LibreWolf is a custom and independent version of Firefox, with the primary goals of privacy, security and user freedom. LibreWolf is designed to increase protection against tracking and fingerprinting techniques, while also including a few security improvements. This is achieved through our privacy and security oriented settings and patches. LibreWolf also aims to remove all the telemetry, data collection and annoyances, as well as disabling anti-freedom features like DRM. Installation LibreWolf has a repository for Debian-based distributions (Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, etc.), with which you can easily install and update LibreWolf. To add it to your system and install LibreWolf, run the following commands one by one: ...

I often choose Linux Mint XFCE when I need a good looking and comfortable system quick. But sometimes I’d rather have a more stable system and match what I have on the server, which is Debian 13. Unfortunately Debian with XFCE doesn’t look as good as Linux Mint with XFCE. In this post I’ll explain what you can do to make Debian with XFCE look like Linux Mint XFCE. ...

Today I am celebrating the 9 years that the TQdev.com blog exists. In this period I have written 237 blog posts on various software development related topics. Best visited post is now “LUKS with USB unlock” with more than 42 thousand visitors. Below you find the visitors of the blog per month. Visitors graph The graph below is a (copy of) a server side generated SVG document from the backend of this blog. As you can see the number of visitors has roughly doubled in the last 2 years! ...

I’ve got a ADATA SX8200PNP (XPG SX8200 Pro PCIe Gen3x4 M.2 2280 2TB NMVe) and it is not as performant as I would like. I’ve found this out by running a simple I/O ping test (using the “ioping” tool). In this post I’ll explain how you can do this test to see whether or not you are affected as well and what you can do to make your SSD 5-10x more responsive. ...

Linux Mint can be installed on an external SSD. Simply boot from this SSD on any other machine and it just works! You can easily buy a fast, large and durable external SSD nowadays. Unfortunately installing Linux Mint on a an external SSD is not so straightforward due to a bug in the installer. In this post I’ll explain you how to work around this bug in the installer of Linux Mint, my favorite desktop distribution. ...

As an IT professional, I often work on remote consoles, especially during installations or troubleshooting. Once SSH is set up, copying and pasting text is easy. However, to gain access initially, I need to enter my public key on the remote machine. Sometimes this has to be done through a VNC console, or even a Java or Spice console window. While modern ed25519 public keys are only about 50 characters (much shorter than old RSA keys) it’s still tedious to type them in by hand. ...

The Monty Hall problem is a probability puzzle. It has no logical contradiction, but for many people the result goes against their intuition. The problem originates from the American television game show “Let’s Make a Deal”. It is named after its original host, Monty Hall. The problem is stated as: Suppose you’re on a game show, and you’re given the choice of three doors: Behind one door is a car; behind the others, nothing. You pick a door, say No. 1, and the host, who knows what’s behind the doors, opens another door, say No. 3, which has nothing. He then says to you, “Do you want to pick door No. 2?” Is it to your advantage to switch your choice? ...

I just published Fyne Authenticator: an open source TOTP soft token implementation that is written in Go and uses Zbar for QR scanning. On desktop it lives in the system tray and it uses the keyring to store the encryption password for a seamless experience. Although the application has the potential to run on many platforms it is currently only tested under Debian (based) Linux. For a Windows, Android and/or iOS release I may need your help. ...

Forms play an important role in business software. Business software typically loads data from a relational database into a form, allows users to change the data and then saves the data from the form back into the database. If you make a lot of business software you have to create and design a lot of forms. To allow you to create nice looking forms (using Bulma for instance) without having to type a lot of boilerplate code I created MintyPHP Forms. ...

Ubuntu 20.04 is EOL at the end of next month, so it’s time to reinstall all your old web servers with Debian 12. Today I’ll share a post with all the configuration that I apply on my web servers. While you could apply these with Chef, Ansible or SaltStack (like a real pro), you can also type them in, like I often do. I’m using Debian 12 netinst and configure “SSH server” and “standard system utilities” as a default packages. ...