DEV Community: Benjamin

Keyoxide Proof

Benjamin — Sat, 07 May 2022 13:29:55 +0000

This is an OpenPGP proof that connects my OpenPGP key to this dev.to account. For details check out https://docs.keyoxide.org/advanced/openpgp-proofs/

[Verifying my OpenPGP key: openpgp4fpr:7FB4736453198E93DBFFCB058CC6A08D6B07E990]

Getting Started with Matrix

Benjamin — Sun, 10 Apr 2022 20:30:51 +0000

Maybe you have heard of so-called decentralized messengers and want to know what the fuzz is about, or you have seen one of those messenger comparison charts, or maybe, your friend send you here.

So, what is Matrix now?

Matrix is a protocol for instant messaging, just like email for business communication.
Just like email, Matrix is just a protocol. And just like email, you can choose which provider - or in Matrix terminology homeserver you sign up on.

Your messages travel from your homeserver to the homeserver of your recipient, just like email.

The advantage of this way of doing things is, that even if one server goes down, the conversation can continue normally for all other parties.

Getting started

To begin, you have to choose the app you want to use, to access your account and your homeserver.

Choosing a homeserver

For this demo, I will use matrix.org as my homeserver, but you should choose a server that you like.
Maybe because it is located close to you, it aligns with your interest, has reliable uptime, or it just has a cool domain name.

As a starting point, I recommend this list to choose from.

Choosing a client

Now that you've chosen your homeserver, you need to choose the client - or the app that you install.

The client you choose affects the look and feel of Matrix.
For getting started, I recommend Element if you want a Discord-like experience, or SchildiChat for a more traditional WhatsApp-like experience.

Signing up & configuring your account

In this demo, I will use Element as my client.

After you opened your client and clicked on "Sign up", you will see this screen:

If you want to create your account on a different homeserver than matrix.org, you can click on the "Edit" Button next to matrix.org.

This window will pop up, asking you to enter your homeserver of choice. After you're done, click on continue.

Enter your username, your password and optionally an email. Then click on register to sign up.

Depending on your homeserver, you will have received a confirmation email, where you have to click on a link to continue.

Once you're registered, go back to the client and log in.

Now you're set. You can start writing messages on Matrix.

Configuring the last bits

Key Backup

Although you can start writing messages now, there are still a few things left to explore.

Messages in Matrix are end-to-end encrypted by default and because you don't want to memorize your encryption key for every chat that you start, Matrix has a feature called Key Backup.

To enable the feature, click on your profile picture and then on "Security & Privacy".

At the top, you can see all the devices where you are signed in, below that there is a section called "Encryption" with an option for a Secure Backup.

Click on the "Set up"-Button, below the "Secure Backup" heading.
This will prompt you to either generate a security key, or enter a security phrase.

I recommend the first one.
On the next screen, you will see that security key - basically a long group of letters.

Write it down. On a real piece of paper. If you lose it, all your message history will be gone.

Click on continue one more time to finish setting up your key backup.

Cross Signing and Multi-Device Support

If you now sign in on a new device, you will get a prompt to "verify this device".

There you have the option of verifying with another device, or with a key backup.

Verifying with a key backup will give you a prompt to enter the Key Backup Code that was generated or that you chose in the last chapter.

But I recommend verifying with another device. This will cause a "Verification requested" prompt to appear on one of your devices.

On one of your devices, click on "Verify using Emojis".

This will generate an emoji sequence, should be the same on both devices. If it is the same, click on "They match" on your devices.

Now, the second session is verified. It will import the encryption keys from the first one and all your chats should appear.

Great. Now for some actual chatting. 😛

As a starter, you can try messaging me at @hbenjamin:kde.org and tell me how it went.

P.S: This guide is published under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, so if you feel like translating or sharing it, it would mean a lot to me. ☺

Private Messaging

Benjamin — Sun, 03 Apr 2022 07:28:14 +0000

There are a plethora of messaging apps available to date.
I wanted to take a look at some good and some better ones.

