The winner stands alone
The Diamond Age
Chronicles of wasted time part 1
Better Angels of our Nature
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Snow Crash

Starfish Peter Watts

Maelstrom Peter Watts

Behemoth Peter Watts

The book of dust part 1 part 2

Homo deus

C j sansom

Dissolution

Black fyre

Red mars kim stanley robinson

Stories of your life and others

Elantris Brendan Sanderson

Borne Jeff Vandemere

My friends and family know I’m on a bit of a crusade. Or maybe they would say I’m over-principled. I’ve felt a creeping sense of dread for a very long time about Facebook, and Google, but it started to crystalise when the Snowden leaks happened. A lot of techies already knew what was being done, and a lot of it was out in the open already.

Ditching Android then. It’s a shame, Android has been good to me. My first smartphone was the HTC Desire, which I got in 2010 to celebrate getting my first job. I knew a few people with a smartphone already, but they were no where near ubiqutious.

I followed it up with the Nexus 4, which I did 2 screen replacements for.

Then the Oneplus One.

Then briefly a 2nd hand Sony Xperia Z5 Compact

That’s 4 phones in 9 years, which means I’ve kept them slightly longer than average. At no point have I spent a more than £400 on an individual phone.

Cyanogenmod Android

I’ve had a go, now and then, at using non-google Android. My first experiment was with Cyanogenmod on the HTC Desire. I had purely practical reasons for this: The proximity sensor had gone bad and always detected an object in proximity. This meant that if I initiated a phone call, the screen would turn off and then just stay off. If I was trying to call a system that required touch tone typing, then I couldn’t use the keypad. I couldn’t hang up, either. If the other party didn’t hang up, or the I needed to terminate the call myself, I would pull the battery.

There was one workaround for this, which was to use headphones. I think that disabled the “screen off” function even if the proximity sensor was always reading 1.

I installed Cyanogenmod on it, rooted it, then played around with the settings and filesystem to disable the sensor entirely. It worked, and the phone kept me going for another year or so.

For the Nexus 4, I kept using standard Google Android, and used it happily until my 2nd screen replacement broke, which was around the time OnePlus launched the OnePlus 1.

OnePlus One came with Cyanogenmod on it, a custom build of it by OnePlus. Although knowing what I know now I wouldn’t be suprised if it was leaking all my data to a Chinese company instead of an American company.

Eventually I got fed up with the defaults on the OnePlus and installed LineageOs on it, which has so far been my favorite android variant. Because it’s just Android!

LineageOs

Using Android without google services has become a lot harder than it used to be, and I think the main reason is Google Cloud Messaging, or Firebase.

Google Cloud Messaging is an inspired way to work around a problem that Android apps have always had, and when it was first implemented it vastly improved battery life and data consumption.

Trying to use any app that wants to send you notifications without using GCM is basically impossible. A good example is Whatsapp. I have issues with Whatsapp but I’m not Richard Stallman, and I’m not a hermit, so I have to make some concessions. Whatsapp is currently one of those concessions.

But using Whatsapp on an Android phone without GCM or google services installed means notifications or often delayed, or never show up at all unless I go to the app and manually refresh it. Something I did notice is that switching between wifi networks, or switching from Wifi to Mobile data would trigger it to fetch messages, so often I would arrive home from work, my phone would join my Wifi network, and I’d suddenly get all the messages I’d missed that day.

The Email app I used, K9 mail, had the same kind of issue. But this could be configured to explicitly poll for new messages every so often, which works fine…..but kills your battery.

I liked LineageOS a lot, but getting it working, and also using GCM, involved a lot of hassle and tended to break when I updated. Microg, which provides Google Services for Lineagos, is great but tends to fall over on update.

I’ve had enough of the fiddle. I’m trying to force a version of Android into my use case, instead of seeking out an alternative. What I’m doing will always be hard and fiddly.

Around this time I was also looking to get a new mobile. The OnePlus 1 has been a good workhorse but it’s starting to die. Too much of the hardware is failing.

I’ve had a gmail account since 2007, when I got an invite from someone I met at a university Open day. At the time it was the bee’s knees, dog’s bollocks and cat’s….elbows?It was hard to get into, it had way more storage than anything else, and it was fresh, and new, and exciting. There were people using it as a filesystem (before dropbox, I think).

I’ve long ranted and raved about how I no longer trust Google. I haven’t done for some time, but their services have become so ubiquitous that it’s hard to actually take the plunge.

Anyway, I’ve been gradually updating my contact information and contact records on a variety of services to my new Fastmail address. I have a choice here: I can use my own, self-hosted email address (using this domain), or I can use Fastmail.

