project-insanity.org

Host your own Mapbox GL JS vector tiles map

I’ve done some research recently on how I could host my own online map viewer with a MapBox GL JS instance, an excellent and modern open-source alternative for Google Maps. The server should also serve own preprocessed map data from OpenStreetmap planet extracts. No external or third-party service will be required, see the demo here […]

Software

Easily setup Signal 2FA on Nextcloud 14

Two-factor authentication (short 2FA) is an important security concept to secure unauthorized access to your web applications. Popular online services like Google Mail, Instagram or Facebook already provide this mechanism to secure user accounts with an additional one-time token. Considering someone is able to obtain your username and password combination, for example on a public […]

Software

Cloud synchronization performance tests of various Linux clients

I already tried using Nextcloud as a backup solution which will sync my complete home directory into a Nextcloud instance. This is very practical if you want to have access to your files when you don’t have your laptop with you or when it gets lost. Of course there are some drawbacks with this approach: […]

Software

Backing up encrypted and compressed VM snapshot to Azure Cloud

For some time now I was thinking about a good backup solution for our root server. We are using our hard drives in RAID0 mode which means that the two hard drives are not mirrored. Therefore we could use the complete 5TB space. In this scenario, complete data loss is quite likely from time to […]

Software

Auto-update Android apps with F-Droid & Yalp Store

I consider auto updates of userland software as an important and also convenient security feature, easpecially on mobile platforms. As far as I know this is already the default behaviour for Android systems with Google Play Store preinstalled. Some time ago I switched from Play Store to the open-source F-Droid market which offers many good […]

Software

Sandbox and torify Signal messenger on Linux

Most of the popular Linux distributions don’t offer any sandboxing or anonymization capabilities and it can be quite difficult to find a good solution. In this post I’m going to describe how I manged to sandbox the messenger app Signal and tunnel all it’s traffic through the anonymization network Tor. All the tool you need […]

Software

Download an installation medium directly to your flash drive

For a longer time I was looking for a more direct and faster method to setup my Linux installation medium on an USB flash drive. Usally one would download an ISO image and wait for it to finish before copying to the drive. Both tasks could take some time, depending on your internet connection and […]

Software

Stopwatch module for py3status

Whenever you use a tiled window manager like Dwm, Awesome or i3 on your linux desktop, you might also want to replace or modify the default behaviour of the status bar. Usually you’ll display some common information like date, battery level or informations about your network connection. Compared to the quasi standard program i3status, you […]