I updated yesterday to Wordpress 5.0 and wanted to test the new editor. Unfortunately it didn’t work like the beta (Gutenberg)-version before. After opening a github-issue and more googling today, I found the solution. The culprit was nginx and that it doesn’t work with the REST-API from Wordpress with the configuration as it was documented in the past. Thus I had to change it and Stack Overflow saved the day again.

Here is what I did:

Change:

       location / {
        try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php;
        }

to

       location / {
        try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php$is_args$args;
        }

and add

   location ~ ^/wp-json/ {
    # if permalinks not enabled
    rewrite ^/wp-json/(.*?)$ /?rest_route=/$1 last;
}

So now I have only to find a way that h-cards work with twenty nineteen…

There seems to be a new method to extract money via spam. This is the mail I got today:

Hi there. I hope you will not really mind my english language sentence structure, because im from Germany. I toxified your gadget with a malware and now have your private information out of your os. It previously was installed on a mature web site and then you've selected the video clip and it, my software quickly got into your os. After that, your camera captured you going manual, furthermore i captured a footage that you have viewed. Soon after a short while in addition, it picked up every one of your device contact information. If you ever wish me to get rid of your all that i have - transfer me 840 euros in bitcoin it is a cryptocurrency. It is my wallet address: 1K5CPpzHABZ7JXYDC7JRjok2a2FAerks6L At this point you have 21hours. to make a decision The minute i will get the transfer i will eliminate this evidence and every thing thoroughly. Otherwise, please remember that this evidence is going to be forwarded to your friends.

I like how the domain it comes from is registered with an organization called “Volatile Game Cult”, and the IP it came from is of course Russian and I guess the wallet was opened just for this e-mail since it has no transactions yet.

I wonder what I can do because reporting it to the authorities will do exactly nothing I guess. I kind of dare to answer with something like “lol” and wait for the response. But should I do that or are there any dangers that might come with it? Mmm…

John Perry Barlow (1947–2018):

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather. We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.

Read the full declaration on the site of the EFF.

I have to administrate several FreeBSD-servers and I need to know which servers need updates. Eveen though I have a poudriere running, I also have a local ports-tree on the machines because they are either not using the poudriere because they are not migrated to it yet or there was some reason to have a locally compiled package. Now I want to know daily which servers need package-updates and if any server has packages that have known CVEs. Thus I update the index of the portstree daily with the following cronjob for root:

0 3 * * * portsnap -I cron updateI have several “classes” of servers, thus I want mails for every class of server. For each class I have a cronjob like this in my personal crontab (or you could put it on one of your servers): 0 6 * * 1-5 /usr/local/scripts/check_for_updates.sh class1The user needs to be able to log into each server with an ssh-key.

#!/bin/sh

TMPFILE=`mktemp`
case $1 in
class1)
SERVERS="server1 server2"
MAILADDRESS="my@mailaddress.foo"
;;
class2)
SERVERS="server3 server4 server5"
MAILADDRESS="my@mailaddress.foo"
;;
private)
SERVERS="privateserver1 privateserver2"
MAILADDRESS="myprivate@mailaddress.foo"
;;
esac

for i in $SERVERS; do
  echo "$i:" >> $TMPFILE
  update_count=`ssh $i "pkg version" | grep \< | wc -l`
  if [ $update_count -gt 0 ]; then
    echo "$i needs $update_count updates" >> $TMPFILE
    ssh $i "pkg version" | grep \< >> $TMPFILE
    echo "" >> $TMPFILE
    echo "" >> $TMPFILE
    ssh $i "pkg audit" >> $TMPFILE
  else
    echo "$i needs no updates" >> $TMPFILE
  fi
  echo "" >> $TMPFILE
  echo "" >> $TMPFILE
done

mail -s "$1 update status" $MAILADDRESS < $TMPFILE
rm $TMPFILE

mail -s "$1 update status" $MAILADDRESS < $TMPFILE
rm $TMPFILE

In FreeBSD 11.0 there was a new daemon delivered in base that helps to blacklist IPs on unsuccessful logins called blacklistd. Its advantage over fail2ban: it works with IPv6 and it is part of base. Its disadvantage is that as far as I understand it applications have to be linked against blacklistd, so that they can work with it.

With the recently released FreeBSD 11.1 sshd got linked against blacklistd. Therefore there is a new option in sshd_config: UseBlacklist. Per default it is set to no. Uncomment it, set it to yes and then reload sshd.

The config is in /etc/blacklistd.conf. Usually you define blocking rules in the [local]-section and whitelisting in [remote]. The sample file and the man page are good enough to explain that part.

In addition you need to start the blacklistd-service and enable it in rc.conf or even better in a file in /etc/rc.conf.d.

In /etc/pf.conf you need to add the following line:

 anchor "blacklistd/*" in on $ext_if

Then you need to reload pf with the new rule:

 pfctl -f /etc/pf.conf

Now blocking should already work. To get the blocked IPs use the following command

 blacklistctl -b

If there are IPv6-adresses blocked, you need to add -w, so it is then

 blacklistctl -bw

If you want to unblock an IP you can look into the tables with pfctl. To see for example the table for sshd, the command is:

 pfctl -a blacklistd/22 -t port22 -T show

Now let’s say you want to unblock the IP 23.23.23.23, then you could issue a:

 pfctl -a blacklistd/22 -t port22 -T delete 23.23.23.23

This will remove the IP from the table and it is now unblocked. blacklistctl will still show the IP as blocked though. But if the IP tries again to log in and fails often enough, it will get blocked again.

I finally got my plaintext-todo-system together. It was a bit cumbersome because I did and could not want to use Dropbox, but it works now. The problem is that some of my machines either run FreeBSD or OpenBSD and all the plaintext-productivity apps on iOS either require Dropbox or iCloud[footnote]To be honest, I do not understand why so many iOS-apps expect a Mac on the desktop. Do so many iOS-owners also own a Mac? I would expect that most actually own a Windows-machine[/footnote]. I have a Nextcloud but the Nextcloud-client on iOS does not really integrate into iOS and nearly no one offers to sync with something else than iCloud or Dropbox on iOS.

But there is a really good git-client on iOS: Working Copy. And there is a really good markdown-editor, that also has taskpaper-support and integrates with some workarounds with Working Copy: Editorial[footnote]It does not integrate as Textastic but that might come in the future[/footnote].

The final piece that was missing where some reminders which work somehow automagically. There is a way to create iOS-reminders in Editorial from Taskpaper-files but there I would need to run a workflow in Editorial manually to create them. And I wouldn’t get a mail in the morning with a summary of tasks that are due, overdue etc. But I have now some scripts and cronjobs which create the mail and will send out push notifications via Pushover[footnote]I use Pushover because our Icinga2, the monitoring system we use at work, already uses pushover to send notifications when an alert is coming up.[/footnote].

How does it work?

I created a git-repo on my server. And have it checked out on my clients and in the home-directory of my user on the server. When I change something on the clients, I commit and push to the server. On the server there is cronjob in the crontab of my user running every minute to pull the repo. Additionally there is a cronjob running a python-script that checks if a task has an alarm set. If one is set, it will send the task as message to pushover, which sends a push notification to my iPhone. At 4 am in the morning there is an additional cronjob that runs a script that will generate a summary mail and sends it to me via e-mail.

The scripts expect the following tags, so that they can work:

• @today or @due[YYYY-MM-DD]
• @alarm[YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM]

The basis is the Taskpaper-Parser from github-user kmarchand. My push-script is a derivate from the script[footnote]Please forgive me since I am not very knowledgable in the arts of programming and just hacked around to get a works-for-me-thing[/footnote]:

[code language=“python”] from datetime import datetime, timedelta from collections import namedtuple from dateutil import parser import sys import re import httplib import urllib

tpfile = sys.argv[1]

with open(tpfile, ‘rb’) as f: tplines = f.readlines()

Flagged = namedtuple(‘Flagged’, [‘type’, ‘tasktime’, ‘taskdate’, ‘project’, ‘task’]) flaglist = [] errlist = []

project = “

for line in tplines: try: if ‘@done’ in line: continue if ‘:\n’ in line: project = line.strip()[:-1] if ‘@alarm’ in line: alarmtag = re.search(r’\@alarm((.*?))’, line).group(1) tasktime = datetime.time(parser.parse(alarmtag)) taskdate = datetime.date(parser.parse(alarmtag)) #print(tasktime) #print(taskdate) flaglist.append( Flagged(‘alarm’, tasktime, taskdate, project, line.strip())) except Exception, e: errlist.append((line, e))

today = alarm = overdue = duethisweek = startthisweek = None today_date = datetime.date(datetime.now()) today_time = datetime.time(datetime.now()) time_tmp = datetime.now() - timedelta(minutes = 1) today_time_less1min = time_tmp.time()

for task in flaglist: if task.type == ‘alarm’ and today_date == task.taskdate and today_time > task.tasktime and today_time_less1min < task.tasktime: alarm = True #print ‘\t[%s] %s’ % (task.project, task.task) conn = httplib.HTTPSConnection("api.pushover.net:443") conn.request("POST", "/1/messages.json", urllib.urlencode({ "token": "APP-Token", "user": "User-Token", "message": task.project + " " + task.task, }), { "Content-type": "application/x-www-form-urlencoded" }) conn.getresponse() if not alarm: print ‘\t (none)’ [/code]

It is simple, it could be probably far more elegant but it works for me™.

In addition there is a simple shell-script[footnote]I am running it on my FreeBSD-server, thus the path to python is /usr/local/bin/python2 - when you are running Linux the path is probably /usr/bin/python2[/footnote]:

[code language=“bash”] #!/bin/sh /usr/local/bin/python2 /home/user/python/tpp.py /home/user/taskpaper/Work.taskpaper > /tmp/taskpaper.mail /usr/local/bin/python2 /home/user/python/tpp.py /home/user/taskpaper/Personal.taskpaper >> /tmp/taskpaper.mail mail -s ‘Your Daily Taskpaper Summary’ my@mailaddress.org < /tmp/taskpaper.mail [/code]

And here is my crontab:

[code] * * * * * /bin/sh -c ‘cd ~user/taskpaper && /usr/local/bin/git pull -q origin master’ >> ~/git.log * * * * * /usr/local/bin/python2 /home/user/bin/tpp_alarms.py /home/user/taskpaper/Work.taskpaper * * * * * /usr/local/bin/python2 /home/user/bin/tpp_alarms.py /home/user/taskpaper/Personal.taskpaper 0 4 * * * /home/user/bin/taskpaper_mail.sh [/code]

Since I am running FreeBSD on my server I have to rely on a crontab and cannot use systemd-timers.

On my computers I am an avid vim-user and I use taskpaper.vim for having syntax highlighting and some additional shortcuts for marking tasks as done or today etc.

In Editorial I use the Working Copy-workflow.

It is all very simple and not very elegant. But it works and brings me the funtcionality I was missing from using apps like Todoist or on the “local” level Taskmator. And everything runs on my own machines except the delivery for the push notifications. But the only chance to get there my own solution would be to develop an iOS-app because you can’t get in any other way push notifications to your iOS-device. And if I should switch back to Android at any point, I still can use pushover. I pushover goes down, I hope there are alternatives… ;)

Recently I had to build an OpenVPN-server on a FreeBSD-machine that uses already port 443. But I wanted to use port 443 because its reachability is usually guaranteed. So I added a second IP-address to the interface. Let’s say for this example the adresses are 10.10.10.1 and 10.10.10.2[footnote]Yes, I know…the original host has routable adresses there[/footnote]. And then I followed the few hints I found on the net for NATing through the interface. Since it is FreeBSD and I have pf available, I use it of course. And after that I opened up certain hosts to 10.10.10.2 on the other hosts.

What is the rule you find when you google?

nat on $ext_if inet from $vpn_clients to any -> $ext_if

ext_if is your interface to the outside world. In my case the one with the two IP-adresses. $vpn_clients is the openvpn-network[footnote]by default 10.8.0.0/24[/footnote].

And then I was up to a surprise. When I connected to the VPN and then tried to connect to the hosts I wanted to reach through the NAT via ssh the following happened: ssh host1 - connection denied, ssh host1 - please log in. If I waited a short moment instead of trying to connect immediately a second time the connection was denied again. And some other strange behavior like that was observable.

What happend? FreeBSD NATed all the time through either address 1 or address 2 but never through the same.

What you can do is define the address for the NATing you want to rewrite to. So it becomes:

nat on $ext_if inet from $vpn_clients to any -> $vpn_nat_ip

In this case vpn_nat_ip is 10.10.10.2.

Another side-note: you don’t want to add a second interface for the second IP-address but use an alias-IP on the first network card. Otherwise you have to start use routing tables etc. for getting your traffic correctly moved through your system.

I cancelled today Google All-Access and use now for streaming Subsonic. So I have my computer at home serving the music and it is really easy to set up. With that I am also moving back to buying music. Less DRM and afaik I support the artists better. One of my favorite musicians, Farin Urlaub[footnote]If you aren’t German and do not know him, listen to some of his music. He has two bands: Die Ärzte (since the 80s) and the Farin Urlaub Racing Team. Both are a bit different but fantastic. And I expect that every German-speaking reader of this blog knows him and Die Ärzte.[/footnote] said once that Spotify is like a punch in a musicians face. So I bought some stuff I found through All-Access and stopped using it now for a couple of days. I expect to spend less music overall but the musicians I like will get more money. Discoverability might be a problem but I guess I’ll find new music by different means. And the children will have to live with the fact that new stuff might be rolling in more rarely but lately they listen to some of their favorites all the time anyways and don’t care about the stuff I got only through All-Access.

The two things I am still thinking about is reading via Safari Books Online, the kindle reading app, because I actually don’t use my reader anymore[footnote]the phone is more convenient and people somehow break theirs and I borrow them mine and they just use it far more than I do. But I’d still like to have a Paperwhite.[/footnote] and Netflix. Safari Books Online is an awesome ressource for my job. But I do not use it that much because I have other stuff to do that I wonder if it wouldn’t be cheaper in the end to buy the books I am interested in as e-books. 40€ per month are a lot of money. But it is so convenient and when I need to read up on something the search is great and the quality is usually better than some tutorial/explanation on a website. So yes, I am not sure about it.

The Kindle is mainly about convenience. The ability to sync and easily send ebooks via mail is great. And they have tons of english-language ebooks and all the others have DRM, too. And I don’t want to move back to paper books for a lot of things. The chance that I am reading a book is lower than I read an ebook because I have the ebook always with me and it works in the dark as well. And since there are no stores that have a similar number of books like Amazon and are completely DRM-free it doesn’t matter a lot if I use a kindle or not. The pure teachings of being DRM-free would mean that I have to return to paper books and get ebooks only from stores like DriveThruFiction or authors like Cory Doctorow who sell all their books DRM-free. But a lot of non-fiction books are not available this way.

Netflix and Amazon Prime Video are hard. I do not use it that much because I somehow spend my time more listening to podcasts, using social media and reading books  but my family does. It is similar in convenience as pirating stuff without the legal risk but with a smaller but still big selection. And when i buy a DVD or Blu-Ray it is aldo DRMed. The evil thing about Netflix is that it puts DRM into browsers which means that we have now a blackbox in software that has to deal quite often with the evil parts of the internet. I like this blackbox since it allows me to watch Netflix and Amazon Prime on my Linux-computers[footnote]but unfortunately not *BSD-computers[/footnote] but at the same time it brings up the security problem. I find the fight of the EFF very good but I don’t see the alternative. Essentially it would also mean that fewer people want to use free and open source operating systems like GNU/Linux[footnote]see what I did there?[/footnote] because many want to watch Netflix on their computers. I already thought that I won’t use Netflix anymo://re on my computers but only on my phone but I am not sure. The only correct thing to do would be able to give up Netflix etc. And in the end it hurts the wrong because it is not Netflix but big media. And stopping the consumption of their stuff for entertainment is kind of hard. I am not willing to take up the fight to convert my family and explain my kids why they won’t be able to watch their favorite animated series from time to time.

It is not easy in this day and age to not be subject to DRM. I just read an article about farmers jailbreaking their tractors. Seriously.

Originally this should have been a micro post that I quit Google All-Access and started using Subsonic. Now it is a long waily waily about DRM. What is your opinion about DRM? Do you care? Do you try to move away from it? If yes, are you succesful? If you don’t care, why don’t you care? Please leave a comment beneath the blog post.

youtu.be/B_qCpDEV-…

Sooo…wie bereits angekündigt habe ich nun Japanbezug und retrogames.kobschaetzki.net runtergefahren. EMUI habe ich in dieses Blog integriert. Eine Feed-URL habe ich noch nicht. Daurm kümmere ich mich, wenn ich irgendwann mal eine neue Folge veröffentlichen sollte. Es sind Projekte, die ich einmal mit viel Ambition gestartet habe und dann feststellte, dass ich eigentlich nicht die Zeit dazu habe.Kurzfristig habe ich überlegt auch dieses Blog wieder zu einem statischem zu machen, aber am Ende bedeutet das auch mehr Arbeit als Nutzen. Und es gibt eine Sache auf die ich warte, die mit Wordpress einfacher sein sollte.

Und so wie es aussieht wird mein neuer Job als Sysadmin bei einem Webhoster mich noch eine ganze Weile auf Trab halten bis ich mich in alles so eingearbeitet habe, dass es ruhiger wird. Komplexe Strukturen, die verstanden und beherrscht werden wollen.

Ich habe viel über FreeBSD die letzten Monate gelernt durch den Job. Vermutlich werde ich auch privat eine ganze Menge nach FreeBSD ziehen. Dieses Blog hier läuft inzwischen auch auf einem FreeBSD-Server. Aber auf dem Desktop fühlt sich FreeBSD wie vor 5 - 10 Jahren an. Der Hardware-Support ist lange nicht auf dem Level von Linux. Dafür gefällt mir die ganze Struktur besser, die Dokumentation ist viel besser und es gibt ZFS. Ich hab gelesen, dass die FreeBSD-Leute wohl häufig Apple-Laptops einsetzen und durch das fehlende Dogfooding der Hardware-Support im Desktop-Bereich nicht so dolle ist. Auf einem Laptop hatte ich kurz OpenBSD drauf, das ist auch sehr schick. Aber aus Gründen gibt es da halt kein Wine und als Virtualisierer nur Qemu. Damit wird das ganze schon um einiges härter. Als reine Arbeitsmaschine ginge das sogar; aber an sich brauch ich vermutlich den Virtualisierer allein um sowas wie IPMIs[footnote]eine Art Remote-Zugriff auf Server, wenn die Kiste gar nicht mehr will[/footnote] weil die alten noch komische Java-Wünsche haben. Aber auch OpenBSD fand ich von den Konzepten um einiges schicker als Linux. Und die BSD-Lizenz ist nun mal noch freier als die GPL, was sie mir schon immer sympathischer machte.

Und dann gibt es noch TrueOS, ein FreeBSD-Abkömmling. Der ist ganz schick aber leidet z.Z. an einem Bug, durch den Festplattenverschlüsselung und die Nutzung von EFI sich ausschließen. Und ich finde es müßig, dass sie OpenRC einsetzen. Nun ja, am Ende ist es aber nah an FreeBSD dran. Wenn das Festplattenverschlüsselungsproblem gelöst ist, kommt es vermutlich auf meinen Laptop drauf.

Der Retrozirkel kommt hoffentlich bald auch wieder öfter. Eine Folge ist schon aufgenommen und muss “nur” noch veröffentlicht werden. Ich hoffe Lucie ist auch bald wieder mit dabei. Nur wann ich spielen soll, ist mir noch nicht ganz klar. Vielleicht mal wieder mehr in der U-Bahn zocken…

Nun ja, es geht weiter. Altlasten habe ich jetzt eingestampft und das beruhigt. Weniger Dinge um die ich mich kümmern muss.

Nice write-up about running systems without swap nowadays: Do we really need swap on modern systems? I use it on my laptops anyway for hibernation. But good to know that you want to have it for reaction time. Never thought about it in those terms.

