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Telegram temporary blocked in France

The 13th of May, Telegram, a popular messaging application, got blocked by the French Government under the child abuse and terrorism fighting enforcement laws. Following their procedure, the Police requested the French ISP to block some URLs tagged as “child porn” as the law requires it. The procedure is : the Police asks the hosting provider to remove the contents. If the hosting does not comply under a legal delay, the URL is blocked.

May 14, 2023 - 3 minutes read time

Guys, it's OK to be on social medias

There’s a behavior I’ve often observed during a discussion about the major social medias. Some people are trying to justify why they’re using them as it would be a problem to use them. – “I’m just using them to keep contact with people I know” – “I don’t use them a lot” – “I just have a read profile to follow some people” – “I just use them for the games”

May 13, 2023 - 3 minutes read time

Xenoblade Chronicles 3 Future Redeemed

Future Redeemed is the extension of the game Xenoblade Chronicles 3, released as a DLC for Nintendo Switch on late April 2023. Like Torna : The Golden Country for Xenoblade 2, this extension was last part of the additional content of the game, split into four parts. The two previous one added new heroes, and this one is an entire new chapter. However, until today, Future Redeemed is still a DLC for the main game and no physical release like Torna has been announced yet.

May 8, 2023 - 6 minutes read time

Final Fantasy VII Remake (Intergrade)

Final Fantasy VII Remake is the long time fans-awaited remake/remaster of the 1997 Playstation game, Final Fantasy VII. Released in 2020 by Square Enix exclusively for Playstation 4, the publisher produced in 2021 the Intergrade enhanced version for Playstation 5 and Microsoft Windows. Final Fantasy VII Remake has been one of the fastest selling game of the Playstation 4 with 3.5 millions copies sold in three days. Remake has been announced as a multiple parts episodic game, covering the first section of the original game in Midgard.

April 24, 2023 - 8 minutes read time

Ghostbusters : The Video Game

Ghostbusters : The video game is a … video game initially released in 2009 by Terminal Reality and published by Atari on Microsoft Windows, Playstation 3 and XBox 360. The game even had a Playstation 2 and Nintendo Wii port. Ten years later, in 2019, the game has been released in a “remastered” version for Windows, Nintendo Switch, Playstation 4 and Xbox One by Saber Interactive. This action-adventure game’s scenario is based on a story written by Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis that develop various unexplored parts of the first two movies.

March 28, 2023 - 7 minutes read time

Use a CI/CD workflow to maintain a book content

This may sound a little incongruous if for you the Continous Integration / Continuous Delivery patterns are for software development, but yes, you can maintain a book with the same principles. Recently, I’ve compiled the Linux Explained articles into an e-book. The idea was germinating in my head while writing the articles and I was wondering if I could maintaining the text using the CI/CD patterns. Actually : yes, it’s possible.

March 19, 2023 - 9 minutes read time

Oops, I think I've wrote a book

Lastly, this blog has been filled by a series of articles named Linux Explained. Since a long time, I’ve wanted to share some knowledge about Linux and try to explain it to people in simple and accessible terms. But, the more the articles were spawning, the more an idea was germinating in my head … Why not compiling these articles into a book ? In the 8th part of the Linux Explained series, I’ve said I could have talked about several more topic regarding Linux and I’ve had an idea regarding this.

March 8, 2023 - 2 minutes read time

Linux Explained part 8 : Remote access with SSH

For the last entry of the Linux Explained series, we will explore the remote access and administration of a Linux machine using SSH. From RSH to SSH The Remote Shell, or rsh, is a command line computer program created in 1983 as a part of the Berkeley “r-commands” - r for remote -, released for the first time in 1981, made to enable the users of an Unix computer to connect to another one using the network.

March 7, 2023 - 18 minutes read time

Linux Explained part 7 : The memory management

For this next entry in the Linux Explained series, we’re going to explore one of the Linux Kernel crucial functionality, the memory management. What is the memory for an operating system The memory management is a critical aspect of an operating system. It’s goal is to provide a dynamic way to allocate the portions of the system’s memory when a process request it and free it when its task is over and reuse it for new tasks.

March 2, 2023 - 13 minutes read time

Mobile Suit Gundam : The Witch From Mercury

Mobile Suit Gundam : The Witch from Mercury is the latest entry in the long-running Gundam Saga. It’s been a while since Gundam has produced a “classic” TV-show, seven years actually, since the last series were Gunpla-based stories (like the Gundam Build series) and the rest of the productions were movies/OVA. The Witch from Mercury is quite an innovative series for the franchise because it’s the first TV series to feature a female protagonist (but not the first Gundam show to do it).