I don't think I have to say much about this one.
WhatsApp is by far the most popular messaging app that ever existed, yet it is owned by one of the biggest companies that makes money by harvesting and selling people's data: Facebook (now Meta 😜)

WhatsApp is (in theory) end-to-end encrypted and perfectly secure. In the time it wasn't owned by Facebook, I would have believed it. In practice: No one except the engineers know.

WhatsApp has a major problem: It isn't open source.

Telegam

After the privacy policy change in 2021 - WhatsApp started sharing data with it's parent and sister companies - many people have fled to alternative messaging providers like for example Telegram.

Telegram definitely seems better than WhatsApp, and it is.

Telegram isn't owned by a giant ad company, it doesn't share your data with anyone.
But it is also by far perfect.

It didn't really have any business model until recently. It was entirely paid out of the pocket of one of the founders.

The one thing that it has going for it, is that the clients are open source. Anyone can verify wether the messages are encrypted - and there the issues start.

By default chats are not encrypted. You have to start a "private chat" to get end-to-end encryption.
Groups and Channels can't be end-to-end encrypted. That makes sense for channels - because they are public - but not for group chats. I wouldn't like to have my entire family group chat open to anyone with access to the Telegram Servers.

One thing I noticed regarding "private" chats, is that Telegram doesn't support Cross-Signing for encryption keys. Moreover, private chats aren't supported in the Desktop or Web Clients.

Signal

After the privacy policy change, my family and I transitioned to Signal for our family group chat.

Signal is pretty much the gold-standard for encrypted chats. Most people in my contact list switched from WhatsApp to Signal.
It finances itself entirely via donations. After the WhatsApp founder left the company, he donated 50 Million dollars to Signal.
Today, Signal is entirely powered by donations from it's users and people like Brian Acton.

Signal is a pretty good messaging app, but it still has it's criticisms.
The client and the server are both completely open source, but not available on F-Droid.
Signal also recieved heavy criticisms for implementing a MobileCoin wallet into the app.

One problem that all "mainstream" messaging apps have is centralisation.
WhatsApp users experienced this first hand with the "big Facebook" outage, where every single Facebook service was down for a few long hours.

Signal users also aren't immune to outages, as Signal had struggles to keep up with the big user growth, they also faced an outage that lasted a whole day in some regions.

XMPP

Fight me, but I don't really like XMPP.
I've never developed a client for it and only have experience with it on the user side of things, but the clients aren't my fit.

They don't look that modern and are missing features.

XMPP isn't a bad protocol by any means, so if you wanna try it out: https://xmpp.org/

Matrix

Matrix is an open protocol, just like XMPP.
The spec is maintained by the Matrix foundation.

Matrix solves a lot of problems "mainstream" messengers have.
It isn't owned by a big tech/ad company, it is able to encrypt all messages and groups, and it is decentralized, protecting from a huge impact when outages hit.

Matrix is kind of split into two companies.

The first one is the Matrix Foundation: it manages the spec and everything around it.

The second company is Element (or New Vector LLC): It builds the Matrix Client "Element" and provides hosting for matrix.org and anyone who wants a server (through Element Matrix Services).

One more special thing the Matrix Ecosystem has are Bridges.
Bridges are programs that you install on your homeserver and through those bridges you can chat with a lot of other chat apps including Signal, Telegram and WhatsApp.

My favourite messenger is definitly Matrix.

My digital classroom experience

Benjamin — Sun, 03 Apr 2022 07:22:31 +0000

Inspired by this post from joelchrono12 I wanted to talk about my experience with the digital lessons that my school provides and just the state of digitization in general.

What things does my school use

For video conferencing and literally everything else, my schools uses Microsoft Teams.
They went all in on the Office 365 Suite pretty early on.

In the first lockdown that we had here, the teachers would give us tasks via Teams Tasks that we could turn in directly on the platform.

My school also deployed digital whiteboards from ProWise.

