Tech Shinobi

After months of disappearing, I’m able to come back blogging, with A LOTS of drafts. I’ll be updating more details about my current situation in a more dedicated post. But for now, let’s talk something technological interesting. Dell Optiplex 3050 Micro has been my ideal open source desktop PC for quite a while, probably since the first time when Libreboot added its support. Recently, I got the chance to have one of these as an upgrade from my older mini PC build. ...

Welcome to the Shinobi Hackerspace. I am the host, Shinobi. You are seeing this probably because you have visited the Hackerspace in person. As the host, I am supposed to give you an on-site orientation for the first time, but unfortunately this article is all I can do for you right now. This hackerspace (or so called hacklab if you will) also functions as a tool library for the local community. It advocates the idea of mutial aid and Free & Open-source movement, so using the on-site equipment or borrowing tools is free of charge. ...

This has been a problem for a while now. That green dot and popup notification persisted on my Mullvad browser makes me feel like using a bloatware than a FOSS. The right way to do this is either follow their upstream Tor browser update model—just force updating seamlessly without any user interaction. Or, like LibreWolf, manual update with the system package manager. This situation might be because of I’m using the portable version of Mullvad browser. If that’s the case, I shouldn’t blame it. ...

Background with Kicksecure Last year, I set up my Monero Wallet with Kicksecure and happy about it. This distro is really lightweight and easy to use. However, it failed completely after a recent upgrade, which was a major version leap from Debian 12 to 13. It lost drivers, desktop environment stopped working and probably much more which I couldn’t discover because I stacked at a login screen loop. After troubleshooting for a couple of hours, it turns out all lightdm related DEs are unusable and Gnome and KDE are working. ...

This post was originally published on February 2025, and I recently updated the IPATool section in the end as a alternative method to prior ones. iPhone Talks There are a many cellphones that make me feel nostalgic. None of them is Android nor iPhone. Some of them are QWERTY, some are flip phones. Phones were much interesting back in the days when Motorola, Nokia, Sony, Sharp, Blackberry and more are still competitive in the market. Today’s smartphones are indifferent and rather being “boredphones”. And all of these boredness are rooted in the “iPhone Moment”. ...