I am posting the majority of new content to my Gemini Capsule.
The address for the Gemini Capsule is gemini://frrobert.net
If you don't have a browser that supports Gemini, please use this proxy link.
Datenstrom Yellow is for people who make small websites. Installing is unzipping one file and you are ready to go. The most important things for small websites are included. You can add features, languages and themes. Datenstrom Yellow works as content management system and static site generator.
After reading several stories about Internet installs, I thought I would write a post on the best way to prepare for an Internet install.
No matter your provider or the type of Internet you are going to receive there are things you need to keep in mind.
Ask questions about your install. One of the best places is your provider's forum.
Know what your provider is willing to do during an install and what they will not do. For example, your provider will not run cabling in attics, crawl spaces, or walls.
Make a plan on what you need to do and what the provider's installer will do.
Let me give you an example of my recent AT&T Fiber Optic install.
Before I ever called AT&T I posted on the forum what I needed to have done and if the AT&T installer would do it or if I needed to do some of it myself or have a third-party do some of the work.
I wanted the new fiber optic line ran from the outdoor patch panel through the attic and through the wall of my office. I was quickly told AT&T would not do any work in the attic or fish wires through the wall. I was given the suggestion of running conduit from where I wanted the line to enter the house to where I wanted the line to enter my office, then run a string through conduit for a pull line. This way the AT&T installer could connect the fiber optic line to the string and pull the line through the conduit from the other end using the string.
My days of climbing in an attic are long gone so I had my electrician run the conduit for me. He installed a lightweight plastic conduit. The conduit is called "Smurf Tube" due to its blue color. He also fished a string through the conduit so the installer could pull the fiber optic line through the conduit.
When the day of my install came everything went great. The installer installed a patch panel to the side of the house, ran the fiber line from the pole to the patch panel using the existing hangers, pulled the optic line from my office out to the patch panel, installed the Optic Network Terminal, and connected it to AT&T Gateway. He than powered everything up and after a few updates to the gateway everything was working great.
By planning ahead and getting some great advice I was able to have a quick and smooth install. If I had not plan ahead I would have had to either reschedule the install or have the gateway installed in a different location that will not work as well.
One other thing I would mention is don't make WIFI the primary way to connect to the Internet. WIFI is second rate to a connection using an Ethernet cable. There are so many things that limit and interfere with your WIFI too many to talk about here. Just know that you signal will never be as strong, fast, or have the range as you think it should be.
Zettelkasten ID gettingreadyforintenetinstall-2020-11-21-1224
There is always going to be struggle for safe untracked browsing on the Internet. I am not sure it is completely possible, but we can try to make ourselves as safe and allusive as possible. I am no security expert so take this all with a grain of salt.
While there are many tools to try and accomplish this I have settled in on three tools to make surfing as safe as possible and keep my profile to myself. The three tools are Firejail, the use of profiles with Firefox, and my hosts file.
The first tool I want to talk about is Firejail. It can sandbox any program you run with it. The program's description from its web page, "Firejail is a SUID program that reduces the risk of security breaches by restricting the running environment of untrusted applications using Linux namespaces and seccomp-bpf. It allows a process and all its descendants to have their own private view of the globally shared kernel resources, such as the network stack, process table, mount table."
So if you run Firefox within Firejail Firefox has a limited ability to read your system and even more limited ability to write to your system. The default Firejail profile for Firefox limits Firefox write permissions to the Downloads directory and writing to your Firefox profile. This limits the amount of damage a malicious website can do to your system. For added security, if you use the private switch in Firejail anything from the session is deleted when the session is closed.
I use Firefox profiles in conjunction with Firejail to help prevent trackers from building a profile of me. I have a Firefox profiles for Google, the School I teach at, banking, Amazon, and an unknown profile. Profiles themselves do nothing to prevent you from being tracked. It is how profiles are used that help prevent trackers for building a complete profile. By using multiple Firefox profiles you look like multiple users to the outside world.
I start each Firefox profile in its own instance of Firejail so each profile is isolated from one another. Your behavior is what makes this work. In my Google profile I only use Google services. In my banking profile I only do banking. Again this doesn't limit tracking, it only makes you look like multiple users. So by having multiple profiles for different tasks, hopefully I am a little harder to profile. FYI, it takes some practice browsing with multiple profiles, but it gets easier with some practice. I use the I3 window manager, so if my browser windows are in tab mode it is like browsing with tabs that have subtabs.
The last tool I have does help limit tracking and that is my hosts file. A host file is like a bit of on board DNS. Usually it has that 127.0.0.1 is local host and a few other things but one thing you can do is add websites and corresponding ip addresses to it, so DNS requests are not made. For example a large domain may have multiple ip addresses but if you always want to connect to a certain ip address you could specify the ip address in the hosts file.
You can also use it to block ads and trackers. Lets say you go to a web page example.com but it has an ad tracker embedded that loads ads from anoyingads.com.
In your hosts file you can enter
0.0.0.0 annoyingads.com
What happens is Firefox rather checking the DNS server for annoyingads.com ip address it just uses the one in the host file. Since 0.0.0.0 signifies a non-routable address the ad / tracker from annoyingads.com doesn't load. You can create your own list but there are many premade lists. The best hosts file that blocks ads and trackers is at https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts It is a combination of several lists. Just add the list to your existing hosts file and many of those trackers and ads will not show up in your browser.
Again, I am not a security expert just a guy trying to browse a little safer than the day before.
Zettelkasten ID firefoxandfirejail-2020-09-20-1517
Newsboat is my RSS feed reader. It allows me to check the websites I am interested in quickly and without distraction. I have been able to create macros that keep me on the command line from videos to mp3s to actual articles. There is one small glitch in all this, sites that only include a description of the articles in the RSS feed and force you to go to the website to read the whole article.
At this point there are two options. The first being using a command line web browser to read the article and scrolling through pages of menus and ads to find the actual article. The second being leaving the command line and reading the article in Firefox's reader mode.
Now there is a third option using Readability CLI to read articles in "Firefox's reader mode" on the command line.
Readability CLI by gardenappl using Mozilla's Readability library to strip a web page to the core content. The result being a simplified HTML document which can be viewed by any browser.
I created a two line bash script that is called by a Newsboat macro key that ties together Newsboat, Readability CLI, and Lynx.
#!/bin/sh
readable $1 > /tmp/readablearticle.html
uxterm -e lynx /tmp/readablearticle.html
The first line after the #!/bin/sh has readable, the executable for Readability CLI download the url provided by Newsboat, convert it to, using Mozilla's Readability library, a HTML file with just the core content, and finally save the new file in the tmp directory. The second line opens an xterm terminal and executes the opening of the HTML file with Lynx.
Readability CLI can be found at GitLab
A Video, by Brodie Robertson, of Readability CLI in action
Zettelkasten ID newsboatmeatsreadable-2020-08-14-1545