Recently I was browsing through git add’s manual to find out how to split hunks and stage them. I found that there is an option called --intent-to-add which is pretty useful. Like it says, one can use it to add an untracked file to git’s index but not stage the file. Why is it useful? An untracked file doesn’t show up in diffs and cannot be staged by hunks since nothing is in the index yet.

Firstly, DNS is how web addresses are looked up to find their location in terms of IP addresses. So it is actually surprising that this lookup has always been unencrypted. The issue has become mainstream of sorts when UK’s Internet Service Provider’s Association nominated Firefox as an internet villain for enabling DNSOverHTTPS (DoH). This allowed people to bypass DNS based blocking performed by ISPs which further cemented the idea that one needs encrypted DNS to avoid being censored or worse MITMed by an authoritarian government by using domain level blocking.

The common way for most people to chat is using an app on their phone which typically one of Whatsapp, Messenger or Telegram. In the same vein we have apps like Threema and Signal which are more popular in certain circles. But the one consistent feature for all these services, is the centralization of accounts and forcing users to be trapped inside a silo. It is true whether the services or clients themselves are open source or not.

I usually encounter this when saving notes about list of items that are not numbered but are generally better off being itemized. Since this is such a common scenario I did find a couple of posts1 2 that explained the method but they had edge cases which were not handled properly. Say you want to note down a shopping list and then decide to number it later, Soy milk Carrots Tomatoes Pasta Start off by numbering the first line and then move the cursor to the second line.

We had an introductory session on Ansible in #dgplug and these are some notes from the class. Learned about hosts file to create an inventory, https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/user_guide/intro_inventory.html#hosts-and-groups Different connections (ssh and local for now). I had also tested it against a server running CentOS. We then went on to create an ansible.cfg file in the demo directory which takes precedence over the global configuration. Learned to write a basic playbook which is a YAML file.

Original post at https://mjbraganza.com/atomic-habits/ Schedule and structure make or break the plan. Goals only show the direction of the task. Personally I would say this has brought all change I need. Answer in the affirmative. You don’t try quitting smoking, you don’t smoke period. Personally I don’t identify as someone who can’t eat butter or meat but as someone who won’t. This confirms my resolve in what I believe to be done.

systemd-networkd is a network manager that comes built in with Systemd. It has features, similar to NetworkManager and ConnMan which are more commonly used in distributions like Ubuntu and Fedora. My old system I had moved away from NetworkManager one year back due to constant issues with connecting to enterprise Wi-Fi with logs and errors that were difficult to debug or fix. It was also difficult to see where the failures occurred prompted me to move towards a more modular system.

Mozilla, the organization behind Firefox actually does more than just build software. In its advocacy efforts, they roped in Veronica Belmont to make IRL: Online Life Is Real Life, a podcast that explores various aspects of privacy in everyday life explained in a way that can be understood by everyone. It is into the third season and the current episode takes a look at the dilemma of sharing data with companies for free services and privacy.

Raison d’être When I first installed this system, I was oblivious to disk encryption and didn’t factor it in. This resulted in a non-LVM system with some haphazard partitions from subsequent resizing and nuking of Windows in the past few years. One good decision I took when installing was to separate / and /home so this turned out to be easier than I thought. Preparation I was apprehensive of ending up with a dead system before today’s DGPLUG session, so I managed to get weechat up and running inside tmux in a virtual console.

Today’s session of summer training in #dgplug on freenode is a follow up on writing and its importance. I wanted to share an answer to one of my doubts given by Jason. It is established that one has to write regardless of its quality to kick start the habit. The major roadblock is mostly on topic and specificity since there are times when you are in no man’s land. With this laid out, lets get to the answer.