’ve lost around £3,000 to a pig butchering scam, it a long story I’m not going to go too much into details on that, that will be for another post. On the plus side, I’ll recover and hopefully go on holiday this year, as long as I don’t do anything too fancy with my spending I should be ok.

I’m going to figure what my bad habits are and try to find a way to address, I’ve been doing that last year as well. I think I’ve been spending way too much time on Twitter.

I’ve been playing badminton last year, so going to be doing more of that this year, maybe some other fun activities, definitely got to do more graphic design stuff as well, I just recently brought a license for a nice suite of graphic design software.

Also I should write more blog post, I can make more time for that, I actually enjoy writing blog post, I find it quite zen and relaxing!

Ultimately I should be more proactive and stay healthy! Also study more Japanese 😄

Happy New Year 🥳

Nix Package Manager

Sat, 13 Aug 2022 07:33:46 +0100

Finally I found a package manager I can agree with, can be used on macOS and that Nix what I like about it, is that it does not touch the /usr/local folder on macOS let alone change the ownership of the directory, instead it create a sub-volume and mount it at /nix directory.

I read the manual and I paid close attention to the multi-user section

Nix has multi-user support. This means that non-privileged users can securely install software. Each user can have a different profile, a set of packages in the Nix store that appear in the user’s PATH. If a user installs a package that another user has already installed previously, the package won’t be built or downloaded a second time. At the same time, it is not possible for one user to inject a Trojan horse into a package that might be used by another user.

I especially like the last sentence in the paragraph, in other package manager like Homebrew, that is quite possible to do, here is a quote I got from the wikipedia article.

Homebrew does not honor the default privileges of /usr/local; directory ownership is changed from root with group permissions for the wheel group to the installing user and the “admin” group. Specifically, the mode changes from drwxr-xr-x root wheel to drwxrwxr-x myuser admin. All files, not just the directories, have their ownership changed by the installer. This is considered by some as a major security flaw.

It is a major security flaw, for example it can be use to override command like sudo and use that to steal password from the admin and therefore gain root access to the system. They change the ownership so you don’t use sudo command, in my humble opinion this is not a very good approach, because of that alone I choose not to install the Homebrew.

But thankfully Nix does not use that approach, it relies on the unprivileged user to interact with the lightweight daemon which has the privileged to managed anything in the /nix directory in a very safe manner and like Homebrew you don’t need to use the sudo command. If I wanted to install neovim, I can run the following without using sudo.

nix-env -iA nixpkgs.neovim

Conclusion

Well I just love the Nix package manager, I really love the way it was designed and I also heard it can more than package manager, it can do manage server configurations and it can also do DevOps stuff, pretty much what Chef does. I think it awesome it can do all those, but I choose to use it as a package manager. I had other advices to check out home manager as well, but I choose not to, I prefer to install and uninstall the package as I need to.

There is also part of NixOS, which demonstrates to me that they got a great background in dealing with Unix (Linux and macOS). Homebrew is just one of the those things built by a cool kid, who thinks it cool to change the owner of /usr/local which in reality that is dangerous, therefore I don’t recommend Homebrew. I leave it at that. 🙂

Have a nice day ☀️

Sandboxing SDK With Shell Script

Wed, 10 Aug 2022 20:19:19 +0100

Many developers like to sandbox their stuff with things like Docker, which I’m not a fan of, it just feels like a clumsy way of doing it, but fortunately there is a way to do with shell script alone. I have many different example of shell script to do that for Golang, Node and Deno.

I’m assuming you got the SDK in ~/.software/sdk and the bin path ~/.software/bin in PATH environment variable for the shell script.

Golang

#!/bin/dash
PATH="/Users/cjjackson/.software/sdk/$(basename $0)/bin:$PATH"
go $@

Notice the path reflect the file name of the script at $(basename $0)

Node

#!/bin/dash
PATH="/Users/cjjackson/.software/sdk/$(basename $0)/bin:$PATH"
if [ $1 = "--" ]
then
    shift 1
	$@
else
	node $@
fi

If you want to run rpm, you have to run the command like node16 -- npm install

Deno

#!/bin/dash
PATH="/Users/cjjackson/.software/sdk/$(basename $0)/bin:$PATH"
deno $@

Conclusion

You can create copies of the script for different version of the SDK without having to rely on Docker or any gimmick in the wild, which would be probably over engineered compared to those script. It not limited to those SDK I mentioned, can be used with other SDK.

The trick was prepending the PATH environment variable temporarily, the same trick that used by Jetbrain’s IDE suite, I should know I run echo $PATH inside the IDE terminal and it did prepend something in the beginning.