February 26, 2023 - 7 minutes read time

Linux Explained part 6 : The Standard Streams

Now we have seen plenty of basis about Linux, let’s dig into some nice other features. This one will be about the Shell Streams, or Standard Streams, the basic input and output channels you may interact with. What are the Standard Streams On a Linux text-based shell (and on other systems too), you have the notion of Standard Streams. In the shell, you can interact with commands, files and manipulate them through the Standard Streams.

February 23, 2023 - 19 minutes read time

Linux Explained part 5 : The users management

For the fifth entry of the Linux Explained series, we will now see how does Linux manage the users. What is a user and group for Linux ? If you remember the Unix history in the first chapter, one detail about the Multics, then Unix conception was to be multi-users. A multi-user software is a program able to give access to the computing resources by multiple users of the machine. Nowadays it must seems to be pretty obvious, but in the dark ages of computing, the ability for a computer to executes several processes simultaneously was limited.

February 18, 2023 - 16 minutes read time

Linux Explained part 4 : The files permissions

In this fourth entry of our Linux Explained series, following the filesystems definition, we will now see how Linux manages the access to the files and folders. The file permissions Now we have seen how do Linux organizes its filesystem, let’s see how it manages the permissions of the files and folders. It won’t be a surprise, Linux’s file permissions are also inherited from Unix. The file permissions are one of the core features of Linux’s security model : determine who can access to what and what they can do on it.

February 13, 2023 - 13 minutes read time

Linux Explained part 3 : The Filesystems

In this third entry of our Linux Explained series, we’re going to see at a deeper level the filesystem management that have been mentioned previously. The first part will be a general description of what is a filesystem. Then, we will see describe how Linux organizes and uses its filesystem. What is a filesystem ? A filesystem, or FS, is the method an operating system uses to structure the data on a storage device (hard drive, SSD, USB flash stick, whatever).

February 12, 2023 - 12 minutes read time

Linux explained part 2 : Bootloader, Init and Shell

Second entry in our Linux Explained series, let’s talk about three common concepts composing a Linux Distribution : the Bootloader, the Init Process, and the Shell. In a simple words (I hope), we will see what are these three concepts and how do they work together in a Linux distribution. The bootloader The bootloader is a software that is responsible for booting the operating system of a computer. Booting the computer is the moment when you push the “Power On” button and have the hardware powered and initializing.

February 7, 2023 - 13 minutes read time

Linux explained part 1 : History and basic concepts

On this blog, I’ve wrote some articles about Linux. But maybe you’re not entirely familiar with the lowest layers of the Linux distributions. I’ll propose you a little series of articles about Linux, its history, what is the Linux Kernel, the concept of Linux distribution, what are the filesystem permissions, etc. This first article will cover the general informations about Linux : what is it, its history, and what is a Linux Distribution.

February 4, 2023 - 8 minutes read time

The EDPB adopts the final report of the cookie banner recommendations

Between May 2021 and August 2022, 18 European data protection authorities (DPA) received several hundred of complaints from NOYB regarding the design of the cookies banners. A coordinated task force between the DPAs, piloted by the French authority La CNIL and its Austrian counterpart, the DSB, ended-up after 13 meetings by the production of a report containing various recommendations for designing a cookie banner. I propose here a summary of my understanding of this report.

January 20, 2023 - 8 minutes read time

I'm tired of companies thinking we're buddies

There is a virus in France that infect more and more companies… Inverting the T-V distinction with their customers. In French, there are two pronouns for addressing to somebody : tu or vous (based on latin tu and vos). Tu is usually for family, friends, coworkers, classmates, and any kind of close people. Meanwhile vous is for a more respectful approach, talking with a stranger, a boss, or somebody you don’t know.

January 17, 2023 - 3 minutes read time

Final Fantasy XV

Final Fantasy XV is an action RPG developed and published by Square Enix. Its first release was on Playstation 4 / Xbox One in 2016, then the game as been ported on Microsoft Windows in 2018. Initially, FF XV was known as Final Fantasy versus XIII and developed during the Fabula Nova Crystallis Final Fantasy project (the FF XIII universe). It’s first images appeared on 2006 and the game was scheduled for Playstation 3.

January 15, 2023 - 12 minutes read time

New device ? Don't forget to clear the old one !

