Posts

I’ve done a lot of research into securing and encrypting DNS on all the platforms I have: Linux, Android, iOS, and Windows. I’ll make this short as to my recommendations for each platform. Linux On my Linux machines, I use dnscrypt-proxy as a system-wide proxy server. Android On my Android phone, After much experimentation, I recommend Nebulo, as being best balance of reliable, flexible, and less battery-draining. It supports DNS-over-HTTPS and DNS-over-TLS.

Yesterday I was rebooting my machine after installing a new monitor, and noticed that my Tomato router giving errors about not being able to access its CIFS/Samba mount on my desktop, which is where I have it store its logs. The error I kept getting was: kernel: CIFS VFS: cifs_mount failed w/return code = -5 Turns out that at some point, Samba changed the default minimum allowed server protocol to allow only newer clients.

Today while trying to figure out how to get my wife’s phone to keep WiFi on if she puts her phone into airplane mode, I learned that Android 9 and later disallow automation apps like Automate from controlling WiFi anymore during airplane mode. Android 10 appears to disable control of WiFi completely outside of the settings panel. I came across an xda-developers post of how to keep WiFi on entirely when entering airplane mode.

I’ve developed several Python projects in the distant past, and after recently releasing rsnappush and following it up with release 1.1, I’ve researched and learned several new methodologies that Python developers need to be aware of. A quick preface, though: I only write code for Linux platforms, so compatibility with Windows platforms doesn’t engage me at all. I therefore go with the simplest route for a Linux-only distribution. setup.py changes: use setuptools Back in the day Python developers relied on the distutils package, but now setuptools is recommended.

My Android ssh server app can’t write to the SD card! My Android 8 phone has limited internal storage, so I keep my my 50GB+ music collection of mp3s, flacs, etc on my sd card. In general, Android doesn’t allow apps to write to external storage, except in their own private directory. Therefore, my ssh server app, SSHelper, can’t write to /storage/emuated/3333-ABCD/music or wherever. What I’ve been doing in the past is removing the card, and rsyncing with it.

So I just made a release of a personal tool I’ve been using for a while, and cleaned up. rsnappush is a backup utility I’ve been using for a long time, solving the issue of wanting: incremental backups plain file access for the backup remote backup host has few utilities I’ve used EVBackup as my backup provider for probably 10 years or so because I get easy rsync and shell access, which allows me to do tricks with rsync like hard-linked files.