Macrogol’s Personal Blog (Inspired by Mynacol’s Blog: blog.mynacol.xyz)

I have a talk that teaches students how to set the most beautiful seminar paper. It is written in LaTeX, obviously, because a LaTeX talk made in PowerPoint would be the academic equivalent of a vegan butcher. It has kerning diagrams. It has glyph boxes. It has a slide that explains, with a straight face, that LaTeX is worth the effort. It also took over 90 minutes to compile. The workaround I called a feature Beamer has a handout mode that collapses all the animations into single slides. The handout version compiled in a perfectly normal amount of time. The full version, the one with the overlays that reveal bullet points one by one like a very slow magician, took an hour and a half, and more if you were impatient enough to check. ...

Every year some poor soul organizes a hiking event and puts the word “Marathon” in the title without checking who’s on the starting list. This year that soul was Schwarzwaldverein Engen/Hegau e.V., and the poor souls on the starting list were us: a small delegation of DAV Gogginsingen, a club whose entire personality is built around treating “recreational” as a slur. 45 kilometers, 7:30 am to 9 pm latest, advertised pace 4–5 km/h, advertised character “non-competitive.” We read “non-competitive” the way we read every warning label: as a suggestion aimed at other people. ...

Everyone tells you that exercise is a numbers game. Burn more than you eat and the weight comes off. Nobody tells you what happens after that, once your body has read the same advice and decided to optimise against you. This is a guide to the endgame. It is a strategy I arrived at not through discipline but through paying attention to the mechanism, which turns out to reward doing nothing. ...

Suppose you want to run someone else’s blog. Not steal it, exactly. Just quietly continue it under a name that is legally distinct enough that nobody sends an email. Keep the posts, keep the opinions about inotify, keep the layout override you never finished. Only the name on the door changes. This is a short guide. The someone else, in my case, is me. Step 1: pick a name that is close, but not too close The new name has to clear a few bars. It must be pronounceable by a human who is not currently looking at it. It must survive a domain registrar without a hyphen. It must not already be a Mastodon instance run by someone with more free time and more anger than you. ...

Earlier this year I brought an old laptop to my home my grandfather once gave. It is a relict from roughly 1999, with which I’ve already played around some nine years ago. Prior to 38C3 I had the idea to bring it to the congress so people could mess around with it. In the end, I was the one messing around with it, fighting to get some operating systems installed on this poor thing. ...

Since some weeks I got a strange error message from the Nextcloud client on startup: Changes in synchronized folders could not be tracked reliably. At first, I ignored it, but I noticed Nextcloud wouldn’t sync local changes reliably to the server. After I lost a git commit (yes, I sync some git repos over Nextcloud), I took the issue seriously. I knew this was related to a Linux feature called inotify. With it, you can monitor files or directories and get notified by the kernel whenever the selected events happen on those elements. I searched the Nextcloud client and nixpkgs changelogs, but didn’t find anything related to my problem. Then I searched in the Nextcloud client source code and found the dialog I saw. However, that didn’t help me either. ...

Mail clients are notorious for sending information not really required for mail conversations. They leak their identity and version number, sometimes even the operating system in User-Agent and X-Mailer headers. They leak the locally set time zone in the Date header. And sometimes they leak the private IP addresses during mail sending. Here I document some settings to hide this information in my preferred mail clients. Note: Hiding this metadata might not be enough to fully disguise your choice of mail clients. The ordering of mail headers was not tackled, behavior with attachments varies equally high and other details disclose the mail client identity. ...

I’m using NixOS since over a year for most of my server stuff and I’m loving it. One of the missing services was my email setup, originally deployed on Debian 10, later upgraded to Debian 11. I followed a setup guide and was quite happy, tweaking it over the years to my needs. Roughly, the software stack consists of Postfix as the MTA (“SMTP server”), Dovecot as the MDA (“IMAP server”) and rspamd including its requirement, redis, for spam protection and SPF/DKIM/DMARC verification as well as DKIM signing for outgoing mail. I avoided a webmail service to keep things simple and I already use standard mail clients across my personal devices anyway. ...