It. Was. Awesome.

No, really. I had not that much opportunities to talk to strangers, though it was an awesome congress and I really look forward to 33c3!

I talked a bit to the rust guys (less than expected, but anyways, yeah), watched several talks, including “fnord Jahresrückblick” and the Perl talk. They were sooo awesome! I really recommend to watch them online!

Sadly, I couldn't watch the “Security Nightmares” talk, as my train left at 18:30, but I watched it online and it was one of the most awesome talks.

As always after c3, I was completely exhausted afterwards (3 hours less sleep per night). But it was worth it.

I hope I have the opportunity to attend next year as well.

tags: #ccc #life #media #network #social

Do you use Google for all this? Maybe you do. Don't you want to uncouple from Google? Well, then... I have to tell you about the sad state of PIM for nerds.

If you want to organize your personal information without google and host everything on your own, you will soon meet tools like owncloud, emacs orgmode or similar tools. Sadly, all these things are not what I want. OwnCloud is getting more buggy with every release and it is already slow as hell. orgmode needs emacs, which is a huge tool itself and you have to learn a whole new ecosystem. If you are a vim user like me, you don't want to use emacs.

But I'm not talking about editors here. I'm talking about PIM tools. What I do right now: Owncloud with khard, khal, vdirsyncer for contacts and calendar organization. As said, OwnCloud is buggy and sometimes calendar entries cannot be synced to all my devices. On Android, I use Apps to sync my contacts and calendar as well, and they fail as well, sometimes.

I use taskwarrior, which has a sync server available. Sadly, it doesn't work yet on NixOS, but well, that's my issue and I'm working on a solution. Nevertheless, the Android client (Mirakel) is badly supported and does not work that good as well.

For news, I use ttrss, which works fine and the appropriate Android App works good, too, so no issue here. For a Wiki, I use Gollum, which works but is a bit annoying to use because it is not that customizable. I do not use note-taking tools at all, because they simply suck. There's no good note-taking tool available for commandline use which integrates with the other tools. Mails work fine with mutt, of course, but they cannot be integrated in the wiki, todolist tools or the other tools I just mentioned. I do not use browser bookmarks at all, because there is no CLI tool available for them. Same goes for shopping lists.

What I want

What I want is simple: One tool, which integrates

• Personal wiki
• Personal todolist
• Personal notes
• Personal mail indexing
• Personal Calendars
• Personal Contact management
• Personal News Feeds (RSS/Atom mostly)
• Personal Bookmarks
• Personal Shopping list
• Personal Diary

in the following ways:

• I can use whatever
  • text editor
  • mail reader, sender, receiver
  • rss reader I want to use
• I can synchronize everything to all devices, including Android smartphones or my Toaster
• Everything is done with open standards. Means
  • vcard for contacts
  • ical for calendar
  • markdown for
  • wiki
  • notes
  • diary
  • shopping list
  • maybe YAML for todolist
  • mbox or Maildir for mails
  • normal Atom/RSS for news stuff
  • for bookmarks, YAML or JSON would be appropriate, I guess.
• I can access all my data in the system with a text editor, if I have to
• a clean and polished (+fast) Android Application to access and modify this data.
• I can move/link data from one system to another. For example:
  • I can link an Email from my notes
  • I can link a entry from my RSS, notes, calendars to (for example) my Wiki
  • I can send a shopping list from my mail client to a contact and attach a calendar entry which links to the shopping list
  • ... and so on
• All the things are encrypted (optionally)

As everything should be plain text, git would be fine for synchronization. The sync should be decentralized at least, so I don't have to host a server at home and cannot sync if I'm on the go. A web-hosted entity should be optional and so should be a web interface. Having a web-UI like owncloud has is nice, but not that critical for me. A full encryption of the content would be nice as well, but would be kinda hard for the Android devices, at least if the device gets lost. Anyways, my drives are encrypted and that should be enough for the first step.

It is, for me, really important that these tools interact well with eachother. The feature that I can send a mail to a contact and attach for example a shopping list, which itself has a calendar entry (which gets attached as well, if I want to), is a real point for me. Same goes for attaching a RSS entry to a wiki article or todo item.

Another requirement would be that the tool is fast and stable, of course. Open Source (and at best also free software) would be a crucial point to me as well. GPLv2 would be the thing.

Do it yourself, then!

Well, developing such a tool would be a monstrous huge amount of work. I'd love to have time for all this, especially as student. But I think I have not. I have a lot of opinions how such a tool should work and also a lot of ideas how to solve a certain problem which may arise, though I absolutely have no time to do this.

I, personally, would develop such a tool in Rust. Simply because it gives you so much power to your hands while remaining a really fast language in manner of execution speed (speaking of zero-cost abstractions here). Though, there would be the need for a lot of external libraries, for example for git, vcard, ical, yaml, json, markdown, configuration parsing, etc etc. While some of these things might be available already, others are clearly not.

