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Personal accounting management is a tedious task: logging in to each bank’s web portal, checking for new PDF documents to download, then downloading for each account a “computer-friendly” record of transactions since the previous visit. And this is only to get the data…

All banks seem to agree on using the PDF format for “official communication”. For files intended to be imported into accounting software, however, anything is possible: csv, qif, ofx, or even nothing (that’s Oney…). Besides, the downloading process is not always satisfactory: the HTML forms to fill may be a bit buggy, the downloaded files sometimes have the wrong encoding, the included labels may not be as informative as those found on the web site…

Then I discovered boobank, from the Weboob software collection. This awesome tool can automatically login to each bank, and then convert the web site’s paged list of transactions into a standard format, such as ofx!

(yes, the title is a nod at something… guess what!)

You are aboard a space-ship, and you crash on the nearby planet after hitting an asteroid. Thus begins the tale of Blackvoxel. From the wreckage, you salvage a base machine, and you are still under the protection of your space-suit. Much like Matt Damon in The Martian, you are alone, and you have to make do with your environment and the salvaged equipment…

The Chrome web browser won market-share fast, and still is. But people tend to forget who is behind Chrome.

Now Google (or should I say Alphabet?) decided that their Chrome browser feeling faster is worth breaking web sites and going against the established standards that make the Web an open platform. That’s bad.

I’ve been using Firefox since it first appeared, not because it is the fastest, nor because it is the best, but because it is free software, backed by an organisation that pursues its users’ best interests and protects their privacy. Here’s one more reason to do so, if one was needed.

The icing over the cake is that Firefox is getting really fast! If you’ve been using Chrome, think again…

When I setup gitolite on my server for Git access through SSH, of course I did test that cloning worked from outside my network. That was for my Paperweb project.

Later I configured port-knocking on the server to get rid of bot-based authentication attempts that were polluting my log files. Unfortunately, at this time, the “outside” server on which I have an account was down, so I could not leave my network to check that all was fine; from the inside of the network, all worked like a charm, though!

Same situation when someone asked me for the Paperweb code by e-mail because they could not get it the normal Git way. I had no idea that port-knocking was the problem: from my side of the firewall, all worked correctly…

The following text is the second part of a reboot —as they say for films, now— of my 3-year-old series about having a universal Linux and Windows toolbox on a bootable USB flash drive. The main target is a full portable Linux OS, but I will also address the Windows OS, for those times when you have no choice ;-)

This part is about the boot loader and miscellaneous tools accessible from there.

I tried to import an old e-mail file from year 2000 or so, using Thunderbird’s ImportExportTools extension. And it failed. I first tried to split the mbox file, but eventually I found that X-Mozilla… headers were at fault! So, the solution is simply to run this command on the file before importing it in Thunderbird:

sed -i.bak '/^X-Mozilla/d' MboxFile

In case someone is interested, here is how I could split the mbox file into multiple eml files:

mkdir files.eml
awk '
  BEGIN {f=0; o=""}
  function new() {if (f!=0) close(o); f=f+1; o=sprintf("files.eml/%d.eml",f)}
  /^From - / {new(); next}
  /^X-Mozilla/ {next}
  {print >>o}
  END {new()}' MboxFile

This worked because each e-mail in my mbox file started with a « From - … » line. I’m not sure this is a universal rule, however.

Heureux possesseur d’une théière électrique riviera&bar Yunnan, je déplorais toutefois le volume strident de son alarme sonore, dont le rôle est d’informer l’utilisateur des différentes étapes : ébullition, infusion, maintien au chaud… Il suffit d’ailleurs de consulter la FAQ du fabriquant concernant cette théière pour s’en convaincre ; une seule question à ce jour : « Peut-on retirer les signaux sonores du produit ? »

C’était insupportable ; j’ai donc atténué le volume sonore de son « buzzer ».

My ageing eSATA SheevaPlug is running a lot of tasks:

• web, e-mail, and xmpp server;
• database server;
• NFS and DLNA (media) server;
• sync server for contacts, calendars, files, and Firefox profiles (old protocol);
• and various means of connecting remotely.

It is now running Debian Jessie, after having run Lenny, and then Wheezy, which shows just how long it’s been running, considering the long lifetime of a major Debian version :-D

With only a half-GB of RAM, it’s come to the point where swap is being used on a regular basis, although not too much so far. As for the processing power, everything works, albeit slowly; reasonably so… so far. And more importantly, anything more is impossible (eg. nice ownCloud modules, or a sound server…).

The time has come to plan a replacement, which is the subject of this post.

Like everyone, I have important data on my computer. Like everyone, I have a backup (several, actually) of this important data —you do too, don’t you?— But while this backup is good enough in case I have a hardware failure, it won’t help me if my apartment gets flooded or catches fire. That’s because the data and its backup are stored in the same place. Several solutions exist.

J’ai récemment commencé à utiliser ownCloud pour la synchronisation de fichiers. En fin de compte, malgré quelques problèmes à la marge, l’expérience est vraiment satisfaisante, à tel point que j’ai déplacé sur ownCloud tout mon « nuage personnel », précédemment sur un partage NFS. Néanmoins, si le client ownCloud standard convient lorsqu’il est disponible, il ne l’est pas toujours. En particulier :

• Je transporte avec moi sur clef USB un bureau Linux léger basé sur TinyCore Linux, et pour lequel ce client n’existe pas.
• Je possède aussi un vieil ordinateur portable qui doit se contenter d’un système d’exploitation obsolète à cause d’un composant vidéo bogué, qu’aucun système plus récent ne supporte (bien que cette même référence de composant graphique sur un autre ordinateur portable soit parfaitement supportée…).

Pour de telles situations, j’ai essayé d’utiliser DavFS, qui s’est avéré bien trop lent ; cela reste toutefois un bon second choix. Puis j’ai essayé le programme Java WebDAV-Sync, mais bien que celui-ci ait correctement effectué l’import initial, on ne peut pas dire que la synchronisation ait vraiment fonctionné : l’ensemble des données était à nouveau intégralement téléchargé à chaque nouvelle tentative de synchronisation !

Donc j’ai créé mon propre outil de synchronisation, dont les seules dépendances sont curl et bash, et optionnellement ssh. Ces dépendances sont disponibles partout, même sur Windows et quelques systèmes embarqués ;-)

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