I am building a free email service that respects privacy and prevents profiling on 103mail.com. The simple premise is that even if you don’t use Gmail then Google still has half of the world’s email messages and since email messages tend to contain all previous content, they can still profile all people in the world (even people that try to avoid Google). When using 103mail.com the email (content) will never leave the server. The outgoing email will be replaced with a notification with a link to the web mail viewer. Thus the outgoing mail content can only be viewed over the web and people or servers reading the mail will be logged. Nevertheless 103mail.com will be a standard compliant IMAP/SMTP server that can be used with any mail client on desktop or mobile. ...

It was already 3 years ago that I wrote Minesweeper for Ebiten in Go. I wanted to try to bring the application to desktop. I have ported that implementation from using the Ebiten game engine to desktop using the Fyne GUI library and I have just released version 1.0.0 that can be run on Windows and Linux. Download You can download the Windows and Linux releases from Github: https://github.com/mevdschee/fyne-mines It is a portable (single-file) executable without any dependencies. ...

I ran into the free online solitaire card games by Oddstream Games and I loved the (open source) implementation of solitaire card games in Go and Ebitengine. I noticed that the 12.4MB WASM file had been compressed with GZIP which resulted in only 4.8MB of transfer. I compared the support for Gzip with the support for Brotli and also compared the resulting file sizes. The Brotli compression is not only better supported, but it also compressed the same 12.4MB file to 3.5MB instead of 4.8MB. In this blog post I’ll explain how to serve Brotli compressed WASM files using Apache. Note that I am using pre-compressed files (not on-the-fly compressed) as Brotli compression can be heavy. ...

I was reading the (well written) article “The CAP Theorem. The Bad, the Bad, & the Ugly” by Dominik Tornow (recommended read). On “partition tolerance” (the P in CAP) he writes: “network partitions are inevitable in a realistic system model” and that tolerating partitions is a “non-negotiable requirement”. His opinion is a common one, shared by Eric Brewer (author of the CAP Theorem), who also wrote in “CAP Twelve Years Later” that his framework was misleading and that “designers cannot forfeit P”. I disagree as the same could be said about Consistency or Availability: people won’t lightly give those up on those either. ...

In a previous post I have showed how to install Debian 12 with disk encryption. In this post I will show how to install KVM on it, so that you can start using it as a GNU/Linux hypervisor to run virtual (Windows 10) machines. In this post I will also show how to load a graphical tool to connect to your KVM enabled server. Install KVM KVM requires CPU virtualization support (VT-x/AMD-V) to be enabled in the BIOS. You can check if your CPU is supported by installing cpu-checker and running the kvm-ok command. ...

In this tutorial I’ll walk you through the steps of setting up Debian 12 with LUKS full disk encryption on a server you bought from the Hetzner auction. I’m using the recommended method using the “installimage” script (that Hetzner provides) to make things really easy for myself. Enter the rescue mode Login to the Robot robot.hetzner.com and go to the “Server” page. Click on “Server” > “Key Management” > “New Key”, add your public key and click “Add Key”. Click on “Server” and click your server and choose the “Rescue” tab. Select your “Public key” and click “Activate Rescue System”. Now click on the “Reset” tab and choose “Execute an automatic hardware reset” and click “Send”. Wait for 60 seconds (duration depends on the hardware) for the server to reboot. Use an SSH client to connect with username “root” to the IP address of your server. Installation instructions Add your public keys to the rescue image by using an editor and pasting the public keys: ...

The fairly new N100 processor was mainly available in mini PC’s and firewall devices, but now we have ASRock that offers it as “N100DC-ITX” on an ITX sized motherboard. I’m using it to rebuild a PC in my living room that I designed to be powerful and silent and always on. My previous build was an ASRock J5040-ITX motherboard in an Inter-Tech ITX-601 HTPC case with 32 GB of RAM a 1 TB SSD. It used 8 watt at idle and I wrote a post about it. No reason for real complaints as I’ve used the machine daily, but certain websites (and sometimes VSCode) started to feel a bit slow. I wanted a little better performance and the N100 should be able to deliver and hopefully it will not consume much more power. ...

In my last post I’ve told you about how I’m writing (simple) games in TypeScript. In this post I’ll share the source code of a Simple TicTacToe game I rewrote in TypeScript. I’m using Visual Studio Code and the TypeScript plugin. I’m working on Linux, but on Windows you should be able to use the same instructions within the WSL2 environment. Quick start Type the following commands to get started: git clone git@github.com:mevdschee/typescript-tictactoe.git cd typescript-tictactoe curl -o- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nvm-sh/nvm/v0.39.5/install.sh | bash nvm install node npm install npm run dev Now use Visual Studio Code (with the TypeScript extension) to edit the content and see how the code is recompiled and the browser is reloaded when the code is saved. ...

I loved programming in Actionscript (for Flash) and I have tried Haxe and other languages when Flash was widely abandoned. I felt JavaScript was lacking features for better structural programming. Typescript and Visual Studio Code provide a great development experience for creating (well performing) cross-platform games. I have rewritten my AceCardGames.com solitaire card games in TypeScript. In this post I will share my development setup and some of my lessons learned. ...

Any IT security measure must be evaluated in the context of a specific set of threats with context specific relevance. IT security is much like the security of the windows of a house. In a bad neighborhood of a city having steel bars in front of your ground floor windows may be considered required to prevent people from breaking in, while in the countryside having them would be considered dangerous as it would prevent you from escaping the house in case of a fire. In short: no security measure can be evaluated without the context of a set of threats. ...