joh.fi

Encrypted Windows and Arch Linux dual-boot installation using UEFI

Sat, 05 Mar 2016 13:30:00 +0000

I will start this with a note that this is not a tutorial type of post. It’s just to remind myself how I did this myself. I’m way too lazy to keep updating tutorials and therefore it’s easier to just post some rough guidelines instead of step by step instructions.

For some time now I’ve been running a pretty nice dual boot setup with my trusty old Lenovo X220. I have a 512GB Samsung 840 Pro SSD divided between a Windows 10 and Arch Linux installations. Both operating systems share the same EFI partition. This is especially nice as now I have a bit more faith with Windows updates not screwing up my linux installation. With the fact that the computer is a laptop comes a requirement that both installations are encrypted. Luckily both operating systems support full disk encryption and are relatively easy to set up.

How to fix your damaged gnupg database

Fri, 02 Jan 2015 11:18:14 +0000

Some time ago I had troubles with my gnupg installation. Namely gpg was unable to read keys from my trusted.db. I figured this had something to do with the upgrade to GnuPG 2.1.0.

That’s all for now folks and happy new year!

Install Ubuntu 13.10 on top of encrypted lvm

Tue, 18 Mar 2014 20:08:00 +0000

Introduction

Ubuntu’s installer provides a simple option for installing on top of encrypted lvm. The option however does not allow to modify partition layout and that for me is a showstopper. The other option is to create an encrypted container for all the partitions which works fine but then one has to enter the passphrase to each and every device individually.

This guide explains how to install ubuntu on top of an encrypted lvm and also give user the power of specifying partition layout. Using LVM makes it possible to specify partition sizes and unlock the encrypted device with a single passphrase. The alternative is to use encrypted devices for each partition and store keyfiles, that are used to unlock the other devices, on the root device.

IPv6

Tue, 31 Dec 2013 22:38:00 +0000

Just a quick note that the this site is now accessible via IPv6. :)

Unlike many others I will not be doing recaps for the past year nor predictions or promises for the next one. Still I wish happy new year for everyone!

Fresh new look

Wed, 09 Oct 2013 20:28:00 +0000

As you can see the site has a new fresh and responsive look. :)

New Skype for Android

Mon, 01 Jul 2013 17:16:00 +0000

It’s about time! Finally the functional but otherwise not very attractive Skype on android has been updated. User interface has been totally revamped and follows the nowadays so popular flat style. With my initial testing the new version seems to work really well and so far I haven’t found anything to complain about. Well except for the most awkward ad I have seen in a long time.

Post status format

Thu, 27 Jun 2013 15:57:00 +0000

I just found out that wordpress supports different post formats. Neato!

Newsblur

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 20:51:00 +0000

I recently wrote about leaving Google Reader. Of course this decision was made for me when Google announced that they will shutdown Google Creader on 1st of July. In the beginning I simply used thunderbird as my RSS reader but eventually this became too limited as for instance I couldn’t easily access my thunderbird installation from work. Then I switched to theoldreader which is more or less a Google Reader clone with additional features. It worked just fine and was free as in it didn’t cost anything. However theoldreader failed to fetch all the articles for me. Of course I couldn’t complain much as I was not a paying customer but it was enough to push me for searching for an alternative.

Waiting for Haswell Macbook Pros

Sat, 15 Jun 2013 17:56:00 +0000

I am a strong believer of mobile computing and to me a perfect setup is a small laptop that can be connected to a bigger screen via docking station or similar setup. My current setup consists of two year old Lenovo X220 and a high resolution Dell U2711. I’ve been quite happy with it. Laptop is easy to take out from the docking station, which by the way comes with the device, and it serves as a desktop replacement while at home. However two years is a long time in technology and I constantly find myself drooling after newer laptops.

Goodbye Google Reader

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 20:34:00 +0000

So yesterday Google announced that they will retire Google Reader. At first this annoyed me since to me Google Reader was their best service after Google Search of course. Luckily there are plenty of alternatives and for now I chose Thunderbird as I already use it for email.

