I have always been stunned by the beautiful time-laps videos of clouds slowly rolling by on a beautiful blue sky. Or why not a building project slowly taking form by having hours or sometimes days become compressed into seconds or minutes. It is of course no secret how those are done. Setup your camera to take pictures every few seconds, download them to your computer and stitch them together. Simple!? Well, not so much. Especially if you don’t want to buy expensive software just to try something out.

“Mastodon is a free and open-source self-hosted social networking service. It allows anyone to host their own server node in the network, and its various separately operated user bases are federated across many different servers. These servers are connected as a federated social network, allowing users from different servers to interact with each other seamlessly. Mastodon is a part of the wider Fediverse, allowing its users to also interact with users on different open platforms that support the same protocol, such as PeerTube and Friendica.” English Wikipedia

Since I started to use Linux many many years ago, I have been exposed to many different text editors. In the beginning I used Midnight Commander (mc) and the built-in editor of it. If my memory doesn’t serve me wrong, I found and editor called “joe” that I found comfortable. My main use case was to edit configuration files so nothing fancy was really needed. As all new Linux users, I was deadly afraid of getting into vi since there was no way out. When I did, I sometimes had to reboot to get out. Quite a few years later I decided to deal with my “vi-phobia” and I learned vim. At least to a proficient level.

A certain amount of paranoia is good for you! Even if you are using secure and unique passwords someone could get into to your systems if they would get hold of it. That’s why it is a good idea to protect your logins using a second factor, thus 2 factor authentication. First factor is something you know (password) and the second factor is something you have (token). In my case I am using a YubiKey (or a few actually) that generates a one time password (OTP). It is a small flat thing that can easily be carried around with your keys. To use it you plug it into a USB-port and press the “button” on it. Done.

A couple of months ago I wrote a blog post about me trying out Debian on one of my laptops to figure out if it was something for me. I have been using Linux since the 1990ies and have at time used it as my main OS. The last couple of years I have been living mainly on MacOS but also spent some time with Windows (client requirements) and only used Linux on the server side. This experiment was to see how easy or hard it was going to be to live as much as possible with Linux on the desktop. My conclusion is: