Posts

Introduction Given what’s happening in the world right now, I really want to minimize my reliance on US-based services and Big Tech (“Les GAFAM” for French readers), even more so than a few months ago. Here’s a quick summary of what I use and do in an effort to become independent from those corporations. Almost everything mentioned is FOSS (Free and Open-Source Software). This is mainly addressed to tech-savvy people, but it can give you some ideas to get started if you’re not one (yet) :). Each solution will be attributed a “pain level”, which rates how painful the setup was for me, with my knowledge at the time. It’s therefore entirely subjective and is mainly just for fun. Feeling interested but lost? Feel free to reach out! See about page. ...

I often find myself needing to share text from a device to another, like a link from my phone to my laptop for instance. I thought, wouldn’t it be great if I had a simple webpage where I could just paste text from a device, so that it could be read from another? Some sort of LAN clipboard, if you will. I could use Nextcloud notes as a medium, but that requires me to login, and it would be a pain to log out and login every time I need to just share some text on a shared/untrusted target devices. So it’s important that this hypothetical webpage does not require authentication. ...

I found a neat little Android app the other day that removes EXIF data from pictures before you share them. It’s called Scrambled Exif and it’s available on F-Droid. The name is a bit misleading, since it really does remove EXIF data altogether instead of just scrambling it. The way it works is simple: when using the share menu with a picture in Android, select Scrambled Exif instead of the destination app where you want the picture shared. Scrambled Exif removes the metadata and displays another share menu, where you choose where the EXIF-less picture should go. And yes, it works for multiple images too! ...

Sifting through a several hours-long DJ set, concert or podcast to find a specific portion is a pain. If you happen to store your tracks locally and use Poweramp as a music player on your Android device (probably something like 0.000001% of Earth’s population), there is a solution - or small hack, whatever you want to call it. You can use the “LYRICS” ID3 tag to store chapters as if they were lyrics: ...

Here’s a little systemd unit and script to disable ACPI-registered wakeup sources automatically at startup. It’s quick and dirty, but has the advantage of being set-and-forget. No more waking up your computer by accident with your mouse, keyboard or otherwise. The power button still works, though. https://git.ampho.fr/anhminhpho/disable-acpi-wakeup The systemd unit calls this bit of code, which disables all wakeup triggers associated with currently connected peripherals: for d in $(cat /proc/acpi/wakeup | grep enabled | awk '{print $1}') do echo $d > /proc/acpi/wakeup done Instructions to install are available in the Git repo. Tested on Debian 12 and 13, but it probably works on most distros. ...

You’re telling me I need yet another account to use my Tapo and Kasa “smart” devices? Thanks, but no thanks. Here’s how to connect these to your Wi-Fi network without giving out personal information. This post assumes you have a Home Assistant instance up and running to manage your IoT devices. Install python-kasa pip install python-kasa Join device to your home network Some devices might require authentication, mine does not. Scan for Wi-Fi access points: ...

While writing my latest post, I realized the number of images might make loading quite slow, and that’s when I found out about jpegoptim and Oxipng. Those tools can, losslessly, significantly reduce the size of JPEG and PNG files (among others) thanks to black magic operations involving the Huffman algorithm, as well as stripping metadata. There are a number of GUIs that make use of those utilites. I personally like OptiImage: 72% decrease in size from a digital camera. Not bad! ...

Got word of a GitS art exhibit/sales event taking place in Paris thanks to a friend. Couldn’t miss it for anything! I went there with a friend, came back two days later with a camera, and the following day with three other friends… Am I obsessed with the franchise? Yeah, maybe. The artworks are a creation of GAAAT, a Tokyo-based art gallery. The event is hosted by the DANAE gallery, from October 2nd to October 9th, and is the result of a partnership with La Méduse Violette. It was supposed to end on the 5th, but was extended thanks to its popularity. ...

Music Jungle/DnB The “Yeah! Whoo!” heard in many Jungle and Drum & Bass songs come from the “Think Break”, sampled from “Think (About It)” by Lyn Collins (1972). Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex “take a little end” plays towards the end of the flashback section in episode 11 of 2nd GIG, according to tvtropes. “Dew” plays in episode 17 of 2nd GIG according to a comment thread in this YouTube upload. It starts around the 2:40 minutes mark, although it’s an instrumental version. ...

If you don’t own a Windows 11-compatible computer, or simply don’t want to upgrade to that shitty, ad-ridden, spyware of an OS, Massgrave is the way to go. It’s an open-source interactive Batch script that lets you enable ESU on a Windows 10 computer, for free, no Microsoft account required. Here’s how it looks like at the time of writing. TL;DR, use the TSforge option in Massgrave. Massgrave provides this PowerShell one-liner that runs the script after performing some checks. Make sure you are up to date, it might fail otherwise. ...