Ubiquiti, Digi Euro, Random, FIDO2, Delta Chat, P2P, Briar

1. Just as above also started to use Ubiquiti ER-12 as router and firewall. Lots and lots of configuration work and testing, but switch over went pretty nicely, there's a separate blog post about that stuff and related findings which was posted earlier (here).

2. Read the report: Digital euro [PDF] (@ europa.eu)  Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) by European Central Bank (ECB). Interesting to see how this differs from current situation and what the main goal is. Because nobody uses cash in Finland or Sweden anymore. So there's nothing new about Digital Currency. But I think this goes bit deeper in the process how money is created and whom actually controls it and how it can be tracked etc. Complex topic. Also found awesome:  Central Bank Digital Currencies Status Dashboard (@ cdbctracker.org). kw: €

3. When people say it can be done, they often talk about capability. But the history shows us that, if high perpetual maintenance is needed, the project gets abandoned sooner or later. Thus, overly complicated and or expensive to maintain things are bad in long term. 

4. Analyzed my webcam random number generator results. In a month it has produced 77 760 000 captured (uncompressed) frames, and the interesting part is that none of those frames are similar based on hash. So I think it's working in that sense. Of course this information is only fed to a pool, among other sources and not used directly.

5. The usual case, suddenly FIDO2 (WebAuthn / passwordless) stopped working with Microsoft Outlook, nobody seems to know why. This is great, yet not totally unexpected. They're probably having some issues on their side. - Around 12 hours later, now it's working just as mysteriously as it stopped. Probably they had some backend issues. I've done nothing, nor even restarted any programs, same browser session still going on.

6. Delta Chat (@ delta.chat) - This chat over email, this is fun stuff. Lovely stuff, oldskool dude like me likes. Just like - DNSKV - dnskv.com - & dnsmsg allows chat messaging channels over DNS.

7. I once thought about peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing over SMTP / IMAP, because it would allow using bcc and push the upload load to mail server from the user's connection. Technically allowing "multicast" and radially improving upload / download ratio. But email rate limits would practically kill that. Mailbox size not a problem with auto delete and chunking.

8. It seems that Briar / Mailbox development continues, but is delayed for several years. Problem with full and pure P2P applications and mobile users is that the systems need to be online at the same time, if there isn't intermediate message storage available. The Mailbox service can be used as intermediate storage, so users can send and receive messages asynchronously without being online at the same time.

9. In one case huge logs were the problem. Solution? Well, let's add even extra logging about log retention and policies. Sounds kind of funny, but that's what the chosen solution officially is.

10. I so much hate some programs. Especially Element Desktop which seems to store Cache And Events under .config path and not under .cache. I wonder if they know why the cache path is called cache and why cache stuff should be placed under cache. Well, sigh. Thanks Electron (?).

11. Moved most of 'system notifications and event notifiers' from email to Teams, Slack, Matrix and Telegram a while ago. Everyone seems to be happy about this solution. With matrix full e2ee is taken care by using matrix-commander instead of super light curl to API with access_token.

12. Keyboard discussion, how bad many keyboards are. - The Ducky One 2 can handle 7 keys statefully, also 8th+ keys pressed do work, but keyboard doesn't seem to remember state pressed or up, and keeps firing for the extra keys. Technically I'm not sure if that's OS or keyboard limit.

13. Continued ER-12 configuration, now I can use NAT bidirectionally with multiple WAN addresses, using DNAT & SNAT. Of course for IPv6 networking, the networks already use the public addresses. On top of that configured the QoS which is just perfection, no more large data transfers bring extra latency of 3 seconds. Now the latency is maxed out at 2 ms which is pretty awesome. See: configuration fun post (@ this).

2022-05-01