Technology on L0G.is

Quickly Make a Mastodon bot with IFTTT

Sun, 27 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

If you recently joined mastodon or another fediverse instace of something and thought to yourself, “If only x was here from Twitter” or “If only this feed was in mastodon”, well do I have a solution for you. The easiest way to turn a tweet (or a variety of things) from anyone into a toot from a bot is with IFTTT (Pronounced, If This, Then That)

Leaving Birdland

Wed, 16 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

This week, I deleted all my tweets on Twitter and posted a signpost to my new Mastodon account at https://infosec.exchange/@L0G1S, might delete the whole thing next week, we’ll see.

I’ve noticed from others within the infosec.exchange instance that there are some various growing pains for some when moving from Twitter to a federated community and I wanted to speak about why that is. Moving from a centralized community to a federated instance of something requires a shift into a new mindset of how you approach online communities in general. Even if the operation of the social media is similar. It doesn’t matter if tweets and toots are very similar, the underlying model is drastically different. If someone isn’t aware of those differences with the federated model, they might be disappointed when this community doesn’t operate the same (meaning: offer the same features) as the old, centralized service. Also moving from a billion dollar app to an open source one will also differ in quality and features.

Archiving Youtube Channels with YT-DLP and Plex

Fri, 24 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I’m going to try my hardest not to ramble.

Is it possible to archive youtube channels and use Plex to organize and watch them?

Yes, here is how.

YT-DLP

Located here https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp

My Plex server is already installed and running on Ubuntu, so thats the POV that this guide is written from. Yt-dlp does have a windows binary though, but there may be some slight differences. If you’re running ubuntu, you can install it via snap https://snapcraft.io/install/yt-dlp/ubuntu

Spinning up a Matrix Homeserver in Ubuntu 20.04 in 15min*

Tue, 16 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

This guide was adapted from Jonathan Bossenger’s guide here. He spins up in SQLite and then migrates to Postgres where I kept running into problems, so here I trim it down a little more to go right into Postgres. Also Arul Muhammad’s guide here can be of use if you run into any issues. Also, all the other matrix guides normally reside here. Mathew Hodson(co-founder of matrix), has a video guide here that does everything including jitsi.

Decentralizing Social Media and E2EE Communication with Matrix

Sun, 14 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Since around the beginning of COVID, I’m found myself in the unique position where I have a foot in a number of different chat circles and discord servers and group chats on varying services. While at the same time I’m on the journey to deactivate and end my usage of Facebook only to pop back in a few months later. I’ve been moving my conversations around from various places, and then to eventually signal, which I still like, but I found it limiting besides generally 1 to 1 chat. While at the same time I have interest in moving to a decentralized approach to chat and feeds. I originally looked at matrix a while ago an passed on it, but upon circling back. Once I discovered bots that can be utilized in matrix to create custom feeds of whatever the room creator wanted from Reddit to YouTube to RSS or even Twitter feeds, I realized that matrix could replace all the various sites I would doom scroll through algorithmically and be fed curated crap rather than controlling what exactly I want to see. One app to rule them all, or at least until RSS gets killed off even more.

Quitting Facebook

Thu, 20 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

The more and more I have chewed on this issue on this the more and more I am convinced this is the correct decision for myself. I caught myself scrolling my newsfeed for about 15 minutes today and I was trying to keep track of things on my feed and asked if this was something I needed to see. Heavy emphasis on need. After that 15 minutes I didn’t see a single update from either friend updates or news that was worth my time. Yet throwing the sink out of the window will leave us with a gap that we have a responsibility to replace.

What’s In My Facebook Data?

Sun, 16 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

In the spirit of my last blog post, I’m in the process of writing a guide on how to properly quit Facebook and try and replace the services it provides for you with other more privacy centric solutions, while at the same time not letting perfection be the enemy of doing any good. So to start, I wanted to download all my data first, The main thing I knew I wanted to ensure I had was a copy of my videos or stories, everything can be deleted without the bat of an eye. However, being curious to see the full extent of the text data. When I peeked inside, i immediately knew it required its own post.

