Max Mehl (Ilove fs)

I love the hidden champions

Fri, 14 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

A few days ago I’ve sent an announcement email for today’s I Love Free Software Day to a large bunch of people. Most of the remarkably many replies have been positive and a pure joy to read, but some were a bit sceptical and critical. These came from Free Software contributors who are maintaining and helping projects that they think nobody knows and sees – not because these software projects are unused, but because they are small, a building block for other, more popular applications.

When we ask people to participate in #ilovefs (this year for the 10th time in a row!) by expressing their gratitude to contributors of their favourite Free Software projects, many think about the applications they often use and come up with obvious ones like Mozilla’s Firefox and Thunderbird, LibreOffice, their Linux-based distribution, or CMSs like WordPress and Drupal. Not that I think this is not deserved, but what about the projects that actually form the foundations for these popular suites?

I researched a bit on my own system (based on Arch Linux) and checked on how many packages some of the aforementioned applications depend (including dependencies of their dependencies)¹:

Firefox: 221
Thunderbird: 179
LibreOffice: 185
GIMP: 166
Inkscape: 164

Phew! Looking through the list of dependencies, there a dozens of programmes and libraries that I couldn’t even imagine what they could be about. But they make a big application, be it Firefox, Thunderbird or GIMP, actually possible. Isn’t it a bit unfair that we often don’t see these small (or sometimes huge) projects and the people who take care of it?²

I decided to change that, at least for one day! I’ve analysed which packages are most used as dependencies of other packages (similar for Debian/Ubuntu ³):

for p in $(pacman -Q | cut -d" " -f1); do
  echo "$(pactree -r -l $p | tail -n+2 | sort | uniq | wc -l)–$p–$(pacman -Qi $p | grep "^Description" | grep -oP '(?<=: ).*')"
done | column -t -s'–' | sort -nr

Output:

1621  iana-etc                   /etc/protocols and /etc/services provided by IANA
1620  tzdata                     Sources for time zone and daylight saving time data
1620  linux-api-headers          Kernel headers sanitized for use in userspace
1620  filesystem                 Base Arch Linux files
1619  glibc                      GNU C Library
1349  gcc-libs                   Runtime libraries shipped by GCC
1287  ncurses                    System V Release 4.0 curses emulation library
1267  readline                   GNU readline library
1261  bash                       The GNU Bourne Again shell
...

As you might expect, on the very top I found a lot of GNU and Linux sub-projects, some widely known (like bash), some which I as a more-user-than-developer never heard of before (like libffi). This alone has been an interesting journey during which I learnt a lot about projects and their maintainers which play a crucial role on my laptop.

In the end, I decided to express my thanks today to the following projects and people:

The development team behind acl/attr which controls access permissions
The four initial creators of argon2, Jean-Philippe, Samuel, Dmitry and Daniel, for their password hasing function
Jan Dittberner (who also is a FSFE supporter!) and Nathan Neulinger, developers of CrackLib which checks and enforces strong passwords
Reuben Thomas and Dom Lachowicz for their enchant project, a wrapper for various spell checking engines
Maintainers of glibc and gcc, important tools for the C library and compiler
The HarfBuzz team which can shape glyphs from Unicode texts
The libmnl/netfilter people, who provide tools for network-related operations
The contributors of libxml2 for their library and tools that are crucial for the FSFE website
Martin Mitáš who more or less alone maintains md4c, a Markdown parser
Thomas Dickey who maintains ncurses which provides a text-based interface for the command line
Chet Ramey as representative of readline, a programme for interactive user input
And last but not least Lasse Collin who maintains xz, a compression tool

But of course, that’s only a small fraction of the many interesting Free Software components that enable my daily work. However, if we all do the same and think about the hidden champions – not only during #ILoveFs day but beyond – we can make the humans behind it enjoy their invaluable contributions a bit more.

Happy I Love Free Software Day everyone! ❤

pactree -l firefox | sort | uniq ↩︎
During the writing of this blog post I remembered Matthias hugging Peter Stuge for #ilovefs 2013 who also contributes to widely used Free Software projects. ↩︎

If you want to try the same with apt (with another separator):

for p in $(dpkg --get-selections | cut -f1 | cut -d":" -f1); do
  echo "$(apt-cache rdepends $p | tr -d '|' | tail -n+3 | sort | uniq | wc -l)*$p*$(apt-cache show $p | grep -m 1 "^Description:" | grep -oP '(?<=: ).*')"
done | column -t -s'*' | sort -nr

↩︎

I love astroid! #ilovefs

Tue, 14 Feb 2017 07:30:51 +0000

You cannot imagine how long I’ve waited to write this blog post. Normally I’m not the bragging kind of guy but for this year’s edition of my „I love Free Software“ declaration articles (after 2014, 2015 and 2016) I just want to shout out to the world: I have the world’s best mail client: astroid!