Now, after the lockdowns we got laptops for school use. (Really only school use. You can't even change the wallpaper.) We use them to take notes in OneNote for example.

The problems I encountered

Office 365 - or as it is now called Microsoft 365 - isn't my dream setup for school. I'd much rather use a self hosted Nextcloud instance with Nextcloud Talk or Element for communication. That's not what I got, instead I got problems.

In the first lockdown, this new system was really stress-tested. The teachers had to learn to use it and simultaneously they had to teach their students. Not everything was smooth sailing.

On top of that Microsoft pulled a real Microsoft again. Microsoft Teams Video Conferencing just didn't work the first weeks, Office 365 had multiple outages to the point where you couldn't even login and this:

Word saying: "Word can't open the document because the service is too busy at the moment. Please refresh the page again."
No one could access their documents.

On top of the technical fails, came the teachers that gave us way to much homework. Sometimes I sat on one task for 4 hours straight, knowing if I manage to finish it, I still got 3 other tasks I need to do.

The good things that I got

It wasn't all broken and depressing, though.

In that time, I massively improved my grades. I started to experience, that school can be fun.
Sometimes I had a task completed so fast that I just made up a new one just to learn more about a topic.

Now, we're back in Face-to-face teaching and I still experience the techincial problems of the microsoft cloud 🌧 from time to time, but I also know that school can be fun.

P.S.: I was today years old as I learned you cannot export OneNote Documents in any form.

I care about privacy

Benjamin — Sun, 03 Apr 2022 07:20:34 +0000

This website doesn't track you. It doesn't sell your data or displays ads.
I purposefully didn't include any ads or trackers because I care about privacy.

I think privacy is a good thing and everybody should care about it. But I also do regret my decision of climbing down the rabbit hole of internet privacy sometimes.

The state that privacy has in our society is troubling. "I have read and accept the privacy policy." is the biggest lie of the internet.

How to achieve privacy

What is privacy and how do I get it?

Privacy isn't a thing you can have or don't have it. It's not binary, it's a scale where you decide how much privacy you want or need.

You can just install Signal to make you communication secure, but is it enough? That depends on you.

Incremental Change

This one is really important I think.

I see this so often and it's just sad: Youtube videos for "privacy minded" people that tell you things like "don't use Signal, it's owned by the FBI and they can read all your messages. Switch to <random messaging app that no one uses> instead."

Signal has it's criticisms - as does every single app or service that was ever created - that's not the point.
It's sad that such videos get recommended to people who just start out.

Those videos decourage people to even start their privacy journey, they may have valid points but the videos directly go all-in and overwhelm people.

Now comes the important part - write it down, print it out, just memorize it:

Incremental change (e.g. first installing Signal) is not bad. Encourage incremental change.

It's way easier getting all your contacts to install Signal then to use Matrix for example. Matrix isn't bad, but the process of joining it isn't as simple as with Signal.

Believe me, I've tried.

Until then

Until we have a society where everyone cares about privacy, just do a few simple things:

Spread the word. You can influence the people around you, to join your journey of privacy.
Go easy on them: Don't discourage their first steps.
Let them have a life, it isn't all privacy. There are way more exciting and beautiful things out there.

I hope that someday the value of privacy increases in our society.

That said: Thank you for reading and I hope this post was somewhat informative or enjoyable.
Have a nice rest of your day! 🌞

Anytype: operating system for life?

Benjamin — Sun, 03 Apr 2022 07:18:19 +0000

After Evernote restricted the number of devices you could use with the free plan, I moved over to Notion.
Notion isn't just a simple note taking app with independent documents, its a big database, where every note can connect to other notes making it easy to sort things into categories.

I've used Notion for a long time, but after I really got into privacy, I started to search for a encrypted alternative.
I wasn't comfortable anymore with organising my entire life in one central, unencrypted place owned by some coorporation.

So, I started to search for an alternative.
I eventually found Anytype, but it was invite only, so I couldn't try it yet.

I moved on and started using Standard Notes. I still use it today, and I am pretty happy with it.

