Let’s migrate all from my self-build custom Android ROMs to the available official builds at the moment, trying to save some by avoiding servers for now. No Google Apps (GApps) and even microG for my main daily driver.
It takes a large appetite to bet on your one wild, precious life and decide what is best for you, to get offline, even when the whole world is shouting at you to better get yourself on LinkedIn, create Instagram to not miss out on the whole entire world having fun, to be well suited for life in the 21st century.
Man, I was just so tired of losing my time, attention, energy, humanity to Big Data.
There is no reward for losing all your life, so decide.
I just recently found out that Netlify CMS, which I have been using to generate posts easily on this site has been rebranded to Decap CMS. I went ahead and changed the necessary moving pieces, which is not a lot, and I have been using it now typing this.
Updated Hugo (which statically generates this site) to v0.127.0, thankfully nothing breaks so far.
I am now signing my Android custom ROM builds with my own private keys. This is for the new requirement of Play Integrity that checks now if the ROM is signed or not.
Ditching again Google Apps on my phone for microG, hopefully I won’t revert back due to some apps that requires it.
Changing the site colors to light mode.
I’m now inspired to add the tech I’m using here, as well as updating my site again, credits to Derek Sivers for the motivation for all of this.
After a month of trials, I finally built a stable custom Android rom for my old device. I now even tried applying backported security patches. All is good.
Frequent evening bike rides while stargazing with clear skies on a remote area has been the highlight of these past few days together with my listening parties.
The bicycle is a freedom machine. Not only will it take you where you want to go under your own power, but it disdains the bonds of pavement and settled map as well. In fact, the only thing that holds the bike back is a lack of imagination, which explains why kids ride their bikes in places adults wouldn’t think to.
[…]
Between you and me, I suspect that the simple act of riding a bike regularly will actually expand your mind, or, at the very least, your sense of where you can get under your own power. In this sense, I pity the fools who move themselves only by automobile. They take dead-end signs literally. They live in a horribly proscribed world.
Rise up early, tried to chill for a bit, remembered to fix some deprecated functions in Hugo, and suddenly this website is now using v0.102.0 version, which is latest as of today. Nice holiday.
I’m starting again to make some minor tweaks in the site and these changes are mostly done in Hugo. I am using a version from two years ago and I need to keep up with the current one just for fun.
Apparently, I can’t build the site using the versions staring from v0.93.0 so I am currently stuck in v0.92.2 which is still fairly impressive as I haven’t done any major changes in the code to accommodate such feature updates.
When the right time comes, I’ll sit with this again to rewrite some things to use the current version. Well, if it happens in the near future. I am just glad to be back writing some nonsense again in this space. Cheers.
I fully used Google Services for my Android phone for the past 3 months. That is quite a long time for me for quite a while. Since I’ve been encountering some stuttering and frequent slow downs, I decided to finally wipe the memory and flash another ROM, not fully ungoogled but still with microg.
With my use case for that duration, I really do not need Google services. Time to dig deep again to current Android development, I hope I can keep up.
On the desktop side, openSUSE Tumbleweed still gives me excitement everyday of using it. This past few weeks also has been big for Linux gaming with new developments.
It started when this random video appeared in my feed. I am aware of openSUSE before but this SUSE parody video made me hop into this distro immediately. I am not aware that it offers both static (Leap) and rolling release (Tumbleweed) model. Not being in a rolling release for awhile now, I decided to roll down this path. The offline installer surprised me with a 4.6 GB ISO, which is quite big than typical size.
The reason for that big ISO file is the install process. It will let you customize your installation by selecting the packages that you want or remove. It is the most powerful installer so far which let you tweak a lot of things. In the disk partition section, the default filesystem is btrfs. Prior to installation, I have no idea about this filesystem. It is apparently the default for openSUSE for quite awhile and first to adopt it. This new information made me more excited since I have a new thing to delve into. More about btrfs here.
I tried KDE Plasma this time. I already used other major desktop environments but for some reason, I always overlooked Plasma. After some learning more about it, reading the documentation, checking the source, engaging with the community, the innovation, etc., I can say that I will stick with it for a long time, I like everything about it. The same can be said about openSUSE. It’s the current perfect match for me.
Two months in, I can say that I found that distro. Everything from the logo, wiki, forums, community, and the different ways of how it handles things is in my alley. Using Linux has been fun again for me after dabbling most of my time in Debian, Ubuntu and Arch based distros. I’m also using it with Wayland and PipeWire which seems to work fine with my current use.
It’s crazy how this journey started with a parody video. I know openSUSE don’t make a lot of noise in the Linux community, hence the small userbase but in some sense, I quite like it that way. I haven’t gone into detail about the features of openSUSE, I’ll let you have fun discovering about it.
“Don’t reboot it, just patch!”
Good anime comes with good OP and ED songs. Here are my picks for Winter 2021 season:
Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.
After being on a specific custom Android ROM (aftermarket firmware) for a year, I changed to a ROM to fully use Google services for a game that needed it to run. I’ve been using microG which is an open-source implementation of Google services but has limited features and I can’t use it to sign in to the game. Three months in, the game has been updated and I can log in to that game without the need of Google services so here I go again wiping my device storage and installing another custom ROM but this time I discovered a custom ROM that’s been also utilizing microG built-in and has security and privacy features.
Enter CalyxOS. What separates this to other custom ROMs is that this has verified boot and cab relock the bootloader. This is a huge deal in terms of security as this prevents others accessing your information through fastboot. Most custom ROMs out there need to have an unlocked bootloader to function. This method is also being utilized by GrapheneOS, but in this ROM, you can’t use microG and most apps that require it will not function properly. CalyxOS circumvent this by implementing microG to make the device functional in most cases.
From their website, they describe the features as:
you are empowered by the combined expertise of the Internet privacy community
‘de-googled’ Android - does not put your data in google’s cloud or constantly report your location to google
you can make encrypted phone calls directly, using the built-in integration for Signal and WhatsApp calls
you are warned when you make or receive an unencrypted phone call
text messages are encrypted and a timer can be set so they disappear
advertising and trackers blocked via DuckDuckGo Browser and DuckDuckGo as default search provider
web browsing is anonymized via Tor Browser
built-in free “Virtual Private Network” services from trusted organizations protect you from being spied on
your phone is receiving regular, timely, automatic security updates
your data is backed up with strong encryption to your personal cloud server or to USB storage
At first, you can see that this is just another custom ROM with a bunch of privacy features as described above. The security feature of relocking the bootloader is really a big difference of it from other custom ROMs.
Almost a month of using it, I can say that it is very comparable to using LineageOS with microG. Very minimal features has been added from AOSP. This is also my first time using a device with relockable bootloader. There are some minor bugs that I’ve encounter but most of it has been recognized by the developers and their GitLab page is active.
As for the usability, since I’ve been using microG before, nothing has changed in this case. I still get most of my apps from F-Droid which like Google Playstore, but it is a repository of free and open source software for Android. My most used applications are:
AntennaPod: Easy-to-use, flexible and open-source podcast manager and player
Overall, I am having fun using it. I might continue using it until my device has stopped receiving security updates. I’ve been waiting for the first update of CalyxOS for my device to see if I will encounter problems.
The Nobel Prize in Physics 2020 was divided, one half awarded to Roger Penrose “for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity”, the other half jointly to Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez “for the discovery of a supermassive compact object at the centre of our galaxy.” 1