Hugo and me declaring our love to astroid

Update February 2018: Meanwhile I have published my mail config incl. astroid, notmuch, offlineimap etc. It is a rather complicated and special setup but perhaps it will help you.

Okay, maybe I’ll add two or three words to explain why I am so grateful to the authors of this awesome Free Software application. Firstly, I should note that until ~6 months ago I have used Thunderbird – extended with lots of add-ons but still a mail user agent that most of you will know. But with each new email and project it became obvious to me that I have to find a way to organise my tenthousands of mails in a better way: not folder-based but tag-based, but not to the expense of overview and comfort.

Thanks to Hugo I became aware of astroid, an application that unites my needs and is open to multiple workflows. Let’s read how astroid describes itself:

Astroid is a lightweight and fast Mail User Agent that provides a graphical interface to searching, display and composing email, organized in thread and tags. Astroid uses the notmuch backend for blazingly fast searches through tons of email. Astroid searches, displays and composes emails – and rely on other programs for fetching, syncing and sending email.

My currently unread and tagged emails

Astroid is roughly 3 years old, is based on sup, and is mainly developed by Gaute Hope, an awesome programmer who encourages people – also non-programmers like me – to engage in the small and friendly community.

Why is astroid so cool?

That’s one secret of astroid: it doesn’t try to catch up to programs that do certain jobs very well already. So astroid relies on external POP/IMAP fetching (e.g. offlineimap), SMTP server (e.g. msmtp), email indexing (notmuch), and mail editors (e.g. vim, emacs). This way, astroid can concentrate on offering a unique interface that unites many strenghts:

Saved searches on the left, a new editor window on the right

astroid encourages you to use tabs. Email threads open in a new tab, a newly composed message is a separate tab, as well as a search query. You won’t loose any information when you write an email while researching in your archive while keeping an eye on incoming unread mails. If your tab bar becomes too long, just open another astroid instance.
It can be used by either keyboard or mouse. Beginners value to have a similar experience as with mouse-based mail agents like Thunderbird, experts hunt through their mails with the configurable keyboard shortcuts.
Tagging of emails is blazingly fast and efficient. You can either tag single mails or whole email threads with certain keywords that you can freely choose. Astroid doesn’t impose a certain tagging scheme on its users.
astroid already included the possibility to read HTML or GPG-exncrypted emails. No need to create a demotivatingly huge configuration file like with mutt.
Theming your personal astoid is easy. The templates can be configured using HTML and CSS syntax.
It is expandable by Python and lua plugins.
It’s incredibly fast! Thunderbird or Evolution users will never have to bother with 20+ seconds startup time anymore. Efficiency hooray!

On startup, I see my saved search queries

Because it is open to any workflow, you can also easily use astroid with rather uncommon workflows. I, personally, use a mix of folder- and tag-based sorting. My mail server automatically moves incoming mails to certain folders (mostly based on mailing lists) which is important to me because I often use my mobile phone that doesn’t include a tagging-based email client, too. But with my laptop I can add additional tags or tag unsorted mails. Based on these tags, I again sort these mails to certain folders to reduce the amount of mails lying around in my unsorted inbox. Such a strange setup would have been impossible with many other email agents but with astroid (almost) everything is possible.

Did I convince you? Well, certainly not. Switching one’s email client is a huge step because for most people it involves changing the way how most of theor digital communication happens. But hopefully I convinced you to have a look at astroid and think about whether this awesome client may fulfill some of your demands better than your existing one. If you already use notmuch, a local SMTP server, offlineimap, procmail or other required parts, testing astroid will be very easy for you. And if your way to using astroid will be longer, as mine was, feel free to ask me or the helpful community.

P.S.: FSFE activists in Berlin carried out two awesome activities for ILoveFS!

I love Free Software (Apps)

Sun, 14 Feb 2016 09:00:18 +0000

Do you know being in a restaurant and getting a menu which is longer than the average novel, and you cannot decide for a single meal because every single one sounds more delicious than the other? That’s similar to the problem I was having when writing this blog post…

Today is the „I love Free Software“ day, on which people all over the world say „thank you“ to contributors of Free Software, often created in free time and with lots of passion. This is software you can use for any purpose, which source code you or others can analyse, which can be modified and distributed – any program respecting these essential freedoms benefits a fair society, and our most personal privacy and security in return.