Good riddance!

From your 55 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 9,443 items, clicked 480 items, starred 1 items, and emailed 0 items. Since May 21, 2010 you have read a total of 237,212 items.

Installing ownCloud on a shared host

Thu, 10 Jan 2013 18:45:00 +0000

I’ve been using Dropbox and Google Calendar for as long as I can remember and I’ve rarely had any problems with them. As a matter of a fact both products work great, offer free service and have saved my ass on few occasions. Sounds too good? Yeah… The old truth still stands: If you’re not paying for it; You’re the product (and sometimes even if you’re paying). The part of me that is concerned about privacy issues has never liked the situation but I’ve argued that the benefits are greater than lack of privacy. Also lately I’ve been syncing more files to my Dropbox and my free disk quota is running out. Therefore I need to either find a better alternative or start paying for the service. Well yesteday I had some free time on my hands and decided to look for an alternative to Dropbox. Ideal replacement should be easy to use, work well and preferably be open souce. It didn’t take me long to bump into ownCloud.

My first patch to GNOME

Sun, 16 Dec 2012 19:22:00 +0000

I’ve used open source software for many years now but I haven’t really contributed back to any of the open source communities. I have filled some bug reports but other than that I’ve been simply a happy (and sometimes less happy) user. However yesterday I took the first step by doing tiny tiny contribution to GNOME or to be specific to gnome-session. The funny thing is that it was all because of selfish reasons.

Git subtree merge

Mon, 29 Oct 2012 18:31:00 +0000

Last week I took part to an intensive Clojure-course which was an introduction to functional programming using Clojure. The course itself was fairly well organized and interesting but that’s not the topic of this post.

The course was built around solving small programming tasks using clojure. Each topic had their own separate git repository on github which we cloned and added our solutions in. The end result was that participants had many repositories (one for each exercise set) and this was fine during the course. Now that I’ve successfully passed the course I wanted to get rid of all the separate repositories and combine them to a single git repository. I could have simply created a new repository and copied the files into it but this way I would have lost all commit history. I have previously used git submodules but since I won’t be developing these assignments further I would rather not user that method. Few minutes of googling and I found a solution for my problem, git subtree merge. Subtree merge is perfect for my use case since I my repositories were separate but they shared no data with each other. In other words there would not be any merge conflicts.

Migration to Octopress

Thu, 12 Jul 2012 21:43:00 +0000

Brace yourselves, it’s time for another “I migrated from X to octopress” blog post. Try to bear with me.

Like the title hints I have finally started my migration process from wordpress to octopress. I have nothing against wordpress per se but it’s way too big for my needs. I only need a simple way of creating posts every now and then and for that purpose octopress seems to be quite suitable. Also static html pages are more pop than hipster glasses these days.

KDE and ssh-agent

Mon, 09 Jul 2012 15:21:00 +0000

Hello lazyweb!

GNOME or to be more precise GNOME keyring has nice feature of including ssh-agent that integrates nicely with gnome-keyring. I find this feature very convenient since I don’t have to input my password every time I connect to a server. (I sincerely hope that no one is using ssh-keys without password protection).

Things are quite not as convenient on KDE side of desktop environments even though KDE provides handy tool called KDE wallet. Luckily with few simple scripts we can use the combination of KDE wallet and ssh-agent to provide similar functionality on KDE. So without further ado here is the guide.

Disable arrow keys in Vim

Fri, 15 Jun 2012 10:24:00 +0000

I know this information can be found in n+1 other places but I will write it here anyway to be able to access it easily later.

One of the most important things when starting to use Vim as your editor is to drop all old habits! Therefore we will disable the arrow keys so that you are forced to use h, j, k, l to navigate. So without further ado here are the changes one should add to their .vimrc file.

