Eric's Ramblings

Aerc Proton

Mon, 30 Mar 2026 14:46:59 -0600

Email with Proton Bridge, mbsync, and aerc

I had been using Neomutt with Proton bridge as terminal email setup for awhile and it just wasn’t working for me. After doing some investigation I landed on Aerc as a potential replacement. In the process I made some changes to my bridge setup. Previously I had setup a seperate user to avoid issues with pass with git commit signing and bridge. Now I have a seperate store for bridge. On thing I have disabled is tls between bridge and clients, the threat model tls protects against is irrelevant with communication only on localhost. If an attacker can see local host traffic I have bigger problems.

Keyboard

Sun, 18 Jan 2026 21:46:50 -0700

Key-remapping and backlights

My new laptop Lenovo Slim came with an interesting feature on windows, the keyboard backlight would turn on and off automatically when typing. This is actually pretty cool, so I enabled it on my linux install. I also wanted to remap esc to capslock and keep the ctrl functionality. I was not able to find a way to do the remap in swaywm by itself. Since I had to install another utility, or 2, I decided that it should be able to do the remap at the console level so that it’s available from first login and for all accounts. Utilities:

Lenovo Slim

Fri, 19 Dec 2025 22:51:02 -0700

Getting rid of Windows

Windows is not my favorite and with the new push for fancy pattern matching engines that we call ‘ai’I’m even less fond. My old yoga2 pro was getting long in the tooth and Sarah’s is not doign well with the increased load from Windows so we got new laptops, Costco had a sale. First things first, how do we get rid of Windows on this Lenovo Ideapad Slim.

Sway Config

Thu, 06 May 2021 19:23:15 -0600

I had been using dwm for a very long time. The keyboard focused interface and minimal resource usage were very appealing to me. When swaywm reached 1.0 release I gave it a try and was hooked. The only thing I really miss from dwm is the default window layout. Wayland uses less resources than xwindows for some reason and all the configuration is in the sway config or the configs for any apps, there is no Xresources and whatever other crazy amount of configs there were for xwindows and it’s stack.

tmux mouse scroll

Thu, 06 May 2021 19:00:59 -0600

The default setting for tmux interaction with the mouse is somewhat annoying. In a terminal window without tmux the mouse wheel will scroll the terminal line history, in tmux it scrolls through the command history. To change this behavior, and get and some other benefits, we have to add a config setting

set -g mouse on

This enables the mouse wheel to scroll the output buffer instead of the command history. It also enables wrapped text selection by pane instead of whole terminal window and selecting text automatically copies it! This is pretty awesome, I’ve enabled it across all of my configs.

ProtonMail Bridge Setup

Sat, 19 Sep 2020 23:12:36 -0600

Setting up Bridge with a seperate password store

I originally had a seperate user for bridge do to it’s use of pass and having issues with git commit signing. Setting up on a new system has made me rethink that. pass allows setting a dir for the password store, so we’re going to use that functionality.

$ PASSWORD_STORE_DIR=$HOME/.local/share/bridge-store pass init <key-id>

Then we create a wrapped script:

#!/bin/bash
PASSWORD_STORE_DIR=$HOME/.local/share/bridge-store <bridge-command> --cli "$@"

This give bridge it’s own store if started with the wrapper, it’s encrypted with my gpg key which is on a yubikey so more secure than one without a password. This ends up being simpler than the next section which I’ll keep around incase I ever need a different way of doing this for some reason.

Thinkpad E495 Arch Linux install

Mon, 17 Feb 2020 22:32:16 -0700

Gnupg to work with smart card needed to install pcsclite and ccid, enable/start pcscd.socket For custom fpass to work needed to copy customized fzf,bash and pass to correct locations. need to create a package build for this

I got this decent piece of hardware a week earlier than expected, so it was a good thing that I had already ordered the hardware upgrades I wanted, those only arrived the day before the laptop. Since I had already installed Arch Linux on the 1TB NVME upgrade drive, the first thing I did was boot from that NVME enclosure to test my install on the actual hardware, I knew the install worked from booting on VirtualBox, but also to see if the e495 could boot from an external NVME enclosure. It did, unlike my Yoga 2 Pro. Once I had verified that the laptop booted my install I started with the upgrade process.

Thinkpad E495

Thu, 30 Jan 2020 15:45:35 -0700

Decided to get a new laptop with the sale of my business and starting school. After a lot of research I decided on a Lenovo Thinkpad E495. I found the Ryzen 5(3500U) model at Best Buy with 8GB of ram and a 256GB SSD for $650 out the door. I decided to go with the Ryzen 5 over the 7 since the increase in performance didn’t seem worth the extra $150. Also with the pending release of Renior and the new XPS 13 developer edition I decided to be as cheap as possible on this purchase and still get something I want and will probably be happy with for 2+ years. I decided on AMD CPU intead of Intel for 3 reasons: 1) support AMD because the Ryzen series seems to be pushing Intel to get better themselves 2) AMD seems to be less effected by the new hardware vulnerabilities coming out the last few years 3) better integrated graphics. I was looking at having 32GB RAM and at least a 500GB SSD, and this laptop series is upgradable. I will be getting a 2x16GB RAM kit and 1TB SSD from Amazon to put in for another $200 - $250. Still around $700 less than I’m thinking the XPS 9300 with 32GB will be and who knows how much or when the Renoir will be.