After I thanked ZNC and Taskwarrior last Valentine’s Days, this year I want to focus on software running on the device that’s almost always in my pocket. My mobile phone is the gatekeeper of most of my communication: short messages, pictures, emails, social media, todo lists, calendar… it’s amazing thinking about what this tiny computer has to achieve to satisfy my needs. But of course, I also want to use as much Free Software as possible to secure my sensitive data. And because of that I cannot name a single software but have to list a few which I depend on almost every single day, and I want to sincerely thank the people contributing to them!

The foundation

With mobile phones it’s not easy to have a completely free operating system platform, depending on your phone model. For mine, I chose OmniROM, which still contains some non-free firmware but is as much Free Software as possible. And it works like a charm, having lots of nice features, a broad device compatibility, and actively development team.

Because I want to avoid non-free software and services which use my most sensitive data for their profit, I avoid Google and similar products as much as possible. Because of that, I do not load my application from Google Play but from F-Droid, an app „store“ offering Free Software apps only! Right now there are far over 1000 apps available, most of them fulfilling high quality requirements. All the apps I’ll list below can be found there.

My big five

I use my mobile phone for communication and information purposes. So K-9 Mail is my sanctuary, enabling me to receive and send, de- and encrypt my emails. Admittedly, the user interface isn’t the best, some things can get on your nerves (organising many folders…), but it just works. That’s an attribute I learnt to value.

The next layer is short texts communication. Since almost nobody in my circle of acquaintances uses oldschool short messages anymore, I switched most of my chitchat communication over to LibreSignal, a Google-dependency-freed fork of Signal, providing very strong encryption and a great and easy user interface at the same time. At the same time I still use Telegram (non-free server) and WhatsApp (absolutely bad) because it’s hard to convince all the contacts you have. But it’s nice to see how many people switched over to better alternatives meanwhile. And with Twidere, I can manage my GnuSocial and Twitter accounts easily with lots of features. And if you are still forced to use Facebook, try Face Slim.

As a scout, many people seem to think that I always know any direction. In the old days I had to navigate using stars and moss on stones, but nowadays I just pick my ultimate compass and can lead the way thanks to OsmAnd and Transportr. The former enables me to download offline vector maps, navigate on them, find points of interest (bars, shops, bus stops – and bars), with the latter I can use the public transport system of almost every larger city in Europe using a neat and fast-responding interface. And the best thing: It even works in areas without sun, stars, or moss-grown stones. But well, without battery…

The small things

F-Droid also contains a myriad of small jewels, nice tools for the even most absurd needs and situations most of us are confronted with not more than once in our lifetime. Not so absurd but also quite helpful for me are primitive ftpd, SMS Backup+, JAWS, and Port Authority. The first starts a small (S)FTP server which I can connect to using a client like Filezilla on my desktop computer, so I can exchange huge amounts of files faster than via Bluetooth. SMS Backup+ backups – surprise surprise – SMSs. But it uploads (and restores) them (and also call logs) to any IMAP folder you define, which comes in handy when you want to search your SMSs quickly at your computer in your email client. JAWS and Port Authority are small tools to debug networks. The former shows all nearby Wifi networks, their signal strength and BSSID. The latter allows you to see all devices in the network including MAC address or open ports.

Conclusion

So you see, Free Software is everywhere and you can do great things with it. Everytime I can replace another non-free and privacy-disrespecting service with Free Software, it makes my day. I hope I can give some of this joy today to the people making this possible!

I love Taskwarrior, therefore I love Free Software

Sat, 14 Feb 2015 12:05:42 +0000

“It’s Valentine’s day and you’re writing a blog post? Are you nuts?” you might ask. Well, but it’s not only Valentine’s day but also I love Free Software day. This day is proclaimed every year on February 14 by the Free Software Foundation Europe to thank all developers and contributors of Free Software (software you can use for any purpose, which source code you or others can analyze, which can be modified and distributed).

As last year with ZNC, I want to say thank you to a specific project which easies my daily life. As you might know by other blog posts here, organisation of tasks, mails and almost everything else is a very important issue for me. So this year I want to write some lines about Taskwarrior, taskd and Mirakel which enable me to take some free time without thinking of task which I could possibly forget to accomplish later on.

