Btrfs, VLC/AV1, HTTP, Win11/ARM, Matrix, Valkey, WA, SSH, Tor

1. Btrfs Snapshots - Whoa, it took around two weeks before my system snapshot services I created from scratch are working perfectly. Now system is snapshotted every 4 hours. Additionally snapshots are created on system shutdown, right before logging service stops and file systems unmounts happen, it's snapshotted once again. Clean-up of the snapshots also runs in background, ~15-45 minutes after system boot and then every 4 hours to delete old snapshots. Snapshots are kept depending on subvolume type from 1 - 30 days, also some volumes are only snapshotted daily, instead of every 4 hours. It was quite simple setup after all, the hardest part to get right was the shutdown snapshots. How to get snapshots to be taken when system is shutting down, but exactly at the right moment, not too early and not too late. Because I don't shutdown the system too often, that's the reason why it took so much wall clock time because getting the results of the changes being made didn't happen too often. That's very familiar problem, especially with tasks which run on only weekly or monthly and if the task isn't important enough that specific test environment would be built to get it done.

2. VLC - As usual VLC and AV1 video (dav1d, av01) video codes are broken and not working. I still can't stop loving quality code.

3. IndexNow.org (@ indexnow.org) was new to me, I've been missing something like it for quite a while. I immediately tested it with my blog and it worked very nicely indeed.

4. Why Boarding Pass loading needs to go over HTTP? Some of these things are out right questionable and seem way more intentional than being accidents by experts. Just why? I would love to hear reasoning for that.

5. Windows 11 for ARM64 (@ microsoft.com) - ARM is coming, let's see if RISC-V processors gain capabilities and also start entering the higher performance CPU realm.

6. Element finally implemented warning when user encryption keys are changed (@ GitHub) - Not all users have verified keys. Also there was crazy bug with iOS client, which prevented you from rekeying. So silly, and it took considerable time from them to fix it.

7. Valkey (@ Wikipedia) nice replacement for Redis (@ Wikipedia).

8. Location Data - Interesting picks from official security documentation. - Mobile user location must be accurate to 50 meters, even if all location services are completely blocked.

9. M365 - Microsoft as always. When trying to access copilot the M365 has infinite redirect loops. - I'm still baffled where do they find these experts to get this job done, this badly. - And even if they manage to deploy such garbage (but why would they?) - It should be looking at the logs and saying f in about first 5 minutes and fixing the problem in less than 5 minutes. - But no, they're having these problems constantly, and those issues won't even get fixed in any sane time ever. - Honestly, I every F-day wonder who makes this S-t. Because it's truly bad. Maybe they have hired professional A-h's to do it, because otherwise it's not fun enough to watch users suffering from constant issues with crappy software. - Redirect loops, broken functionality, complete hangs. Duuh! So called 'quality' stuff they say. - And many other problems since that!

10. WhatsApp (@ Wikipedia) finally added option to se HD pictures as default. That's nice move!

11. SSH daily fail. I added a few rows to the config, and wondered why it doesn't work. Well, the new Host rows were below Host * row. I did expect that the Host * would be used, unless specific Host information isn't found. But I didn't expect that the order would matter. Well it does. Host * needs to be the last entry, or otherwise rest of the entries are excluded. My programs typically behave differently, they look for specific key, and if not found, then fallback to the default configuration. Just like with frameworks, know your tools, or you'll get "strange" problems which aren't strange at all, if you would just know what you're doing.

12. Tor User Specific Hidden services, why would anyone do that, unless they're doing it for traffic pattern / traffic analysis / traffic confirmation attack. I think that's pretty obvious what they're doing. Because it exactly matches what I've been blogging about earlier. Generating clearly visible traffic and tracking it.

2025-06-22