In the long run, I want everything to be on the self-hosted address, and then I can make the choice to either continue to run it myself, which is a bit of a ball-ache, or I can direct the MX record to some company like Fastmail and get them to do it for me. This is a paid service, but then it has to be – Google only run gmail for free because it’s so profitable to harvest user data and to basically be the only option for email that most people have even heard of.

While moving services, I noticed that I have a lot of accounts for basically the same thing. Game Store accounts. Every fucking gaming company has one.

List of GAMING services I’ve had to move

• Steam
• Origin
• Mojang
• Sony PSN
• Battlenet
• Ubisoft
• UBER (Planetary Annihalation)
• WURM (who gives a shit about WURM?) I didn’t even move this one.
• Bethesda! Why on earth does Bethesda have one? They were on Steam until recently! I don’t even remember signing up!

Now that I’ve done this, I need to decide just how long I should leave my old gmail account open for. My “human” contacts already know to use my new address, which I’ve had on this domain for a few years now. I’ve left an out-of-office auto-responder on for a few weeks now, for contacts only. Just in case anyone forgets.

I suppose I’ll let it run for another month, then kill it?

It’s not strange that I am apprehensive about this. After all, this email address has been the keystone of my digital life for more than 10 years now. Practically every service I have ever used has required an email address as part of sign up, and this has been the only one I’ve used for non-financial stuff. It’s also been the case that so many fluff type things have required an email, and the resulting spam has just been unbearable.

This post was written before FreeNAS Corral got memory-holed. I’ve not decided on my course of action yet. I like running my services in Docker far more than I ever liked JAILS and the LinuxVM, so going backwards is not really an option.

I recently upgraded my FreeNAS 9.3 box to FreeNAS 10, FreeNAS Corral. The upgrade was very smooth, although I did panic at one point when it took 500 years to boot back up.

I knew that the old Plugin system had been removed, and that Docker Support was the new way to get your plugins working. I had several plugins I needed:

-Owncloud

-Transmission

-LinuxVM

The Linux VM plugin, or Jail, was what was letting me run an Ubuntu Server to host Squeeze Server. The Linux VM VirtualBox was not available any more, so the Squeeze Server would have to find a new home. Fortunately, there is a Docker Image for Squeeze Server.

Owncloud

Getting an Owncloud container running was pretty trivial. I did the following:

Create a new Dataset, for Owncloud Data to live in

I gave ownership of it to “www” user and group.

Create the Owncloud Docker Container

I needed to do the following:

• Give it a name
• Map the Dataset to the container path
• Set the Container to Bridged Mode. This is definitely possible with NAT, but I prefer having unique IP addresses for each container.
• Save the container, and start it up.

Once Owncloud has started up, I let it do a first time setup, letting it host the database itself, etc.

Migrating the Data from the Owncloud Jail

I needed to use the command line for this.

First, stop the container.

Copy the owncloud Jail data to the new Dataset.

My owncloud data was in /mnt/<Pool>/jails/owncloud/media

This location contained the User’s directories and the database, but not the config file.

Copy everything in here to your new Dataset, into the “data” folder:

/mnt/<Pool>/<Dataset>/data

That’s the data, but you need to edit the Config file as well. The config file for the new owncloud install is here:

/mnt/pool1/ownclod_temp/config/config.php

You’ll need to replace this with the older config file from the plugin, which is here on my setup:

/mnt/<Pool>/jails/owncloud/usr/pbi/owncloud-amd64/www/owncloud/config/config.php

You might need to update the trusted domains to include your new Owncloud Docker IP (or the FreeNAS IP and Docker Port, if you’re using NAT).

After you’ve done this, you should be able to start the Owncloud Container and log in using your original credentials.

SSL, Let’s Encrypt, Reverse Proxies

This was hard work. The actual solution is not complicated, but there’s no single guide to tell you how to do it.

Nextcloud recommends that you use a Reverse Proxy to get SSL working for your NextCloud container. Owncloud is pracitcally the same thing, so it seems like the thing to do in both cases.

I use Letsencrypt for my certs, and previously I ran certbot from inside the Owncloud Jail. I initially assumed I would do the same thing here, but luckily for me the FreeNAS docker collection includes a Letsencrypt Image that includes NGINIX, which would let me set up a reverse proxy as well.

Things to keep in mind before you start:

-Port forwarding on your Router should already be set up for the domain name you want to create the Certificate for.

-you need a writeable area for the certificates. I have a dataset setup with “www” permissions specifically for this.