Also you might want to adjust the PATH variable for your environment, stick to hard coding user home directory otherwise it won’t work with sudo.

The DD Command on Unix

Thu, 21 Jul 2022 16:07:33 +0100

What does DD stand for? It really depends on how you use the command, it could stand for Data Duplicator while cloning the HDD or Data Destroyer while securely erasing the HDD by overwriting with zero or random data. In reality it does not stand for anything really. 😉

Just a little heads up, be absolutely sure if you want to run the command it will not give a confirmation. It will just do it.

Writing iso image to memory storage

dd if=/path/to/image.iso of=/dev/sdX bs=1m

This is quite useful for creating bootable pen drive.

Cloning one device to another device

dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=1m

The destination device should have the same amount of space or more than the source device.

Creating a backup image of the device

dd if=/dev/sda of=/home/user/backup.img bs=1m

Come useful when you want a backup of a SD especially when using it with a Raspberry PI.

Securely erasing the HDD

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX bs=1m

This overwrites the entire HDD with zeros, this should to prevent data recovery.

dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sdX bs=1m

Same as above but with random data.

I wouldn’t recommend trying that with solid state drive or SSD, it will only cause extra wear and tear and you will not get the desired effect, you’re better off using encryption from day one, that way you won’t have to worry about securely erasing the drive.

If you haven’t got the patient you can always drill holes in the drive, so it can’t be recovered.

Conclusion

I have pretty much covered the basic of the DD command, there are more advanced use cases, but you can look up the man page for more details.

https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/dd.1.html

Also you can find more examples using search engines. 😁

The best part about DD it’s comes as standard on most Unix systems! 😉

What Is Systemd-Oomd? How to Disable It?

Wed, 15 Jun 2022 18:11:33 +0100

Systemd-oomd is a userspace out-of-memory (OOM) killer, it supposed to cut off any application that is hogging up machine memory (RAM) therefore causing the system to be laggy, but however it is too aggressive and can cut off application that are not actually memory hogs, resulting in end users losing hours of unsaved work.

It can kill off any application without warning, the most likely to be cut off is the IDE, I could imagine that would frustrate some developers. So that could be a problem to developers.

I know this is going to sound daring to say, but the thing is Linux kernel already has an out-of-memory killer, I felt that Meta (Facebook) has reinvented the wheel, why on earth did they do this? I’d honestly rather see the time and effort spent on improving the kernel’s OOM killer.

Some Linux distribution have systemd-oomd enabled by default such as Ubuntu 22.04. I already checked Arch Linux, it is disabled by default but I do recommend masking the system service so no application can start it up.

How to disable it?

Open up the terminal and run.

sudo systemctl disable --now systemd-oomd

However some application can start up oomd, we can prevent this by running the following.

sudo systemctl mask systemd-oomd

From there it should now fallback to the kernel’s OOM killer.

Conclusion

IMHO Power user and developers don’t need things like systemd-oomd, as that could lead to loss of productivity and that is not an acceptable risk. The project has been around since 2019, so that three years that not a long time and I’ve a feeling that it is not anywhere as mature as the kernel’s OOM killer. Honestly, I think I just leave it there.

Useful links

How do I disable the systemd OOM process killer in Ubuntu 22.04? - Ask Ubuntu

Why I Ditch Windows 11 for Arch Linux on My Main Pc

Mon, 18 Apr 2022 13:03:10 +0100

I decided to get rid of Windows 11 from my PC and installed Arch Linux onto my machine. I don’t the like the direction that Microsoft is going with Windows, it getting more and more invasive over the years, they have been on about introducing ads into file explorer, you’ve read that correctly not edge but file explorer, yes the file manager and I find that very scary.

For the average joe or anyone who works in IT, Windows is quite a simple Operating System (OS) to use, I mean they only have to worry about doing things like word processing, doing spreadsheets and browsing the internet. But for the developers and probably administrators however it’s actually a complicated OS especially when you have to deal with their complicated API, but on Linux or Unix that is not much of the case everything is treated as a file, the devices are treated as files for example /dev/sda would be the storage drive could either be solid state drive, hard disk drive or pen drive and /dev/sda1 would be the partition of the storage device, I mean it couldn’t get any simpler than that!

Linux (or Unix) does not even have a registry, like windows has, I always find the registry system a bit overwhelming and if you not careful with the registry you can break the system quite easily. Linux just store configuration in a file which is easier to access without having rely on complex API like you would with Windows registry, as a bonus you can easily create a back of the file by just copying it or by taking a snapshot if the file system support it e.g. brtfs.

