General things to mention

19/3/2018

No mouse

It has been well over a month now since I packed my mouse away and relied entirely on my keyboard for everything. After a week or so my teething problems were mostly sorted out, however to this day I still find myself using my tablet for screenshots and Reddit ModMail. However I rarely perform these two tasks and they are really non-issues.

I have bound mod(+shift)+volume up/down (my keyboard has a volume wheel) to control the cursor for the other rare times in which I need to click on something (button on a website that can't be hinted for example) and so far that has worked well. I'm really quite happy with my progress with learning and relying on new keyboard oriented tools and shortcuts for doing everyday tasks. I have no desire or intention to go back to using a mouse.

Operating system

Two or so weeks ago I migrated my Arch Linux system to Parabola Linux-Libre. Parabola Linux-Libre is based on Arch Linux and is on the Free Software Foundations list of approved GNU/Linux distributions. The main modification is the use of the Linux-Libre kernel. The stock Arch kernel has proprietary blobs shipped with it, the Libre kernel strips those out. Parabola also comes with a package named your-freedom. your-freedom conflicts with every package available in the Arch repository that isn't free software, meaning you cannot install non-free software without removing your-freedom. This name is absolute genius. The switch was mostly painless - the hardest part was going through everything in the AUR I have installed and removing things that aren't free. However, now I am running (as far as I can tell) completely free software! Of course, apart from my bios... and I still have Intel ME... I'll get a t60 or x200 and libreboot it one day.

School network

Similar to the exploit in TAFE's Force system I recently found, my school had a directory of private and confidential files free for anyone with an unprivileged network account to access. The network share held each staff members personal storage directory. These directories contained countless pieces of private and confidential documents on both students and the staff members themselves. This has been an existing issue since at least 2016. I reported the issue and it was fixed the next time I was in school.

Directory permissions. They aren't rocket science. I fear what else lurks open for others to view on the network.

It's nice to get things off my chest.