Now I got access to the Anytype alpha and wanted to write about it here.

When you launch Anytype for the first time, you are greeted with a seed phrase that secures your private key.

After you save that key and proceed, you get to your homescreen.

On the homescreen, you can create new sets using pre-build templates using the plus button on the top right.

Your anytype "account" is encrypted using a private key that is protected by your seedphrase and it is synced using IPFS.

Because of that, you can also use Anytype on your Smartphone:

One thing I noticed with the desktop app is that is always launches in full-screen mode and it feels kinda sluggish.
I probably won't continue to use it for now, but we'll see how Anytype evolves.

Everyone should have a blog

Benjamin — Fri, 25 Mar 2022 15:44:18 +0000

I think everyone should have a blog, let me explain why.

Processing thoughts

I started writing down my thoughts on the internet in 2016. (That's six years ago already 🤯)
Back then, it was mostly thoughts about faith and my life with God. (I still do that, it's German, though.)

This blog helped me process my thoughts and emotions.

I now started this blog to write down more tech related thoughts and experiment a little with Hugo.

Learn new skills

The second reason why I think, everyone should blog is to learn new skills.
This blog helped me become familiar with Hugo.

The other side of the coin is, to document things and essentially help others learn new things.

I've kind of noticed a pattern with me searching for stuff online. If I need a software for a niche use case, or need a solution to a problem, most of the time, I find the solution on a blog.

Of course, there are forums too, but often the blog post about something has more detail.

Having a knowledge base

You can't imagine how helpful it is, to have a knowledge base of things that you otherwise would have to look up again and again.
This basically goes for every subject and field of work, not only tech.

It's quick, it's easy and it's free!

Spinning up this blog with hugo took me like 30 minutes. And writing a post is nothing more than writing it and clicking one button to deploy it.

And if you use something like Forestry - which is a great product - you can reduce the 30 minutes to something like 5 minutes. I also got my domain for free, from Freenom and my blog is deployed using Netlify's free tier.

It's literally just a click of a button - so what's your excuse not to do it?
Maybe start with something like #100DaysToOffload, to give yourself an incentive to keep going.

In reality, you don't have to blog every day or even every week. Just every time you come across something cool, or something you want to document.

Microblogging

There's one thing I haven't touched on in this post, and that is Microblogging.
If long-form content isn't particularly your style, maybe consider joining a Mastodon or Misskey instance and using that as your blogging platform.

Just start blogging.

Keyoxide

Benjamin — Thu, 22 Apr 2021 14:42:32 +0000

This is an OpenPGP proof that connects my OpenPGP key to this dev.to account. For details check out https://keyoxide.org/guides/openpgp-proofs

[Verifying my OpenPGP key: openpgp4fpr:F95069755AC4B5F645B661663E2520C8653BA282]

Prerender all the Things.

Benjamin — Sun, 21 Mar 2021 18:41:13 +0000

In this Post I want to cover what prerendering is, and how you can use it in Netlify.

Let's go! 🌘

What is prerendering?

When you hava a React, Angular or Vue App, most of the time, it is client-side rendered.

The client receives an empty HTML shell, and loads the content via JavaScript.

Search Engines normally don't execute JavaScript when they index a page.
That changed in recent years with Google, but still, you can't really rely on them to render your application properly.

This is where prerendering comes into play.
The server recieves a request.
It checks the user agent, if it's a normal browser user agent, the server responds with the HTML Shell.

But if it is a Search Engine Crawler that requests the page, the Server responds with a prerendered HTML file.

How to Plan a release of an open source project

Benjamin — Sat, 13 Mar 2021 17:52:38 +0000

I am currently building a social bible app.

Why am I building it?

I started building it, because I couldn't find the features that I needed in already existing apps.

I open sourced my work on it, because I believe everyone should be able to freely access the bible, and I want to be able to build software that is shaped by the community that uses it.
So I made it open source.

What I learned by building it

I had a vision, I knew what I wanted to build.