Gaming

Nowadays I’m not into PC gaming anymore, it’s just too expensive especially when people are buying GPU for crypto currency mining and silicon shortage, those factors are driving the prices up. Also I got a couple of games consoles and I play video games on those.

Every time I install a game on Windows, I tend to install DirectX as well, I thought to myself that is not great design at all, I find that messy; This never happens on games console at all.

Linux does quite well with emulators, so far I tested PlayStation 1 and the Super Nintendo, I compiled and installed the emulators from Arch User Repository or AUR.

The open source driver for AMD GPU are fantastic, run reasonably fast and does not crash, on Windows the GPU driver keep crashing the whole OS now and then, it very annoying when it happens on a video call, that happened to me a few times.

Productivity

I can use the Mac for anything else, like word processing and programming, mind you I can do programming just as well on Linux except for iOS development which I’m planning to get into in the near future and I have to use a Mac for that one.

Any graphics related can be done on the Mac with no issue, nothing wrong with owning two different machine.

At the end

I’ve been wanting to move away from Windows for quite a while now, for when I do need to run Windows, I can run it inside a virtual machine and I have no plans to reinstall it has a host system.

If I need to use different distro of Linux, I can use Linux containers or LXD

Windows registry offer no advantage over traditional configuration files in this day and age, I think it another layer of complexity that the world could do without. I say stick with config file with a sane format such as json or toml .

Having Fun With Age 上げ File Encryption

Mon, 29 Nov 2021 19:32:13 +0000

I needed a decent solution to keep all my backup secured, so I checked out solutions online and I initially checked out GnuPG which is based on the OpenPGP specification , however I looked up a Golang library for that and I’ve read the deprecation message, it’s didn’t take me too long to find an interesting article about the flaws of that specification; not long after that I decided to stop encrypting my backup with GnuPG, I just felt it was just over engineered.

At the bottom of that article I came across Age File Encryption, my first impression was that the key pair the software generated are pretty short and yet still secure, so short that I can copy the public key and easily paste it into a shell script; on a Mac to run a shell script I can simply just double click on it, backup my stuff and encrypt it just like that.

The software itself is quite lightweight, I decided to install a copy on one of the servers (along with the public key) on the cloud, so I can encrypt it server side, so it effectively delivers an end to end encryption as I download the backup to my desktop (I’m also using SFTP). For when I do need to access the backup I can just simply decrypt it with a private key. There is no way I’m going to install GnuPG on my server, the key the software generate are way too long, therefore I just can’t copy the public key and put it into the shell script otherwise it will be a right mess and also I do not want to rely on the keychain, that itself add another layer of complexity that I’d rather not have, thanks but no thanks. Complexity is the bane of most software, that is not fun at all, never has been, never will.

Age is not over engineered, it’s does exactly what it says on the tin and that is ‘file encryption’ nothing more, nothing less, but GnuPG just tries to be more than that, does file encryption, handle signatures and hashing, also support different types of encryption and key types just for the sake of backward compatibility and because of that the software itself tend to be very difficult to maintain.

The process of generating key pairs.

Age

Let’s start with Age, it’s quite a simple process you just run the key generator and it’s won’t ask for any input.

$ age-keygen
# created: 2021-11-28T15:29:43Z
# public key: age1ksn4azh0feuys3kpmc230wjx7hew45aqpty6pnsxwcp9a6wwqgfsv4dsvn
AGE-SECRET-KEY-1YGSLFL2KWS4VNPGNWTPJLPND3XKQ5TAECN8C0WKWDX5JUPYSCK5QH3WQVG

If you want to write a to a file, it just the case of using the -o flag. I won’t be using those keys, obviously.

GnuPG

Let’s move onto GnuPG, first you run the command below.

gpg --full-generate-key
Please select what kind of key you want:
   (1) RSA and RSA (default)
   (2) DSA and Elgamal
   (3) DSA (sign only)
   (4) RSA (sign only)
Your selection? 1

I chose one, the process is already more complicated and for the next question. The key size

RSA keys may be between 1024 and 4096 bits long.
What keysize do you want? (2048)

I press enter for the default. The next one the expire

Please specify how long the key should be valid.
         0 = key does not expire
      <n>  = key expires in n days
      <n>w = key expires in n weeks
      <n>m = key expires in n months
      <n>y = key expires in n years
Key is valid for? (0)

Again I press enter for default, then it ask you for your name, email address and additional comment.

GnuPG needs to construct a user ID to identify your key.

Real name: Best User
Email address: bestuser@example.com
Comment: Best Company
You selected this USER-ID:
    "Best User (Best Company) <bestuser@example.com>"

Change (N)ame, (C)omment, (E)mail or (O)kay/(Q)uit?

