Things Degrade — Part 2

When I wrote in July 2024 about things degrading, I was not in a great mood. While the substance of the post still holds, I wanted to write a follow-up post, as few things have impoved since. I was able to work on some of the challenges, yet sometimes with a significant effort. So there is hope. 😄

• Handling low battery levels on my laptop (Arch Linux): this was an easy one; I’m now using a systemd timer which works nicely. poweralertd also came up in forums. 🎉

• Email client setup. I somehow figured I could move important client capacities, like spam and rules-based filtering, to the server: Rspamd, Sieve and finally adopting mbsync. 🎉 I read IMAP IDLE can be supported by an external program like imapnotify.

  Integrating rspamd actually triggered a whole series of interesting re-works touching DNS, VPN, certificates, firewalls, routing, jails. But most importantly this led to adding a second MX, which enables testing and allows for more autonomy. It also forced me archiving some email; something I hadn’t really done for about 10 years.

  OK I haven’t switched yet. But the bulk of the work is done. I still have a non-blocking issue with IPv6 jail routing. I also would like to test Rspam and Sieve a bit more.

• RSS and Cloudflare: thanks to the recent post on Hacker News Using Cloudflare on your website could be blocking RSS users, I discovered python hrequests¹, which enabled me to re-work my newsboat setup (leveraging exec:) and read feeds via Tor again. 🚀

• IRC: I did try Soju but, although there is a package for FreeBSD, I couldn’t get it to work. I didn’t see the gain of Soju/Senpai compared to Znc/Weechat. So I’ll be sticking to my old setup for now. And to be honnest I’m not using IRC much these days.

I also came to surprising realization that I may be somewhat on the conservative side of tech: nostalgic, aging techie, adverse to change, still sticking to RSS or IRC for example, when cleary the trend has already moved on. I may well be the one degrading actually. 😄