Clickbait is everywhere. This time it is privacy clickbait called “How to encrypt your entire life in less than an hour”. The article is mostly not about encryption but enhancing your privacy. The tips in short:

•  Use 2 Factor-authentication You want this. If someone gets their hand on your password, they still need the second factor to open up your account
• Encrypt your harddrive Even with computers you never move, you might want this. Just had a case in the family were a computer got stolen out of the home. With encrypted data at least the thief won't be able to take advantage of them
• Turn on your phone's password protection Yep, 4 digits are worthless. Biometrics like your fingerprint can be easily copied[footnote]I am at fault here as well. The fingerprint-thing on the iPhone is sooo convenient[/footnote]. Watch this talk to understand why:
• Use different passwords for each service When someone opens up one account of yours, they have all your accounts if you always use the same password. Use a password manager to make your like easier. I use Enpass but Keepass and 1Password are good, too.
• Send private text messages with Signal Signal trumps Whatsapp etc. I prefer Threema though. And in the end I still use Whatsapp for some contacts of Jabber with OTR or OMEMO depending on the contacts. Jabber with OMEMO is actually quite good. But on an iPhone Jabber is not that great. Thus stick with Signal or Threema, both are available on Android and iOS. Signal is free and open source. Threema is independent of your telephone number, costs a few bucks and isn't open source[footnote]But it is audited and there is a way to verify your messages[/footnote]
• Your browser’s incognito mode isn't actually private Yeah. That just hides you from other users using your browser. There's a reason why it is called porn mode.
• Use Tor Yup, Tor will hide anonymize you better than most other stuff. The original article has tips how to use it on Android. On iOS there is Tob. If you want to improve your privacy further on your computer use Tor in Whonix. Or go a step further and use Tor in Whonix on QubesOS which gives you far more security than your OS or even Tails for even more privacy.
• Use DuckDuckGo Yes, DuckDuckGo improves your privacy but unfortunately I have to switch too often to Google :|

You see, most of the stuff isn’t actually about encryption. Thus some further tips.

You might want to think about e-mail-encryption with S/Mime or GPG. It is a PITA either way. But unencrypted mails are like postcards. And there is still the metadata…so e-mail is actually not that good. But if you have to use mail and want to send sensitive material, use GPG or S/Mime. Btw. if your doctor’s office wants to send you something about your case via mail, it probably breaks the legal requirement concerning confidential medical communication. And this can mean jail time in Germany for example.

In addition: when you use backups, encrypt those as well. It is great when your harddrive is encrypted, when your backup isn’t. Same for USB-sticks you carry around. For those you want to use something like VeraCrypt

Are you using Dropbox? Think again, loads of unencrypted data. Use something like SpiderOak instead. I sync personally nowadays with my own Nextcloud-server and do encrypted online-backups with CrashPlan. And I think about using Tarsnap.

• And some more privacy-hints at the end: pay with cash and don't use some card that will collect points for your shopping - those track you better than your credit card
• when you use a Kindle know that Amazon knows what your are reading when and where you are in the book. I guess Kobo et al. are similar when connected to their service
• Netflix and Spotify (et al) know the same about your movie and music-taste. But I guess books are more dangerous than movies and music. You rarely watch a several movies about how your government is a bad thing, how to topple it or convert to religions that several mad men are using for their cause.
• log out of Facebook and Google or use an extra browser for them.
• Use an ad-blocker. More privacy and digital self-defense against malware delivered by ads. I am using UBlock Origin.

I could go on depending on your level of paranoia. But that’s enough for thinking a bit about it. Oh, and read Little Brother[footnote]available for free on that site[/footnote] by Cory Doctorow for the reasons you want more anonymity in your life. Btw. I do not follow all of that advice by myself but I try to improve.

vim is a text-editor I use a lot in my daily work. I even wrote my whole thesis with it. Most of the notes I do on my computer I do in vim, when I configure software I use vim, when I rarely code I use vim. The reason for me to start mutt, a console-based e-mail-client, was that it allowed me to use vim for writing e-mails[footnote]Nowadays I appreciate mutt for itself as well and each time I try something else, I switch back to mutt pretty fast.[/footnote]. Some time ago I found a presentation I finally watched which explains some nice-tricks you can do without using plug-ins:

• file-search
• tag-jumping
• auto-completion
• file system navigation and some more

I knew some of the stuff already but the talk was interesting nonetheless. If you use vim, watch it. And if you want more I can really recommend Practical Vim by Drew Neil.

www.youtube.com/watch

What the hell is Uber for a work place? 25% women going down to 6% in a year because of sexistic behavior (superiors asking women for sex, HR lies to them about being the first offense; perfect reviews but punishing behavior because they probably aren’t compliant enough with the sexistic behavior…). Aaah.

Reflecting On One Very, Very Strange Year At Uber

The HR rep began the meeting by asking me if I had noticed that I was the common theme in all of the reports I had been making, and that if I had ever considered that I might be the problem. (…) Our meeting ended with her berating me about keeping email records of things, and told me it was unprofessional to report things via email to HR.

Thanks to the new US-administration and its fast move to remove privacy protections for non-US-citizens I try again to move data out of the US.

It is as usual easier said than done. And a lot is about self-hosting. Let’s start with the easiest:

News

How do I get my news nowadays? Mainly Twitter but I am thinking about moving back to reading more stuff via RSS-feeds again. Right now I am using Newsblur for syncing and managing RSS-feeds. It is a small, fine, independent service that costs around 25€ per year. It has apps for iOS and Android and an API to allow syncing to 3rd-party-services. If you don’t want to self-host and don’t mind that the company is located in the US, I can really recommend it. But I want my data out of the US. So I am switching back to Tiny Tiny RSS. It is easy to install and is even usable on shared hosting platforms. It requires apache or nginx, PHP and either a MySQL or PostgreSQL-database. The nice thing is that it has quite some plug-ins for stuff like removing ads from feeds or getting the full-text-content from sites like heise.de. The Web-UI is ok  and there are apps for Android and iOS. There is even a plug-in that allows the emulation of the fever-API, a self-hostable RSS-solution that doesn’t really exist anymore. But with the emulation feed-readers like Reeder can connect to Tiny Tiny RSS. And henceforth it is really neat. On iOS I use Reeder, on my computer either the web-interface or newsbeuter, a great cli-client for reading RSS-feeds. It claims to be the mutt of RSS feed readers and it is clearly so.

Files

I had a Dropbox-subscription and it was neat. Now I need something else. I looked at Tresorit, a service like Dropbox in Switzerland which encrypts everything. It looked nice, is far more expensive than Dropbox (12,50€ for 100GB per month or 25€ for 1TB, so more than double) but in the end I decided to self-host a Nextcloud-instance. If you do not want to host yourself, you can find providers here and some even have a free tier, many are hosted in Europe.

E-Mail

There are providers that host in Germany like Posteo, Mailbox.org or services like GMX. I’d suggest you to spend a bit of money on letting Posteo or Mailbox.org host your mail than GMX because they are more trustworthy imho. The alternative is self-hosting your mail. There are projects like Mail-in-a-Box that make it a whole lot easier. I will probably do it without something like that for practicing purposes. Btw. self-hosting means that you do not need to hand out data to the government like the pros have to, since you won’t host mail for a thousand users.

Micro/Blogging

I host my blogging for quite some time. I switched between static blogs and wordpress a lot, right now I am using Wordpress. I have to switch off Jetpack to reach my goal of getting data out of the US which means loosing convenience features… self-hosting Wordpress is not that hard but it will cost you a bit of money. Some webhosters have one-click deploys of wordpress, so that shouldn’t be that hard even for the people who are not that technical competent.

Micro-blogging is a bit harder. You can micro-blog via Wordpress and even crosspost to Twitter. You can use a Gnu Social-account at services like quitter or host it yourself. But I am not yet convinced. There is a new service called micro.blog which I want to self-host and integrate it with Wordpress. I am not sure yet if I close my Twitter-account. I thought about it quite often but I could not convince myself yet.

Messaging

Recently I am using more often Whatsapp because everyone uses it. And since I have an iPhone again, I am starting to use iMessage again and with colleagues it is Hangouts. I’d like to use more Threema and Jabber though.

Maps

You do not have to use Google Maps or Apple Maps, you can use OpenStreetMaps and it is actually pretty good. On the iPhone I use a client called maps.me. But I am not sure how much of my data lands through that where. But it is probably better than Google or Apple Maps

Todos

That’s a hard one. I couldn’t find a good todo-app that I can sync between an iPhone and Linux and that isn’t located in the US. I tried plain-text systems like todo.txt or the imho better but not as well supported format used by Taskpaper. But on iOS the clients only sync through iCloud or Dropbox. On Android there are clients that can sync through the file system and thus you can use something else. Now I am trying myself at using a paper-based system again. I started to use a Bullet Journal again. I used it last year for a couple of months but abandoned it. Now I am using it for a week and it works out better for me this time. The Bullet Journal is a nice system that allows a lot of customizability[footnote]Search for Bullet Journal on Pinterest or Youtube and you will find a lot[/footnote]. And using a paper based system means that I moved my todos completely away from the internet except the occasional reminder in my calendar.

The really hard ones

Things I do not want to stop to use in spite of them storing data in the US are Netflix, Google Music All-Access and being able to sync my ebooks through Amazon. I am thinking about not using the last one anymore. I can buy ebooks somewhere else and there are enough other software and hardware ebook-readers out there. Netflix is irreplacable in my opinion and the convenience of a music streaming-service is just sooo big. And they have a lot of radio plays for children which I use a lot. Buying all those would be far more expensive than the 10 bucks/month. But I am open to suggestions.

And then there is pinboard.in. My go to-service fo bookmarking and archiving sites. I guess there is some self-hostable solution but the archiving part will be the hard one. But tweets of the owner of the site give me a lot of trust in him and that he will take care of all those data we entrust to him.

Ok, that’s it I think. And when you think about self-hosting something, don’t forget to do backups because those are your responsibility then as well.

P.s.: I forgot read-it-later-services like Instapaper or Pocket. There is an open source-alternative called Wallabag. It even has a hosted service for a small fee with the data stored in the EU. But I couldn’t get the application to work on FreeBSD or CentOS because I am already failing while installing it. And the iOS-app doesn’t work offline yet. When your connection is crappy you cannot even log into the iOS-app. The devs promised though to fix this. So maybe I give it another try at a later point of time.

Manton Reece did a kickstarter for a software project on and a book about independent micro-blogging. I really like the idea since it means I can have a full feed of my (micro-)blogging on my blog and certain posts get cross-posted to Twitter. I do this via a plug-in because IFTTT just didn’t work for me. But I like this even better in the end. 

The process is a bit cumbersome because I have to add a category for the micro-posts and in the WP-app this means going into two different screens. I will see if I will continue using that way. But from my understanding everything should become far more easier when micro.blog gets released 😀

Update: I am now using the iOS-apps Drafts and Workflow to post to Twitter and Wordpress. It is less error prone than the plug-in way. 

TL;DR: Yay Linux, Nay Android. Let’s stay with Linux but switch back to iOS.

Recently I am thinking about getting a new computer and phone and whether I should go back to macOS and iOS. I am using Linux and Android for a couple of years now and I am thinking recently about getting new devices. Let’s talk about computers first.

macOS and Linux

macOS is a really nice operating system. It is not open source but thanks to homebrw etc a lot of open source-software runs on it and the command line environment works as expected. Besides that you get a lot of commercial software from big and small companies that you either get on Linux or which you just do not get in that quality on other operating systems[footnote]An example would be OmniFocus…or anything else by the OmniGroup. Or OpenEmu which rocks still a lot more than RetroArch or EmulationStation[/footnote]. Additionally you do not need to tinker with them. Most of the time stuff just works.

But for one I like using open source software even though not everything works always. Just yesterday I tried using the proprietary NVIDIA-driver on Fedora 25 and failed miserably which led me to re-installing the system[footnote]which took like 15 minutes plus installing a bit of extra software and updates…thanks to enough bandwidth that’s not taking long as well.[/footnote] but eventually I will get it to work or the open source-driver might even be working well enough which I actually didn’t test yet. Or podcasting doesn’t work as smooth for me as it does on macOS. But I am getting it to work eventually. And nowadays most of the normal stuff just works. Especially when you are using Ubuntu. 16.04 was a “just works”-experience, even after moving my SSD from a Thinkpad X201 to a Dell T3500 with two NVIDIA-cards and a Xeon. The upgrade to 16.10 worked as well. I guess I wouldn’t have there any problems with podcasting, too. Playing games is possible nowadays as well with Steam etc. My recent problems came from trying to get NVIDIA-drivers to work in Fedora 25 which I like for some reason more than Ubuntu. The only thing that I dislike about Linux is that there is no backup-solution like Time Machine. TM is just awesome. But for most of the other stuff modern Linux-distributions just works. And there is even a simple solution for backups but it is not as good as that for macOS. All in all the pros of Linux, be it that it is open-source or that I can run it on commodity hardware just outweighs the cons of macOS with its high prices and hardware that is not servicable at all anymore.

iOS and Android

Android is quite nice in the customizability-department and there is some stuff you can’t do with iOS. For example syncing a single folder in my Dropbox with a single folder on my device, or doing the same with Bittorrent Sync. But nowadays I don’t use capabilities like that really a lot. I like to customize my device though. And buying games for cheap via HumbleBundle is great. And now comes the big “but”. And it is updates. First I owned a Moto X, now an LG G4. Both companies said that they will release updates a short time after Google released the updates. This didn’t happen. In addition Android seems all in all less secure than iOS. I am not even talking about installing apps from outside the Play Store. That’s a matter of using your brain. But the Play Store has from time to time malware and the Stagefright-stuff is frightening. If I am not mistaken I have several public known security bugs on my phone which aren’t patched by LG in a timely manner. That sucks. And the devices by Google cost now as much as iPhones and have an update guarantee of two or three years max. And I cannot install a custom ROM that might get more often updates since that would break my warranty because I would need to unlock the bootloader of my phone. And I already had a warranty case with this phone. I don’t want to risk to unlock my phone and then have a hardware-problem.

Since I do not need to use a computer nowadays in combination with an iPhone, I don’t see why I shouldn’t get a high quality device with a more secure OS than Android. I don’t buy the 100€-Android-devices anyway. I won’t necessarily buy the newest iPhone but the next phone I want to get is definitely an iPhone. Bye bye Android.

P.s.: I’d really like to try Ubuntu Phone but I don’t see a cheap way to do it. I don’t want to shell out 100+€ just for trying out a phone-OS which I might not like.

This week was actually quite eventful even so it doesn’t feel like it.

I started in my first race. After training for it for a couple of months, I did the 6000m in 28:36.9 minutes. That was in the best 2000 of I think 14.000 runners. It was fun but was weird that I was I overtaking all the time people and some people started walking after a couple of hundred meters. And the organiser already created blocks for different finishing times so that slow people are more in the back and fast in the front.

I also started converting a book in PDF-form to epub and mobi. My old workflow was using markdown and pandoc. Now I am trying asciidoc. That seems to be a better choice because it has built-in support for sidebars etc. The book is quite long and it will take some time. But it is kind of a job, so I have to find the time for it even so I have no fixed deadline.

In Mario & Luigi: Bowser’s Inside Story, a very fun RPG for the Nintendo DS, I am playing for the last months I am finally close to the end. I skipped side quests because I just want to finish it. I played it long enough. It is a really fun game but I am now at 22h play time and needed like 2 or 3 months for it. I cannot see how I will finish a Dragon Quest or Final Fantasy at that pace. Anyway, it is really fun. Nice story, cute graphics, the combat system is ok-ish and very timing based. I don’t like the special attacks which are kind of mini-games and I don’t choose them by power but at how good I am in executing them. A very expensive powerful attack that is poorly executed does far less damage as something weaker that is executed well. And I don’t want to start exercising them. I could see that I would have done that 10 or 20 years ago when I had time for games but now I just want to see the story. Right now I am only two end bosses away from the ending I think. I hope my characters are powerful enough and I don’t need any grinding anymore. The next game will probably the classic Castlevania or maybe Circle of the Moon or so. But that games saving sucks for a mobile game :/ Playing Mother 2 (Earthbound) or Mother 3 would be nice as well but I think I need a break from JRPGs for now.

And at last I found 411. A tool by Etsy for getting alerts on results in an elastic search database. I am using a log server with logstash, elastic search and kibana. And this tool allows me to generate queries, executes them via cron and then sends me a mail if they get results. And all this with a nice GUI [footnote]not the query generation though[/footnote]. But I will try elastalert by yelp as well. This doesn’t have a nice interface but also allows to get messages when certain message volumes change. Like when the denies of the firewall suddenly increase by a lot for example.

That’s it for this post. Subscribe to the feed if you want to get informed about new ones :)

This weekend the vimfest happened in Berlin. A small and nice event about vim, my favorite editor. I attended only saturday because of time constraints. There were some presentations and a couple of flash talks. The highlights were a talk by Justin Keyes, the maintainer of neovim about it and a talk by Bram Moolenaar, the creator of vim, about the new stuff introduced in vim 8.

Both were very interesting. The most interesting “feature” of neovim is that it is not as centralized around one developer like vim is. There was an interview with Bram which asked him

How can the community ensure that the Vim project succeeds for the foreseeable future?

And his answer was:

Keep me alive.

neovim does have a central maintainer but there are more people with an intimate knowledge of the code and more people with commit-privileges. Thus it is not as dependent on a single person as vim is. The next interesting feature is that it tries to be very embedabble. Therefore it is easy to create a gui for it etc.

The new features in vim 8 seem to be more relevant to plugin-developers. But the new features for asynchronosity and communication might enable interesting stuff in vim. It also might have now better defaults. The discussions in the Q&A were very interesting as well.

Besides that I learned about a couple of new plug-ins and software:

vim-bbye: a plug-in for vim that allows you to delete a buffer without closing a window tagbar: a plug-in which generates a window with a list of tags. For me that means that I can easily navigate in structured text tig: a neat CLI-interface for git asciidoc: a markup-language that might fulfill my needs better than markdown. Especially since I have to do some conversions currently to epub and mobi where it will be part of my toolchain, while I used markdown for that in the past.

I did a short presentation of newsbeuter. A CLI-RSS-feed reader that wants to be the mutt of RSS. It is a nice piece of software that I used a lot before I switched to newsblur[footnote]And I just rarely use it for newsblur because the sync is so slow[/footnote].

And I learned that splitting up your .vimrc makes it far more readable and easier to configure.

If you are a vim-user, I can really recommend that you go to vimfest 2017 next year.

So, I noticed that I didn’t blog in quite a while and I need to change this. As always with a re-try in blogging I switched my blog (this time from static to wordpress) for reasons. I think I will never be happy with what is out there and I do not have the time to even think about writing something of my own. This post is quite personal - a bit about my diet and sports, my linux-travellings, retrogaming and pen&paper-RPGs.

What else is up with me recently. Well, after reading a book called “Fettlogik überwinden“[footnote]Conquer fat logics[/footnote] by Nadja Hermann I decided that I have to do something against being overweight. I was still far from adiposity but I never would have wanted to get that far. I didn’t already like that I had to start L-size-t-shirts and that my pants-sizes increased but I didn’t bring up my will to do something against it. After reading that book my mindset changed. I lost 10kg[footnote]ca. 20 pounds[/footnote] in ca. 3 months and build up some muscles as well. Now I officially ended the diet but I still want to get down to a weight that I am jacked. Thus I still have to do something about it but after 3 months I already don’t want to count calories anymore and weigh all the food I eat. I am trying now intermittent fasting in a 16/8-rhythm. 16 hours of fasting a day (from 10pm to 2pm) and 8 hours of feeding. Last week I definitely snacked too much in the feeding time, this week I’ll try to reduce that.

In addition my sports-activities radically changed. A couple of years ago I went up to four times a week to karate-training. But after I got a minor injury in a competition, then my second child was born and so I didn’t went to training at all for ca 2.5 years. In the meantime I tried several bodyweight-programs but nothing for very long. And half a year ago I started going to Karate-training again once a week. Shortly after starting the diet though this completely changed. Now I am going to training twice a week, I go running 2-3 times a week and do bodyweight-training two or three times a week. Thus it is now 5-6 times a week sports for me and sometimes even on every day while one day involves very light training. I kind of have to make now training plans for myself. This whole thing takes up a lot of time even when my running/bodyweight-sessions are only 30-90 minutes[footnote]Karate is always longer: 90 minutes training + the ways to the dojo, changing and showering. So it is more like 3 - 4 hours.[/footnote]. This also means that I do not have that much time doing something else in my leisure time. I am not sure yet how I feel about this. My body likes it and it is better than watching Netflix and reading Twitter all evening.

I also changed operating systems in the meantime. You might remember me posting about Manjaro, Arch and Fedora. In the meantime used Qubes for a couple of months. It was great and probably secure but it had its flaws. For one I couldn’t get my optical drive working in the way I need it to because of technical limitations because of the security features of Qubes. And there was always a bit of a mental overhead where I want/have to do what. So I abandoned it. But I didn’t want to fiddle that much because my amount of free time is limited and so I gave Ubuntu another try. After my pretty bad experiences with 15.10, 16.04 is great. I installed it, the installer supports now even full disk encryption, and everything worked. No fiddling, nothing. It just worked. And it is still working. I am enjoying Unity[footnote]the default desktop environment[/footnote], play around with some other stuff and have so far no problems at all. I am surprised. This is the most Mac-like experience I ever had with Linux.