I type O for Okay and then it’s generate the key pair, as soon as you share the public key to the world, your name and email will be exposed to the world. There is really no anonymity with OpenPGP. You can find an example of a public key here and it pretty long, it’s quite tedious to integrate with shell script.

Useful script I written for Age.

decrypt

#!/bin/dash
identity=""
for file in $HOME/.age/*/*.txt; do identity="$identity -i '$file'"; done
aged="age -d $identity"
for var in "$@"
do
	eval "${aged} -o \"${var%.*}\" \"${var}\""
done
# Example usage: decrypt file1.zip.age file2.zip.age

I use that script to decrypt batches of file, I don’t have to worry about passing in the identity (or private key) as the script does all that work for me and therefore I don’t need to use a fancy keychain, I just use the file system that comes standard with every OS on the market.

ageRotateKey

#!/bin/dash
if [ $# -eq 0 ]; then
   print >&2 "Usage: $0 need foldername"
   exit 1
fi
folderName=$1
cp -r $HOME/.age/${folderName} $HOME/.age/.legacy/${folderName}-$(date '+%s')
for file in $HOME/.age/${folderName}/*.txt
do
	rm $file
	echo $file
	age-keygen -o $file
done
# Example usage: ageRotateKey folderName

Hopefully I won’t have to use that script for awhile, but if one of my private key does get compromised or get outdated, I’ll run this script, it will copy my old keys to a new folder in legacy with timestamp appended to it and regenerate a new set of keys!

decryptLegacy

#!/bin/dash
identity=""
for file in $HOME/.age/.legacy/*/*.txt; do identity="$identity -i '$file'"; done
aged="age -d $identity"
for var in "$@"
do
	eval "${aged} -o \"${var%.*}\" \"${var}\""
done
# Example usage: decryptLegacy file1.zip.age file2.zip.age

For when I do need to decrypt the files with legacy keys, the keys I no longer use with newly encrypted files. Hopefully I’ll not need to touch this script neither, it’s there just in case.

Conclusion

I believe GnuPG has served its purpose for it time when it’s was introduce, but in this day and age, it’s better to have a tool that is specialised for it own purpose and very good at it, for example:

Age for file encryption
Minisign for integrity checking or signing data!
Signal for sending encrypted messages!

As for email, I wouldn’t bother I would use Signal instead! Email is generally not very secure even if you did use PGP and it doesn’t matter which email provider use, that include proton mail!

Just don’t send anything highly sensitive via email, as there is no end to end encryption at all, as the email needs to be stored on the servers!

My Experience With My First Mac

Sun, 03 Oct 2021 09:43:28 +0100

To be honest I’m actually quite overwhelmed, the number of high quality applications that are available to macOS is quite staggering, I like how every application compliments each other in a very seamless fashion as a long time Windows user it felt quite strange at first but as soon as I got used to it, it is quite an amazing experience and I found it to be quite intuitive and productive.

I like that I’m able to place images in Bear note taking app on iOS, sync it though iCloud and then open Bear on the Mac and it’s all there like magic, the bigger bonus is that I can even open images into different applications like Camera Bag Pro and Squash from within Bear, then save the images to the appropriate location and I didn’t even have to abuse copy and paste, which I otherwise would of done on Windows and desktop Linux, that can get messy at times.

One time I was doing wire framing with Flinto and unfortunately I wasn’t able to import SVG file into the applications, so I did some research and I’ve came across IconJar, it’s a very nice application that keep a library of icons and allows you to import SVG into the library, also you can select an icon, convert to a format of your choice such as PNG and drag and drop to another application such as Flinto and problem solved elegantly, I didn’t even touch Finder to do that, sweet!

Most of the application I’ve mentioned I’ve got from Setapp, which is a subscription service that give you access to over 220 apps for as little as $9.99/month which I think is a very good deal and plus you get a 7-day free trial without having to hand over any payment information. 👍 I would also recommend CleanMyMac X keeps the Mac clean and protects it from unwanted malware, that comes part of the subscription too!

So the only steep cost I dealt with was the Mac itself, but at least I didn’t spend too much on the software. As a frugal person who does not drink, breaking even will not be too much of issue with me and that how I was able to afford the machine in the first place. 😉

I came across two different package managers, Homebrew and MacPorts, I went with the latter, while the former had that one unacceptable bug that I can do without. However I choose to run certain software on my Raspberry PI ( running Arch Linux ARM), such as Transmission and YouTube-dl and operate them remotely from my Mac using SSH (for executing commands and upload) and SMB (for accessing the downloaded files with read only access), so I don’t have to abuse MacPorts that much and therefore keeping my Mac nice and vanilla, whatever I do with my Raspberry PI will not have any effect on the Mac, I find using an isolated environment more secure than using any package manager like Homebrew and MacPorts on the Mac.