Facebook Has Already Done What They’re Worried TikTok Will Do

Tue, 11 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

TikTok is in the news, Trump is going to ban it and a couple other Chinese apps as well. The Department of Defense and various military branches have banned it from government phones and have strongly discouraged its use on personal devices. The reasoning according the the Department of Defense was, “the app’s popularity with Western users including armed forces personnel, and its ability to convey location, image and biometric data to its Chinese parent company, which is legally unable to refuse to share data to the Chinese government”

Remote Playing PC Games: Building your own “Stadia” in Google Cloud

Tue, 04 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

It’s been about a year since my last blog about remote playing PC Games. Has has my personal use of it changed? Did I stick with it, or was it a one time experiment?

Well, as of today, I play about 25% of my PC games on the couch via remote play and I would probably be there more if I didn’t just buy a fancy new G-sync monitor for my desk. But the bigger shift has been personally, I moved to a different apartment and with it, my internet went from 500d/500u to about~700d/35u on a good day. This naturally means nothing is streamed externally now, fiber definitely spoils you, but now that I’m in a different situation with worse internet, I’ve wondered what it would be like if I just moved the entire PC to the cloud. Could I essentially create my own personal cloud based “streaming service” with my own steam library? The good news is that it’s actually pretty simple to get some beefy virtual machine up and running in GCP, but the bad news is it’s still not really cost efficient at all. However, Google Cloud is giving $300 in free credit so what the hell, let’s go burn some Google bucks making our own Stadia.

I Survived A Sim Hijack

Mon, 11 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

About 2 months ago, I was leaving a restaurant in LA after dinner when I noticed that my cell phone had no signal, so I restarted the phone (which normally fixed it) and was greeted with the following text message.

I immediately knew someone was either in the process of breaking or have already broken into one of my accounts, so I quickly sprinted across the parking lot, jumped in my jeep, dialed T-Mobile, and slammed on the gas. Somehow, I already had cell service back on my phone. In a panicked call as I was careening down the 405, there was some confusion between a pin and a password with the support rep and they kept asking for my password. It wasn’t until later that I find out they should have asked for my pin, I was never going to give someone my password and you shouldn’t either. T-Mobile accounts also have a PIN which is the number you give them as a private key. This was the first time I ever needed support and wasn’t familiar and the support rep wasn’t explaining so the call ended with them just recommending I visit a store in person the next day, because it was 9:30pm. Thanks for nothing.

Is a VPN The Answer?

Tue, 05 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

With COVID-19 keeping everyone inside for the last few weeks, I’ve been getting a lot of questions from friends about VPNs from and if they are worth the investment. My answer has always been the same, “Oh shit, well, umm I will try and write a blog about it.”

Because it’s never that simple, it’s never a yes or no scenario. Everything comes down to the nuances of your specific use case and threat model. What are you doing, what are the risks, and what are you trying to prevent?

Remote Playing PC Games: Streaming Outside Of Your Home

Wed, 31 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Ok so I can finally play my PC games while laying on my couch in the other room, that’s neat. However, despite the fact that playing anything on a bike at the a gym makes me feel like a total POS, I want to see if I can play my PC games from there. From some initial tests, I was getting good connections, but it would always cut out and terminate the connection to the point where every place, even my work’s fast internet wasn’t playable. It wasn’t until I tried utilizing Zero Tier as recommended on Moonlight’s troubleshooting page that I really found success.

Remote Playing PC Games

Tue, 25 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Note: Because everyone’s network is different, The best way to be 100% sure of how Moonlight runs on your network is to try it out on yours. This post is not a technical deep dive, but more of a brief overview with a couple quick examples from within my local area network. The next part is going to go a little more in depth in requirements to stream outside of a LAN and some attempts to stream over different connections.

Horrors in RAID-ville

Tue, 20 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000

The past few days have motivated me to build a new computer from scratch. I mean I’ve been meaning to build one for the last year, this just was the straw that broke the camels back. This is an embarrassing story given how boneheaded I was in assessing the problem, but nonetheless.

It all started when I moved to Long Beach, for some reason my monitor was going to sleep immediately after booting up. A fix I saw online had me reset the CMOS to no avail, but it wasn’t until I was able to finally boot in safe mode (with a DVI from the onboard video rather than the Nvidia video card either) that I realized its an issue is something deeper. So I decided that a clean install of windows was in order, hey I’ll finally make the plunge to windows 10 then, I thought. After $200 dollars on a clean license, the USB tool that Microsoft provides to create a bootable USB wouldn’t work in safe mode. So I downloaded Rufus and then scoured the web for a clean, uncracked version of windows 10. I have the license, I now just need the iso file.