Podcasting is happening not a lot lately. Japanbezug, a German podcast about Japan I was doing, just needs too much time per episode. I don’t see me doing anything with it in the next months or even years. EMUI, the podcast accompanying this blog, is not doing anything either. I just don’t feel like podcasting at the moment. But I miss doing regular Retrozirkel-episodes. This has more to do with scheduling issues. The next episode will come.

I expanded my retrogames-collection by some nice titles and bought a GB Boy Colour. A Gameboy Color-clone with a backlit-screen. It is really excellent. www.youtube.com/watch

And I found a way to organize my collection better. Gameboy and Gameboy Advance-games are now in binders and I use the sheets used by trading card gamers to put the games in the binder. 9 GB-games per page or 18 GBA-games. For my NDS-games I find nice boxes by Hori which hold 24 games per box.

Right now I am playing Mario & Luigi: Bowser’s Inside Story. A really nice RPG where you play Mario, Luigi and Bowser. But where I liked in the past when games were long, it is now a bit harder. Usually I play now only while commuting and so it is like 20-30 minutes per day. Luckily this game has a lot of save points but after 3-4 weeks playing I am like only half way through the game. I am already thinking about what to play next. Maybe Castlevania 1 or Super Mario Bros. 2 Lost Levels? Or will take the plunge into the Metroidvania-world and start playing Castlevania: Circle of the Moon? I also have a lot of Zelda- and Advance Wars games I like to play. Problems I didn’t have a decade ago when I could play several hours a day…sometimes it sucks to be an adult ;)

And now to the last topic: pen&paper-RPGs. Thanks to a very good friend I was part in a short L5R-campaign with some great people. It was really fun. But I had to trade the biweekly RPG-sessions to have another day of karate-training in the week. And I want to get better in karate and go to competitions. Maybe I’ll find the time to play or run a one-shot from time to time. Especially since I found out about a couple of japanese RPGs that were translated to English which have some great concepts. I really want to play those. And I miss playing Shadowrun. At least I can read Shadowrun-novels again since the old ones get re-released as ebooks and from time to time a new one appears. My favorite of the re-released ones is Burning Bright[footnote]The Bug City-novel[/footnote] and from the new ones it is Shaken: No Job to Small. I can recommend both and I think even non-Shadowrun-fans might like them.

This post is now more than long enough and I won’t write about to-do-lists and minimalism. Maybe I post later about those. We will see. Have a nice day.

First the fix:

Set the following in $HOME/.config/imsettings/xinputrc

export GTK_IM_MODULE=ibus
export XMODIFIERS=@im=ibus
export QT_IM_MODULE=ibus

If the folder $HOME/.config/imsettings doesn’t exist, create it first.

And now a bit of background.

I switched for a short time to Ubuntu. My reasoning was that I can give better family support but I switched back to Fedora. Ubuntu was so far the worst Linux experience, at least with my existing configurations. But after switching back to Fedora 23 Japanese input didn’t work. Fedora 23 uses ibus as default method. And it tries to do things automagically and in doing that, they totally failed for me.

There is a script /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc.d/50-xinput.sh. This script tries to do some magic and works pretty late in the process of starting your GUI when using the default GDM. First it unsets a whole bunch of environment variables and thus will probably anything you set up locally, when you come from another distribution like in $HOME/.xprofile or $HOME/.xinputrc or some other candidate for setting the variables above. Then it looks up if you have $HOME/.config/imsettings/xinputrc. If not, it should create $HOME/.config/imsettings and looks if you have a file $HOME/.xinputrc. If you have it, it gets moved to that folder. And then the file gets sourced and the script is finished.

The folder creation part is the place where I guess the script failed for me.

And if that file doesn’t get sourced by the script for whatever reason, the script looks up which LANG-variable you have set and compares it to a hardcoded list. And then sets up environment variables depending on your LANG-variable.

If you have set en_US.utf8 like me that means that they get set up in a minimal way which leads to not being able to use an IME. And of course the script doesn’t bother logging anything.

Dear Fedora Project, this is too much magic and can fail. Especially since there are multiple places in $HOME where you can potentially set up the three environment variables, not all recommended but possible. There is .xinputrc, .xinitrc, .xprofile, .profile and even .bashrc. And every tutorial in the net suggests setting it in one of these. Why do you add a new subdirectory in .config? And if stuff doesn’t work because of bugginess, why do you make everything dependent on the set language of the system? Never heard of anyone using English for example as native tongue and then speaks a foreign language? And then apparently you didn’t document that anywhere and do not log anything in the script, so troubleshooting gets really hard. I know those problems of setting up Japanese input in Linux. But I had those problem in the beginnings of 2000 and before. Great job catapulting us back 10 - 20 years, a blast from the past :/

So, now it is a week with Fedora. I stopped using Gnome and I am using again i3. I learned about copr which offers unofficial repositories that can be easily integrated in your Fedora install via “dnf copr enable repo/name”. That way I got again current versions of vim (Patch 1194, which is like 300 builds ahead of the official Fedora-vim) and tmux. For tmux this means that I can use again the new way to handle a mouse. And there is a repo for hugo, the blogging-engine I use. Copr feels a bit like the AUR but is not as complete as the AUR. I guess you can’t host there repos for software that use patented stuff like handbrake or makemkv. And the built for khal and vdirsyncer is not very current, so I still can’t use that. But the maintainer knows that but doesn’t have the time for rebuilding all the necessary packages. Anyway, copr makes me a happier person :)

I also got my first contact with the community in the IRC besides lurking. And I got fast answers on my shamingly stupid question without any mentioning of RTFM or some wiki. I could have answered it myself with the manual though…shame on me.

I get updates nearly daily on my system, which is more often than with Manjaro but not as often as with Arch. In the end this means hopefully more security and stability.

Btw. after a short chat on Twitter yesterday I looked again into switching to FreeBSD for my laptop but it still seems not ready for my use case. Netflix is still a problem and the proposed solution I found is running Linux or Windows in a VM and using there Chrome…yeah… Skype and Steam seems only available via Wine, no Dropbox afaik, Spideroak might work…it seems to be a further step back from using Linux in terms of available software and compared to running OS X. But maybe I upgrade my CentOS5-servers to FreeBSD instead of CentOS7. But actually I want an environment that is as heterogen as possible since it makes life easier…

When you read my blog posts, you know that I switched not that long ago from Manjaro, an Arch-based distribution to Arch. And now I switched again - this time to [Fedora]. Even so I was really satisified with Arch. It worked, it was fast and the Arch User Repositories are awesome. I rarely had to google how to install a software. I just had to use a wrapper to search them. And when I googled the first hit was often the Arch Wiki. Right now the Arch Wiki is probably the best documentation for Linux-related software.

But, yes there is a but, recently I started to look more into securing my system. Following more and more ITSec-people on Twitter, I got a bit paranoid and want to have a securer system. At work most of my servers run CentOS and usually I deactivated SELinux because it always meant annoyances. To be honest I didn’t know a thing about it and so when it made a problem I just deactivated it. I wanted to play with some new software, not learn how to troubleshoot some security system I do not need for my internal systems. Now I started to look into SELinux and the tools for redhat-based systems are really good and SELinux isn’t that hard and my systems get more secure[footnote]I really recommend to watch the talk Security-enhanced Linux for mere mortals. And I actually need it also for my internal systems. If there is a breach, this could make life harder for the intruder.[/footnote].

So I wanted to have more security for my system. I tried Grsecurity but I couldn’t get Chrome to run and hibernation wouldn’t work either. Then I tried to install SELinux but I failed. And when I asked on the forums and on the mailing list, I got not very satisfying answers and felt like I got hit by the infamous pseudo-elitism of the Arch-community. Henceforth I thought I try a redhat-system. CentOS is a bit too stable for me and I want regularly new packages. So I decided to go Fedora.

It has a nice installer which worked out of the box. I could use my full encrypted disk and keep my home-directory. After installation I got booted into Gnome which is ok. I like Gnome but I prefer tiling window managers nowadays. When I opened a terminal and typed vim, I got my first surprise. vim wasn’t available but I got offered that it is available in this and that package and if I want to install it. I did and it got installed. Neat. DNF, the package manager of Fedora, is quite nice. I really like that when I remove software dependencies from that software get usually removed as well. What I don’t like is the available software in the repositories. You need extra repos for non-free software (like codecs with patents), I need to google for a way to install software and sometimes it takes quite some time etc. I really miss the AUR. And I didn’t know that a lot of sotware is available for debian-based distros, but not so much for rpm-based distros. Another problem I didn’t expect was that I had now older software than before with Arch and that this could become a problem. I do encrypted backups with Backintime. For the encryption it uses encFS. Well, Arch has encFS 1.7.5, Fedora 23 1.7.4 and that meant that I couldn’t open my backup. I googled but I couldn’t find a way to install it. Maybe if I compiled it from source. I tried Linux Brew but that stopped when there was a dependency that needed XCode. What the…‽

Then I learned to know about Fedora Rawhide which seems to be some kind of beta-channel for Fedora and is closer to a rolling distribution. But when I wanted to switch to it, I would have lost Handbrake and the repo I am using offers only packages for Fedora 23. Probably it is for the better.

Another problem I had was with Japanese input. It was a lot of hassle and I thought it is the beginning of the 2000s. According to the internet it should have been easier, but it wasn’t for me. さて、 今日本語を入力できます[footnote]Well, now I can type in Japanese.[/footnote]。

Other small things are that I switched my login-shell to zsh but all the terminal emulators didn’t respect that and that some packages or the software they provide have strange names. For example the package that provides gvim (graphical vim) is called vim-X11. Or I installed “rxvt-unicode-256color-ml” because I wanted a urxvt with 256color-support. It isn’t started with urxvt like I am accustomed to but with urxvt256c-ml. And I wondered what went wrong when my mutt complained about missing colors. I understand the reason because then you can have standard urxvt also installed, still it is a bit weird imho.

So far, it doesn’t sound well. But, and here is a but again, there is some stuff I really enjoy. Using SELinux is a breeze. There are great tools that show you that something went wrong and how to fix it. IPtables is installed and pre-configured. There is a graphical tool to configure it further and it makes it really easy, even if you have no knowledge about IPtables. I like DNF as a package manager so far. Easy to use, good search, I like that it also removes unneeded dependencies by default etc. Fedora also uses Gnome-software which is like an App Store for Linux-software. It looks really nice and is easy to use. I will not really need it, since I like the command line but for browsing and finding new software it is nice.

I will need more time to get to a final conclusion. Thanks to the AUR Arch feels a bit more easier to use for me. But I like that I have now a more secure system. And I can experiment with stuff on my home machine I can later use at my job. Arch is nice for a desktop but I’d never install it on a server. There it will always be CentOS or Debian I guess…or some BSD. Thus for the time being I will stay with Fedora and I wonder how the upgrade to 24 will work out.

Some more experiences one week later.

When switching to Linux over a year ago I decided originally that I use Mint. But when I read about the suggested upgrade path which essentially said that you should re-install on each distribution upgrade, I searched for another solution. And that’s how I found distributions with a rolling release cycle. Most distributions release a major version of their distribution and between those major releases updates usually contain mainly security and bug fixes. With a rolling release you get “all the time” updates and there is no major release. Right now the best known rolling release-distribution is probably Arch[footnote]and in the past Gentoo[/footnote]. But Arch is kind of intimidating since it installs only quite a minimal system and after the installation you just land in a TTY, no graphical user interface at all. In addition it seemed too bleeding edge and has a reputation for being unstable. But it has right now the best documentation in the Linux-world in my opinion[footnote]The documentation of FreeBSD is still better though.[/footnote]. So I searched for an alternative and found Manjaro. Manjaro is based on Arch but with a delay. They take the packages from Arch, test them more and apply additional patches for more stability. So far so good. When I wanted to get newer software I had to switch to more unstable repositories from Manjaro and ended up on unstable which is more or less on the level of Arch stable. I used it for months on end without getting into any trouble. So I decided to switch to Arch since I can start from anew and can have only the software installed I want. Manjaro comes with a lot of software installed to be more comfortable to use.

The installation was surprisingly easy. I use full disk encryption. After finding a guide it was easy to install. Since I keep /home on a separate volume, I could keep it and needed only to install the base system. The fstab, the file that tells the system which volumes to mount, was not generated in a way that I could boot at first. But after a little bit of fiddling[footnote]I had to move from UUIDs to mapping the LVM-volumes.[/footnote] I could boot. And after that I only had to install the stuff I needed. I used my old config files for Xorg which were already customized for my system. And in a couple of hours I was up and running. Slower than with most Linux-distributions but the system has so far only the software I need.

But then I noticed something else: The system worked better. Things I couldn’t get to work in the past, I could get to work now. I am using only a window manager (i3) and not a desktop environment. Thus I have to get stuff to work because some comforts are missing in comparison to using KDE, Gnome, Xfce, LXDE or whatever. In the past I had to start pcmanfm to automount the attached USB-hard disks. With Arch I suddenly could get udisks to work as it should work. So automounting happens now on boot and I don’t need to start pcmanfm anymore. In the past I never could get my bluetooth headset to work with my computer. It might connect but directly disconnect or no audio reached the headset etc. I tried a lot but it just didn’nt work. Today I tried it again with Arch. After 10 minutes there was audio coming out of my headset. Some AUR-packages[footnote]AUR stands for Arch User Repository.[/footnote] were problematic or didn’t work at all. Now I have no problems at all so far.

I will see how stable my system will be and if anything breaks. But so far using Arch is a real improvement over Manjaro. But Manjaro gave me an entry to the world to Arch that eased me into it. Thus I am happy now to using Arch, but I am grateful for projects like Manjaro or Antergos for being an entry-point to distributions like Arch.

Since I switched from OS X to Linux, one of the questions I get asked now and then is whether I would switch back. Since recently I clearly said that I would switch back to OS X and iOS if my income situation would change that I could afford it again. But recently my opinion is changing. When I get to hear that people are forced to upgrade from 10.6 to a more recent version of OS X because iOS got updated to iOS9. And iOS9 syncs only with a version of iTunes that doesn’t run on OS X 10.6. Thus one user I know had to upgrade and move away from the apps he still used with Rosetta and had to buy newer versions. Another user has an old MacBook that doesn’t run anything newer than 10.6. Thus she would need to abandon her working laptop and get a new one for things like syncing music to her iPhone. Hint: the user won’t get another iPhone. Then there are problems like the user where I couldn’t get Mail.app to work again and moved the user over to MailMate, reports that OS X gets more and more annoying about updating which sounds like Windows to me[footnote]Yes, I know updates are important but for example updating to an 10.X.0 can be problematic.[/footnote], stuff like not allowing an app with video content about IT-security into the AppStore for the AppleTV etc etc.

In addition I see more and more value in using F/OSS. If I want to I can get the source code and fix a bug myself. I am most of the time not able to, but I have the possibility. And that’s in addition to having software that is free as in beer[footnote]From time to time I donate money to software projects I use a lot.[/footnote]. I also have no real problems with my setup. Even though I am using a rolling distribution, it just works as long as I do not get “creative”. And if I do not like the desktop environment/window manager I am using now, I can try another one[footnote]But i3 is really awesome and I try from time to time stacking/compositing window managers/Desktop environments and return to i3 after a short while.[/footnote]. I have also a bigger choice in hardware, even though it will be hard for you to move me away from X-Series Thinkpads ;) I can buy good serviceable hardware for cheap as used computer, I can build up my own computer from parts or I can buy some high end new shit and nowadays most stuff already works with Linux. A lot has happened in the last 10 years. I can use the same operating software for my servers, my raspberry pi and my own machine. Even though I will use different distributions. Thanks to systemd distributions got more similar in handling them. And that is great. More and more I think that if I could get those 1500€ for a new computer, I might spend it on a Thinkpad X250 and not a MacBook Air/Pro. And don’t let us get started about docking stations. I love mine. It is so awesome to move my laptop around and when I am at home, I connect it to my docking station and it gets connected to two external displays, several hard drives, a DVD-drive[footnote]Which I still need regularly for getting movies cheap or for childrens movies[/footnote] and my ergonomic keyboard and the vertical mouse. With my MacBook Air this was quite cumbersome and involved a chain of USB-Hubs…

Btw. it is similar now for my Android-phone. My LG G4 is awesome and I really do not see a point why I would want to switch to a current iPhone for loads of more money. Games would be the only reason and because of time constraints I play less and less and I have more than enough games on my pile of shame.

Yesterday I’ve got rid of a to do I had for months in my list: converting my crontab to systemd timers. Once the timers are set they can be controlled via systemctl, log to journald, systemctl –user shows if something failed and systemctl –user list-timers shows a list of your timers, when they ran the last time and when they will run the next time. It is great. But since I am not a pro when it comes to systemd I had a hard time figuring out how I get systemd timers to run for my personal context. For example I am using mutt with isync[footnote]isync is far better than offlineimap. It is faster and uses a less ressources but it is imho harder to configure because it is not as widely used as offlineimap. But the developer is very helpful on the mailing list.[/footnote] and for getting automatically my mails, I run several cron jobs or now timers.

After a lot of googling and try and error, this is my solution. There is probably a way to do it more elegant and more efficient, but this works for me.

In ~/.config/systemd/user you have to create two files per job. One file is the service-file, the other one the timer-file. For example myjob.service and myjob.timer.

myjob.service looks something like this:

[Unit]
Description=This is my job I want to run

[Service]
Type=simple
ExecStart=/home/user/bin/some_shell_script.sh foo bar

[Install]
WantedBy=default.target

myjob.timer looks something like this:

[Unit]
Description=Run my job every 6 minutes
RefuseManualStart=no #I can manually start the timer
RefuseManualStop=no #I can manually stop the timer

[Timer]
Persistent=false #when it is true systemd stores when the timer was last run and when the machine boots up after a long time, it will automatically catch up onto this timer if it should have run in the meantime
OnBootSec=80 #how many seconds after the boot should it run the first time
OnCalendar=*:0/20 #I will explain that later
Unit=myjob.service

[Install]
WantedBy=timers.target

OnCalendar takes different arguments which define when the timer runs. You can do stuff like “hourly” or “weekly” or “*:0/20” will run the timer every twenty minutes. The times that can be used by timers are explained in systemd.time(7).

After you created both files, you should start at first your service to find out, if it will run or fail and you need to debug:

systemctl --user start myjob.service

When it runs succesfully:

systemctl --user start myjob.timer
systemctl --user enable myjob.timer

The man-pages you want to read regarding timers are systemd.timer(5) and systemd.time(7).

This is really a quick and dirty-solution and I bet there is a far more elegant way to solve this, but this way I could convert my complete crontab and it is working.

Here are the sources I used to figure out how to get the stuff to work:

• https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Systemd/Timers
• https://mjanja.ch/2015/06/replacing-cron-jobs-with-systemd-timers/
• http://krisko210.blogspot.de/2014/06/replacing-crontab-with-systemd-timers.html
• http://jason.the-graham.com/2013/03/06/how-to-use-systemd-timers/

The #Gamergaters have a new hashtag: #IstandwithLinus. As everyone knows who read stuff from conferences or mailing lists where Torvalds speaks or writes, he seems too be a pretty big asshole. He created the Linux Kernel and for this I am grateful. It is an awesome project and helped to get free software a huge momentum.

But that does not justify that he is an asshole.

#IstandwithLinus apparently found its way onto Twitter because Torvalds explained that he does not really care about diversity and people once again called him out on it. And thus the #Gamergaters had found a new hashtag. And oh wonder, it is again about trashing women and trying to find ways to fight people who think we left the 50s and 60s behind us and not about ethics in game journalism. And they do it with the same means: they dox people, they threaten people and try to get to them in the meatspace. Just read the twitter-timeline of @Shanley.

The sad thing people like Torvalds or RMS[footnote]Richard Ms. Stallman[/footnote] probably do not care about it, so they won’t speak about it. I wonder if at least organizations like the Linux Foundation or the FSF will speak out or some other big FS/OSS-projects. Otherwise it is once again just a sad example how broken the open source-community is. Diversity is important and not being an asshole in social matters is important as well. It is astounding that people still develop for the Kernel while the project leader is just uncouth.

Who wants to know about why diversity is important, I can recommend this presentation by Lena Reinhard:

www.youtube.com/watch

If you like Linux and free software you shouldn’t use the hashtag #IstandwithLinus. It just is another synonym for #Ihatewomen. You are hurting the whole project more than you do good. Actually you are doing no good at all, you just hurt Linux.

Recently I switched to Linux. At first I used Linux Mint but it’s philosophy that there shouldn’t be dist-upgrade but a clean install every six months was not very comforting. Then I heard about Manjaro in an episode of Going Linux about Sonar GNU/Linux. Sonar is a distribution which is specialized for disabled people and they just switched from some distribution to Manjaro. In the episode I heard phrases like “Manjaro does for Arch what Ubuntu does for Debian”. Quite a claim. And since Arch is a rolling release and thus I didn’t have to worry about dist-upgrades anymore and Manjaro is based on Arch but in user-friendly, I gave it a try. Right on the frontpage of the Manjaro-website they boast there is the following sentence in big fat letters:

"Professional and user friendly Linux at its best."

Sounds great, so I tried it for a short time and my laptop worked with it fine. Thus I decided to abandon the Mint-install and switch to Manjaro and stay with it. I do not want to waste time with switching distributions, even so it is tempting.

Unfortunately Manjaro is user friendly for various degrees of user friendly. Let’s compare it to other distributions, I would call user friendly like Mint or Ubuntu[footnote]Ok, Mint is based on Ubuntu, so well…[/footnote]. I installed Mint and everything worked out of the box. I connected my external hard drives and could read and write to them, I connected my secondary display and in contrast to OS X it directly detected the correct resolution, if I needed some software, I could usually find a deb-package except Gnome Shell, stuff like i3 worked like I would expect it from the manual etc.

Then I started to install Manjaro. I know that it does not yet have reached the state of a 1.0 but it boasts to be user friendly. The graphical installer couldn’t be used by me because when I chose English as UI-language, I couldn’t choose a German locale. Thus I used the command line-based installer which is menu-driven. It worked but I needed the help of Google to set it all up with an encrypted hard drive. I ended up with an XFCe-desktop like I expected. Then I installed Gnome3 because that is actually the desktop I wanted to use and missed from Mint. That worked but suddenly the splash-screen was messy and when I switched to the TTYs I could see parts of the splash screens. The only way I could get rid of it, was to edit my grub-file, thus the splash-screen doesn’t show up anymore.

I tried using the graphical install-tool called Pamac which also supports AUR. AUR are the Arch User Repository. As far as I understand it there are official repositories but those have not a lot of software. So users can add new software via the AUR and with the package manager of Arch, you can easily install them. Unfortunately Pamac had quite often the problem that when I tried to install more than one package from the AUR or had to install dependencies, then it usually stopped working. But I could never got it fail consistently enough to write a bug report. Henceforth I abandoned it and started using the command-line tool called pacman. And learned how to use AURs. Later I found out about yaourt and packer which made my life easier. But really user-friendly is something else.

For more fun: I just learned about how to remove orphans with pacman in manjaro and it just removed git from my system.

Next thing: I installed vim. And when I installed it, it was quite a recent version, nothing like the old stuff Mint gives you (350 patches behind or so). There I had to compile my vim from hand to get something fairly recent. When I opened the first time a markdown-file my vim gave me errors that it is not compiled with python. Thus I had to google and found out that I have to install gvim because the vim-version just gives you a watered-down version and only gvim is compiled with (probably nearly) everything possible. Why? An Ubuntu or CentOS have for example various vim-packages like vim-tiny, vim, vim-gnome etc. So you can quite easily see what you get. I just wondered why my vim won’t work with python and had to google again. Please Manjaro, be friendlier to the user and tell her straight what she gets.

When I wanted to dip my foot into i3, I found a meta-package called i3. I thought that this is great and easily installed. Then I started i3, pushed win+d which should call up dmenu and nothing happened. I really wondered what the problem is. Searched the i3-manual and yes, that should call up dmenu. Well, dmenu wasn’t installed. The i3-meta package handles dmenu as optional because it isn’t required to install dmenu to run i3, even so the i3-user manual on the i3-website prominently speaks about dmenu. When you offer something like a meta-package, you shouldn’t offer a piece of software that is mentioned in the manual of that software only as an optional install but just install it. I didn’t install i3-wm, I installed i3. Yes, I oversaw that dmenu is optional but it shouldn’t be optional in the i3-package but should be included.

When I installed Openbox, it was pretty barebones, too. I expected the full experience since there is a Manjaro-edition with Openbox but nope, not really. And I cannot even find packages that give me a decent configuration.

After installing Gnome 3 I had to set up by myself that the laptop suspends when the lid gets closed. It is configured correctly in XFCe, so why don’t they apply configurations like this to other desktop environments as well?

My secondary display is not detected correctly and shows the same problem as in OS X. Now I have to figure out, how I get it to work in 1280x768 :(

But my absolute favorite is how Manjaro handles external hard drives. I have several disks that are formatted with ext4 and several with HFS+. When I connected the ext4-disks in Mint, I could just use them. Manjaro mounts them by default with user root and group root and the permissions that only they can write to them. Asking in the forums just led to what I could find easily: change by hand on the command line owner and permissions. I know that I can configure it somehow with udev and udisks. But why do I have to? Manjaro claims to be user friendly. It should work as a user expects it who comes from user friendly distributions or beware from Windows or OS X.

I do not expect behavior like that what I described above from Arch or Gentoo. Those distributions are not aiming to be user friendly in my opinion. But Manjaro states that it is. Thus the distribution developers/maintainers should think about the needs of true users. Right now Manjaro is like Arch but at least you have a ready available desktop environment and some applications after installing it. That makes it a bit more user friendly but it is far from user friendly.

I really like Manjaro. It is some work and I have to tinker and learn more about my system. And things work mostly the way I want them to work[footnote]There are some pieces of software I cannot get to work but I had the same problem on Mint with other pieces of software like Gnome 3.[/footnote] but I would not dare for example to install it on the laptop of my brother-in-law who asked to install Linux instead of Windows on his new used laptop. There I installed Ubuntu since I know from several non-technical persons that they have no real problems with it and could fix their problems easily. With Manjaro, well, I do not waste my time on more inner-family-support calls. But I will keep it on my laptop.

I had the problem that just using fprintd on my system as an authentication-method lead me to a state where I always had to input my fingerprint or fail three times until I could finally type my password. In the pam.d-config-files not fprintd should be used but fingerprint-gui. That works then also for the TTYs and when you have registered several fingers, you can use them all and not only your right index-finger for authentication. There is an Arch-How To for this: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Fingerprint-gui

As you maybe know I switched recently to Linux and Android and lived before that the Apple-Lifestyle. I had a 2011 MacBook Air, an iPhone 4S and an iPad[footnote]which I still have and use[/footnote]. So I really could see what Jobs meant with his e-mail when he wrote”tie all of our products together, so we further lock customers into our ecosystem”.

This is only a critique about Apples way locking someone in. That doesn’t say others do not try the same. Google tries to get you into their eco-systems or Amazon wants you to lock you into the Kindle-ecosystem. Therefore Google can show you more ads and Amazon can sell you more Kindle-books etc. But their lockin-strategy involve to be ubiquitous thus I can at least change the manufacturer of my laptop or my phone. Yes, I know Apple is in the hardware-selling business but not being able to change hardware and operating systems is in my experience worse than having several apps for reading ebooks on my device.

So, let’s start.

iCloud

I’ve seen more and more applications adopting iCloud as a medium to share documents between devices. Usually you need the same applicaiton on all your devices. Like iA Writer on the iPhone and iA Write on the Mac and the iPad to get to those documents. So if you saved your documents to iCloud, you won’t be able to get them onto another operating system.

Contacts and Calendars

Apple uses Caldav and Carddav, standards, to synchronize calendars and contacts between devices. It should be easy to get read/write-acces to them, right? Right? Nope. You can share a caldav-URL easily but that is read-only. If you want to give someone write-access, you can do this only easily when they are also in the Apple-ecosphere. And I cannot remember having something similar available for Contacts at all. Sure you can export all the data and get ics-files for your calendars and vcs-files for your contacts but I cannot use iCloud easily. And I need to use iCloud for syncing because I am doing stuff together with people and we are all accustomed to use the the Apple-service.

Fortunately some other people wrote software to get those URLs[footnote]A solution for desktop-computers is here. For syncing iCloud-calendars on Android you need iCloud Sync for Android and for syncing contacts you need Sync for iCloud Contacts. Or if you have already the URLs you can probably, just use apps for adding caldav- and carddav-support to Android which makes it a more general approach.[/footnote] but you have to find that first.

iTunes

iTunes won’t let you sync music to other devices than iOS-devices and iPods, everybody knows that. And getting your music collection onto those devices iTunes is the only way to use. Btw. I know several people who switched away from iOS-devices or wouldn’t get one because they dislike iTunes or cannot use it for some reason like using Linux.

And iTunes Match is only usable with iTunes and iOS-devices. It’s nice to have but when I thought about switching, I didn’t want to give up that functionality. Contenders have at least software for iOS and Android to make that possible.

And then there is the DRM. It is not necessarily Apples fault but the content industry that wants DRM. But if I do not have iTunes available, I cannot legally watch the video-content I aquired licenses for. Yep, I am into buying DVDs[footnote]And maybe sometime in the future Bluerays but HD doesn’t give me enough bang for the buck that I will start using Blueray in the near future.[/footnote] again.

Podcasts.app

I checked it today and couldn’t find any way to export podcasts. To be honest it is the only podcast-app on iOS that I know that doesn’t allow exporting subscriptions as opml. But afaik it works great together with all the other Apple-products.

Update: You can export your list of podcasts from iTunes and you can sync the app with iTunes. But you cannot export a list of podcasts right from the podcast-app on the iPhone.

Apple TV

Nice device, if you are living the Apple-lifestyle. Step away from the path and it becomes pretty useless afaik.

Facetime and Messages

Oh, you want to use Messages or facetime with someone who doesn’t have an Apple-device? That’s your problem. All the people you know have iOS-devices, but you don’t? Well you can’t use what they might be accustomed to.

Apps

This is actually a problem of all operating systems and ecosystems. But this was a reason for years for not even thinking about switching to another mobile OS. I just spent too much money on apps, that I won’t be able to use anymore. This was really hard to overcome in my mind.

The Future

Thinking about upcoming releases and the lock in, Continuity comes to mind. The feature in which you can start working on something on your computer and seemlessly continue to work on it on your iOS-device. Sounds great, but moving away from Apple and that feature will be lost.

Conclusion

Using only Apple-products is great. Everything works pretty much seamlessly together but moving away one step and a lot of things just break. Thus Apple really tries to get you to use their new features, so you integrate them into your workflows. And when you use only Apples products and some of their third-party-developers like Omni, you are becoming dependent on them and cannot switch easily to anything else. After all you have to rethink how you get things done at the end of the day. With using those features you gain some utility but also loose a bit of freedom of choice in the future.

I don’t have a grudge against Apple that they are doing what they are doing. It is an important strategy to get more sales. But I see often complains about other companies that try to lock you in, but Apple mastered it imho.

When I installed the Android Developer Studio and started it, I got the message that OpenJDK has performance issues and that one should install the JDK/JRE by Oracle. Oracle offers only tar-balls and rpms, thus I needed to find a way to install it. Thanks to Google the solution wasn’t far away but for making it easier findable for me, I post the way I did it in the end here as well in a more generalized way.

Download the JDK from Oracle, then start by removing OpenJDK:

sudo apt-get update && apt-get remove “openjdk”

Then go to your downloads-directory and untar the tar.gz (tar -xzvf jdk-$version)

Create a folder in /opt for the jdk:

sudo mkdir -p /opt/java

Move the JDK to the folder:

sudo mv ~/Downloads/jdk$version /opt/java/

Make the JRE and JDK the default sudo update-alternatives –install “/usr/bin/java” “java” “/opt/java/jdk$version/bin/java” 1

sudo update-alternatives –set java /opt/java/jdk§version/bin/java

sudo update-alternatives –install “/usr/bin/javac” “javac” “/opt/java/jdk$version/bin/javac” 1

sudo update-alternatives –set javac /opt/java/jdk§version/bin/javac

After my switch from iOS to Android, I switched now from OS X to Linux. I wrote already about my reasons for switching. I switched in 2004 from Linux to OS X because my laptop got stolen and I needed a new one. My requirements were a unix-style operating system where I have nothing to do to make it work and a small laptop with great battery runtime. The iBook 4G 12” was the best in that regard back then. Last year I tried my luck with running Linux for 30 days and talked about it in some podcast-episodes of mine. The short version: running Linux from a USB-stick on a MacBook Air is not a very bright idea to get to know if Linux is any good. It works somehow, but not well.

But in the last couple of months or maybe it is a process which went already for a year or longer, I moved more and more of my workflow to open source-tools that are also available on Linux. The last things that were a problem were my iPhone, OmniFocus and 1Password. Since I switched now to Android, the iPhone is no problem anymore. Because the OmniFocus-client I tried on Android wasn’t good enough, but the todotxt-client (Cloudless) was really good, I switched my todo-workflow over to todo.txt. So the next hurdle was gone. And then I found out that you can run 1Password 4 in wine with working browser-extensions. So somehow the most important parts should work. I thought several times about switching to Linux but thought that I actually like my MacBook Air and have no real issues with OS X, so there is no good enough reason for it. But then one of the laptops in our household is on the verge of dying and a new Apple-computer is just too expensive right now. So I decided to go for a used Thinkpad X201. I added a 250GB SSD, got me a docking station and will get a 9-cell-battery in the near future. That is still cheaper than a used MacBook Air and far cheaper than a new laptop.

This blog post is about my experiences with getting the laptop up and running to a state that I want to and can work with. You will find some advice, links and nice software I found.

Installing Linux and first software

I started out with installing Mint 17. Why Mint? Well it is partly the fault of @tante. I asked him what I sould use: Ubuntu, Mint, Arch or Gentoo and his anser was Mint. Arch and Gentoo are closer to the bleeding edge and need more maintenance and Ubuntu is often a bad fork according to him. And what I read in the past it seems that Ubuntu goes more and more its own ways and therefore might get shunned from the community. The latter one is just my own concern. Installing Mint on the X201 was a breeze. It installed and every piece of hardware in the laptop worked out of the box. When I put the laptop into the docking station, everything continued to work and even using a secondary display over the display port worked. My secondary display is an old TFT-TV which I got only correctly to work with OS X with the help of SwitchResX and fiddling around. With Mint, it worked out of the box. So far so good.

Installing software was mainly no problem. Steam was installed fast and it didn’t need long until I could play my first games of VVVVVV, Super Hexagon, Super Meat Boy and Shadowrun Returns on my Linux-machine. In comparison to the past, I could suddenly play the games I want to play problem free on Linux. What a blast.

The version of vim is something like 300 patches behind in the repositories of Mint, so I had to compile it by myself. That was rather easy by following a guide called Building Vim from Source.

Let the fun begin

And then I started with the not so easy stuff. I wanted carddav-sync for syncing my contacts between my phone, my laptop and owncloud. I needed caldav-sync with calendars from iCloud, I wanted emulation of retro-console- and arcade games, I need Japanese input, I want to use mutt instead of a GUI-mail client, I need 1Password etc.

Syncing Carddav with owncloud

There are two ways I got cardday-syncing to work. But first you need the correct URL from Owncloud. I got the working one from logging into my owncloud, going to contacts and then push in the lower left corner the button for the Carddav-Link (a small globe). Mine looks like:

owncloud.foo.bar/remote.ph…

And after getting that, which was actually the hard part because I couldn’t find it and googled which led to lots of wrong results, it was easy to get it working.

Number one is Evolution. There you can add a new addressbook with your credentials and the link and then it just worked for me. Number two is pycarddav. That worked as well, but I have no idea yet, how to get stuff into it. But at least I can pull my addressbook. I have a cronjob that runs it every 10 minutes. And with pycarddav I have an easy way to get completions for addresses in mutt.

I cannot recommend Thunderbird for syncing with carddav because Thunderbirds sync can only pull one e-mail-address from a carddav-addressbook per user. And if there are multiple addresses, it will choose one randomly.

Syncing calendars from iCloud

My wife is still all Apple and we need shared calendars, so I haven’t have a look yet how owncloud works with multiple users, calendar sharing and I remember only that it wasn’t that easy to get it to sync with OS X and iOS. So we still use iCloud for our calendars. The problematic part was again finding out the right URLs. I used a software from http://icloud.niftyside.com/ which I installed on my Uberspace. It was just unpacking it into a directory of the webserver and visiting the site. Then entering my credentials and I got all the URLs. There is even a URL for carddav, so you might even be able to sync your contacts with iCloud.

I am using again Evolution to sync my calendars. It works fine.

mutt and offlineimap

I had already settings which worked quite well but needed a bit of fixing up. I followed mainly The Ultimate Guide to Mutt to get everything to work. The only real problem I had in the end was getting offlineimap working as a cronjob. I ended up putting my passwords into the .offlineimaprc because I just couldn’t get Gnome Keyring to work with a cronjob and only the pure offlineimap-command worked in a cronjob. When I used for example “offlineimap -q -f INBOX -u quiet”, it didn’t work. Only “offlineimap -u quiet” (or whatever interface you want) works for whatever reason. I added hooks for Mairix in offlineimap and added a keybinding in mutt for doing a fast-sync of the inboxes, when I see on my phone that mail arrived and I am too curious.

Emulation

In the beginning it looked a bit desperate in terms of emulation. I only found command line emulators and had problems getting everything to work. But then I found solutions. a) Nintendo-consoles (NES, SNES, GBC, GBA): Higan which is in the repos of Mint 17. b) Sega-consoles (Master System, Game Gear, Mega Drive/Genesis + CD + 32X): Kega Fusion which I needed to install from the site

For arcade games you can search for MAME and for the rest you might have to use a command line-client.

If you use an XBox360-pad there is a better driver than the built-in one which is called xboxdrv. If you need to map your joypad to keyboard-buttons there is the tool QJoyPad which does it. It is a bit weird to use, but it works.

The rest

The easiest way to get Japanese input working was ibus with anthy. As dictionary software I am using gjiten and installed additionally the wadoku in the edict-format.

For syncing I am using Bittorrent-Sync which has nowadays a nice GUI-tool in Linux as well: Linux Desktop Gui Unofficial Packages For Bittorrent Sync.

I am accustomed to have escape and control on my caps-lock-key. Control for key-combinations, escape when I just press it. This is great when you use vim a lot. For getting this mapping to work, I use xcape. This works only in X, but on my private laptoop I am most of the time in the GUI anyways.

For getting 1Password to work, I have a blog-post for you. If you are a YNAB-user, it works fine in Linux with wine as well.

After testing out several Twitter-clients in Linux, I ended up using the Chrome-app of Tweetdeck which works quite well. For App.net there is Cauldron which works as good as on Windows and OS X.

For music I am using Google Music All-Access in combination with the Nuvola Player. With that player I get native integration into the desktop with Google Music, at least as native as it gets with Flash in the app. I get notifications for song changes and can use the media keys of my keyboard.

My GUI-client for todo.txt is DayTasks which is better than the other clients I tested. It is quite nice, when I do not want to use the command line interface of todo.txt.

The only thing which I did not figured out yet is a workflow for creating screencasts for Let’s Plays. There is ScreenStudio but this didn’t really work in an initial test. And from time to time Cinnamon just freezes - everything freezes except the cursor. Restarting X helps but this is not really satisfying. I did not yet find out what the reason might be.

Conclusion

So far I am positively surprised. The hardware worked out of the box and the laptop is really neat. If I wouldn’t have certain demands, I could have started to work directly after the installation of the system. The system is really fast, the fans are not too loud, when I am running tons of stuff, it seems to have lower RAM-needs than OS X and all in all it works and is pleasant to use. I enjoy having the docking station which makes live easier since I do not have to unplug my external HDDs and controllers when I take my laptop with me, but just remove the laptop from the docking station. I wonder if I stay as satisfied with this system, as I do with my Android-phone right now. Would you have told me a couple of months ago that I go from all OS X and iOS to Linux and Android, I would have laughed. But right now, everything works and is fun to use. I wonder what I will think in a couple of months once the novelty has worn off.

First: huge thanks to @thatswinnie and @PhilippeLM . Winnie for pointing me to Philippe and Philippe for pointing me to the right forum-entries and his helpful posts to get it to work in Linux with 1Password 4 and Firefox. Supposedly it works with the Chrome-extension, too.

Please take note that this solution is not officially supported by AgileBits and can probably break with any update. But let’s hope that it doesn’t.

So 1Password is a pretty popular password-manager for OS X and there is also a version available for Windows. In addition there are great companion apps for iOS and Android[footnote]I am syncing the different installations with the help of Bittorrent Sync. OTA-sync with my own infrastructure. The iOS-version gets synced via iTunes.[/footnote]. Since I have licenses for all the versions, I wanted to continue to use it on Linux. But how?

First you have to install Wine. There should be a package for it in the package manager of your distribtion. Then start Wine once, so it can configure itself.

Next up, download 1Password for Windows and open the downloaded exe. It should be opened by Wine and start the installer. Just let it do its thing. Then you have to edit the following file ~/.wine/user.reg[footnote]The reg-files are representations of parts of the windows-registry for Wine.[/footnote] for disabling browser validation. Search for [Software\AgileBits\1Password 4] and add beneath it a new entry:

“VerifyCodeSignature”=dword:00000000

Save the file, open 1Password and restart the 1Password Helper. This option is in 1Password in Help - Restart 1Password Helper.

Then you have to download and install the Browser-Add On/extension from AgileBits. Restart your browser and it should work. I had to restart the 1Password Helper once more and after that it worked flawlessly for me.

Update: I have now my real machine and couldn’t get it to work even with this manual. To get the 1Password-extension working I had to open the preferences of 1Password, had to go to the Browsers-tab and check “Unlock on Secure Desktop”. After a restart of Firefox, it worked.

I felt the need to track my old video games and I wanted to be able to do it from my smartphone and my computer. After a bit of search, I had the idea to do it with a wordpress-blog. I know that at least one other person (Hi @streakmachine) wants to do something similar, I thought it might be a good idea to explain what I am doing.

I am using a recent Wordpress. The theme I am using is called Market. The plugins I have installed are:

Then I created categories for each console I want to track games for. Other interesting data I want to easily filter for I add via tags. The title of the article is the name of the game. If it is a Japanese game it depends on which name I usually use when I talk about a game. Often this is the US-title and if it is a Japanese-game where I use the US-title usually I just add (Japanese). For each article I use now the following boilerplate text: Japanese Name: The Japanese name in Kana and Kanji with a translation. Other Names: Some games have different names per region which are commonly known. For example Seiken Densetsu is known as Final Fantasy Adventure in the US and as Mystic Quest in Europe. Release Date: YYYY-MM-DD Code: There is a code on Nintendo-modules that identify them Packaging: Do I own the packaging? Manual: Do I own the manual Battery Date: YYYY-MM - if the module has a battery it is useful to know how old is approximately Condition: I am not sure yet how I want to quantify the condition of the module, manual and packaging Genre: Which genre is the game part of. The genre is used also as a tag. Rating in tests: How was the game rated? I try to add the Famitsu-, IGN- and Video Games-rating (the last one is my favorite German videogame-magazine from back in the day) Personal Rating: a rating from 0-5 in .5-steps if I have a opinion Completed: Did I finish the game. Also added as a tag. Now you can see my pile of shame and I can think if I really need that other game. Wikipedia-article: A link to the English Wikipedia-article Language Skills: Which language skills are needed. More a service for other people Notes: Some personal notes which can grow up to a blog-article in its own rights

Then I add some tags, usually the genre and whether I completed the game or not. Maybe I should add the release year. I add this because I can search then easier for it.

With my iPhone I make a square picture of the module, packaging and manual. I add the picture with the size 300x300 to the article as a feature picture via the iPhone-app from Wordpress and put the picture on top of the article. The feature picture is needed to show it on the front page.

The last thing to mention is the archive-page which I create with the Archivist-plug in. The games are sorted by console and within that by alphabet. The entries look like this:

[archivist query=“category_name=CATEGORY-SLUG&orderby=name&order=asc”]

That’s it I think. It seems to work but at one point I’d like to add better photos. I can now easily search the games, have a look which I have, can see which I did not yet complete etc.

I tried installing the Command-T-plugin in OS X 10.9.2 with a current command line-vim installed via homebrew. When I did the make-command I got the following error:

linking shared-object ext.bundle clang: error: unknown argument: ‘-multiply_definedsuppress’ [-Wunused-command-line-argument-hard-error-in-future] clang: note: this will be a hard error (cannot be downgraded to a warning) in the future make: *** [ext.bundle] Error 1

The solution I found was to edit the Makefile in the folder ruby/command-t of the plug-in. I just commented out the ‘-multiply_definedsuppress’ in the following line: dldflags = -undefineddynamic_lookup -multiply_definedsuppress

So it looks now like this: dldflags = -undefineddynamic_lookup #-multiply_definedsuppress

after that make ran without any problems and command-t works for me. I didn’t try it with MacVim yet and there might be problems because of different ruby-versions (this is described in the manual). But I use usually the command line-version anyways.

Es schreien ja in letzter Zeit so viele “Krypto, Krypto”. Und auch wenn es nur das Aspirin gegen den Kopfschmerz des Hirntumors ist, versuche ich Krypto zu benutzen. Und dann kommen immer wieder diese Fails von gerade den Leuten, bei denen man erwartet, dass es klappen sollte. Und ich frage mich: Wenn ihr schon die ganze Zeit davon erzählt und es selbst nicht auf die Reihe bekommt, wie sollen es normale Menschen auf die Reihe bekommen?

Drei Beispiele, die mir spontan in den Kopf kommen:

• Das SSL-Zertifikat von wiki.chaosradio.ccc.de war vor einiger Zeit abgelaufen. So richtig aufgefallen ist es, weil iOS sich dann geweigert hat die Seite zu besuchen. Es hat gefühlt Ewigkeiten gedauert bis ein neues eingespielt wurde.
• Der Sub-Key von Netzpolitik.org für submit@netzpolitik.org ist abgelaufen. Mal abgesehen davon, dass ich ne Weile gebraucht habe, bis ich gerafft habe, was das Problem ist, weil der Haupt-Key eben nicht abgelaufen ist, ist das schon ein wenig peinlich. Auf die Frage an @netzpolitik gab es nur folgende Antwort: "ja, steht auf der To-Do-Liste. Bis dahin kannst Du mir direkt auch eine verschlüsselte Mail schicken."
• Ich habe heute eine Mail an ein eher öffentlich stehendes CCC-Mitglied, das den Eindruck eines Aluhuts hinterlässt und bittet, dass sein PGP-Key verwendet wird, geschrieben. Also Key importiert, verschlüsselte Mail geschrieben (und es ging auch erstmal was schief, weil die angegebene Kontaktadresse nicht im Key ist). Und was bekomme ich als Antwort? Eine signierte aber unverschlüsselte E-Mail, die den kompletten Inhalt der ursprünglichen Mail enthält. War nichts weltbewegendes, aber ernsthaft?

Jetzt mal Butter bei de Fische: Wenn es der CCC mit SSL ewig nicht hinbekommt, Netzpolitik seine Keys nicht aktuell halten kann und bekanntere Aluhut-CCC-Mitglieder auf verschlüsselte Mails mit unverschlüsselten antworten, warum sollte man dann auch nur ansatzweise annehmen, dass Otto-Normal auch nur den Hauch einer Chance hat Mittel zur Kryptographie zu verwenden und zu verstehen? Warum sollte man es überhaupt benutzen, wenn gerade die zumindest gefühlten Verfechter sich nicht mal wirklich die Mühe machen?

When writing a term paper or like now my final thesis, I need for myself to do an outline of all the notes from articles and books I am reading. In the past I used OmniOutliner for that job but I want to convert to plain text more again. Plain text just has the advantage of portability. Also I can use one editor for writing my notes and my thesis[footnote]In my case it is vim and when I understood how awesome the combination of vim+tmux is, I even converted from MacVim/gvim to vim on the cli. If you want learn vim, I can really recommend the Vimcasts and Practical Vim, both by Drew Neil.[/footnote].

Thus I have my editor open in full screen and just have a split view, left with my notes, on the right with my thesis[footnote]which I write in LaTeX, to be correct I write it with XeTeX[/footnote]. Because I am using a Bib-File for compiling my bibliography, each text has a cite-key which is kind of a unique date to identify the text. My cite-keys have the following format: firstauthorxyearyz, for example cukiermanx1992hc. So first the first author, then an x to divide author and publication year, then the publication year and then to random letters. The advantage of an x in contrast to a special character is well, it is not a special character and won’t make any trouble when using my files on other computers. For administering my bib-file I am using BibDesk which is an awesome piece of software for that and hands-down beats any other bib-application in my opinion. I have unfortunately no suggestions for good software in that regard on *BSD, Linux or Windows.

Usually I start with compiling notes by creating a file per article. Those files are just called citekey.md. And when I see the bigger picture I move to files that have a topic name and move my notes over from the specific article-files to the topic-files. I use md as an ending, even so the files are not really Markdown. But then vim will recognize it as markdown and with it, it does folding accordingly and when I want to format anything, I can do it with the very very easy to learn markdown-syntax[footnote]lists are prefixed with -, italic is word, bold is word, heading is 1 # per heading-level like ### Heading 3. That’s all you need to know for the beginning.[/footnote]

The note-format is what I had to fight the longest with but I have now an easy solution that is quite satisfying. One line just looks like this:

- [citekey][pagenumber] Text

And I use tab-stops for the indentations. Essential is that each line has the citekey and the page-information. Only with that information you can move stuff around without loosing this information for being able to cite later correctly.

Bonus Content

For reading PDFs I am using now PDF Expert on an iPad. I highlight everything interesting in a PDF, then I “share” it as an e-mail with the notes in the mail-text. On my computer I copy the text in a file[footnote]Well, I am using mutt nowadays, thus I just save the mail-body as a text-file.[/footnote] called citekey.md. After that I run a bash-script which was written by @kopischke after he saw my bad tries doing it.

#!/usr/bin/env bash declare -i pnum=${2:-1} file_name=“${1##/}” # remove path file_name=“${file_name%%.}” # remove extension page_num_re=‘^PAGE ([[:digit:]]+):’ # match “PAGE XXX”

while read -r line || [[ -n “$line” ]]; do if [[ $line =~ $page_num_re ]]; then number=${BASH_REMATCH[1]} elif [[ $line =~ ^Highlight ]]; then printf ‘%s - [%s][%i] ‘ “$line” “$file_name” $(($pnum - 1 + $number)) elif [[ $line == ‘and Note’ ]]; then printf ‘%s: ‘ ‘Note’ is_note=true else $is_note && { line=“${line#\“}”; line=“${line%\“}”; is_note=false; } echo “$line” fi done < “$1”

The bash-script is run like this:

reformat.sh basepage filename

The basepage is the page number on the first page of the PDF. PDF Expert will give you notes stating “Page 1”, “Page 2” etc, even so the article started at page 362. The result is a file that looks exactly like what I have written about above (- [citekey][pagenumber]) when the file-name is in the format citekey.md of course. In addition anytime the word and Note is found at the end of a line, it will remove the and put the word Note in the next line.

Since PDFs usually have some ugly hyphenation, I have to clean that up as well. How to do that depends on your text-editor. In vim I use the following command

:%s/.\zs- //g

This removes all “- ” that are not in the beginning of a line. And then you have rather fast a file you can work with.

I am using vim with the LaTeX-suite for writing longer texts. But I had one problem when using the \cite-completion with F9. Instead of getting one split-view with nicely formatted entries of my bib-file, I got two split-views: one with cite-keys, one with my unformatted bib-file. I could go through the cite-keys and the bib-file would jump to the right entry but that’s it. Nothing to see of functions like filtering etc.

The solution was to install vim-latex manually. I am using normally NeoBundle and used previously vundle for managing my plug-ins. But those seem to interfer with the functionality of vim-latex. So, if you run into the same problem, just de-install it with your package-manager and install it manually from Sourceforge. It is cumbersome but it works and the plug-in got updated the last time over a year ago, so missing out on updates do not seem to be that much of an issue.

P.s.: Another problem I found when googling many people seem to have is, that the cite-autocompletion won’t work when there is a space in the path to the bib-file or when there is for example a leading space in bib-entries like “@article{⎵kobschaetzkix2014gh, …”

Ich hatte ein kleines vim-Problem. Datei und Ziel sahen folgendermaßen aus:

Dazu gab es mehrere Lösungen, die alle dasselbe Ziel erreichen: :%s/.\zs- //g :% v/^- /s/- //g :%s/\%>2c- //g :%s/\v^(.+)- /\1x/g

Die diversen Leute waren sogar so freundlich auf meine Anfrage hin, mir die Sachen zu erklären. Aber irgend etwas in meinem Gehirn blockiert. Vim, Ex und RegEx kommen mir gerade wie Magie vor und ich glaube, ich weiß jetzt, wie sich Kreationisten fühlen müssen, wenn sie versuchen zu verstehen, was Evolution ist.

Vim, Ex und Regex, ich verbeuge mich vor euch und mögen eure Ninjas meine Priester sein.

Gestern schrieb ich in meinem Jahresrückblick, dass ich ein wenig unglücklich darüber bin, dass mein eines MacBook Air im fünften Jahr zerfiel und das iPhone 3GS in seinem vierten, dasselbe Schicksal erleidet. in einem Kommentar wurde mir dann vorgeworfen, wann ich denn endlich begreifen würde, dass man nach fünf Jahren einen neuen Computer und nach zweien ein neues Telefon kauft.

TL;DR

Neue Smartphones und Computer sind schön, aber wirklich brauchen tut man sie nicht.

Das neue Smartphone

Fangen wir mit dem Telefon an. Meiner Meinung nach ist ein Smartphone an sich ein Spielzeug. Natürlich ist die Funktionalität nützlich und ich möchte es auch nicht mehr missen, aber wirklich notwendig ist es nicht. Musik und Podcasts könnte ich auch mit einem Billo-MP3-Player abspielen, Kalender können auch viele Dumbphones und die Online-Funktionalität ist nett und komfortabel aber wirklich brauchen tu ich sie nicht. Viel Zeit verwende ich darauf Spiele zu spielen. Mal abgesehen davon, dass ein Billo-Android (die 100€-Kategorie) das wahrscheinlich auch erledigen könnte. Nur nicht so schön und würde sich dabei nicht so wertig anfühlen. Und in Sachen Spielen habe ich auch so einige (ältere) Handhelds, von denen immer einer in meiner Tasche ist.

Dann kommen wir mal zu dem finanziellen Aspekt. Ein 16GB iPhone 5S kostet ohne Vertrag 699€, das sind über zwei Jahre etwa 29€ pro Monat. Was kann ich mit 29€ im Monat machen. Ich könnte eine ordentliche Hose für meinen Sohn kaufen, oder ein paar Kinderhausschuhe. Es sind mehrere Tage für die Familie essen oder ein Kinobesuch plus kleines Dankeschön für den innerfamiliären Babysitter oder oder oder. Und das 24 Mal. Ich find 700€ sind eine Menge Geld, selbst wenn man sie über zwei Jahre streckt. Und warum soll ich das Telefon in die Tonne treten, wenn es noch einwandfrei funktioniert? Herje selbst mein iPhone 3G ist noch im Benutzung und die aktuelle Besitzerin ist ganz glücklich damit. Klar hätte ich gerne alle zwei Jahre, oder gar jedes Jahr das neue noch schönere iPhone. Aber ist es wirklich notwendig? Nein. Notwendig wird es erst, wenn es kaputt ist. Und selbst dann stellt sich die Frage, ob es wirklich notwendig ist. In meinen Augen ist ein Smartphone ein schönes Spielzeug und ein iPhone ist ein schönes Luxusspielzeug. Da ärgere ich mich, wenn die nach exakt zwei Jahren grundsätzlich über den Jordan gingen. Zum Glück tun sie das meist nicht.

Der neue Computer

Nun zu den Computern. Da kaufe ich aufgrund von OS X immer von Apple. Weil ich Garantie haben will, kaufe ich neu. Schauen wir, was da das neue Wunschgerät für den Haushalt kosten würde (ist nicht für mich). MacBook Pro 13” (weil das interne optische Laufwerk explizit gewünscht ist) mit 8GB RAM, 128GB SSD und Apple Care. Sind wir bei 1747,99€. Sind über fünf Jahre auch 29€. Ein MacBook Air in der Ausstattung, wie ich es neu haben würde, wäre bei 1648€. Über fünf Jahre etwa 27,50€. Meins läuft aber noch wie eine eins, ist ja auch erst zwei Jahre alt. Wobei ich bei einem Computer noch nicht einmal den finanziellen Aspekt beleuchten würde, sondern lieber auf den funktionalen eingehe.

Was mache ich mit meinem Computer? Wenn ich darüber nachdenke ist es folgendes:

• Texte schreiben mit vim
• Texte kompilieren mit TeX
• ab und zu einen Word Prozessor wie Pages, Word oder Writer verwenden
• Tasks verwalten
• Webdienste wie Fever, app.net, Twitter benutzen
• im Web browsen
• PDFs lesen
• einen EDICT-Client nutzen
• Bibtex-Dateien verwalten
• Mails abrufen
• Musik hören und verwalten
• ebooks verwalten
• Spreadsheets verwenden
• Podcasts aufnehmen
• Spiele spielen, teils neu oftmals via Emulator
• Remote auf andere Rechner per SSH, RDP oder Teamviewer zugreifen
• Photos verwalten

Sicherlich sind da noch ein paar andere Kleinigkeiten dabei, die alle nicht die Rechenleistung eines Core i5 benötigen und nicht weniges davon könnte ich sogar direkt auf der Kommandozeile machen, was dann so gut wir gar keine Ressourcen mehr benötigt.

Ein Bekannter von mir macht fast alles das mit einem zehn Jahre altem Aldi-Rechner, der nie aufgerüstet wurde und Windows XP. Wir überlegen aktuell, ob wir die Kiste auf eine Linux-Distribution mit geringen Anforderungen umsatteln. Als ich ihn das letzte Mal sah, meinte er aber, dass sie wieder gut läuft, nachdem er Acrobat 11 runterwarf und sich nen PDF-Viewer runtergeladen hat, der sehr simpel ist.

Mein zweiter eigener Rechner war aus der Not geboren. Mein Laptop war irreparabel kaputt, die Garantie futsch und ich hatte so gar kein Geld. Also habe ich ihn mir selbst zusammengebaut mit dem was wirklich notwendig war und der lief super. Klar, die neuesten Spiele gingen nicht, aber ich konnte super für die Uni damit arbeiten, im Web surfen und auf Emulatoren spielen. Weil ich ihn nach mehreren Jahren selbst nicht mehr nutzte, hatte ich ihn verschenkt an jemanden der überhaupt keinen Rechner hatte und dem der Rechner ausreichte.

An sich könnte ich all das was ich mache, auch auf einer alten Kiste umsetzen, es ist eher der Komfort und das Bedürfnis nach einer schönen glänzenden Kiste, die fix ist, dass ich einen neuen Rechner will. Ich habe in der Vergangenheit schon häufig alte Kisten wieder flott gemacht und damit gearbeitet. Denn für das was ich sie brauche, reicht in der Regel was altes. Das einzige wofür ich einen aktuellen Rechner brauche sind HD-Filme und halbwegs aktuelle Spiele. Mein Pile of Shame ist aber so groß, dass ich die nächsten Jahre an sich mit Spielen beschäftigt sein kann, ohne etwas neues zu kaufen. Warum soll ich mir alle fünf Jahre einen neuen Rechner kaufen? Wofür? Es ist einfach nicht notwendig. Und wenn ich mir einen neuen Rechner kaufe, kann ich einen funktionierenden alten Rechner immer noch für andere Dinge verwenden. Sei es ein Rechner zum rumspielen mit Linux- und BSD-Distributionen, als Heimserver oder als Geschenk an ein Kind oder Bedürftige in der Verwandtschaft oder Bekanntschaft, die froh sind, dass sie überhaupt einen funktionierenden Computer haben. Ich sehe nicht ein, dass es ok sein soll, dass Computer nach fünf Jahren (oder noch schneller) kaputt gehen und sie dann nicht reparabel sind. Das Bedürfnis mit OS X arbeiten zu wollen und was kleines leichtes haben zu wollen, lässt mir leider keine andere Option als einen nicht wartbaren Computer zu kaufen. In der Not könnte ich aber auch in den sauren Apfel beißen und mir ein altes Thinkpad zulegen, ne SSD (so lang SATA drin ist) reinstecken und die Sachen erledigen, die ich erledigen will. Nicht so komfortabel und shiny, aber es ginge.

Der Bedarf sich alle paar Jahre ein neues Telefon oder Rechner zuzulegen, ist doch hauptsächlich der Bedarf ein neues, glänzendes, hübsches Gerät haben zu wollen und nicht, weil man dann um Längen produktiver wird und seine Arbeit so viel besser verrichten kann. Es ist schicker und dadurch besser, aber wirklich nicht notwendig.

Und wenn ich eins “in meinem Alter”, zurückgreifend auf den Vorwurf aus dem Kommentar, gelernt habe, ist es, dass man eben nicht alle fünf Jahre einen neuen Computer und alle zwei Jahre ein neues Telefon brauch. Es ist zwar schön, aber fern von notwendig.

Wurde ich heute gefragt, nachdem ich jemandem auf Twitter gefolgt bin, dem ich schon früher folgte. Da ich das oder ähnliches die letzten Tage öfter gefragt wurde, ein kurzer Blogpost zum Thema.