If I don’t do any mistake, recently it was Christmas and the social convention wants to have people offering consumer goods to others. Among these consumer goods there are a lot of electronic devices like smartphones, tablets, or computers. You may had received a new one and you’re happy with it. You may also want to sell, give, or if any other possibilities are available, trash your previous model. But, don’t do it to fast !

December 26, 2022 - 3 minutes read time

The alternative front-ends to centralized online services

If sometimes you need to consult or follow a content available on a centralized platform like Youtube or Twitter but you’re worried about your privacy ? Or you don’t want to create an account for this specific requirement ? To do so, you can use an alternative front-end to these services. I’ve quickly talked about them in my article Why would I need something else than RSS ? but let’s develop the idea.

December 25, 2022 - 5 minutes read time

Terraform your CICD Toolchain : SonarQube

So, in the previous article we’ve Terraformed GitHub (that must hurt), so let’s continue with another tool commonly used in a CICD process : SonarQube. For a brief introduction in case you don’t know this tool, SonarQube (or SonarCloud for its SaaS version) is an open-source software published under LGPL v3 made for Static Code Analysis having both free and paid Enterprise plans. Basically, SonarQube will analyse the source code, use a big set of rules associated to the language, and throw issues if it found bugs, regressions, security hotspots, duplicated code lines, code test coverage, or code smells.

December 23, 2022 - 3 minutes read time

Terraform your CICD Toolchain : GitHub

When you’re running and managing the CICD Toolchain of a big organization, you may want to establish some conventions and usage rules to avoid having to manage a big inconsistent mess. One possibility to avoid this, after you had established your various naming conventions and usages, is to use Terraform to maintain all of the objects constitutes your application projects. For example, if your application’s sources are hosted on GitHub, using Actions for the build and SonarQube for the code quality analysis, you have to maintain both services : the repositories, the accesses, and the SonarQube project.

December 18, 2022 - 6 minutes read time

Idées Noires

Idées noires, translated as Franquin’s Last Laugh in English, is a collection of Black Comedy comic strips drawn by André Franquin, written by Franquin and Yann Delporte in 1977. After its cancellation in the Spirou Magazine supplement Le Trombone Illustré, the series has been continued in Fluide Glacial until 1983. Franquin created Idées noires while he was suffering himself from depression. The drawing style is far more simple and pure than Franquin’s usual work, using black and white colors and characters drawn as shadowed figures.

December 13, 2022 - 3 minutes read time

Bayonetta 3

Third entry in our series of articles about Bayonetta, we’re now talking about the third game, Bayonetta 3, still developed by PlatinumGames and edited by Nintendo, released on October 2022 for Nintendo Switch. Announced in 2017, the game development took a lot of time with a very few news about it, and finally showed some images in 2021 during a trailer with its titular Witch saying “Sorry, I’m terribly late”.

December 9, 2022 - 5 minutes read time

GDPR : French ISP Free sanctioned for violations

On November 30th (link in French), la CNIL, the French personal data protection authority, sanctioned the French Internet Service Provider FREE for data security issues and not respecting the people rights granted by the GDPR. According to the more complete délibération (in French) published in the Journal Officiel de la République Française, the Authority received 41 complains between October 2018 and November 2019. Ten of the complains were analyzed during the procedure which ended by this sanction.

December 8, 2022 - 5 minutes read time

Bayonetta 2

Second article for the Bayonetta franchise, this one is dedicated to the game’s sequel : Bayonetta 2. Bayonetta 2 was released on 2014 on Nintendo Wii U. Following the cancellation of the game development by Sega, Nintendo proposed to PlatinumGames to fund the title as an exclusivity for its slow selling console. Of course, Bayonetta’s fans complained because the first title was multiplaform, but the game producer responded that without Nintendo, the sequel would not have been released.

December 4, 2022 - 5 minutes read time

Bayonetta

Bayonetta is a series of action video games created by Hideki Kamiya and developed by PlatinumGames. The first iteration was released on 2009, published by Sega, on Playstation 3 and XBox 360. The creator of the game is the same as the Devil May Cry franchise and some similarities are present. The main character is Bayonetta, a powerful witch welding four pistols on her hands and feet and able to invoke terrible demons shaped by her very long hairs.

