One drawback to using a static site is that when you make changes to things that are shared between pages all those pages have to be updated. And since I’m also GPG signing the pages one change can end up touching a couple hundred pages. With the move to Hugo I’ve also been updating things more often that I normally do. I had forgotten about the CloudFront limit on invalidation requests (first 1000 a month are free.
This blog has been running on Pelican since 2011. I’ve been pretty happy with it, even contributing AsciiDoc support upstream. But lately I’ve been feeling like it’s time for a change. I’d heard good things about Hugo from friends, and even though my first attempts with it were frustrating (thanks to their docs pointing to content/posts/ instead of content/post/) I decided to give it another try after my attempts to add a Mastodon social icon to the mg theme for Pelican failed.
Back in 2013 I wrote about using socat with Tor to setup a Hidden Service chat. It was pretty simple to setup and I wanted to see how much harder it would be to do with Whonix , since the Gateway handles Tor and the Workstation should run socat. Ends up it isn’t hard at all.
On the Gateway you need to edit /usr/local/etc/torrc.d/50_user.conf (as root) and add a Hidden Service to it:
Whonix has released version 14.0.0.9.6 of their XFCE KVM build . Whonix is a Debian based operating system that routes all network traffic through the Tor network . It is included as part of Qubes OS or you can run disk images using your favorite virtualization solution.
Their KVM release includes xml files for importing into libvirt , but sometimes that’s a bit too heavy of a solution and you want something simple where you don’t need to be root to set it up or run it.
You are being tracked. It is now no secret that on every level your cellphone is being used to compromise your privacy. Not only are the cellphone providers injecting tracking headers they have been selling off your location data to 3rd parties with lousy website security . We have no way to know how much of this data was archived, or who may have access to it. There is no way to ensure that it is all deleted.
I recently needed to convert a CD of xrays into jpeg images, and it wasn’t immediately obvious how to do this. The files on the CD were in DICOM format , which appears to be a commonly used format in the medical community that includes the image and extra metadata about the patient. I first used the aeskulap viewer which worked fine for viewing, but has no options (that I could find) for exporting them to regular jpeg images.
Inspired by this old post from Rob Smith I have started making some changes to the blog. All of the pages are now signed using my GPG key, and can be verified by running curl https://www.brianlane.com/ | gpg --verify on the page.
Rob did this by adding a plugin to Jekyll, but I’m using the Pelican static blog system for these pages, and as far as I can tell Pelican’s plugin support has no way to make sure your plugin is the final one being executed.