VMWare and recent kernels

Wed, 05 Jun 2019 20:29:10 -0700

VMware is still slow at updating their software to support newer linux kernel releases. I’m still using vmware modules for linux on github. Download the branch corresponding to the version of vmware I’m currently using. I rewrote my module upgrade script to use these src files to build the modules.

Proton Mail Bridge

Tue, 04 Jun 2019 12:24:08 -0600

Bridge CLI summary

The available commands with description are listed bellow. The content of CLI configuration instructions should be added to Static website. The tab completion and command history is available.

Crostini containers

Thu, 16 May 2019 20:37:16 -0600

Chromeos is pretty awesome as a developement platform now with the integrated linux support. The project is called Crostini. To install you go to chromeos settings -> Linux and enable it. A locked down read-only VM is installed that uses LXD to run containers that have access to persistant storage. The default container is called penguin and runs a debian variation that has been modified by google. I prefer arch and since the containers run on LXD you can pull containers from linux container image server. If your preference is Fedora, Alpine(great for servers), Ubuntu they’re all there. To use penguin just open the terminal app. Now let’s go about getting an arch container up and running. First we need a crosh terminal, Ctrl-Alt-T. Once crosh is up we need to start the vm, it’s called termina:

Fish

Fri, 03 May 2019 20:14:43 -0600

Let’s use fish instead of bash. fish shell shell has many great features, dynamic auto suggestions, auto completion from man pages, a web based configuration tool, syntax highlighting, and ~~Oh My Fish~~ Fisherman. Some great setup tips were on Arch Linux Wiki. I chose launch it from my bashrc, add the following as the last line(if you need to get a bash shell run bash –norc)

About

Sun, 28 Apr 2019 20:45:47 -0600

Lead Developer, actually only developer, at a small delivery company.

Moving my blog from Nikola to Hugo

Sat, 27 Apr 2019 22:53:24 -0600

After some research I’ve determined that Nikola was too painful to use as a blogging engine. Entering a virt environment, mainting all that code and keeping it updated was tedious and it doesn’t run on my espressobin. Hugo is my replacement of choice. Written in go it compiles into one binary and it runs on my espressobin. It works the same, I create the site on my remote machine, write posts in markdown, run hugo to pack it all up into a static site and send it to the server. Nice. Now to figure out a theme…..

Setup and maintain gpg on yubikey

Sun, 29 Apr 2018 12:10:29 -0600

I have a yubikey 4 nano that I got specifically for the smartcard feature. This allows me to generate openpgp keys on the yubikey and the private key is usable yet unretrievable with software. This also allows me to store my master key on a USB stick that only gets plugged into a computer once a year when new keys need generating. For the initial setup I used this excellent guide from Eric Severance PGP on a Yubikey. I’m going to outline the steps here that are required to create new signature and auth keys on the yubikey since they exprire every year.

Vmware Player 14.0 on Arch Linux kernel 4.14

Sun, 14 Jan 2018 21:39:10 -0700

VMware is slow, really slow, at updating their software to support newer linux kernel releases. I just found this vmware modules for linux on github. It’s a really cool repo with the patches already applied for the relevant vmware version to work with the latest kernel. I downloaded the zip file, created a tar ball of vmmon and copied that to /lib/vmware/modules/sources/ then ran my custom vmware-modupgrade script. Worked perfectly.

Disqus for commments and a license

Sun, 10 Dec 2017 13:28:26 -0700

Update: I’m not using Disqus for comments anymore, see Why you should quit disqus

rEFInd

Fri, 02 Jun 2017 20:56:04 -0600

Booting linux requires a boot loader. I chose to use rEFInd vs GRUB or systemd boot. Installing is easy once the partitioning is setup. My partition scheme is a vfat esp partition of 512MB a ext2 boot partition 512MB and the rest of the disk for root on btrfs encrypted with dm-crypt and LUKS. This works for a bootable usb as well as internal drive. BTRFS was chosen for the subvolume feature. In the BTRFS root I create a /archroot and /home subvolume. On major system changes/upgrades I snapshot the /archroot subvolume to /archroot-date making a rollback simpler.

Blog script

Thu, 01 Jun 2017 20:26:53 -0600

I created a script for bash that automates creating a new post, rebuilding and deploying

creating my blog using Nikola

Tue, 30 May 2017 21:18:45 -0600

I switched to Hugo, see this post