TIL: You can’t use port 587 to send mails via an smtp-client when your firewall on the server blocks it m)

Great podcast about different aspects of infosec with @hacks4pancakes: Mr. Robot, Secret Dating Profiles, and Network Security with Lesley Carhart

The recent weeks I use Twitter far too much. It’s like a car crash and I can’t look away. So I deleted the client now from my phhone

Building my mail server. Each day a piece. I have now smtp, imap, working tls and a roundcube. Soonish I might be able to switch to it.

I wanted to build an e-mail-server tonite but I am just too tired 😴

Switched off Jetpack on my blog and activated Piwik #datafleesUS

Some more suggestions for replacing google services: www.jacoduplessis.co.za/we-dont-n…

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.