Implementing binary heap without an array

Thu, 17 Nov 2011 17:06:00 +0000

So I had this school assignment to implement a binary heap with a twist of not using an array to store the binary tree. You might think that this is an easy problem to solve and after some thinking it turns out that it isn’t much harder than the generic array implementation. However if this is the first time you’re implementing binary heap this way, you’ll likely find it difficult to insert new nodes in O(lg n) time. With arrays you can always find the last element in constant time. Unfortunately this is not the case with object references unless you have a trick or two in your sleeve. Once you’re able t access last node of the heap and sibling nodes of a particular node in constant time, the solution is similar to any text book implementation. It is also worth noting that at the time of writing google isn’t much of a help solving this problem because next to every example shows the array implementation.

256 colors in vim and screen

Thu, 03 Nov 2011 14:44:00 +0000

For some strange reason at least Fedora ships screen and vim with 256 colors disabled. Here’s a quick guide how to enable 256 colors in vim and screen.

Add to you .vimrc file
```
set t_Co=256
```

Add following lines to your .screenrc file

attrcolor b ".I"
termcapinfo xterm 'Co#256:AB=\E[48;5;%dm:AF=\E[38;5;%dm'
defbce "on"

Also check that your terminal supports or has 256 colors enabled. At least gnome-terminals seems to have this by default. Enjoy combination of vim and screen with 256 colors. :)

Unmounting a busy drive

Mon, 03 Oct 2011 18:45:00 +0000

My computer setup consists of Lenovo x220 with a docking station, two external screens and of course mouse and keyboard. Even though my laptop has a fast hard drive, it has only 120GB disk space which means I need external hard drives to store my data. I have one external hard drive and one docking station which accepts regular internal 3.5" and 2.5" hard drives. Since I prefer suspend over shutdown I sometimes get problems with my external docking station.

Spotify 0.6.1 on Fedora 15/16

Mon, 03 Oct 2011 18:31:00 +0000

Edit: This works for version 0.6.2 as well.

Spotify is a popular music streaming service which unfortunately isn’t globally available. Here in Finland we have had the opportunity to enjoy Spotify from the begining which is a rare thing. For a minuscule amount of 9.99€ you’ll have pretty much unlimited collection of music at your hands and on your mobile phone. Ok, granted not every artist has their music in Spotify but the collection is huge! Better yet they “support” Linux with their preview client. The support is nothing compared to Windows or OS X but it’s more than most services ever offer. While the service is certainly rewarding for the end-user, I’ve heard stories about artists complaining that the money coming from Spotify is next to nothing. Personally I don’t know what real situation is, probably record labels are taking most of the money. Enough said, lets get our hands dirty.

Disabling URL trimming in Firefox 7

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 14:23:00 +0000

Mozilla released Firefox 7 released yesterday (actually day before yesterday since it’s already 29th here) and of course I did an upgrade as soon as RPM files were available in koji. Call me old fashioned but I didn’t like the new feature which trims the http:// part of URL. Perhaps it’s something that I’ll eventually get used to but for now I disabled it. Luckily disabling the feature was easy enough.

Here is how you do it:

Project Euler

Tue, 27 Sep 2011 14:44:00 +0000

Project Euler is a website containing computational problems intended to be solved by small programs. Currently there are 351 problems to be solved and all of the problems should be doable within one- minute-rule. In other words you are doing something wrong if computing the solution takes more than one minute (or at least your program could be optimized). If you’re interested in programming or mathematics then Project Euler is for you. Solving problems is fun and along the way you may learn something new.

NTMLv2 authentication on Linux

Thu, 15 Sep 2011 12:04:00 +0000

Today at work I was trying to get my virtual machine, running Fedora, to access internet. Unfortunately the place I work is pretty much married to products from Microsoft. All the networking to the outside world go through proxies and in this case through Microsoft ISA. ISA uses NTLMv2 authentication mechanism which is not supported out of the box by Linux. Luckily there was multiple applications that were able to act as a man in the middle proxy, such as cntlm and NTLAMPS.

About

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Ahoy there! My name is Janne Haapsaari and I’m a software developer based in Helsinki, Finland. At the moment I’m writing code for Qvik. It should go without saying but this is my personal journal and opinions reflected here are my own.

Contact:

Email: janne@joh.fi