I developed a (for my situation) pretty good release plan:

1. Phase: Closed-Alpha

In this phase, the product is ready to use, and I open the registration via invite codes to a select number of people.
I frequently ask them to report bugs and improvements.
If the product is usable without major bugs, I transition into the next phase.

2. Phase: Open-Beta: A unlimited number of people can now register and test the product.

Now, I begin to polish the user interface and flow.
When that's done, I transition into the last phase.

3. Phase: Release.

Now everyone can register and use the product.
I write a release announcement.

To Jamstack and not to Jamstack

Benjamin — Sat, 06 Mar 2021 08:09:19 +0000

Als ich awesomeBible starten wollte, hatte ich das Ziel einen Blog zu bauen, ohne viel Geld für Hosting auszugeben.
Zu der Zeit habe ich auch mit SSGs (Static Site Generators) experimentiert.
Ich hatte Hugo und Jekyll ausprobiert.

Jamstack

Die Seite sollte schnell sein, Jamstack und statische Blogs sind hier das perfekte Beispiel.

Das Hosting sollte wenig bis gar nichts kosten, dieses Kriterium ist mit Jamstack Hostern wie zum Beispiel Netlify oder Github Pages gegeben.
Das einzige, was hier noch Geld kosten würde, wäre die Domain. Ersteinmal.

Kommentare

Ein Feature was ich unbedingt brauchte, waren Kommentare.
Die Möglichkeit der Leser, direkt ihre Meinung zu sagen.

Ein kostenloser Anbieter ist hier Disqus. Meiner Erfahrung nach, echt nicht gut.
Aus mehreren Gründen:

unerwünschte Werbung
Datenschutzprobleme, Breaches

Es gibt noch einige andere Anbieter, die teils richtig gut sind, aber ich wollte für Kommentare nichts ausgeben (bzw. ich hätte meinem Vater erklären müssen, wie das mit Jamstack läuft, und wofür ich einen Drittanbieter brauche)

Kontaktformulare

Kontaktformulare sind eine ähnliche Sache.
Ein Anbieter, der richtig gut ist, ist Formspree.
Und es gibt ja noch die gute alte E-Mail.

Not to Jamstack

Ich nehm's vorweg, ich habe mich schlussendlich doch nicht für den Jamstack entschieden. Warum?

Ich habe neben der Überlegung des Jamstack-Weges auch immer noch nach Hostingprovidern gesucht, die zu der Zeit günstig genug waren. (Mein Budget war tight. 💸)

Ziemlich schnell habe ich dann Manitu gefunden.
Als ich den Preis gesehen habe, bin ich erstmal vom Stuhl gefallen:

Im Vergleich dazu 1&1 ionos (Auch der 50 GB Tarif):

Lasst euch von den 2€ nicht täuschen, im Endeffekt sind das vier Euro pro Monat.

Anmerken möchte ich auch, das manitu die 50GB Webspace über alle Dienste zieht, sprich ich habe auf awesomebible.de eine Website liegen, und alle Mails und Datenbanken werden da auch noch dazu gerechnet.

Bei ionos nur 2 GB pro E-Mail-Postfach, und nur 2 GB pro Datenbank statt 50 GB.

Wordpress

Es ist vielleicht schon aufgefallen, dass ich für awesomebible.de WordPress benutze.

Als Theme benutze ich Blocksy, und auf der Plugin-side-of-Things ist Jetpack und WP Super Cache.

Kommentare

Ja lol, Kommentare gibts for free.
Ich brauche keinen Drittanbieter.

Ich glaube das war's.

Das wars, danke fürs lesen! ❤️

Hallo Welt!

Benjamin — Sat, 06 Mar 2021 08:04:39 +0000

Ich bin Benjamin Hartmann, auf diesem Blog möchte ich ein bisschen über die technischen Hintergründe von awesomeBible reden.

Warum habe ich welche Technologie gewählt, und welche vielleicht wieder verworfen habe. Man kann gespannt bleiben. 😜