My head is full of ideas and mental To-Do lists and so I’m in need of a handy tool which allows me to write down and organise items at any place and time: At my desk, in bus or train, when I’m offline or abroad. And its important that I don’t have (analog and digital) bits of paper everywhere, so I need a system that syncs all task inputs and outputs. I tried a lot of tools but Taskwarrior was the best so far. It used the well-known „Getting Things Done“ concept with different priorities. Taskwarrior also supports tagging tasks, organising them in projects, due dates, postponing, making tasks dependend on others and much more. And Taskwarrior has a (modifiable) algorhythm that sorts your tasks by urgency levels, so that the most important tasks always are on the top of the list. Even now I just took a glance at what Taskwarrior is able to do!

Someone who loves Taskwarrior as much as I do

“Services and programs that organise tasks aren’t very special!” one might think. But if you prefer sorting tasks digitally, you cannot simply chose a random todo-organising service provider. Most of the tools and services on the market aren’t free and transparent. All input may no longer belong to you, all the gathered information (which is a lot if you think of it!) could be used for targeted ads or worse. You cannot modify the algorhythm to suit your needs. And what happens if the service provider goes bankrupt? All data, all project history and all pending tasks would be lost at once. So using a free (as in freedom), decentralised, maybe self-hosted service is the best idea to organise your tasks decentrally.

But one thing at a time, let’s start from the very basic. You can install Taskwarrior and almost any operating system. After the installation, taskwarrior isn’t much more than a black window with white letters in it. And even when you’re a pro-user, you won’t find much more than white or colourful text on black background – and this is a good thing! I’ve seen no graphical user interface which can handle Taskwarrior’s complexity and the users‘ needs sufficiently (but there are some, feel free to test them!). Nevertheless, it’s quite easy to use Taskwarrior from your terminal:

task add "This is my first task"          # Add your first item
task long                                 # Show all pending tasks
task add "Second VIP task!" pri:H         # Add a task with priority
task add "Third task with tag" +test      # Add a task with a tag
task add "Fourth projected task" pro:Blog # Add a task with a project
task long                                 # Show all pending tasks
task 1 done                               # Mark first task as done (ID = 1)

There are many useful and well understandable guides in the project’s documentation. Most likely you do not need every command but maybe it’s useful to read something about techniques which might help you to organise your tasks your way.

Some useful commands of Taskwarrior using some fish shell features

But Taskwarrior is only for your local computer. What’s if you want to use it when sitting in the bus and don’t want to forget a ToDo item you want to write down at the very moment? Then there’s a handy application for Android called Mirakel. Even the app itself is powerful, but it’s full potential is unleashed when combining it with Taskwarrior. For this, we need a central instance which synchronises the tasks you add or edit on your devices. The Taskwarrior project developed taskd for it which you can easily setup on a server. You can also use Mirakel’s own public taskd server (at least in the past) if you don’t own a server or don’t want to maintain this service.

So if you connect both Taskwarrior and Mirakel to the new taskd server, you can easily share all tasks among them. When marking a task done on your smartphone, it’s marked as done on your home computer some seconds or minutes later if you want to. Security is an important part of taskwarrior as well, so transport encryption is on by default. And if you want, you can also try a web interface or other handy tools and extensions for your server and client which I haven’t tested yet.

Hopefully you now know a bit more about Taskwarrior and Mirakel and the great tools they designed. Of course I do not only want to recommend some software but also use this opportunity to say a big THANK YOU to all the people behind these projects! Thank your for developing the software and making it compatible to each other. Thanks to the various contributors which are writing the important documentation, adding new languages, writing tools and bridges for other usage scenarios and thank you for reacting to bug reports. People like you make Free Software possible!

My internship at FSFE

Fri, 24 Oct 2014 10:39:54 +0000

I recently saw that the Free Software Foundation Europe is offering a new and very interesting internship position. That’s a great opportunity for every student interested in Free Software and political activism — and for me to write about my internship I completed from October 2013 until end of March 2014. Here’s a report I wrote some time ago:

Starting from October 2013 I was able to work 6 months as an intern for the Free Software Foundation Europe in Berlin. This was an internship required by my bachelor degree course at the University of Konstanz (Germany) where I study Politics and Public Administration. Some years before my internship I already was an FSFE Fellow and then decided to apply there.

My daily tasks contained monitoring and moderation of the various mailing lists and social network accounts. There were also various technical jobs to do: Updating and creating single websites, sending out newsletters, fixing smaller bugs on our pages and so on.

The bigger part in my internship was political work. In Germany, various ISPs want to hinder end consumers to freely choose a router because they only want officially supported ones. Such policy comes with serious consequences for security, free competition, trust in technology, and compatibility. My tasks contained analysing regulation drafts, writing statements for public hearings and coordination with other activists. We summarized the issue and our work on https://fsfe.org/activities/routers

After the parliamentary elections in Germany 2013 I analysed the Grand Coalition’s agreement to identify possible positive and negative effects on Free Software. I also was able to visit several politicians in the German Bundestag to talk with them about Free Software and upcoming important tasks we wanted to work on.