Ja und nein. Ja in der Hinsicht, dass ich Twitter wieder mehr benutze, nein weil ADN weiter nutze. In letzter Zeit wird es auf app.net ruhiger und mir fehlen immer mehr so einige Leute von Twitter. Ich habe es vor einiger Zeit wieder angefangen zu nutzen, weil mir bestimmter Content über Japan auf ADN fehlte und auch viele App-Entwickler ihre Support/News-Accounts nur auf Twitter befüllen. Jetzt hole ich mir nach und nach die interessanten deutschen Twitterer, die nichts mehr oder noch nie auf ADN geschrieben haben zurück in meine TL. Fertig.

Auf app.net wird es gerade um einiges ruhiger und ich lese dort auch noch gerne. Technisch ist es imho auch um einiges besser (eingebauter Sync, Links in den Posts, 2048-Zeichen-PMs, kein aufgezwunger Link-Shortener etc). Aber ich habe auch jahrelang MSN-, AIM- und Yahoo-Accounts in meinen Messengern rumgeschleppt, weil ich einige Leute nur dort erreichen konnte. Und so geht es mir jetzt auch mit Twitter und Facebook. Manche Leute kann ich nur auf Twitter lesen (und da bekommt man den Kram nicht mal ordentlich per RSS mehr raus) und andere nur auf Facebook kontaktieren bzw. bekomme dort schneller manche Nachrichten. Also wieder mehr Twitter und ein bisschen Facebook. Ist nicht wie ich es mir gewünscht habe, aber wenn’s nicht anders geht, dann geht’s halt nicht anders.

Geschrieben wird, wie es passt. Manches nur auf Twitter, manches nur auf ADN, manches in beiden Netzwerken. Twitter auf Deutsch, ADN auf Englisch. Und wenn mich jetzt nochmal jemand fragt, zwecks Twitternutzung, kann ich ihn oder sie hierher schicken ;)

Nur fünf Apps, hab ich bei Truhe gelesen. Die Aufgabe: Du kannst nur fünf Apps installieren auf deinem Smartphone. Welche wären das?

1. YNAB

Für meine Budgetverwaltung brauch ich schon etwas auf dem iPhone und da ich YNAB dafür verwende, ist das mobile Gegenstück natürlich die App der Wahl

2. 1Password

Mit iOS7 und der iCloud-Keychain könnte sich das evtl. erübrigen, aber aktuell habe ich halt alle meine Passwörter in 1Password und die sind derart gestaltet, dass ich sie mir nicht merken kann. Daher geht ohne 1Password nichts. Obwohl, vielleicht ginge es mit 1Password Everywhere.

3. OmniFocus

Meine Bedürfnisse in Sachen ToDo-Listen sind etwas umfangreicher und die App von Apple in dem Bereich suckt. Daher OmniFocus. Keine Lust mir irgendwas zusammenzuhacken, was ohne das mobile Gegenstück zu OmniFocus am Mac ginge.

4. hAppy

Ich benutze nur noch ein soziales Netzwerk so richtig. App.net. Und da ist hAppy auf dem iPhone einfach die App mit dem größten Funktionsumfang und deckt nicht nur den Microblogging-Teil ab, sondern auch private Nachrichten und den Chat Patter und sieht dabei auch noch brauchbar aus und hat Funktionen, damit ADN auch im Edge-Land Spaß macht. Ok, keine Push-Benachrichtigungen zu haben suckt ein wenig, ist aber verschmerzbar.

5. Anki

Meine App der Wahl zum Lernen von Vokabeln. Gibt nichts besseres unter iOS und OS X meiner Erfahrung nach, auch wenn’s hübscher sein könnte.

Zum Schluss noch die Apps, die ich wirklich vermissen würde:

• Instapaper
• Sunstroke
• Kindle
• PDF Expert
• Japanese
• Duolingo

TL;DR: Alles Mist.

Seit ein paar Wochen ist bekannt, dass die Aluhüte™ recht hatten. Die Überwachung durch Staaten findet großflächig statt. Wir wussten, dass wir freiwillig Konzernen unsere Daten übergeben. Teils ist es Wahl, teils entgeht man nur mit Aufwand der Datensammelei von Konzernen. Ich habe keine Illussion, dass Google und Facebook sehr detaillierte Profile von mir haben, auch wenn ich ausgeloggt bin. Und ich möchte nicht wissen¹, wer sonst noch so alles detaillierte Profile von mir angelegt hat.

Inzwischen weiß ich, dass vermutlich mehreren Nachrichtendienste Profile von mir erstellen könnten, wenn sie wollten. Die Zielrichtung ist nur eine andere. Statt 31, min. ein Kind, Apple-Fanboy, heißt es halt 31, informiert sich über verschlüsselte Nachrichtenübermittlung, könnte potentiell etwas zu verbergen haben.

Seitdem PRISM, Tempora und wie die Programme auch immer heißen bekannt sind, habe ich keine einzige Mail bekommen mit einer PGP-Signatur oder einem S/Mime-Zertifikat bekommen. Für mich heißt das, dass fest zumindest mit meinen Kommunikationspartnern in der Zeit niemanden gibt, der zumindest alles eingerichtet hat um Mails zu verschlüsseln. Ansonsten könnte er/sie ja signieren und ich wüsste, dass es einen öffentlichen Schlüssel gibt und ich eine verschlüsselte Mail verschicken können. Chats, die mit OTR verschlüsselt waren, hatte ich exakt einen.

Rede ich mit Leuten über die Thematik, sind sie in der Regel erbost darüber. Wobei ich aber sagen muss, dass ich noch nicht wirklich auf die Thematik angesprochen worden bin. Etwas das normalerweise passiert, wenn irgendwas böses mit Computern die Runde macht. Mein Eindruck ist, dass es den meisten weiterhin schnuppe ist, ob mitgelesen wird oder Verbindungsdaten erhoben werden. Welcher Nachteil ergibt sich auch für sie? Was soll schon passieren?

Ich bin mit Cyberpunk groß geworden. Ich habe Enemy of the State gesehen. Ich habe einen Namen, der meines Wissens nach einzigartig auf der Welt ist. Ich schreibe in der Regel mit Klarnamen. Ich bin es gewohnt damit umzugehen, dass alles was ich ins Netz schreibe in der Regel sehr einfach auf mich zurückverfolgt werden kann.

Wenn ich eine Mail schreibe, eine Nachricht per Jabber oder eine private Nachricht auf app.net, fühle ich mich allerdings unbeobachtet. Obwohl ich weiß, dass zumindest Mails durch viele Hände gehen und jeder auf dem Weg mitlesen kann. Bei Jabber und PMs liegen sie auf dem Server und dem Administrator muss ich vertrauen. Denn zumindest der kann in der Regel mitlesen, wenn er denn wollte.

Jetzt kann ich mir allerdings sicher sein, dass es Institutionen gibt, die mitlesen können, wenn sie es denn wollen. Hat sich dadurch mein Kommunikationsverhalten geändert? Nein. Ich hab zwar bei meiner Freundin Threema² installiert, aber wir benutzen trotzdem Mail, SMS und iMessages. Ich hab meinen GPG-Kram mal wieder reaktivert und könnte an sich verschlüsselte Mails schreiben. Aber mit wem?

Und selbst wenn, im Kopf sitzt es nicht drin, dass da potentiell ein gelangweilter Analyst irgendwo mitliest oder ein Tool über meine Mails geht und mich potentiell als Gefährder³ einstuft, weil ich über irgendein Rollenspiel schreibe. Und dann kommen ja noch die Verbindungsdaten hinzu. Was weiß ich, was die Leute mit denen ich auf app.net kommuniziere evtl. außerhalb des sozialen Netzwerks treiben. Ich denke, dass man in so ein Netz schneller reinfallen kann, als man denkt. Aber es ist nicht im Kopf drin. Es ist einfach zu abstrakt, zu weit weg. Das ist so ein bisschen wie in den Nachrichten das Leid in anderen Ländern zu sehen. Ja, ist schlimm, gleich fängt der Tatort⁴ an, oder? Und ich denke, so geht es den meisten.

Persönlich würde ich gerne etwas machen und habe auch all die schönen Werkzeuge zur Hand und weiß, dass ich mit BlackVPN und Tor, sowie mit GPG, OTR und was weiß ich nicht, relativ sicher⁵ kommunizieren könnte. Aber dazu gehören immer zwei und irgendwie ist es auch unbequem. Und wie oben geschrieben, kommt dazu, dass es einfach nicht im Kopf ist.

Und ja, ich habe Dinge zu verbergen. Wer nicht? Und wenn man der Meinung ist, dass man nichts zu verbergen hat, sollte man die Kreativität anderer Menschen nicht unterschätzen, die etwas draus drehen können. Evtl. reicht es ja schon aus sich verwählt zu haben.

Also was tun? Der Aussage “If You Have Something You Don’t Want Anyone To Know, Maybe You Shouldn’t Be Doing It” von Eric Schmidt folgen? Aber kann man das immer, will man das immer? Haben sie dann nicht gewonnen? Eine angepasste neutralisierte Menschheit, die das macht was Staaten und Konzerne von ihnen erwarten? Eigentlich will ich Freiheit nicht durch gefühlte Sicherheit ersetzen. Mit der ganzen Überwachung bekommen sie auch nur die dummen Übeltäter und wer weiß, ob sie die nicht auch so bekommen hätten. Gleichzeitig steigt die Zahl der False Positives.

Irgendwie ist das alles unschön und eine Lösung habe ich auch nicht. Nachrichtendienste abschaffen wäre sicherlich erstrebenswert. Aber ich denke nicht, dass es eine Lösung wäre. Es wird immer andere geben, die einen haben und den gewonnenen Informationsvorteil nutzen werden. Es ist ein bisschen wie ein Staat, in einer Krisenregion zu sein und keinerlei Militär zu haben. Selbst das laut Verfassung pazifistische Japan hat zum Einen immer unter dem Sicherheitsmantel der USA gelebt und seine Selbstverteidigungsstreitkräfte haben auch eine nicht geringe Größe.

Gleichzeitig kann man Nachrichtendienste auch nur schwer demokratisch kontrollieren. Schließlich sind Geheimnisse ihr Geschäft. Natürlich sollten sie einer parlamentarischen Kontrolle unterliegen und das Parlament besteht schließlich aus gewählten Vertretern des Volks, aber wer überwacht die Wächter? Interessant wäre natürlich, wenn sie voll transparent arbeiten würden und es dadurch keine Geheimnisse mehr gäbe, aber das führt wieder zu ganz anderen Problemen.

Wenn alle verschlüsselten und VPNs und Tor nutzten, würde man es den Überwachern sicherlich ziemlich schwer machen. Aber das ist auch eher unrealistisch. Und wenn man der einzige unter vielen ist, der sich über Verschlüsselung heraushebt, dann ist man auf einmal auch wieder interessant und es wird genauer hingeschaut.

Und gar nicht mehr privat online kommunizieren bringt’s ja auch nicht. In den USA werden jetzt schon die Verbindungsdaten von sämtlichen Briefen seit Jahren erhoben. Damit fiele das auch weg. Und Brieftauben züchten, ist jetzt auch nicht mein Ding. Und die Latenz von dem ganzen analogen Kram ist doch recht hoch.

Tja, irgendwie eine ganz schöne Zwickmühle das alles. Und am Ende steht ein Gefühl der Ohnmacht.

Last weekend I sat together with @map and we noticed the following behavior on app.net: When you send someone a private message that has his privacy settings set in a way, that the person can’t receive a message from you, then well, nothing happens. For you it look likes that they received the message, but they won’t get it.

Except one of two things is happening: * they send you a private message * they change their setting to something that they can receive a private message from you and you send her a private message

In both cases they will see all private messages sent previously.

To understand that behavior I have to get a bit technical here and since I am not a developer, I hope that I do not mess up :)

Sending someone a private message creates something called a channel. Depending on the private message-settings of the user, you have the ability to subscribe her to this channel or not. If not, the channel will be created, it will look like you both are a member of that channel but in fact only you are (at least in my tests it seemed that way).

Now my question: Why doesn’t the sender get an error message? After all for the sender it will look like you are ignoring her and not as if you cannot get the message. Which can lead to real life social problems (like people thinking you are a prick).

From what I gathered my understanding what the reasoning on app.nets side is that:

• the receiver could have a setting in place that he intentionally ignores you (like a mute)
• clients could implement it, if they wanted

Do you see already the contradiction in that argumentation?

If not, I will explain it to you. You can check if you can subscribe a user to a channel (there’s a flag for it in the user details when you ask for it called “you_can_subscribe”). If the user has privacy settings in place that she can’t receive messages from you, the flag is set to false.

Now what happens, if a user has muted you but has her private messages set up in a way that she can receive private messages from all? Well, “you_can_subscribe” is set to true, but she won’t see your message.

Well, if a client implements a check wether you can send someone a private message or not, the client would as I understand it check for “you_can_subscribe”. When the person has appropriate privacy settings in place, the flag is set to false, if not it is to true, wether or not she is muting you. Thus people who intent to ignore you will still seem to ignore you.

And now again my question: Why the hell doesn’t get the sender an error message? As in an error from the API? Clients usually have already something implemented to show you error messages - they are not always look nice, but they can do it. But the check for it, is an extra step that has to be implemented. And since they can only implement it in a way an error message from the API could show it, the API could directly throw the error. That way, when it gets implemented even clients that are not getting updated often (I look at you Netbot) could have this feature immediately. Or am I seeing something wrong here? If yes, please correct me in the comments.

If you see it similar to me, that there should be an error message thrown by the API, please write the app.net-staff.

Best chances are probably to write support@app.net and writing directly to @dalton, @berg and @mthurman. The more who write them, that this is a problem, the better the chances that it gets corrected in the API. After all, it is a network where we are the customers and which thrives not only from good clients and happy developers but also from happy users. And I know already some unhappy users because of this.

Yesterday the guys from Riposte released an update of one of their clients, which is fairly popular. Originally it cost $5, then went free and now they added an in-app-purchase for $5 for some additional “pro”-features.

Of course there were immediately some people that felt ripped off, it had a bit of bad taste for me but not for long and then there was also at several places a discussion about the Developer Incentive Program (henceforth DIP), too.

What is the DIP?

If you know what the DIP is, just jump to the paragraph after the next one. So, what is the DIP? Each month users of app.net get an e-mail from app.net to rate the usefulness of clients they used. If you are a subscriber to app.net your vote counts, if you are a user of a free tier, your vote is “just” important for the statistics. It was promised if I remember correctly that the developers will get at one point the feedback from those mails, thus the “free vote” is important here as well.

Developers can apply for their clients for the DIP and if they get accepted, any user who uses the client will get asked in the feedback-mail to rate that client. Then there is an unknown algorithm that weights the votes by the kind of API-calls the client does (specialized client or a client that does all you can think of) as far as I understood it and then developers will get a share of $30.000 (subject to change - with more users this amount will rise). That’s the DIP.

Some history

Now some recent history. Netbot got released by Tapbots and cost a certain amount of money. Everybody expected that they will be pretty succesful, since they are famous from their Twitter-client and many people still see app.net as a paid form of Twitter (which it isn’t). After some weeks they made Netbot free because sales dropped with the reasoning that they want to get more users to the platform, their client will help to do that and with more people using Netbot, they will get a bigger share of the DIP.

There was a big uproar in the community, and I have to say that I was also one of the people who didn’t like the move. After all a very popular client that will get guaranteed downloads from Twitter-switchers and it will be hard to get people use other clients. In addition Netbot makes app.net look like Twitter to them because they get the exact same experience as with Tweetbot. Therefore it might even hurt app.net.

But Netbot wasn’t the first client to be free. The first client on iOS for app.net was Rhino and that was free from the beginning. Another popular app.net-client called Rivr was free, too. It just offered an in-app purchase for push notifications. All the other clients cost money. But since they won’t attract users as easy as Netbot, it is in my opinion a bit of a different story.

After Netbot got free, Riposte, a very polished client that cost $5 got free. The reasoning was more or less: Netbot got free, our sales dropped, so we correlate that to Netbots gone free and to have a chance at all, we go free, too and hope for the DIP. Thank you all who paid, with that our push-servers are financed for quite some time.

Other clients went free as well, but none with the fanfare as Riposte (and hAppy went free and when some users complained that Felix still cost money while so many clients are free, Dominik Hauser, the Dev of hAppy began charging again for hAppy).

Double-Dipping?

Now Riposte released an update and added an IAP for $5 with some neat “Pro”-features. Naturally there were users who felt double-dipped. Others got Riposte for free and pay now $5 to get the features and they have paid after all $10 when they wanted the Pro-features. I had a bit of a bad taste in my mouth but then thought, well the first time I paid for it, I put some money in the pool for as all having push notifications with Riposte. That’s ok with me. Would be nicer if I got the features for free, but hey, it is their decision. And for people who use Riposte as their main client, then they probably use it on a daily basis. And $10 for a software I use daily is not a lot of money. Especially I have the feeling that people only feel that they get double-dipped because Riposte went in the meantime free and others get the whole package for $5 instead of $10 and so feel treated unfairly. But to be honest, how should the developers handle it? They can get their client out for free and if you really like the client, you can upgrade it. I don’t see how they could check when you bought the app, a separate app is not good, either etc. So, don’t feel double-dipped. If you don’t like it, don’t pay for it. If you think other clients are more feature-rich than use those. So why oh why all the time whining?

I think Riposte Pro looks interesting but it’s a bit hard to justify for me the payment since I have so many clients. But the features look very interesting. And it is the first time for a long time that a client could convince me to move from Felix for my day to day usage to it.

DIP - Pain or Gain?

But what about the DIP? In the Patter-room German there was a short discussion again about the DIP if it is an incentive for devs or if it hurts the platform, since it prevents further development. And now I have to come back to Netbot and Riposte going free.

One of my two majors in university is political economics (which I already finished) and there we talk a lot about incentives. The aim of an incentive is to steer people in a certain direction. The aim of the DIP, as I understand it is to steer the developers to continue to enhance their clients and try some other concepts as well. Since when they do good, they not only get a lot of usage of their apps, but also get continually money from the DIP. Since app.net determines the weighing regarding the API-usage, they could even steer developers into certain directions to develop certain clients. For example if they would be transparent in how their algorithm works, and they say now: Clients that only do a few specialized API-calls get weighted triple in comparison to a client that tries to do everything, it incentivices developers to develop specialized clients instead of a swiss army knife. If they would say API-calls for showing the stream of a users without any filters will loose some weightening, it could steer developers into a direction to not develop further clients that expose the microblogging-part of app.net.

But all that will only work, when app.net is transparent regarding their weighing. Otherwise it is just a bonus to development.

The next question is, wether only non-free clients should be included in the DIP. After all it seems that there are clients that can make some kind of a living just from the DIP. And since they are free, they have a bigger chance of broadening their usage and therefore broadening their share from the DIP. In addition they drive the prices down for other developers, since people will expect that clients are free or at least very very cheap (as in not more than 1 or 2 bucks).

I can understand that reasoning but at the same time those clients loose out on sales. When the free tier got released, I really wondered how much money Netbot could have made, if it wouldn’t have been free. Loads of the newcomers went probably straight to Netbot and would have gone there also if it wouldn’t have been free.

In addition it makes things really complicated. What do you do with clients that do some kind of promotion and go free for a day? Should they be removed from the DIP forever? What about clients that cost only $1 instead of 5? It would make the whole concept so complicated that no one could really handle it. So, I think free clients should be in the DIP as well.

Does it hinder clients from getting developed further? Well, there is the case of Netbot, which is a clone of Tweetbot with some small updates and which doesn’t get a love for some time now. It is still pretty popular. So, they might still get money from the DIP. But as long as income is not high enough to justify further development, it is a move I can fully understand from Tapbots to just let it sit there. Why should they put in more development time, if it is just too expensive because income is so low? I don’t say that I like it, but I can understand them. And the longer Netbot doesn’t get updated, the more users will search for alternatives. And over time the DIP-share will decrease. And at some point Tapbots will make their mind up wether there is enough money in the app.net-client-market or not. And it doesn’t cost them any money to have Netbot sitting there in the AppStore.

So usually you get money from your sales and with app.net you get a bonus because of the DIP. The better your client, the more money you get. And since the number of users for app.net is relatively small, it is not a lot of money you can get from sales. We have now ca. 90k users. Let’s say all use iOS and buy a client for $5 from the AppStore. Then it is $450.000 what you would make. That is actually not a lot, when I think about what it means to work full-time on a client. So the DIP adds the extra that could mean that your succesful client in the small market gets further developed, even so sales will be low because of the market size. If a government would do it, we would call it a subsidy. The effect of subsidies is that they distort the market. In terms of app.net this means that it distort the market in a way that clients get developed or continued to be developed, that wouldn’t have been developed in the first place or would stopped being developed because feeding your family is actually more important and so you would rather work on another project.

