Things Degrade — Part 1

I like to customize and maintain my home lab and work station. Main motivations are control (autonomy and purpose — privacy) and learning (mastery). But recently I started finding it hard to keep up. Furthermore I fail to see a clear path towards an improved situation.

Make sure to read the follow-up post.

Broken windows

Here’s a list of tools and services that don’t work well:

• Email client setup. mu4e and imapfetch) are fine. But I found myself in situations where I wanted to access my email from different devices. I run my IMAP server so in theory that’s not an issue. But on the client side, I need to move away from imapfetch (basically IMAP-as-POP3) and the evolution is not clear. In short my ideal requirements are:

  • Read my email in Emacs; mu4e is ideal;
  • Decent IMAP support; Ideally use the IDLE IMAP command for efficiency;
  • Email filtering and spam classification (responsibility of the MDA — Mail Delivery Agent);

  Bundling together all aspects from multiple component tools is not straight-forward. Some people use mbsync but omit mentioning filtering. imapfilter might be an option, but would require a significant programming investment.

  Furthermore, while fetching happens via imapfetch, sending email happens via mu4e. And Emacs’ auth-source doesn’t have any rbw backend (Vaultwarden CLI). So until I write this backend, I have to stick with pass for at least SMTP passwords.

• RSS reading. The main issue is that an increasing portion of feeds are now behind cloudflare 😡 Meaning my client, Linux behind Tor, now gets 403 responses with a captcha. I used to use scripts to bypass cloudflare but they don’t work anymore. I guess I will have to write site owners to allow automated and anonymous access to their RSS feeds 🤷

• IRC connection. Anonymous access via Tor to IRC networks is somewhat random. Some networks straight deny access to Tor users. But also sometimes I get random SSL errors (like SSL+routines::unexpected+eof+while+reading). Admittedly my setup is a bit involved: IRC client → Znc bouncer → Tor → IRC server. I might want to try getting rid of Znc or switch to Soju/Senpai.

  Also people are less and less using IRC to be honest. Many communities I was interacting with moved to Matrix or Discord.

• Openwrt router. Support for my hardware, although relatively popular, was basically interrupted. I was uneasy leaving my router unpatched. Especially since ZFS started playing weirdly on some server. I read support has been unofficially added back and will diligently attempt an upgrade.

• Handle low battery levels on my laptop (Arch Linux). My requirement is pretty simple: display a warning notification in my window manager (i3) on low battery level then suspend on critical level. I failed with udev rules (push-based)¹. I will try with systemd user timer (pull-based) next.

• Rooted phone. My Android mod of choice dropped support for my device a while ago. The only option left was LineageOS but support for my device was initially incomplete (voice calls didn’t work). I’ve been dragging my feet ever since for several reasons:

  • No guaranty Lineage is going to work;
  • Heavy effort to switch (actually flashing + install/configure apps);
  • F**g bank apps 🔥🔥🔥 Not only will I need to go through the sync procedure with banks and credit card companies, but recent apps refuse to run on rooted phones. Magisk is of no help and I don’t know if there are alternatives. For now old versions still work. Do I need a vanilla phone for banks? 🤮

• Linux audio support. While I never had to complain on most models, sound regularly breaks with Arch Linux updates on a laptop at work, a ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 10². After a lot of research and debugging I’m just out of ideas. It may well be a hardware issue as was the case with video card on some Dell laptop about 10 years ago. I may end up pinning suspicious packages.

• GnuGPG agent freezes. I suspect this is related to some systemd interaction but wasn’t able to debug the issue. So I just have to kill the agent whenever this happens 😞

• Open standards. My wife uses a stock android phone. We haven’t been able to share calendars because the google calendar app seemingly does not support self-hosted opensource servers. My email attachments also don’t show up in gmail. 😡 For calendars, my quick research showed a fix exists. If not I should be able to install opensource alternatives.

Realization

Having stated all this — and I may have forgotten some, I see some trends emerging:

• Hardware are not supported for long (router 2018, phone 2019).
• My usages change albeit slowly. Adoption of mobile phone and multi-device access mainly (IMAP). Regarding communication tools and protocols, maybe apart from the fragmentation in the messaging/chat space, they broadly remain the same.
• Privacy gets really hard (RSS, rooted phone).
• Custom solutions require more care.

Let’s review them and how they can be addressed.

Privacy

This might be a long and controversial debate so I will just say that we are giving up rights/freedom for convenience. We continue using platforms which impose drastic measures, like requiring to login to access user-contributed content. To protect us (as consumers) or our services (as producers), we rely on centralized services like cloudflare or gmail. This tendency is probably here to stay and I see two alternatives: fake identities (anonymity has become illegal) and alternate services (and so alternate people 👽).

Custom solutions

😶

The dilemma here is: control vs usability. Wait that sounds a lot like freedom vs convenience! With the slight variation that there is here a bottom level of usability: for example I don’t want a bloated system (desktop environment, OS, etc.) but I can’t give up on audio.

Usages

I reluctantly use a mobile phone. The reasons I use one fall into the following categories:

• organizational: maps, public transports, calendar. One could say convenience because paper counterparts had worked well for me for a long time.
• imposed: banking (authentication device) mainly but I also recall unavoidable apps during the corona pandemic.
• proxied: required for another (less or non-digital) service, like car sharing, hotel doors, where the phone is used as a device to unlock or control other parts of the service.

In short, society has taken for granted that we all have a mobile phone. That’s including public services. Like it was taken for granted in the previous era that people had a land line phone number. But given that mobile phones are effectively tracking devices, the shift is not harmless.

😶

OK I can’t help but see the freedom-vs-convenience dilemma again. I guess a mobile phone dedicated to a restricted set of usages could be an option if I was to opt for freedom.

Obsolescence

Hardware improves. Fast. I had to replace the primary disk in my homemade NAS recently. The disk takes the slot of the optical disk, so there’s actually room for a 3.5" hard drive. Since I used an SSD, I bought a case to fit nicely into the slot. Now I was thinking to reuse an M.2 or NVMe SSD and considered buying yet another nested case with a SATA adapter. So within 10 years I could literally see the drive size shrink.

I should also mention cultural media and how we went from owning it (CD/DVD, books) to renting it. While I tend to believe that environmental impact thus increased (just by sheer usage increase), research is more cautious about conclusions. The pace of technology shift is breathtaking when we come to think that laws enacted around 2005 to fight peer-to-peer copy³ were rendered partly obsolete around 2015-2016 when streaming services took over physical media.

The trend is that acquiring new hardware is easier. The counterpart is that keeping old hardware running and hardware reuse is difficult. One reason is that related software chooses to drop support. Another reason is that it can be difficult to find parts or they are so expensive that buying new is tempting. I had the case for batteries on my “old” UPS.

In the software space, noticeable projects that care about aging hardware are:

• NetBSD, which intentionally supports a very wide variety of old and new hardware⁴.
• Dusk OS with a strong commitment to empower operators (instead of users) to hack old hardware.
• Repair Cafes, which I have been attending in the past to repair small electrical equipment. Super rewarding!

Note for self: explore the topic of low-tech.

Last year I wanted to change a broken drawer in my kitchen. I was shocked to learn that Ikea discontinued the famous kitchen line which was installed in our home only 10 years ago! In my parents’ time, kitchen furniture lasted lifetimes.

Conclusion

Maybe the bigger question is: how do societal systems empower (re-capacitate) people? In this regards, Bernard Stiegler’s books provide eye-opening insights on the contemporary evolution of modern societies.