Category Archives: EN

Anything that does not fit into other categories …

George F. Kennan, 1997-02-05

A fateful error Excerpt: The view, bluntly stated, is that expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era. An op-ed by George F. Kennan in the New York Times from 1997-02-05. This … Continue reading

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Chomsky before the invasion started

Noam Chomsky: on the Pandemic, Ukraine crisis & Climate Change

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Signing my code from within a (Windows) VM

My main workstation runs Linux. It has for quite some time now. I had some issues getting 3D acceleration passed through using my AMD GPU and VMware Workstation, but finally got it to work. However, this time it’s about signing … Continue reading

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Running IDA 7.x/8.x inside Crossover 21/22/24

For a few versions I had issues running IDA Pro in Crossover with IDAPython enabled. Prior to the starting issues, everything worked fine, e.g. in the IDA 6.x version range. Please note that the setup of IDA Pro also succeeded … Continue reading

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Changing local Git clone from master to main

I never understood why Git chose master as the default branch name, MAIN in CVS seemed more sensible, but perhaps Torvald’s animosity towards CVS and SVN plays a role. Presumably trunk in SVN is a reference to the tree-like structure, … Continue reading

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Transition

After more than 17 years — it all started in April 2004 — I am no longer hosting the UltraVNC forum. To the users the only very visible recent change may have been that forum.ultravnc.net now forwards to forum.uvnc.com. The … Continue reading

Posted in /dev/null, Administration, EN, Software | Tagged | Leave a comment

Corona Pass

As could already be seen in other EU countries the restrictions are getting more and more ridiculous. The pressure for unvaccinated people is mounting. This account of a Lithuanian man shows the absurdity of the rules once again and how … Continue reading

Posted in EN, Opinion, Thoughts | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Just booted a Windows 2000 VM I archived 15 years ago

This was certainly one of the stranger, but also very intriguing things I’ve done so far this year. Alone the fact it’d prompt you for the setup CD (!) when simply removing one keyboard layout and configuring another as the … Continue reading

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Key witness for US in Assange case recants testimony

This is big, but I doubt that it’s going to change anything for Assange really. The British judge proved the UK is in bed with the US to keep Assange locked up. There is no other explanation for the January … Continue reading

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Unprofessional, hopeless, Sectigo

In February I applied for an AuthentiCode code-signing certificate for personal projects. I decided to go with KSoftware, a reseller of Sectigo certificates. That was February 15th. TL;DR: More than two months and dozens of emails later I’m none the … Continue reading

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Giving up some domains

Just for the record, so no one gets the wrong idea from this point on, I am giving up the following domains: assarbad.com assarbad.info assarbad.org In the past I have given up other domains, but none of those were by … Continue reading

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Assange

So turns out — for now! — Assange won’t be extradited. Whether he’ll be set free on bail is yet to be seen, though . The thing is that the lawyers representing the US government have already said they’ll appeal … Continue reading

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Flashing Tasmota to the Gosund SP1, easy and hard way

If you ended up here it’s because you’re a subscriber or a web search led you here. Great. Tasmota is likely on your radar already and you’re trying to flash a Tuya-based ESP device with Tasmota. Easy way The easy … Continue reading

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Finding which fonts offer a particular symbol with TeXlive

I just learned how to find a given Unicode character by its code, to see which fonts on the system support it. albatross 0x2114

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I don’t feature products often, but this one deserves it

Zalman, a Korean company that filed for bankruptcy a few years ago and is better known for silent CPU and chassis fans and power supplies, is selling a range of devices that are being designed and produced by another Korean … Continue reading

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Swiss companies and IT security

Given there’s a rather (in?)famous Swiss messenger touted as secure — but not open source — and the same was said about Crypto AG products until someone lifted the lid off the conspiracy surrounding that I’m wondering how one can … Continue reading

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Oh, so that’s what Republican stands for …

While Trump manages to avoid a concession speech, here’s what one of his most vocal boot-licking sycophants had to say: If we don’t challenge and change the US election system, there will never be another Republican president elected again. President … Continue reading

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Running old Ubuntu versions as chroot with proot

Currently I am working on building a modern Clang/LLVM-based toolchain for ancient Ubuntu versions. In order to do that I wrote a few helper scripts I am using in conjunction with proot to run old Ubuntu rootfs inside a chroot … Continue reading

Posted in Bash, EN, Linux, Programming, Software, Unix and unixoid | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Alacritty as default GNOME terminal application

Personally I prefer Super+T as my primary shortcut for opening the terminal from anywhere in my desktop environment. However, how can I replace the existing terminal application in GNOME so that the keyboard shortcut setting applies to an alternative terminal … Continue reading

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I’m in love with my Rust, turning angel wings to dust 😁

Sing to the tune of “I wish I had an angel” from Nightwish. The more of Rust I am learning, the more I fall in love with it. Behold this beautiful and expressive use of the match keyword: let leapyear: … Continue reading

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