Overall I find the Mac very easy to keep clean and I think I can get very far with 1TB of storage, considering I keep my movies on my NAS which is around 6TB and I can also offload my downloads to either my NAS or external storage. Also I like how the app are in an archive file (the .app extension)

My First Mac Ever

Sun, 12 Sep 2021 17:17:14 +0100

Introduction

12 weeks ago I’ve put a down a deposit for a new iMac and now I’ve finally got one, after plugging in the Mac the first thing I did was set up time machine using my one of my existing raspberry pi and I got that working nicely. Time machine is a backup system, I thought it would be wise to get the backup system working, simply because the Mac has SSD soldered on. Never backup to internal storage, if the Mac break down, you’ll lose everything.

Raspberry Pi SMB server to use with Time Machine

Because I was so familiar with Linux, it’s didn’t take me too long to get used to the Mac, I was already familiar with default zsh terminal because it’s my preferred choice with Linux at work. I installed oh my zsh and I got my other work colleges into oh my zsh (including my boss).

My freshly setup first Mac

Developing my first mac application

Just to get the feel I’ve taken my time to develop my first Mac application, it was just simply a hello world program with a simple GUI interface, but I was impress the IDE Xcode, it’s just has pretty much everything really for you, whether it’s macOS or iOS app, it has it all. Even the debugger was ready out of the box, in other words I didn’t need to set up the debugger. I haven’t gotten to writing test files, but I’ll have to learn how to do that and I’ll eventually start building iOS application.

Tutorial: How to Make a Simple Mac App on OS X 10.7 Tutorial: Part 1/3

Packaging the Mac came in.

Even the packaging the Mac came in well engineered, it’s also quite heavy, even when it’s empty, my theory is that they designed it that way, so that would be thieves can not run off with it quite easily. The Mac itself is quite light.

iMac accessories

It’s very easy to open and get the mac and the accessories out.

More to come

I’ll be doing more graphically more as well, so I’ll write another blog post in the future. This is the first using Bear to prepare this blog post, it’s previewing as well.

Update, more photos

Future Plans and Ambitions

Sat, 19 Jun 2021 07:40:24 +0100

There are quite a lot of things, I would like to do in the future, I would like to get on board with machine learning that means I have to invest in getting a new machine and I could do it with my current machine, but that would mean switching OS, which I don’t want to do at all, as that will be too much hassle; so it will easier for me just to buy a new machine which would be the M1 iMac and hopefully I’ll be able to excel with machine learning, but honestly I do not know where to start on that exactly, but that okay, everything is a learning process. Yeah, my bank balance will take a bit of tumble but I’ve been through a lot worse, I’ve recovered from that and I’m pretty confident that I’ll recover again, I’ll do whatever I can to break even, by any means necessary and I can’t tell you exactly.

I’d also like to get better at drawing and I already brought an iPad just to do exactly that, I also ended up using that to do other things like notes of everything I learn during those online Japanese lessons, I’ve been enjoying so far, I’m not sure if I ever move to Japan, even if I fail to do so, I won’t regret learning, as life is supposed to be a learning experience anyway and I enjoy learning new language either spoken or programming language, I hope I get to learn ideas and concepts more in the future, which I’ll probably do.

I mean I ready been learning Swift on my iPad with Swift Playground, it’s been quite interesting actually. I don’t know, I brought the device to do one thing then I end up doing something else, but what can I say just go with the flow.

Also, I would need to brush up on my Twitch channel, it could do with a fresh coat of paint, basically, give it a fresh new look and I do have something in mind, I’d probably have to do that after I get the new machine, I can do it on my existing machine but the concern is that the resolution is a bit too low and I need plenty of headroom.

I’ll also be posting more content on YouTube, so I won’t just stick to one avenue, I’m going to take as many avenues as I can, my current boss thinks I take on too many hobbies, you know what, I think he right, but honestly that what drives me to do better in the future and I’ll not have any regrets. Honestly, I’m looking forward to it!!!

Emotional Attachment in Computer Science

Sun, 18 Apr 2021 10:50:15 +0100

At one time, I used to have a favourite text editor and a favourite programming language, but I had one issue I have got emotionally attached to them and why was that an issue? It was an issue because it’s caused me to have an inflexible attitude, for example, I couldn’t work with a certain company or clients because they want me to use a certain programming language and then I realised if I learned only one programming language and not anything else, I would have got stuck in a rut and that not really a good thing, I really don’t want to be in that position.

