The solution

The solution we came up with is actually very simple and already possible with GPG anyway. You attach a photo to your public key! This ways if you (in person) claim that the key belongs to you (you say the fingerprint is correct or whatever) the person that wants to sign your key can check (live) to see if the photo attached to the key is really you. Of course this will require yout to update the photo every once in a while. And well since you only have your private key (or at least I hope that is the case) you are the only person that can add (or replace) the photo in your key.

A nice side effect is that you don’t have to show your ID to a lot of people (which could be a problem to some).

Remarks

I can’t really think of any reason (right now) why this would be less secure than checkking an official ID. But maybe someone can?

Publish/subscribe can be used for a lot more (see XEP-0163) but one of the most logical implementations to start with would be publish/subscribe as a rss-polling replacement. Right now a lot of people get updates for a website via an aggregator, this basically works by fetching an rss or atom file on a given interval and then parsing the result. Lets say your interval is 1 hour, then a worst case senario would be that you get the update 59 minutes later than it is published. A “solution” would be to set the interval to 1 minute. However this creates unessesarry bandwidth (and load) to the server.

For all this publish-subscribe seems to be the solution. The best way to see it is as a one-way chat. When a news items (or blog post or whatever) is post an item is published to a node. That node then sends out the notification to all subscribed clients. It is clean and simple (for a more in depth explanation you should read the XEP or google a bit!).

Now it would be awesome to see this implemented in some aggregator (especially Akregator since I am a kde-man), of course that would have to be done in such a way that I can use my existing JID (Jabber-ID) but that it does not appear online or receives other messages.

I think a good way to start is for me just to check-out the sources of Akregator, yet another project

1. Go to a QR code generator site (I used this one“).
2. Choose “WiFi Network for Android” from the drop down list.
3. Fill in you network details and export (to SVG of course since vector graphics rule!).
4. Print the code and put it on the refrigerator or something .
5. Let your friends scan the code.

Awesome stuff those QR codes!

Now I finally get to put the famous button on my own website:

See you all at FOSDEM!

So if you go to the gentoo bugzilla and then navigate to bug #345239 you will find two “quick-and-dirty” ebuilds. But they work

So if you want bluetooth in your kde, check them out and if you have the skills and time improve the ebuilds.

Installing the printer on my girlfriends windows machine was relatively straight forward, but I still do not uderstand why I would need a 50mb download for some printer drivers?

Installing on my laptop was also made easy thanks to hplip. However I could not print! My cups log had the following message:

/usr/libexec/cups/backend/hp failed

Which is not that clear at all. Enabling debug loglevel in cups did not make things any clearer. After a lot of googling I found someone suggesting to install avahi. Which indeed is the solution!

So now I am happily printing! And will not try to get scanning up and running

The problem I encountered when installing the Android SDK is that the some of the programs won’t run on non-multilib AMD64 installations. This is really annoying since I do not want to have 32bit libraries on my system (it is matter of principals!). But linux to the rescue! A simple multilib chroot allows me to compile and deploy my android apps!

Mounting (with bind) the source directory allows me to code in my normal env while compiling in the chroot. Which is not a big thing for me since I code in VIM but for IDE users this might be an advantage!

So for all native AMD64 users there is hope! But it would be better for the Android devs to fix the binaries!

All this was created in a about an hour but would not have been possible without qfacebookconnect.

It is far from finished and no notifications are really visible yet but a nice start is made (not bad for 45 minutes coding). See the git repository of qbook if you want to take a peak, all paths are currently hard coded so you will need to do a little hacking, this is mainly because qfacebookconnect is not yet in portage so I can properly link to it.

Maybe next time when I am up early I will first fix an ebuild for that one

It seems there are still some problems with the wifi but we have a dedicated acces point for that. Which means the required software is not even installed on the router. This is a good thing since there is very limit storage on the router.

While I was playing with the router I wanted to, finally, get OpenVPN running on it. Not that I really need the VPN but it is a matter of principles! So I started out with the OpenVPN Howto which guides your pretty much trough the whole setup.

However since room on the openwrt is limited, the easy-rsa (for key generation and signing) is not included. So I used my server to generate the keys and certs.

The ethernet-bridging is not necessary in my scenario but it seems the best way to go, espessialy since I want to implement it for some people that want to browse the samba shares. It is however important to note that you should have different local subnet and remote subnet.

So a productive weekend. It still feels cool that the router (which coasts only 55 euro’s) can be pimped so you can ssh to it, work with IPtables and act as an OpenVPN server! Embedded linux rocks