Info-Dump

Info-Dump

Not too long ago I had completely different configurations across different computers. Terminal color schemes between computers weren’t consistent. Git was configured slightly differently between all computers. Lucky for me, there’s a program that’s well suited for this task: stow.

Special thanks to Brandon Invergo for his blog post documenting how he uses stow to manage dotfiles.

Git & Stow

Before I found stow I was using a purely git-based workflow. It worked but it was a little clunky keeping a git repo at the root of my home directory. One minor annoyance was that the repo’s README would show up in my home directory whenever I ran ls (minor, I know, but it didn’t feel right to me). I was always a little paranoid that I would accidentally commit some secret inside of ~/.cache too.

I recently picked up a 6th gen X1 Carbon so of course I wanted to install Arch Linux on it. This post documents the steps I took in case I ever have to do this again. I used ejmg’s guide guide, HardenedArray’s gist guide, and the Arch Linux wiki page as references.

Note: This was my setup as of July 2020ish. Things have changed since then.

Setup

Prepare Installation Media

This part is relatively straightforward. Check out the arch wiki page.

I bought a domain name on a whim recently and felt like I had to justify my purchase by building a site to make use of it. In a past life I might have used WordPress or Django but I was feeling especially lazy. At first I was going to use GitHub Pages but that seemed too easy. I haven’t really touched AWS before and I felt like I might as well make this into a learning opportunity. As you can probably tell by the title, I ended up using AWS to host a static site. This post documents the steps I took to get this working. These steps were compiled after I had everything working so it’s possible there may be some typos. If you stumbled upon this and have a question on a step, feel free to reach out (you can find my contact info on the about page).

TL;DR

• Use same-origin Referrer Policy with Django
• Double leters are unecesary and slow down typing (see Referer in this document)

I found a post on Hacker News with a link to webbkoll which tries to check how privacy-friendly a particular site is. Of course I had to check against my own site!

Webbkoll reported that my referrers were being leaked and that I was using a Google as a third-party service. My site does make requests to Google for some fonts, so that was expected. The privacy checker gave a helpful explanation on why someone might not want to make requests to a third-party (well the actual description singled out Google specifically, but the same is true for any third-party). I could host these fonts myself (as suggested) but the risk seems low to me and loading the fonts from Google means that users are more likely to have the fonts already cached (making my site load faster… not that anyone reads this).