Now I believe it is better to learn more than one programming language and more opportunities will open up to you if you stick to one programming language you might not get as many opportunities and that not where I want to be in life and not ever, those other programmings language I tried to learn and yes I tried, but still it was a breath of fresh air, I have felt better for trying, I have felt like I have become a better person in a way. I believe the same logic also applies to spoken language, but that a different topic for another day.

If a company asks you to use a certain IDE or text editor, but if you think your text editor is better, well you could try to convince your employer, but at the end of the day, you’re better off using that IDE, you never know you might end up liking the IDE and that has happened to me, I ended up liking it and it was awesome, I ended up using it for my own projects, it has boosted productivity.

If a company requires you to use a certain language you got no choice but to use that language, you could try to convince them but it is very likely they will change so the best option is to use that language even if you don’t like it, but try to make the most of it and you should be fine. The same can also apply to computer equipment as well, it is better to use their equipment and again make the most of it while still conforming to their restriction but you will always have more freedom when doing your own project at home.

Check out the comment made by one of those emotionally attached types, figure out the environment they are in, do you really want to be in that environment? I don’t think so, you want to be in a better place, a place you deserve to be in. Have a nice day champ!

My Impression of Hugo Static Site Generator

Wed, 31 Mar 2021 07:52:00 +0100

I have heard of Hugo for quite a while now, I never thought about using it, until about a few weeks ago. When I started using I thought it was great, the idea of being able to write content in Markdown and actually being able to save it to Git is really quite nice.

What Hugo does is take the content that written in Markdown and convert them to HTML, on top of that it uses Go’s templating system, because of my background in Go, I was already familiar with it, so I felt right at home.

In the past I have used WordPress, at first I thought it was great, as time gone by I felt that something about it didn’t feel right, as soon as I got good with PHP the more I started to realise how much of a mess WordPress codebase was, but to be fair it was a while ago, a lot might of change today, but even today users who self-host WordPress may have to maintain the database unless they’re using a managed host. Oh, there is also the plugins, they have to be vetted and maintained, as some plugins can introduce security holes into the site if you’re not careful, yet you have to install a few plugins to make the WordPress site scalable as the product on it own does not scale well, there has been a few instances when the site did go down because of heavy traffic.

Because Hugo generates static HTML, all of those above concern that I mention about WordPress pretty much does not exist with static HTML. Hugo does not have a plugin system, and in all fairness, it does not need such a system, as Hugo has enough features in my humble opinion, like for example esbuild which is one of the faster JavaScript bundler, if not the fastest, the extended version comes complete with Sass and other CSS processing abilities. It does have a lot of nice stuff out of the box, I honestly prefer that, out of the box experience always count.

I can execute esbuild and Sass from within the Go template system in Hugo, so I don’t need to write any of those complex configuration files that you otherwise need to do with Webpack, I heard from my colleague that it was a pain to maintain. I mean I worked with task runners, I even built my own task runner, they can be tedious to work with.

I’ve checked the landing page of Webpack and esbuild, the former welcomes you with a fancy box, just to try to woo you into using their product, but the latter on the other hand welcomes you with a benchmark, just to demonstrate how fast their product in comparison to others in the market and that has left me with a very good lasting first impression and obviously first impression does count.

I did check out other static web generators on the market, but I’m happy to stick with Hugo for the time being, as I’m really impressed with the performance of the product. I look forward to seeing what the product has to offer in the future.

To prepare my blog post in advance I use draftin as I can easily use that on my iPad while sitting in the Café, for when I don’t feel like writing at home.

I think Hugo is the way to go for beginners who want to get into blog posting, I highly recommend it. Or if you more experience you can try out something else, nothing wrong with being adventurous but it’s probably not as fast as Hugo 😁

The Theme I Have Chosen

Fri, 26 Mar 2021 19:41:11 +0000

The theme I have originally chosen was Ananke, I thought the design was ok. Anyway, I ran Hugo with CSS processing.

$ hugo
Start building sites …

                   | EN | FR
-------------------+----+-----
  Pages            | 21 | 13
  Paginator pages  |  1 |  0
  Non-page files   |  0 |  0
  Static files     |  5 |  5
  Processed images |  0 |  0
  Aliases          |  3 |  1
  Sitemaps         |  2 |  1
  Cleaned          |  0 |  0

Total in 1889 ms

Yes, that 1889 milliseconds, that theme had few things that I didn’t like, one of them being the fact that it relied on node.js and some packages from npm, it was kinda slowing down the site generator.

So I decided to fork the theme and strip out anything I thought wasn’t necessary, mainly I removed the dependency on the node.js, as I felt the features in Hugo was enough and I didn’t feel the need for anything from node.js or npm, if I kept it, I would need to keep updating the dependencies, which I don’t want to keep doing.