November 28, 2022 - 5 minutes read time

Some Google-free way for an Android smartphone migration

After 4 years of service, my Nokia 8.1 was starting to have some weakening battery issues and also a very capricious USB port. The connection was random and charging it took forever. So it wasn’t anymore suitable for my daily usage (and working in a place where the mobile network is very low is not a good thing for a weak battery because the smartphone will have difficulties to reach the network…) and during previous September I’ve bought the Nokia G60.

November 25, 2022 - 5 minutes read time

Ever heard about the Linux distribution CBL-Mariner ?

A few days ago, I was on a business trip at Microsoft France HQ in Paris, to take part at some meetings organized between them and one of my clients regarding the various technologies they use from the publisher. During a session with the PM of Azure App Service/Functions, I’ve learned about something. Did you knew that Microsoft released a Linux distribution ? For my defense, I don’t work with Microsoft Azure since a long time, mostly 2 years, so I still have a lot of things to discover about this provider.

November 16, 2022 - 3 minutes read time

Don't get mistaken : Mastodon is not Twitter

It’s been everywhere on the news, following the acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk, a #TwitterMigration movement spread in various Mastodon instances. A lot of new users registered on various instances during the last week (Fosstodon had + 5 000 new users in a week) and Mastodon’s developers told about over 655 thousands active users as a new record. Some news articles also stated if Mastodon could “replace Twitter” or being “the new Twitter”.

November 6, 2022 - 8 minutes read time

Why do I enjoy Fosstodon

I’ve joined Fosstodon since a little more than 2 years now. At this moment, I wasn’t into social medias and had none of them. I’ve discovered the power of the Fediverse with my former blog tool : Plume. Seeing some comments coming from Mastodon instances was fun an nice. Then, I’ve wanted to check myself what was going on there and eventually I’ve opened my account at Fosstodon. I’ve always liked Forums and I’ve been a lot on IRC too during my beginning of using Internet.

November 1, 2022 - 5 minutes read time

Something about our languages

Recently in France, the Administrative Tribunal took a decision against the Health Ministry (Ministère des solidarités et de la santé - Link in French) and the French State because of a project named : “Health Data Hub” (sic). Launched in 2019, the Health Data Hub project is a platform administered by the public health ministry for medical research and treatment quality enhancement. But, for some conservative associations, this project had a big problem : its name is in English.

October 28, 2022 - 5 minutes read time

My vinyl records collection

If somebody told me in early 2022 I would buy a vinyl turntable and starting a vinyl records collection, I don’t think I would have believed it. Like I’ve said in the linked blog entry, I’m not audiophile and not a “vinyl nostalgic”. Because I remember this medium while I was a kid and the sound of the family turntable was awful, the needle jumped a lot, and the “cracks” were not really enjoyable.

October 18, 2022 - 5 minutes read time

The relations between the Xenoblade Games

Until now, the Xenoblade series produced four main games and two expansions. As their relationship could quickly become a mess, I’ve made the following tree that explain with a very summarized chronology the relationships between the game. As there is not a lot of official material explaining this at my knowledge, this chart remains a personal interpretation. Of course, as Xenoblade Chronicles X is a standalone episode and universe, it does not appear in this chart.

October 9, 2022 - 1 minutes read time

Xenoblade Chronicles 3

Xenoblade Chronicles 3 is a video game developed by Monolith Software and published by Nintendo, released on July 2022 on Nintendo Switch. It’s the fourth installment of the Xenoblade series. The game setting explore the future of the first and second entries of the series, while the gameplay is mostly based on Xenoblade 2 ’s. The Xenoblade games have usually long term development and took time to be released, but this one had a pleasant surprise of being released earlier than the expected schedule.

October 8, 2022 - 11 minutes read time

The CNIL GDPR learning workshop

If you’ve read some of this blog legal-related content, you may have seen that I’m pretty interested by the privacy protection. However, despite being myself informed of the legal context, I recognize I’ve never deeply learned the GDPR itself. Of course, my various readings about this topic (including my professional activities) made me learn some good basis, but that wasn’t enough. That’s why I’ll propose you to discover a service made by the French personal data protection authority, la CNIL, which is a training to the GDPR principles, legal basis and its impact in our lives.

October 4, 2022 - 4 minutes read time

Is being rude in UX design the norm ?

If I must explain why I enjoy static and simple websites, the main reason would be because they’re not annoying attention-seeking kids yelling at you. The web surfing is a complete mess of distraction and rude behavior with absolutely no respect to the viewer. Here is some examples of what I found to be rude and counter-productive when you inflict then to your visitors. Newsletters popups I’ve tooted about it this morning.