In addition it works as a signal (yep, signalling-theory is nice, too ;)) for developers that app.net cares about developers. They do not pay them to develop for their platform. That would send another signal. Microsoft is doing that as far as I know for Windows Phone. That signal would say, hey, we need desperately clients, so we pay you for doing it.

No, they give you a bonus, an incentive to develop for the platform. You still have to make something on your own that is succesful to get your share of the pie. It shows that they care enough to give out some of the subscription money to the developers. And this is probably far more cost-effective than paying directly.

Henceforth I guess in terms of signalling it is a very good thing that it exists. So it might also be called the Developers Signalling Program. But if they would make the weighing of the algorithm public, it could also be a powerful mechanism to steer development of certain types of clients. But my gut feeling tells me that people wouldn’t like it, when app.net started to directly influence which type of clients people develop with the DIP. So they are probably better off in not doing it in a transparent way.

tl;dr

Things for design and and an ultrafast sync but you have to follow a certain way to be able to work with it and it can clutter up fast. OmniFocus for flexibility and when you have more than a dozen active projects but it’s not as nice looking.

Introduction

This text shall be about OmniFocus and Things. It is not definitive and I probably miss features since I will write here as objective as possible how those two Mac-applications and their iPhone-counterparts present themself to me and to my workflow.

I guess the best is to tell you where I come from. In 2005 I got introduced by a colleague to GTD (“Since I am using it, my desk is always tidied up and I always have backup batteries for my Bluetooth mouse”). He lent me the book, I read it and I was sold.

I started with a modified moleskine (something like this), used a Hipster PDA but was never really happy with the solutions. On my Mac I tried iGTD, kGTD (the precursor to OmniFocus, essentially a pimped OmniOutliner-document) and some other stuff. When Things became public I used it happily and when they released the iPhone-version I was in heaven. I had a look or two at OmniFocus (henceforth OF) when it got released but it looked always ugly and far too complex.

So I used Things and was always happy but I got unhappier. The always promised over-the-air sync (henceforth OTA-sync) didn’t get released, the updates were slow and stuff like the tagging-UI on the iPhone drove me nuts. So I had again a look around and suddenly OF didn’t look that bad anymore and I bought with it over two years ago the iPhone-app, too. I also bought an ebook about it and read loads if articles because I wanted to get the most out of it.

So after approximately three years I switched from Things completely to OmniFocus. Now it is two years later and because of the looks of Things I was still interested in it and recently I decided to give it another chance.

And what I found I will write up here.

Mapping features

There are some features which are similar in both apps but different enough that I have to explain them here to make the rest of the article easier to understand.

Contexts vs Tags

Things uses tags, OmniFocus uses contexts. When you know GTD, you know that a task should usually be associated with a project and a context. A project is something you try to achieve (clean up the garage, publish a podcast etc) what needs several steps. The single steps of a project are the tasks. A context is depending on definition a location (home, work, at the computer, at the phone) or state you are in (highly focused, zombie). In OmniFocus you can only add one context per task. You can have them divided like Errands and then a ton of subcontexts like the supermarkets but that’s it. One context per task, as it is written in the book. In addition you can add a duration, and a flag to a task.

Things on the other hand has tags. Therefore you can add unlimited tags to a task and use it for durations, priorities etc. tags can also be hierarchical like the contexts on OF, two levels, that’s it.

I will write more about the weaknesses and advantages of both later.

Start Dates vs Scheduling a Task

In OF you can set a start date for a task. That means that the task will be marked as inactive until it reaches it start date.

In Things you can schedule a task which means that it will be marked as scheduled (kinda like inactive) and it turns up in a daily review sheet when it reaches the date and then you can decide what to do with it. The two main options are “show in today” (a view for tasks in Things for tasks which are due, overdue and you decided on todo today) and later (reschedule it) but you can also modify the task in any way you like.

For the purpose of this articles when I speak about start dates I mean in terms of Things the scheduling of a task.

Inactive vs Someday

In OF you can set a context (all tasks with that context are inactive), task or project to inactive. Depending on your filters it won’t show up then. There is a similar feature in Things which is called Someday. You can place a project or a task there and it will be removed from the side bar and the projects view on the iPhone and will turn up only when you switch to the Someday-view.

When I talk about setting something inactive I mean in terms of Things that I move it to someday.

The Design

Things looks better. No doubt about that. The desktop-app and the iPhone-app are well designed in terms of looks. OmniFocus on the Mac has support for themes and there is a plethora available and I even use custom icons from Icons & Coffee but nothing gets OmniFocus to look as polished as Things. On the iPhone it is not even themeable. But at least the OmniGroup gave it nicer looking icons on the Mac and on the iPhone which is at least something. The OF2 α looks better than OF1 but it still is not at the level of Things. Looks are important for me because I want to look at nice things when I use something all the time.

Entering Tasks

Both applications on the Mac have quick input windows which work fine and have auto-completions. There are workflows for Alfred for both which work fine. The only difference is that I can’t add a start date in Things but I can do so in OmniFocus.

On the iPhone both apps have a universally available button for pulling up the “enter a task-sheet”.

But they differ in some ways and here the way both apps work start to diverge.

OmniFocus

When OmniFocus does a “cold” start aka wasn’t in the background, it always optimizes the database. When your database has a certain size, this can take up to a minute in my experience. Since I am archiving my tasks on a regular basis it’s often a max. of a view seconds. Anyway in this time the sheet misses the ability to put in a project or task. So, that can be annoying.

If OmniFocus was in the background you can do everything incl. making recurring tasks and it even lets you attach a photo or an audio-recording. The only thing missing is a way to add a duration.

When entering a project or a context, a new view is pulled up that lists all projects or all contexts and you get a fuzzy search that searches while you type. I usually only need to type in a few letters and it is filtered down to a point where I see what I search.

Maildrop

When you use the Omni Sync Server as a way to sync your todos OTA (you can also use your own WebDAV-server), you can use the OmniFocus Mail Drop (which you find in your sync server account page). This means that you get a mail-address and when you send something to this mail address it gets added to your inbox when you sync the next time. The subject becomes the task, the body a note of the task.

I use this often when I am on my phone and find some interesting piece of software or video which I want to have a look at, when I am on my Mac. And app.net-, twitter- and RSS-clients and browsers on iOS have usually an easy way to share something via e-mail. It’s really fast. And as I noticed it is kind of a dealbreaker when I have a look at other todo-apps.

Things

In Things on the iPhone I can add a task, set a due date and project it belongs to, add tags and a note and schedule it. No way to make it a repeating task, add a photo or audio recording.

In addition for adding details to a task (like tags, note, due date) you have to do an extra tap to open the details. It feels like they discourage entering those details when you are entering a task. It might feel a bit cleaner than with OF but it also discourages you to think about it already when you are putting it in the first place imho. When you have a task in the inbox and get its details-view, you can move it but need to push the edit-button to add tags for example. One more thing thatched me think that CulturedCode (henceforth CC) discourages you to use those. When I used Things a lot I often didn’t enter tags on the iPhone, one reason was that it is hidden until you actively want to use them.

When I started to use OF I suddenly started to actively use contexts because it was right in front of me and I thought about where I actually have to do this. And therefore I could filter for it easily later.

The next problem with Things is that tags and projects are list views without a search. You can reorder them (and have to do so manually) to have the most used tags on top but I wouldn’t enter sub-tags of Errands for several supermarkets for example because it clutters up the list and I need ages to find what I search. And remember you also do priorities and durations with tags. But that’s missing one of the big advantages of tags: I can apply multiple of them to one task in contrast to OF. But I wouldn’t add a lot because it clutters up the list. It’s not a problem on the Mac though because there tags auto-complete when you add them to a task.

The same problem have projects. When you have more than let’s say 15 projects it becomes a hassle to get to the correct one. This will be a problem in the next section of this article, too.

Folders, Areas of Responsibilities and Projects

In both applications you have projects and they work similar. They group tasks (OF bad even the ability to enter sub-tasks to a task but I did not yet find a real use case for me). In both cases they can have notes, start and due dates, can be repeated and scheduled.

The first important thing to note is that projects in Things cannot contain recurring tasks. CC says that projects are something definite that is not ongoing and thus they shouldn’t have recurring tasks. They probably never had a project which took up only a short while like a few weeks where you had to do a specific task every day of the project.

But in Things you have Areas of Responsibility. You can group there projects and recurring tasks. So for big projects the best thing would be to create an Area of Responsibility and add there the smaller projects that are part if the big one and recurring tasks which belong to the big project. But I wouldn’t want to create an Area for a small project.

In OmniFocus you have folders to organize your projects. I use them like Areas in Things and have folders like “home”, “work”, “university”, “administration” etc.

One big difference is that tasks in Things can actually have no project associated with them, while in OF it always has to have project. My “project-less” tasks are in a project called “Misc”. When I moved from Things to OF I had to get accustomed to this and when I tried Things again I had to get accustomed to the fact that tasks do not need a project and therefore the project Misc. is not necessary. Btw. most of my repeating tasks live there. So it is actually a minor annoyance that Things doesn’t allow repeating tasks in a project. But it will be one of the pieces of my conclusion.

There are two more differences regarding projects and their organization.

Parallel and Sequential Projects

In OF projects can be parallel or sequential. In a parallel project you can do the task in any order you like, the top most is the “next task” though (important for filters), while in sequential projects only the top most task is the next one.

I have for example projects when I have get a bill from the doc with the following tasks: write the letter for the insurance, put in an envelope and write the address on it, bring it to the post office, wait for the money on the bank account (due a three days before the bill is due), transfer the money. The waiting for-task is an inactive task (like all my tasks with the waiting for-context) because I won’t do anything until I get the money or I really have to transfer the money. So all tasks after that are inactive as well which is good for filters when I want to see only active tasks. But when the inactive task becomes due it will turn up anyway in my due tasks.

In Things however there are only parallel projects in terms of OF. Which can be quite annoying. To explain that I have to explain a view in Things. I will get into more detail about views later.

There is a view in Things called Next. In there are all tasks listed that are not in someday, ordered by project and at the bottom are all scheduled tasks (except on the iPhone where a scheduled repeating project is listed with the other projects but I guess that’s a bug). Now I have my project with the bill from the doc. Guess what, the task after the waiting for task is listed there, as well as the project itself. Even so there is no task that is actually active right now. So it just clutters up the next view.

I thought for a long time that sequential projects are not necessary but when they help to filter stuff and get an overview they are quite some help. I already had also the case where I had a parallel project and suddenly couldn’t continue until I got an e-mail from someone. So I added a waiting for-task, made the project sequential and all tasks became inactive and some perspectives (the term for special view in OF) became cleaned up.

At last there is the side bar. Both applications, OF and Things have a sidebar where they list projects and in the case of Things some special views (Today, Next, Someday, Schedule - but more about that later). Things doesn’t have folders but the aforementioned Areas of Responsibilities.

In OF I Put my tasks into projects and most projects into folders. And I can fold the folders and the projects are removed out of the view. I see only the folder.

In Things there are no folders. So the more projects you have, the more projects you see in that sidebar. Putting a project into an Area doesn’t allow you to remove it from the sidebar. Clicking on an Area just shows you all projects and tasks associated with it. If you have a lot of projects, at some point eve. The areas get out of the sidebar and you have to scroll. More clutter. It works fine when you have only a few but I tend to have rather more than view because I have projects for each podcast-episode (that’s two), big blog entries that need research, several projects for my master thesis, upcoming birthdays of friends and relatives, home projects, administrative projects and so on. If you think a bit about it, you can get really fast to a lot of projects. And it is easy to clean your views up in OF, in Things it is not possible.

Templates

Both applications don’t allow template-projects but I will shortly describe what my solution to the problem is.

Templates in OF

I have a folder Templates and in there a couple of inactive projects (one for tidying up the apartment, one for paying a doctors bill, one for a new podcast-episode etc). Usually they are done like “Doctors bill [date of bill]” or “Retrozirkel [episode name]” (the podcast I am part of). When it’s time, I duplicate it, make it active, change the part of the name in the brackets and move it into the according folder. Afterwards I add due dates to the project and the tasks if necessary.

Templates in Things

In Things I have the templates stored in Someday and tagged them with “template”. The rest is the same as in OF, I just remove additionally the word template of course and move it to the according Area.

I like the folder a bit more because I can fold it up and don’t have them clutter up the someday list. But since I do not have that many templates, it is not really a problem in Things. But I can see that it might be really annoying for a power user of templates.

Contexts and Tags

I wrote already in the introduction and in the part about entering tasks about contexts and tags. Here I want to discuss how they actually work out.

To freshen up your memory, contexts in GTD are some kind of location where a task can happen. The word location is pretty broad like “home” or “phone”. There are new ideas out there that move contexts from location to something like state of mind since many people can do their work everywhere. Nowadays you are pretty much all the time online, so why have an online-context? And you carry your phone all the time with you, so why a phone-context. And our phones can do most of the stuff our computers can do, so a computer-context becomes redundant, too. Therefore you can come up with contexts like “focus” or “zombie” (you know, right after waking up and before your first coffee). But I think you get now the idea.

Contexts

OmniFocus uses contexts which can be hierarchically in two levels. I have as written before a context called Errands and sub-contexts of supermarkets and other shops. Or I have a library-context and several sub-contexts which bear the name of the library. In OmniFocus I can go now to the contexts-view and select “Errands” and it will me show all errands. When I select “Errands/Postal office” it will show me all those. In a search for Errands all tasks within the current view that belong to the context or one of its subcontexts.

Unfortunately OmniFocus doesn’t allow multiple contexts. Why multiple contexts you might wonder. When I do research it is not uncommon that I find books that are available in several libraries and not only in one. So I would like to create a task that says “get book so and so” and add all libraries in which it is available as a context (and add the signatures in the notes-field). That is not possible with OmniFocus.

There are ideas to add tags to OmniFocus for something like this via the notes-field but it is just a work around and nothing more. Regrettably it doesn’t seem that OmniFocus 2 will add tags, judging from the current Alpha.

Tags

Things uses tags which can be organized hierarchically like the contexts in OmniFocus. Unlimited metadata \o/

But it doesn’t work as well, as one would think. And my latest mail-exchange with a support-guy from CC doesn’t let me think that this will change. Anyway, why doesn’t work it that well?

On the one hand there is the input-problematic on the iPhone. I at least enter a lot of tasks into the iPhone-version because when something comes into my mind, I put it into my iPhone. The trusted inbox, you know. But there it’s this extra tap and the bad UI I described above that I do not really want to enter tags there.

On the other hand there is the problem is a matter of the hierarchical tags. Let’s say I add to a task the two tags: “Central” and “State” which are both sub-tags of “library”. In the UI of Things it will show me the tag “library” with a hint that there are sub-tags and then I can open them specifically and filter for those. Or I click on “library” and it will filter it correctly. But when I search for library, it won’t show me tasks that have only a sub-tag of library.

And both in combination don’t really let me use tags in Things, even so they should be superior to the contexts of OmniFocus.

Search

Both apps have a search. But it works quite differently. Even so I usually start with the OmniFocus-part, I will this time start with Things. Things’ search is great. On the Mac it is always in the lower right and it always searches all projects etc, independent from the view you are in. Results come up while you are typing and are ordered by Inbox, Next, Scheduled, Logged and Trash and you can filter the search-results by tag. On the iPhone it is available on the first screen of the application with, you just have to scroll up and is a universal search, too. When you start typing it shows an extra bar that says “Title”, “Notes”, “Tags”, “All” for doing a bit of filtering. As written above there seems to be a bug though with scheduled repeated projects on the iPhone. The only thing that bothers me is the tag-search I described in the previous section

On OmniFocus search is available universally as well but it only searches your current view. Therefore when you are in the Inbox and you start searching, it will show you only results from the Inbox. You have to go to a view that shows you all task to search over all tasks. I never understood that. Usually when I search, I don’t want to filter first and then search but want to search and maybe filter when I can’t find it.

On the iPhone there is an extra search-view which searches everywhere but it is not search as you type and it doesn’t search for contexts. So it is far inferior to the search in Things.

But the way both apps are constructed lead at least for me to the following: Since I usually give every task a context and a project in OmniFocus everything is well ordered and because of the weaknesses of the search, I rarely use the search but still find everything very fast because I usually know to which project a task belongs and it every phone call that I have to make is in the context phone.

In Things the search is so good that I really like to search but because of it can’t find the parent tag of a sub-tag it has kind of a bad taste for me. In addition I do not have everything as well sorted since it doesn’t really encourage you like OF to give everything a project and a tag.

Due Dates and Times

The next thing I want to write about are Due Dates. I am not sure anymore if the book Getting Things Done mentions due dates. Tasks shouldn’t have one if possible. Because usually stuff with a specific time or date is an appointment and not a task, thus it should be in your calendar and not in your todo-list.

OmniFocus has due dates and times. It defaults to a day at 7 pm. You can change the time though. The task will turn orange (and an icon badge will appear) when the task is due soon which is a time period set in the preferences between 24 hours and 7 days.

When a task becomes due and therefore overdue you get a notification and it will turn red, as will the icon badge.

In my experience the icon badge on the iPhone will only turn up for due soon tasks, when you open the app while a task is due soon. So not opening the app will only give you a notification when the task is due and then add the badge.

Things allows only due dates. When a task is due it will turn up in your daily review and the iPhone will remind you that there are due tasks at a set time (like 8 am in the morning). But you can’t give tasks a due time. Hence you have to rely on another app for that, like the built-in app Reminders or the great app Due.

I have to say that I don’t like that I have to have two apps for that. I often create tasks like “phone person x” and set a due date some time today. So I see it all the time at the badge that there is something to do but I will get an additional reminder at a certain point of time. In Things I have to create that task and do it a second time in Due. Or leave it out of Things (and therefore don’t have it in the project and logged that I did it, when I did it) and have it only in one app. Sure it’s kind of a first world problem but it annoys me. And to be honest being able to decide between OmniFocus and Things is a first world thing, too.

And CC mentioned several times that they won’t change it because a task shouldn’t have a due time. But it is something I could live with, it is just inconvenient.

Reviews

You should review your projects and tasks in a regular interval. The idea is that you do not loose oversight and you think about what might need an update (additional tasks or cross off tasks that are done or not necessary anymore). There are people who do it daily, I do it weekly on the weekend. When I have really a lot to do I do it daily.

OmniFocus supports you in doing reviews. You can determine a time how often a project should be reviewed (n days, weeks, months, years) and when you hit the Review-button, you will be presented with a list of projects and the tasks they contain which are up for review. You go through them and can mark them for review.

I have a repeating project for my weekly and monthly review. The weekly review contains not only stuff like “review projects” but also tasks like review previous and upcoming calendar data. The monthly review contains tasks that I have to do monthly like set up your budget or do a backup of you website.

OmniFocus 2 will have a new review-view which is apparently taken from the iPad-version (which seems to be awesome from what I’ve read). From what I’ve seen so far I like it but since it’s in its early stages I cannot say a lot about it now.

Things, like most To-Do-apps doesn’t support reviews at all. It has a daily review which will show you in your Today-view all tasks that are due today or are scheduled for today but that’s it. I have my weekly review-project. But it means that I always have to review all projects because keeping track of what when to review is cumbersome. It doesn’t matter when you only have ten projects, but with many projects it is not feasible imho.

Perspectives and Views

Things offers several views. Inbox, Today, Next, Scheduled, Someday, Projects, all Active Projects, all Areas, the Logbook and the Trash.

The Inbox is the inbox. Quick Entry defaults to the Inbox and the way the Entry-sheet is designed on the iPhone tasks put in there usually land here, too. Today is a view where you see all overdue and due-tasks and tasks you decided you want to do today. Next is a list of all active tasks and projects, Scheduled shows you scheduled and repeating tasks and is the only view were you can create repeating tasks (remember they can’t belong to a project), Projects shows you all Projects sorted by Areas of Responsibility, a click on a project shows you all tasks in it, a click on a single Area shows you all projects and scheduled tasks in it. The Logbook all logged tasks and the Trash all tasks which are in the Trash. That’s it. When I used Things a lot I lived basically in the Today-view. In the morning I looked through the next-list, selected all tasks I wanted to do today and from then on it was usually the today-view or maybe a project I was working on. When the Today-view was empty I got me new tasks from the Next-view. And there was a big maybe that I filtered the Next-view for tags (because, well I said enough about tag-entry on the iPhone, didn’t I?).

Let’s talk about Perspectives in OmniFocus. Or better not, I will give here only a brief abstract about them. Perspectives are one, if not the most powerful feature in OmniFocus. Merlin Mann did a 56 minute talk about them, if you are really interested.

