revsuine

Asking Good Questions

Tue, 02 Sep 2025 15:00:06 +0100

In some of my circles, I am seen as the “technical” person, which means that all sorts of questions get sent my way.

I have always thought that I am a pretty poor choice for a teacher, because you know how teachers say “there are no stupid questions”? Well, even if I wouldn’t say it to your face, I most certainly feel I have been asked stupid stupid questions.

I wanted to write a quick blog post explaining what I think makes a good and a bad question.

Librebooting a Dell Latitude E6400

Tue, 29 Jul 2025 04:53:51 +0100

Introduction

Libreboot is a user-friendly distribution of coreboot. Coreboot is free and open source firmware for desktop computers.

The Dell Latitude E6400 is a recommended laptop for Librebooting because it can be internally flashed and it doesn’t require vendor file injection.

To change the firmware on a computer, you can flash externally, by opening up your computer and using a flash programmer to overwrite your motherboard’s ROM chip. Alternatively, you can do internal flashing, which means flashing from inside the OS, from within software. This means using the internal programmer on your motherboard, rather than an external one. Only some mainboards support internal flashing of Libreboot.

Windows 11 Virtual Machine with Virt-Manager and QEMU/KVM

Thu, 24 Jul 2025 21:06:18 +0100

These are my notes on setting up a Windows 11 VM using virt-manager. This is assuming that virt-manager is already set up; I wrote notes on how to set up virt-manager on Artix Linux here.

Download

Firstly, obtain a Windows 11 iso. You can download from Microsoft here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/software-download/windows11

Microsoft blocks VPN users from downloading Windows 11. If you are a VPN user, or if you just don’t want to download from Microsoft’s servers, MASSGRAVE is a reputable source of genuine Windows isos.

Artix Linux QEMU with Virt-Manager Notes

Wed, 23 Jul 2025 19:41:37 +0100

These are my notes for setting up virt-manager with QEMU/KVM on Artix Linux. I’m using runit, but anything runit-specific should be easily converted to other init systems/service managers.

This is largely the same as tomit4’s instructions, but I’m doing networking over a bridge rather than a NAT.

Install virt-manager

Firstly, install relevant packages:

# pacman -S qemu virt-manager virt-viewer vde2 openbsd-netcat libvirt libvirt-runit

If you need virtualised TPM (e.g. for Windows 11), you also need to install swtpm. Also, for Windows VMs in general, install virtio-win from the AUR for virtio drivers for Windows guests.

Getting the Canon PIXMA TR4755i to Work on Linux

Wed, 16 Apr 2025 23:26:33 +0100

Introduction

For those of you who don’t know, Student Finance England provide free printers to more or less all disabled students via their Disabled Students’ Allowance (DSA) funding. The printer they provide is a Canon PIXMA TR4755i (or at least, it was for me).

Printers are known for being rather unreliable pieces of technology, particularly on Linux (although, historically, I’ve honestly found printers to work much more reliably and without need for troubleshooting on Linux than Windows). So I was quite concerned when the government sent me a free printer, that I would not be able to use it. Luckily, after a few short hours of wrangling things, I managed to get it working via USB (I’ve not tried network printing, but will update this post once I do). I wanted to make this post to save people time if you are also a disabled student, or happen to have this model of printer for another reason.

PGP Encrypting All (Incoming) Emails

Fri, 13 Dec 2024 16:06:23 +0000

Let’s say we want emails on our mail server to be encrypted at rest, such that only the user has the key. Luckily, there already exists a popular solution for encrypting emails such that only the recipient can read them: OpenPGP.

Using Dovecot Sieve scripts, we can easily PGP-encrypt all incoming email for a user.

A lot of people have done this before, and I didn’t come up with the idea. Please see the Further reading section for some recommended articles I referred to.

How to Set up a Mail Server on Alpine Linux with Postfix and Dovecot

Sun, 24 Nov 2024 16:29:01 +0000

About mail servers

Simply put, a mail server sends and receives email. When ruby@protonmail.com emails klaasje@gmail.com, Protonmail’s mail server’s MTA sends the email to Google’s mail server’s MTA. Google’s MTA then passes the email on to Google’s MDA, which is responsible for storing the email. MDAs also run IMAP or POP3 servers so you can read your emails and send emails with an email client. IMAP and POP3 are protocols for email retrieval over TCP/IP. For sending email, you would use SMTP.

About

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

I’m revsuine and this is my personal website.

I’m a communist with various interests. This website contains my blog which I’ll post to occasionally. I also host various services for myself and my friends:

Nextcloud
Forgejo
Mastodon
A Matrix homeserver at revsuine.xyz
An email server at mail.revsuine.xyz

My contact details can be found here.

Contact

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Email

You can email me at pid1 [at] revsuine [dot] xyz. Please use my OpenPGP key (fingerprint 87B1783E27FD008152BA69CA7A7F274F7422E7CF) to encrypt emails to me.

All legitimate emails from this email will be signed with the above OpenPGP key.

When I change OpenPGP keys, I will upload a statement signed with my previous key indicating what my new key is, and this statement will be linked from this page.

Previous keys:

8FB418CD952022E5BBC432613F257B68F5BC9339 expired 02/11/2025; I didn’t sign a revocation statement due to forgetting.

Matrix

I can be contacted on Matrix at @revsuine:revsuine.xyz.

Privacy Policy

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

This is a privacy policy notice for anyone who happens to use any of the services I use.

For all services

My server is a VPS with full disk encryption. This means that, if the disk is seized, e.g. by law enforcement, your data will be unreadable to them. However, if the VPS host wishes to, they can dump the decryption keys from RAM and read my disk. For most user services I host, there will be additional encryption at rest, including such that data is never decrypted server-side.