Sadly, such a tool is not available. Maybe I can find time until I'm 35 years old to develop such a thing. Maybe someone else has done so until then. Maybe I just inspired you to develop it? Would be neat!

tags: #life #linux #mail #media #open source #programming #software #rust #tools #vim #wiki

The order

Well, to order a oneplusone you can go to amazon and order it for like 433 Euro (64 GB version). Or you go to the oneplus store and order it for 299 Euro, which is what I did. I also ordered a screen protector and a case for it, to protect it even more.

But well, if you want to order from the manufacturer, you have to register on their page, which pissed me off a bit. The second problem was that you can only pay via Paypal and because you order from non-germany, you have to setup your Paypal account with a credit card. I do not have a Paypal account (because it really sucks) – so I asked someone else to pay the order for me and transfered the money to the persons bank account.

Unboxing

The One arrived seven days after I ordered it. It was absolutely nicely boxed, though some boxing was rather ridiculous: I understand that the power adapter has to be boxed separately, because of adapter variants. I do not understand why it has to be boxed two times – one time in a box, another time in a plastic-foil.

Screen protector

I also ordered a screen protector. It was shiped together with the One, nice! I applied it accordingly to this tutorial and I managed to get only one really tiny bubble under the protector foil. Well done!

Update!

Of course, when starting the One for the first time, it asks you to insert your google account data, etc. etc. I do not have a google account, so I was really pleasant surprised when I was offered a “skip” button!

As I do not have a micro/nano-SIM card yet, I also skipped the SIM setup.

Then, after some localization and skipping, I was offered to update the phone from CM 11 to CM 12. I did this, of course. It was really fast, although it said it would take up to 20 minutes. While updating it told me that 128 Apps are optimized. I always thought CM comes without Apps preinstalled? Well... We will see.

Initial setup

After applying the update I was asked for several things again, including google account data. Of course I switched off what I could switch off.

I also disabled everything the google apps want to do. None of the google apps should now be able to access my texts or other data. I hope.

The initial setup was fun. I really enjoyed using the device. It is a bit heavier than my old device, but it is also a few inches bigger, so that's completely okay.

I really hope I can get my SIM card as soon as possible, so I can start using the device properly.

What really bothered me in the first place: I have a 64 GB device. I can use about 55 GB of this – copying music will be painful! But well... I solved that “issue”. I found out, that one can install git-annex on Android. So I did that and just imported my complete music library. It took a rather long time to create the 44771 files and 3913 folders on the device. But having git-annex available on my Android device is a great plus point. So I don't have to care about syncing the files and so on, I just can use git-annex and it does everything for me. I just have to be careful with the available memory, as 55 GB can not handle my 500 GB music library, of course.

And, just you know, I do not use the web interface. I use the terminal emulator, of course!

But then, the disillusion: The music player didn't work with the symlinks git-annex generates. So I removed the git-annex repository from the device and copied music to it as I am used to.

Sync with owncloud

Well, syncing with owncloud was a topic. I thought it would be easy, but it wasn't.

There is this DavDroid app on both the market and F-Droid, which can by used to sync between caldav/carddav servers and the device. I entered my owncloud data and synced, but it just won't work.

So I filed a bug in the forum of the developers, but they couldn't help me with my problem (though they responded really quickly and were really nice at all).

So I tried other synchronization apps and finally landed with CalDAV Sync Adapter and carddav sync free which worked.

Now I have everything set up to use the oneplusone as my daily driver! Yay!

A gem I found

I found a nice app in the f-droid as well: whohasmystuff, which can be used to keep track of things you lend to someone. Really nice and basic app. It just works™.

tags: #android #cmmod #linux #media #music #open source #software #oneplusone

• diaspora
• ifttt
• dropbox
• kwick
• google
• twitter

Sadly, there is no option to delete a Wordpress-Account, as well as there is no possibility to delete an account on ubuntuusers.de, raspberrypi.org, ruby-portal.org and java-forum.org (for the last one, I don't even know the password and username anymore)!

I'm not sad about it, just for twitter ... It was always fun tweeting around stuff. But privacy is more important to me than fun! I did not delete my amazon and ebay account by now, I think... I will still buy stuff on amazon or ebay, and if I do this, I have to give them my data anyway, so there is no point in deleting my account. But, if someone comes up with good arguments on this, I will happily delete these two accounts, too! Feel free to contact me on my other accounts, which are on github, reddit and stackoverflow. If you just want to chat with me, you are really welcome to use this branch new technology almost nobody uses by now, called E-Mail.

Adr: mail@beyermatthias.de GPG: 20CA0F94

I will update my blog on the skype(-alternative) thing as soon as I did something about it.

tags: #social #network #media