Typeblog Random

I am going to start a blog series on porting custom ROMs for Android devices. This idea comes from recent chats with friends on the topic of choosing new phones to buy and custom ROMs -- that the whole notion of being able to compile an entire operating system from scratch and make it running on a given device seems pretty magic-like to many. Pretty much all of these friends of mine are fairly tech-savvy, and many of them are developers themselves and use Linux as their daily driver OS on their ...

As you may know, I have been a user of Standard Notes for a long time. Since I am a self-hosting nerd, during this whole time I was using a self-hosted server of Standard Notes, using the Go implementation of the Standard File protocol (the former name of the sync protocol of Standard Notes). There is just one slight problem: this implementation seems to be abandoned since mid-2019. Of course, Standard File (and thus Standard Notes Sync Protocol) is not a particularly complicated protocol that...

We are not in a time short of products that claim to "encrypt" your personal data with "millitary standards" and thus keeping them safe from leakage or delibrate attacks. This can really work in convincing a lot of non-tech-savvy people and even some with rudimentary computer knowledge about how secure those products are -- until some leakage events happens out of nowhere and everybody gets screwed. The problem here is that things involving encryption does not necessarily imply security of the ...

(From "The Zygon Inversion", in 9th series of Doctor Who) ... "It's not fair." "Oh it's not fair. Oh I didn't realize that -- it's not fair. You know what, my TARDIS doesn't work properly, and I don't have my personal tailor." "These things don't equate." "These things have happened. They are facts. You, just want cruelty to beget cruelty. You are not superior to people who are cruel to you. You are just a whole bunch of new cruel people. A whole bunch of ... you cruel people, being cruel t...

For a guide instead of a diary, please click here Note: This article describes the process of me finding a way to flash custom ROMs onto my Qin 2 Pro phone, and this is not meant to be a comprehensive guide that anyone could do after reading. If you decide to follow this, please make sure you read the entire article and you have sufficient technical knowledge to do so. The unlock and flashing process is more complicated than any Android device I have ever used. I take absolutely no responsibili...

As you may have noticed, this is not exactly the original en.typeblog.net blog. The original one has been deleted, and then recreated with most of the original posts and 301 redirections from the old URLs to the new ones. I'm doing this partly to unify this blog with my main blog (zh_CN), typeblog.net, as part of a recent restructure of my hosting infrastructure for personal services. Previously, these two blogs were on completely different platforms: the main one was hosted with some spaghetti...

As you may or may not know, I've got a brand-new Surface Pro 6 in place of my GPD Pocket, partially due to the unbearable slowness of Atom processors. It is easy to see that I'm not a Microsoft guy, especially not a Windows guy, thus I almost immediately wiped the OEM Windows and installed ArchLinux on my Surface. Why did I bother buying a Microsoft device in the first place you ask? Well, somehow I just wanted a 2-in-1 device and this seems the only usable choice. I haven't written a blog post...

This should be the first new article to this blog after the new domain https://en.typeblog.net is online. Long story short, I've not been writing or even doing anything productive for a while due to some "emotional" problems. I'll probably write something about it in the future, but now I might be feeling better and might be able to restart my blog, starting from this one. This is not my main blog, instead it's just an alias domain to the Listed service of StandardNotes, which is far more conv...

The story As you may all know, I am the administrator of a Mastodon instance, https://sn.angry.im. One thing that is really fun doing this job (and every SysAdmin job) is that you run into different problems from time to time, sometimes without doing anything or sometimes after some upgrade. Last week, Mastodon v2.4.0 was out and I, along with my friend, admin at https://cap.moe, decided to upgrade to the new release as quickly as possible. Since there was nothing breaking in the new version, ...

There just really can't be any idea worse than blocklists. As a Mastodon instance administrator, I've seen the growth and popularization of Mastodon as a decentralized social media, especially after the recent case of data leakage of Facebook. This can't be a better phenomenon as to us, since we have always hoped that people will one day wake up from the dream that large entities, such as governments and companies, would ever protect their freedom and / or privacy. However, while the amount of ...