I also replaced PostCss version of Tachyons with a Sass version of Tachyons, I just like using Sass that all I can say really.

I ran Hugo again, this time with all the junk removed

$ hugo
Start building sites …

                   | EN | FR
-------------------+----+-----
  Pages            | 21 | 13
  Paginator pages  |  1 |  0
  Non-page files   |  0 |  0
  Static files     |  5 |  5
  Processed images |  0 |  0
  Aliases          |  3 |  1
  Sitemaps         |  2 |  1
  Cleaned          |  0 |  0

Total in 1525 ms

I had a slightly faster result, the best thing I like about the Ananke theme is the fact is that it’s under the MIT license, meaning I can just fork it and make proprietary use of it. Also, I just like having something that I can fully control.

If you like the theme and you want full control just fork it, but of course check the license first before you do that, you don’t want to get into legal trouble obviously 😁.

How to Prepare a Raspberry Pi Image File on Windows 10

Thu, 18 Mar 2021 20:28:23 +0000

What is a Raspberry Pi

It’s basically a small ARM-powered computer that lets you do whatever you want with it if you want to know in great detail visit https://www.raspberrypi.org/

I personally used a Raspberry Pi for building a custom NAS server and torrent box, it’s has served me quite well. I also used a Raspberry Pi for setting up a media centre as well, it’s pretty cool.

Running a NAS Server on Raspberry Pi 4 (4GB)

Kodi running on Raspberry Pi 4 (4GB)

How to prepare the image for Raspberry Pi using WSL2

Before we do that I’m going to list down the requirements. I’m assuming a Raspberry Pi 4B.

Windows 10 May 2020 Update (build number 10.0.19041) or greater
- This is required for WSL2
Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 (WSL2)
- version 1 does not support the ext4 file system, which will not work.

Now we are going to prepare an image file with multiple partitions, let’s create a 1GB image file using the WSL2 terminal.

# Not as root
dd if=/dev/zero of=1GB_sd.img bs=1M count=1024

You can create a bigger image file if you like, but it will take longer to create, alternatively, you can expand the partition after you booted up the system. link.

Now you going to need to link the image file to the system, you can do that by using losetup

# As root
losetup -Pf --show 1GB_sd.img

That command should tell where it has been linked, I’m going to assume /dev/loop1, now we are going to prepare the partition inside the image using fdisk.

# As root
fdisk /dev/loop1

At the fdisk prompt, create two new partitions. Type n, then p for primary, 1 for the first partition on the drive, press enter to accept the default first sector, then type +100M for the last sector.

Type t, then c to set the first partition to type W95 FAT32 (LBA)

Type n, then p for primary, 2 for the second partition on the drive, and then press enter twice to accept the default first and the last sector. Write the partition table and exit by typing w

Then create and mount the FAT filesystem

# As root
mkfs.vfat /dev/loop1p1
mkdir boot
mount /dev/loop1p1

Then create and mount the ext4 filesystem

# As root
mkfs.ext4 /dev/loop1p2
mkdir root
mount /dev/loop1p2

Then download and extract the root filesystem (as root, not via sudo)

# As root
wget http://os.archlinuxarm.org/os/ArchLinuxARM-rpi-4-latest.tar.gz
bsdtar -xpf ArchLinuxARM-rpi-4-latest.tar.gz -C root
sync

Then move boot files to the first partition

# As root
mv root/boot/* boot

Then umount the two partitions

# As root
umount boot root

Then unlink the image from the system.

# As root
losetup -d /dev/loop1

At this point, you should have the image file ready to write to the SD card, you can use Win32 Disk Imager Once you have done that insert the SD into the Raspberry PI and it should boot up. 🙂

References

Creating Virtual Disks Using Linux Command Line
Arch Linux ARM Raspberry Pi 4

About My Previous Site

Sat, 13 Mar 2021 14:42:42 +0000

My previous site was a total nightmare to maintain, I got a bit wild with my ideas, I thought it would be cool to have a component based blog system, well it was cool at the time, the issue was I ended up building an interface that was very clunky to work with, therefore it has taken me a lot of effort to write a simple blog post as each blog page was built up with different component for different kind of content for example, text (Markdown), images and youtube video.

I mean I can honestly say I was over ambitious, I thought I had the site well-thought-out, but the reality is that the site was difficult for one person to maintain alone, I had to constantly make sure that the database software is up-to-date, and it was hard for me to find the time to do it. I can’t just update them in one step, it’s has to be done in multiple steps and that has taken a lot of my time, and I don’t get much time nowadays because I work most of the weekdays and sometimes weekend, and I also have other commitments as well, I like to draw, learn how to play the guitar which is not going well at the moment 😂, play video games when I’m feeling a little stressed, to be honest that doesn’t happen much nowadays, I like to take my dog for a walk, go for a bike ride and study Japanese.