Perspectives allow you to create any view on your projects and tasks you want. I have for example a today-view which has no side-bar, and shows only the tasks that are flagged, overdue and due today. Or there is the predefined context-view that shows you in the sidebar all contexts. And clicking on them will give you a list of tasks. Or you could create an inbox-view that shows you only the inbox and nothing else, not even the toolbar. You can essentially setup your window a way you want it, take a snapshot and when you want that presentation of tasks and projects you choose the perspective.

Perspectives can only be created on the Mac but can be synced to the iPhone. Because of perspectives you can essentially emulate any view of Things in OmniFocus and make it as clean or as cluttered as you want.

OTA-Sync

I want to talk only about the over-the-air-sync here. Things didn’t have it for a long time but has it now. And howly mowly it is damn fast. You can type a task on your iPhone or Mac and see it turn up on the other side more or less instantaneously. But you have to rely on CC for it because you have to use their infrastructure (for free).

The sync of OmniFocus can be fast and pretty slow. It is never as fast as the sync from Things or at least doesn’t appear as fast. When you want to keep it fast, you should archive your tasks on a monthly basis (one of the tasks in the monthly review project) and sync all your clients on a regular basis. Yeah, that one rarely used laptop can make a difference.

But if you want to use your own infrastructure, you can sync with a WebDAV-server of your choice and do not have to rely on Omnis sync server. But if you use Omnis sync server you can use the above mentioned Mail Drop which is ingenious in my opinion.

But the sync of Things is really neat. Rome wasn’t built in a day, too.

Conclusion

Now coming to an end with this big comparison. And you probably can guess that I will keep using OmniFocus. It is very flexible and powerful. But as I have written in the introduction I read (most of) a book and a lot of articles about it. It has a steep learning curve. And you really should have read Getting Things Done by David Allen when you want to use OmniFocus. But while it is heftily invested in GTD it doesn’t take the book word by word (but with contexts unfortunately) and seems to see it more as a guideline. Henceforth it allows you to model things to your way to get things done.

Things on the other hand is clean and easy to use from the get go. It hides stuff like tags and therefore looks clean. If you have more than 20 projects it becomes fast unclean and cluttered.

I always have the feeling the people from CulturedCode have a specific way to do Getting Things Done and if you want to strife from that way, you have a problem and need workarounds or can’t do it all. I do not even understand their reasoning. They say that tasks shouldn’t have a due time but at the same moment they allow tags (which aren’t “pure GTD”).

If good looks and a really fast sync are important to you and you do not have a lot of projects and don’t care about having a second app running for your tasks, then Things is probably the way to go.

If you want flexibility in the way you deal with your todos and projects and even be able to work in phases when you have a lot of projects on hand, then OmniFocus is the way to go in my opinion.

Update: Der Artikel hieß einmal: Fever° - ein Fehlkauf. Inzwischen bin ich anderer Meinung, vor allem mit der Ankündigung der Abschaltung von Google Reader und habe das in entsprechenden Update-Bereichen angemerkt.

Fever° ist ein RSS-Client aka Feedreader, der besonderes verspricht. Er sucht sich die Links raus, über die am meisten gesprochen wird und sortiert danach die Artikel. Damit wird Fever umso besser, je mehr Feeds man folgt. Bis jetzt habe ich im Web nur positive Reviews gefunden. Für mich stellte es sich aber als absoluter Fehlkauf heraus.

Ich habe es mir gekauft, weil ich mir dachte, dass ich mich zum Einen unabhängig von Google Reader machen kann, da man ja nie weiß, ob der Service vielleicht mal eingestellt wird und zum Anderen so etwas habe wie ein personalisiertes Google News, mit einer besseren Darstellung was mir wichtig ist.

Installation und Benutzung

Die Software ist in PHP geschrieben und benötigt eine MySQL-Datenbank. Sie ist sehr einfach auf einem Webspace/Server installiert der die Anforderungen erfüllt. Vor dem Kauf bekommt man ein paar Dateien, um zu überprüfen, ob Fever mit dem eigenen Webspace funktioniert. Danach heißt es nur noch kaufen, Seriennummer eintragen und fertig. Vorhandene Feeds können per OPML importiert werden. Ein Multi-User-Betrieb ist nicht möglich, da die Registrierung an der Domain/Sub-Domain hängt.

Benutzen kann man Fever über ein Web-Interface, das auch eine Anpassung für Smartphones hat. Eine API befindet sich aktuell in der Beta. Auf der Webseite gibt es eine Hilfestellung, um es mit [Fluid]([fluidapp.com](http://fluidapp.com/) "Fluid - Turn Your Favorite Web Apps into Real Mac Apps.") zum Laufen zu bringen. Neue Feeds werden über ein Bookmarklet hinzugefügt.

Für das iPhone gibt es keine explizite App, für das iPad gibt es Ashes über das mir auf Twitter erzählt wurde, dass es wohl sehr absturzfreudig ist. Auf dem Mac gibt es ChillPill. ChillPill ist aber nur ein schicker Wrapper um Fever, der Shortcuts hat und sich nativ als RSS-Reader ausgeben kann.

Das Web-Interface ist sehr gut zu benutzen. Einfach gehalten, man kann seine Feeds in der Hot-Ansicht lesen, die einen anzeigt, worüber gerade viel geschrieben wird oder in Gruppen bzw. Feed für Feed.

Auf dem iPhone ist es eine typische Web-App. Funktioniert, aber man merkt, dass sie nicht nativ ist. Fühlt sich langsam an, die Icons sind leider nicht ans Retina-Display angepasst. Aber es funktioniert und man kann es benutzen.

Der Unique Selling Point: Hot

Wenn man Fever installiert hat, sollte man es mit vielen Feeds füllen, so viel wie möglich. Einsortiert werden diese in Gruppen oder Kindling Sparks. In Kindling Sparks sollten Feeds rein, die viel posten und somit einfach nur die "Temperatur" für Artikel erhöhen. Kandidaten dürften dafür sein: Slashdot oder Rivva. Spiegel Online aber nicht, und warum das gibt es im nächsten Abschnitt zu lesen.

Im Abschnitt "Hot" sieht man dann die Themen über die alle gerade bloggen. Den Zeitraum für "Hot" kann man auch einstellen. Wie sich für mich herausgestellt hat, funktioniert es mit längeren Zeiträumen besser, da die Blogs Zeit brauchen um etwas zu verlinken.

Update: Die Funktion Kindling zeigt alle Feeds, die keine Sparks sind. Die Funktion ist aber für mich auch nutzlos, da ich meine Feeds nach Gruppen sortiert habe (Entertainment, Computer, etc.) und ich nach Gruppen lese. Da sind auch High Volume-Feeds drin, weil ich da auch mal durchskippen will. Und da Sparks aus den Gruppen rausfliegen, kann ich heise und The Verge für mich nicht in Sparks reinkippen, da ich solche High Volume-Feeds nicht unsortiert rumfliegen haben will.

Werbelinks kann man blacklisten. Sponsort also jemand reihum Blogs und alle posten, dass in ihre RSS-Feeds so wandert das ganz schnell nach oben.

Fehlkauf

Warum war es nun ein Fehlkauf für mich? Fever scheint wirklich nur mit Links zu arbeiten. Folgt man vielen Blogs und diese verlinken immer wieder auf den selben Link, so steigt er in der Hotness an. Das habe ich nur in wenigen Situationen als wirklich funktional gesehen. Z.B. zum Thema Zynga kopiert Tiny Towers, Twitter fängt an zu zensieren u.ä.

Schon an diesen zwei Beispielen sieht man Fevers Schwäche: es funktioniert nur, wenn die Blogs immer wieder auf's Selbe Verlinken. Und dadurch funktioniert es nur mit Blogs. Und Blogs haben meiner Ansicht nach eine Schwäche: sie decken nur einen sehr begrenzten Themenraum ab. Fever funktioniert bei mir mit Tech-News. Da werden Links benutzt und viele linken auf die selbe Quelle, aber damit war es das auch.

Ich will aber nicht nur Tech-News lesen. Und die Webseiten, die den alten Medien entspringen verlinken nun einmal nicht auf die Agenturmitteilung, sondern schreiben einen eigenen Artikel. Und damit kann Fever nichts anfangen. Selbst bei den Tech-News schwächelte es. Selbst mit Slashdot, Engadget, Ars Technica und Heise in den Feeds klappte es nicht wirklich, außer bei sehr wenigen Themen. Das einzige Thema mit Blog-Streuung konnte ich bei der Twitter-Zensur sehen: Engadget, Netzpolitik, Nerdcore.

Am Besten funktionierte es bei Mac-News. Da schreiben aber eh alle beim Gruber ab. Da reicht's dann auch Daring Fireball direkt zu lesen.

Für normale News habe ich mir eine Reihe Zeitungsfeeds abonniert und Google News in der entsprechenden Sprache. Auf Englisch Huffington Post, LA Times, Economist, Time, New York Times, Washington Post u.a. Auf Deutsch SpOn, Tagesschau, Zeit, FAZ, TAZ, SZ, Handelsblatt u.a.

Gebracht hat es exakt nichts. Da diese keine Links benutzen, bekomme ich auch in Fever ein und dieselbe News dutzendfach dargestellt. Und Blogs schreiben selten über tagespolitische Themen, Weltpolitik und Wirtschaft und verlinken dabei auf bestimmte Artikel ein und derselben Quelle (außer es geht um die Piraten…).

Damit waren das $30 für die Katz. Eine Geld zurück-Garantie gibt es nicht bei Unzufriedenheit. Schließlich bekommt man den Source unverschlüsselt geliefert. Aus dem selben Grund gibt es auch keine Demo-Version. Seh ich ein, ist aber sehr ärgerlich bei missfallen.

Fazit

Update: Heute (14.03.2013) hat Google angekündigt, dass Google genau das tun wird. Nun ja, also dann doch Fever für den Sync.
Während die Funktionalität des "Hot" überhaupt nicht für mich funktioniert, ist es jedoch ein brauchbarer Web-Reader für RSS-Feeds und da es mit Reeder und Sunstroke inzwischen native iOS-Clients gibt, ist dieser Bedarf auch gedeckt. Keine Ahnung wie es bei Android aussieht.
Aber ich schaue auch mit großem Interesse auf Newsblur und dann ist noch Feed Wrangler. Newsblur finde ich am interessantesten, aber die mobile App kommt lange nicht an Reeder ran imho, dafür ist die Webapp um einiges besser als die von Fever. Man wird wohl abwarten müssen, was die ganzen nativen RSS-Clients anbieten werden zum Syncen. Meines Wissens nach ist die Newsblur-API auch offen (Newsblur ist im insgesamten sogar Open Source). Bei Fever zahlt man halt einmal und kann nicht testen. Bei Newsblur zahlt man einen geringen Betrag pro Jahr (zwischen $12 und $36 nach eigener Wahl) oder kann vermutlich auch selber hosten mit dem oben verlinkten Source Code. Bei Feed Wrangler ist noch nichts bekannt.

Altes Fazit:

Altes Fazit: Ich kann Fever wirklich nicht empfehlen, außer man interessiert für einen sehr begrenzten Themenbereich und hat da alles an Blogs abonniert was es gibt. Aber dann kann man auch einfach seine Feeds auf die paar wenigen Meinungsführer reduzieren.

Lasst Fever° lieber links liegen und gebt das Geld für einen anständigen Feedreader aus und hofft, dass Google Reader nie seinen Dienst zwecks Sync aufgibt. Baut euch eine gute Liste an Leuten, denen ihr auf Twitter folgt und benutzt Google News für das tagespolitische, da es nach Kontexten Nachrichten nach oben bringt.

Schade. Tolle Idee, die aber zumindest für mich überhaupt nicht funktioniert.

Seit ein paar Wochen versuche ich mit zwei sozialen Netzwerken umzugehen: Twitter und Appdotnet.

Wie Twitter mit den Entwicklern umgeht, finde ich einfach nur schlimm. Das Twitter anscheinend inzwischen von BWLern beherrscht wird und man sich in Profitmaximierung versucht auf Kosten der Nutzer finde ich auch einfach nur schlimm. Dazu kommt, dass Twitter seinen eigenen Desktop-Client aufgibt und ggf. in einem Update der API-Guidelines Desktop-Clients verbietet. Meiner Meinung nach ist Twitter einfach unberechenbar geworden, auch wenn sie die Änderungen schon vor einem Jahr ankündigten.

Und dann gibt es jetzt auch Appdotnet (ADN). Für ADN zahlt man aktuell pro Jahr $50 und dafür wird es wohl werbefrei eine Plattform für soziale Netzwerke geben. Es entwickelt sich technisch sehr schnell, bei der Anzahl der Benutzer macht es allerdings einen anderen Eindruck. Aktuell fühlt sich ADN wie Twitter in einem frühem Stadium an aufgrund der geringen Nutzerzahlen. 

Inzwischen ist es featuremäßig bei Twitter angekommen. Seit kurzem gibt es auch Favs (Stars) und native Retweets (Reposts). Es gibt aktuell keine Listen, dafür 256 Zeichen zum Vertippen. Sieht alles ähnlich aus, nur hat es generische Namen und damit weniger Charme. Clients gibt es noch nicht viele, aber es befinden sich so einige in Entwicklung und ich bin mit meiner aktuellen Wahl (Appetizer unter OS X und Spoonbill unter iOS) recht zufrieden, auch wenn zumindest Spoonbill noch nicht alle ADN-Features unterstützt.

Technisch hat es den Nachteil, dass es nirgends integriert ist es wie Twitter. Weder in Instapaper, noch in Reeder und ganz böse und das wird vermutlich nie kommen: direkt in iOS oder OS X.

Was stört sind aktuell immer noch die fehlenden bzw. die nicht-postenden Nutzer. Nicht jeder mag sich $50 für ein soziales Netzwerk leisten, Twitter geht ja auch noch gut genug und sehr viele sind da. Andere haben zwar einen ADN-Account, posten da aber nichts. Gleichzeitig sind Crossposts, sprich Posts von Twitter nach ADN weiterleiten oder umgekehrt, von vielen aus unterschiedlichen Gründen verpönt (wer beides richtig liest, bekommt doppelten Content; RTs sind über Accounts, die es nicht gibt oder die falschen sind etc). Damit könnte ADN sich aber zumindest bootstrappen. Wenn die Leute, die bei beiden SNs einen Account haben, aber aktuell nur Twitter nutzen, zumindest ihre Posts weiterleiten, könnte man ADN nutzen und zumindest die Posts derer trotzdem nicht verpassen. Ich hab’s versucht in die eine und in die andere Richtung. Auf ADN ist es weniger verpönt als auf Twitter, aber glücklich macht beides nicht.

Ich selbst habe versucht die letzten Tage sehr wenig Zeit und hauptsächlich Zeit mit ADN zu verbringen und dabei so einiges erstmal für mich aufgesetzt. Eine IFTTT-Regel, die alle Links von Twitter nach Pinboard umlenkt, damit ich die gesammelten Links habe, da ich inzwischen für mich meine Timeline recht gut zusammengestellt habe. Dann eine IFTTT-Regel für einen ungenutzten Zweitaccount auf Twitter ohne nennenswerte Followerschaft, um cross zu posten, um die Twitterintegration von Programmen/Betriebssystemen zu nutzen. Und retweeten versuche ich auf Twitter zu vermeiden, sondern verlinke hier auf dem Blog interessante Links, wie in einem Linkblog und poste das dann zu beiden SNs, da mein Blog anscheinend, nahezu gar nicht über RSS-Feeds gelesen wird. Macht allerdings auch mehr Arbeit. Damit lässt sich aber irgendwie leben. In meinem ADN-Stream geht auch schon ein wenig was.

Allerdings musste ich feststellen, dass mir ganz viel Content von Leuten fehlt, die ich auf Twitter gerne lese. Spontan fallen mir da z.B. @map, @no_vem_ber, @mrtoto, @nsemak, @jakeadelstein, @hirokotabuchi und noch eine ganze Reihe anderer ein (wehe, es fühlt sich jemand beleidigt an, weil ich sie oder ihn nicht genannt habe…aber die Liste ist zu lang). Teils haben die genannten Accounts, posten aber nichts auf ADN, teils haben sie keinen und werden sich vermutlich auch nie einen zulegen. Und das macht halt entweder Twitter oder ADN einfach zu einer weiteren Inbox mit anderen Leuten. Da Crossposts verpönt sind, muss man sich auch irgendwie entscheiden für welches Publikum man schreibt (meine Blogposts gehen in beide SNs). Ehrlich gesagt, läuft das bei mir darauf hinaus, dass ich an einem Tag entweder nur auf Twitter oder nur auf ADN schreibe. Ich hatte schon ein Problem damit Facebook und Twitter gleichzeitig zu nutzen, als ich noch Facebook versuchte aktiv zu nutzen und da hatte ich wirklich unterschiedliche “Follower”.

Aktuell führt es dazu, dass ich mich “schlecht” fühle, wenn ich Twitter benutze, da ich eigentlich Twitter verlassen will für den ganzen Mist den sie verzapfen. Das Gejammer über Twitter bringt halt nichts, wenn man es weiter benutzt. Bei mehreren Hundert Millionen Nutzern ist das Twitter egal und wenn die Alpha-Nerds zu was anderem ziehen, ist ihnen das auch egal, so lange nicht alle Nutzer wegziehen. Die Alpha-Nerds sind auch die, die sich über Werbung aufregen, aber Werber zahlen vermutlich mehr, als die Nutzer bereit wären zu zahlen. Und für Twitter zählt aktuell anscheinend Profitmaximierung und nicht glückliche Nutzer. So lang sie es auf dem Level halten, dass die Nutzer Twitter gerade nicht verlassen, ist alles schön für Twitter. Und die meisten sind ziemlich schmerzbefreit, wenn man sich überlegt wie viele Leute Facebook benutzen (keine wirklichen 3rd-Party-Apps, kein Desktop-Client, Privacy ist ein Fremdwort und Spammen durch Freunde ist eingebaut).

Gleichzeitig will ich ADN benutzen, weiß aber, dass ich eigentlich noch Twitter lesen muss, um alles mitzubekommen, was ich mitbekommen will. Das nervt. Kolossal. Vermutlich bin ich der einzige dem es so geht, aber es stört mich massiv. Was nun also tun? Twitter-Account verkümmern lassen, ab und zu reingucken und irgendwann heißt’s “Aus den Augen aus dem Sinn”, noch mehr der knappen Zeit in das Lesen von zwei SNs und Posts reinkippen oder ADN ADN sein lassen und wie so viele andere warten, dass es was wird? Aber wenn zu viele so denken, dann wird das mit ADN nie etwas. ADN ist erst ein paar Wochen alt, aber gefühlt tut sich nach dem Anfangshype zumindest nutzertechnisch nicht viel. Um genau zu sein viel zu wenig. Die Unique Users waren heute 939 (als ich diesen Post schrieb), vor ein paar Tagen waren es ca. 1500. Das ist a) so gut wie gar nichts und b) scheint sich das nicht zu steigern. Kurz: Mit ADN ist das irgendwie alles blöd und das Momentum scheint trotz Clients in Entwicklung abzunehmen. Clients sind halt nicht alles.

Manno, ich find das alles doof und verschwende eigentlich viel zu viele Gedanken auf sowas wie die Entwicklung von sozialen Netzwerken… >_<

Wie Google seine Karte baut.

The Atlantic hat einen Artikel veröffentlicht, der beschreibt wie Google seine Karten baut, da das erhaltene Material nur suboptimal ist und eine Menge Nacharbeit erfolgen muss.

On first inspection, this data looks great. The roads look like they are all there and you've got the freeways differentiated. This is a good map to the untrained eye. But let's look closer. There are issues where the digital data does not match the physical world. I've circled a few obvious ones below.

Und wenn ich mir das so ansehe, bezweifel ich, dass die Kartenanwendung in iOS6 da viel reißen wird.

I came away convinced that the geographic data Google has assembled is not likely to be matched by any other company. The secret to this success isn't, as you might expect, Google's facility with data, but rather its willingness to commit humans to combining and cleaning data about the physical world.

Ich arbeite schon jahrelang im Support, sei es nun im CallCenter oder in einer IT-Abteilung mit Endanwenderbetreuung. Da erlebt man so einiges, gebloggt habe ich aus Gründen darüber noch nie. Wer trotzdem etwas vom alltäglichen Wahnsinn und besonders den Extremfällen mitbekommen und lachen bzw. seine Hand vor die Stirn schlagen will empfehle ich Clients from Hell.

4Chan hat ne API?

A little more than a month after revealing that it had reached one billion posts, 4Chan has announced that it has released an API that should allow developers to build better third-party extensions for the imageboard.

Bug - Getting Attached to Technology.

Technology is socially acceptable as long as it's not attached to you.