Macrogol's Blog

How to Fake Someone Else's Blog Under a Different Name

Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Laptop archeology – or – how to install NixOS 24.11 on a 25 year old laptop

Wed, 15 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Nextcloud and inotify limits

Sun, 24 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Increasing Privacy in Mail Clients

Sun, 10 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Hosting a Mail Server at Home

Sun, 14 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

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.