The other issue with building your own blog system that you intend to run on a server, is that you got to have that unhealthy obsession with security, I mean nobody wants their property getting hacked into, that in itself can have hugh consequences such as lost in finance, which is unlikely to a site that does not make much money anyway, but still I don’t want to get hacked.

Do I regret building my own blog system? No I don’t regret it at all, it’s actually been an amazing experience, as I do enjoy programming, I felt that I have learned a lot from it and working with Google Go Programming Language that I happen to prefer over say Node.Js, I might talk about that some other time. Sometimes I just can’t help myself. 😂

What do you use now? I use Hugo and it’s been great, I did have a few small issue, I work them out at the end. Being able to write content in pure Markdown, manually copying and pasted images to a folder, and being able to save them to a Git repository, it’s a godsend really. After I have written some content, I use Hugo to generate static HTML and some XML feeds and deploy it with a rsync command, it’s just really nice, as I don’t have to worry about maintaining a couple of databases.

I have written the command in the script file and save it to the repository.

#!/bin/dash
export HUGO_ENV=production
hugo && rsync -avz --no-perms --no-owner --no-group --delete public/ hugo@example.com:~/www/

I can just run the command inside the terminal of my IDE of choice, that happens to be WebStorm in my case. Hugo seems to take care of the highlight for you, that awesome, save me from a lot of research cost. It’s just soo much cleaner then Wordpress, I’ll get to that someday. 😊

Anyway I look forward to writing more blog post.

Hello World

Thu, 11 Mar 2021 11:21:11 +0000

Hello, I have recently switch to Hugo and the reason why I have done that is because I just don’t have the time to maintain my existing site, it’s involves having to maintain the database and that can take some time to maintain.

I honestly rather just use an IDE of my choice and just write in MarkDown and save it to my private git server. I don’t mind maintaining my own git server as that does not take up too much time, and it’s relies on SQLLite and that is built into the software (Gitea), and I can easily keep the backup maintained.

I honestly didn’t think I ever go back to static html, anyway I look forward to using Hugo more in the future. Happy Days 😁

CV/Résumé

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

My CV/Résumé are available in the following formats, pick the format that is the most ideal to you.

Search

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Social

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

CJ-Jackson Blog

Using GoCryptFS with QR-Code

Use Named Pipe to Unlock Encrypted File With Remote Key

Using QR Code to Unlock Encrypted File Container

Script

Preparation

Note

Creating an executable TOML

Random Conclusion

Preparing a LUKS key file image for usb flash drive on Linux

Tips

Replacing Sudo With Doas on Arch Linux

Optional Stuff

Creating sudo Symlink to doas

Creating a safe environment for editing doas.conf similar to visudo.

Good reads

I’ve Been a Victim of the Pig-Butchering Scam

What do I have to say to anyone who been scammed?

File Encryption with Disposable Keys Using QR Code

2023 New Year Resolution?

Nix Package Manager

Conclusion

Sandboxing SDK With Shell Script

Golang

Node

Deno

Conclusion

The DD Command on Unix

Writing iso image to memory storage

Cloning one device to another device

Creating a backup image of the device

Securely erasing the HDD

Conclusion

What Is Systemd-Oomd? How to Disable It?

How to disable it?

Conclusion

Useful links

Why I Ditch Windows 11 for Arch Linux on My Main Pc

Gaming

Productivity

At the end

Having Fun With Age 上げ File Encryption

The process of generating key pairs.

Age

GnuPG

Useful script I written for Age.

decrypt

ageRotateKey

decryptLegacy

Conclusion

My Experience With My First Mac

My First Mac Ever

Introduction

My freshly setup first Mac

Developing my first mac application

Packaging the Mac came in.

iMac accessories

More to come

Update, more photos

Future Plans and Ambitions

Emotional Attachment in Computer Science

My Impression of Hugo Static Site Generator

The Theme I Have Chosen

How to Prepare a Raspberry Pi Image File on Windows 10

What is a Raspberry Pi

Running a NAS Server on Raspberry Pi 4 (4GB)

Kodi running on Raspberry Pi 4 (4GB)

How to prepare the image for Raspberry Pi using WSL2

References

About My Previous Site

Hello World

Archives

CV/Résumé

Search

Social

Creating `sudo` Symlink to `doas`

Creating a safe environment for editing `doas.conf` similar to `visudo`.