Pine Phone

Yes, you read it correct, we're still speaking about pinephone. Librem5 is still out there. Not in here. Regardless, Pine64 started selling CE upgrade for the braveheart and as soon as I figured that I decided to upgrade one of mine pine phones with 3GB. The upgrade is delievered as a new mainboard and for braveheart owners there's a discount. This week the board finally arrived to my post-office and they decided it's too big for them to deliver it (they always do it regardless of the size and weight, that's the way they work).

Linux Phone

Aeons ago I've ordered a phone. A Librem Phone. Librem5 to be precise. It was all well forgotten history when all of a sudden last spring I got notification it has been delayed.

After that glorious event I've started monitoring the progress of the almost finishing development with greater interest which also led me to know there appered to be another project promising to deliver mainline linux phone in about half a year. The price tag was ridiculously low (comparing to L5) so I just gave it a shot - just in case.

Now last week you can imagine the degree of my bewilderment when I've received sealed envelop stating the customs office awaits for my decision on how to proceed with some electronic shipment to me, which clearly need tax clearance (if I want to proceed with the shipment).

PS3 BD BT Remote

Once upon a time I've made XBMC based HTPC... And as any proper HTPC mine should also have a remote control.

Since my TV is Sony, the choice was obvious - Sony PS3 BD BT Remote - both remotes are almost the same which makes HTPC looks aesthetic.

Then however I've realised that despite being recognized as a generic HID keyboard, keys mapped to buttons aren't seen by Xorg (XInput to be precise). Second issue i found was related to battery power. Don't know how PS3 is properly handling it but I solved the problem by suspending the HID via explicit teardown of BT link.

In continuation to this

DLV is gone. mobi zone is not yet signed. What to do? Wait and be prepared

Turris Omnia: sounds tasty

There's Indiegogo campaign running for the turris and I am determined to get one, so managed to fetch an early bird pack!

Let see how good it will be in real life :) Shipment is planned for April 2016 *sigh*

Small footprint web server

Nowdays we're all concerned about environment and our impact on it. At the same time security concerns do not allow our conscience to agree on these cloud bells and whistles.

Luckily we have now available at the consumer segment low profile and power consumption platforms like Raspberry PI and others. Compare 1-2W of raspberry to at least 10-20W of any other HTPC. Such platforms however have certain resource restrictions.

PS3 BD BT Remote on Bluez5

Being tired of background noise caused by active cooling on HTPC, moved it off to Raspberry PI (B+).

As time moves forward there appears plethora of mobile apps for any platform doing convenient remote control of Kodi and its library. Hence I've actually stopped using PS3 BD BT remote.

Nevertheless recently decided to dust it off and connect again (using BT dongle on RPI)

IPSec with DNSSEC v2

Back to our business. On 11 Oct a patch to enable DNSSEC protected DANE CERTs was merged to StrongSWAN's upstream so now you can have interoperability between racoon and strongswan if you need to use CERTs for easy deployment.

The approach is pretty the same, only with StrongSWAN you have additional DNSSEC validation (racoon blindly trusts underlying DNSSEC implementation).

TT-RSS - why not?

There are many news aggregators, especially after google's improvement on a reader service. All of them however are part of some fog... steam... ah, cloud!

I on the other hand am a cloud to myself. So here TinyTiny RSS aggregator is a perfect match to my needs. Lightweight, no stupid dependencies (well, except phph, but that's bearable), good online web ui and api and hence - external clients

Back to basics: PIC is not PC

Microprocessors are good, but don't forget about microcontrollers. Microprocessors are smart but they are flawed - they are too generic, too complex, running too complex code and hence unreliable. Microcontrollers are perfect implementation of KISS. So let's look back to low level - asm, mics, ICs, MCUs, etc.