monovergent 🛠️

  • 16 Posts
  • 86 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: November 27th, 2023

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  • The Pixel Tablet with GrapheneOS is the gold standard, but there’s even more than just the tablets with LineageOS support if you are adventurous.

    I was gifted a Samsung Tab A7 Lite, which is without LineageOS support. However, I’ve been able to flash TrebleDroid Generic System Images (GSI), which are vanilla AOSP images modified to support as many devices as possible. They come with no Google apps or services.

    Nearly everything works as expected, performance is much better, and battery life is unchanged. I can even run Android 15 smoothly when Samsung will end support for my tablet with Android 14. If anyone wants a writeup to the best of my memory, feel free to reply.






  • In my personal life and in communicating with family, there are few compromises. Most of my compromises come from work.

    Phone: Pixel with GrapheneOS and FOSS apps only as my primary. Old Pixel 4a with GrapheneOS as my secondary, with the main profile as testing grounds for various apps and a second profile holding work apps. Whatsapp seems to be the lowest common denominator for practical communication with colleagues.

    My workplace is BYOD, with MDM only for software licensing. Alongside my customary X230, I carry my lightweight, secondhand X1 Nano, where I have Windows, software licensed alongside said MDM, and Firefox logged into my work Google account.

    Key aspect for me is having work and personal life on separate devices. Not completely airtight, but as good as I can get it without making work any harder than it needs to be.

    Banking: Fortunately everything my bank has to offer can be done through a browser. My plan if a mobile app with play integrity ever becomes necessary is to buy a regular Android with a removable battery just to host that app.

    Transport: If I’m on a business trip without access to my car (no spyware, it’s from the 90s) and there is no public transport, I’ll get a friend or colleague to call an Uber for me. I haven’t gone out drinking at night since college and I’m not inclined to do so in the future.

    Maps: Usually Organic Maps suffices, I generally commit routes to memory before going out. For the occasional satellite map, Google Maps in a browser. I have gotten my family to use Magic Earth though.

    Fitness: no actual stats, just a handwritten entry in my daily journal as to whether I followed through with my exercise routine.





  • Of course! I’ve procrastinated having to edit the images, but here are the results:

    The X230. Only removed the coating on the bottom cover since the coating on the lid has yet to go sticky. Not perfect, but I personally like the resulting “rugged” look of it.

    The half-S230U which I refused to let go of after transplanting its IPS display to the above X230. Exposed palmrest surface is black plastic.

    Close-up of scuffing and damage to Intel sticker left by the cleaning process. Could certainly be polished, but couldn’t justify the effort here.

    Bottom of the S230U, a magnesium part.






  • I wish I found a guide like that back when I first made the move to FDE. Regardless, I was adamantly against reinstalling and painstakingly replicating my customizations, so I came up with a hacky way of tacking on FDE.

    It went something along the lines of:

    1. Shrinking the root partition as much as possible
    2. From Live CD, dd root partition to external drive
    3. Perform minimal encrypted install of Debian
    4. From Live CD, open LUKS container of the newly-installed Debian and overwrite the root partition within with my old root partition.
    5. Update fstab, crypttab, initramfs, and grub
    6. Cross my fingers and reboot

  • It’s been quite a journey:

    • Posting accurate personal info to my Google+ account when I first signed up
    • Signing in to Google on my phone and browser
    • Using an Android phone from eBay of dubious origin
    • Sending confidential info via email
    • Using the same gmail address for everything
    • Signing up for things with my real info when it wasn’t necessary
    • Handing out my phone number to loyalty programs
    • Running hacked game APKs without checking for malware
    • Using the User Agent Switcher extension on MS Edge, which was subsequently updated to include an infostealer
    • Using browser extensions of unknown provenance

    How to avoid:

    • Ironically, Windows 10 started me on my privacy journey. Microsoft was in my face enough with privacy offenses that I began moving to Linux and investing time into my privacy.
    • Don’t post unnecessary info to social media.
    • Never email confidential info.
    • Use a password manager, or at least some organized text file if you have an encrypted disk.
    • FOSS software is more available and user-friendly than ever, always look for a FOSS alternative.



  • The text editor shortcut on my taskbar runs a sort of autosave script in ~/.drafts. I wanted my text editor to function more like the one on my phone so I can just jot down random thoughts without going through the whole ritual of naming and saving. It creates YYYYMMDD_text in ~/.drafts (or YYYYMMDD_text_1 etc. if it already exists) and launches Pluma, which I also have configured to autosave every 10 minutes.

    The other thing extends beyond Linux itself a bit. I like to joke that I have the most secure NT 4 / Windows 95 lookalike ever put together. Aside from the encrypted and hardened Debian base (/boot is also encrypted), I was in part inspired by Apple’s parts pairing (yikes!). So my coreboot is configured to only accept my boot disk. If it’s swapped out or missing, or if I want to boot something else, it will ask for a password. In the unlikely event my machine gets stolen, the thief must at a minimum reflash the BIOS or replace the motherboard to make it useful again. Idk, it amuses me every time I think about it.