Besides I helped a lot organising our various campaigns like „Document Freedom Day“ and „I love Free Software“. For many of these political tasks and campaigns I wrote press releases and public statements.

During my internship I learned a lot about the structure and work in a multinational organisation and how to collaborate and talk with different people around the world. Another plus is the know-how I aquired by helping planning the various campaigns and analyses. When I was in Brussels and Chemnitz to help at FSFE’s booths during conferences I also learned very much about how to talk with people of all kinds and how to carry ideas and convictions to others.

I will never regret applying for and completing the internship at FSFE. There were so many theoretical and practical things no study course can teach. Being able to work at the interface between communities, companies and politics is something every interested student should be granted.

I want to thank everybody who enabled the FSFE to offer these internships. Organisations like the Free Software Foundation Europe are important to bring equality and freedom to our society and these internships allow students to get an insight into this very interesting area of activity.

This internship was a very general one so I was able to work in many different areas of FSFE’s activity. The offered internship is mostly about Document Freedom Day, FSFE’s largest campaign in which I also invested a lot of time. I’m quite sure that this position is also very interesting — and very important as well! So if you want to take responsibility and want to learn much about collaboration, worldwide activism and public relations, go ahead and apply for this internship!

If you are interested in this internship but you have some questions left, please feel free to ask me anything.

I love ZNC because #ilovefs

Fri, 14 Feb 2014 05:00:14 +0000

Today is I love Free Software day 2014. Using the slogan „I love Free Software but I love you more“ this day should not only be used to thank our significant others for their love but also to say „thank you“ to people who work hard to ease one’s everyday tasks with the software they develop.

Have you ever been in an IRC channel?

If not, you should try it, it’s a great and easy way of communication and very common.

If yes, then the term „IRC Bouncer“ might be familiar to you. It keeps „you“ online 24/7 in the channel, although your device at home is offline. During this time, your slot in the channel is reserved by your bouncer.

Screenshot of ZNC

In this blog post, I’d like to present ZNC to you, a beautiful piece of Free Software which you can install easily on a server, is highly configurable and consumes only little server resources.

„What the hell should this be for?!“ you’re asking? Well, since I’m presenting ZNC, I can give you a few examples of the mightyness of this software:

Features

If you’re leaving the channel, ZNC can set an individual away status and reply to anyone how’s calling you directly in the channel or in a query that you’re unavailable at the moment
You can add multiple IRC networks with only one account and one port. Similar bouncers like psybnc are unable to do this. You can edit your networks separately, for example with different nicknames or away messages
You don’t want to quit IRC even if you have to because the ongoing discussion is so interesting? No problem with ZNC. ZNC can buffer the channel chat and queries to you, so you can everything if you’re back again. This also helps if you had connection issues and come back a few minutes later – you’ll never miss anything again

Well, these are only the basic functions. Below I added several others which have convinced me to keep using ZNC and nothing else. Of course, it’s Free Software (Apache 2.0 License) and it’s quite actively developed. If you have no server or no time to install something on it, you can also use one of the many ZNC providers for free.

If you like ZNC as much as I do, please consider helping them to improve the software or just donate to keep the very useful wiki alive!

Further cool functions you might find useful:

Administration:

Installation is super-simple: Get the newest version, configure, make and make install. Then execute an configuration script which asks for the most important parameters while explaining them to you. Ready.
Upgrade is very easy. Some days ago I upgraded from 0.2x to 1.2, a large version step. No problem at all, all configuration has been adapted
Multi-user: You can set up an infinite amount of users per server/port, each with several networks.
ZNC has a great webpanel which lets you administer everything. Of course, you can also do this directly in you IRC client if you’re connected

Nerdy stuff:

To protect you from suprises, you can enable modules like fail2ban (to block password bruteforcers), ctcpflood or crypt (to chat encrypted with other znc users without having them to install an extra plugin or client)
You can automatically change your nick if you’re going offline. For example with „username_offline“ you make clear that you’re definitely not available
You can create custom CTCP replies. Try to write /ctcp USERNAME version and you’ll get detailed information about his IRC client. With ZNC, you can simply overwrite the default reply and send something generic instead
You can even get shell access through your IRC client if you enable the function. Dunno what’s the advantage of this but it’s cool, right? ;)