October 2, 2022 - 5 minutes read time

Cyberpunk: Edgerunners

Cyberpunk: Edgerunners is an animated Polish-Japanese TV-series based on the CD Projekt Red videogame Cyberpunk 2077, released on September 2022 on Netflix. Its story is placed one year before the video game scenario. The series has been animated by Studio Trigger under the supervision of CD Projekt Red. David is a street teenager living in Night City, a big corporations ruled dystopic city where corruption and crime is the daily basic.

September 23, 2022 - 3 minutes read time

Why would I need something else than RSS ?

Once upon a time, there was a very decentralized Web where each website proposed to subscribe to newsletters or follow their RSS feed to have the last news. We had RSS readers (on web version or on desktop, for instance I was using Opera’s RSS feed reader) which were regularly pooling the feeds and update the new articles. Then, we could sort the feeds and assign them categories and read it according to our time and mood.

September 13, 2022 - 3 minutes read time

The discovery of an electric car

Last February, I’ve posted I’ll switch to an electric car. And now it’s done, the vehicle took a long time to be delivered but now I can enjoy it. I’ve ordered it on February, and it has been constructed during June. I’ve received it last week after a long wait. Fun fact : the car has been delivered to the retailer during July, but it took a month to have the immatriculation certificate.

September 12, 2022 - 6 minutes read time

Getting into the fish keeping hobby

Two weeks ago, it was my birthday (and as you may know, a geek doesn’t age, he level up). A friend who set an aquarium for himself asked me if I wanted one. After some hesitations (where would I put it ? will it need too much maintenance ? etc), I’ve finally said yes and it was the birthday present from my friends. It’s not a big one, it’s a 60L tank (around 60x30x45cm), a starter-kit for tropical fishes including the filter, the heater, some accessories, and a hood with a LED light.

September 7, 2022 - 3 minutes read time

Yet Another Blogroll

During the previous week-end, I had a simple idea about if a blogroll directory could be made with a static-site generator like Hugo (the one I use here). After some tinkering, it appeared that it worked pretty nice, so I’ve launched it on the web and let see what will happen. So, I’m happy to introduce you Yet Another Blogroll, a humanly curated personal blog directory made with a static-site generator.

August 21, 2022 - 2 minutes read time

Something about commercial VPN Services : My concerns

In the previous article, I’ve exposed here the concept of a VPN, what’s happening when you using one, and what do the commercial services are offering. Now, I’ll explain why I don’t trust them, and why I won’t use them. And by extension, why I will never write any “sponsored content” for them. Once again, that’s just my personal opinion, do whatever you want ! Common misconceptions and misinformation Some benefits exposed by the providers are not true or incomplete.

August 15, 2022 - 14 minutes read time

I'm getting lazy in video games

Following my previous post about Tales of Arise, I would like to share a feeling that’s growing with the time. I’m getting lazy in video games. What does it mean ? Since some years, I always set the difficulty to “Easy” or “Story”. Mostly because I don’t want to struggle or being stressed or pissed off by a too much difficult gameplay or mechanics. And more recently, I usually enjoy when some gameplay parts are fully automated, especially when it’s the most repetitive ones.

August 15, 2022 - 4 minutes read time

Tales of Arise

Tales of Arise is an action role-playing game developed and published by Bandai Namco Games, released on September 2021. It’s the first Tales game to have a simultaneous worldwide release, five years after Tales of Berseria and install a new departure for the series. The game has been released on various platforms : Microsoft Windows, Playstation 4 and 5, XBox One, and XBox Series XS. Tales of Arise begins by a background exposition of the game’s world.

August 14, 2022 - 5 minutes read time

Something about commercial VPN services : What is a VPN ?

Last years, I’ve wrote a vulgarization article about the differences between a VPN and a Proxy (article in French). You may have noticed that the commercial VPN services are a common sponsor for the so-called social medias influencers. I have myself received various offers from various affiliation managers (I’m an influencer, yeay ! \o/) and I never answered them. Mostly because they simply didn’t read my contact page where I say it’s unnecessary to reach me for these kind of proposition.

August 13, 2022 - 10 minutes read time

The complex case of online age verification against privacy protection laws

La CNIL, or Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertés, is the French Administrative Authority competent for the personal data protection under the GDPR and national law perimeter. On July 26th, they published a study (link in French) about the online age verification regarding the adult restricted content on the Web, the existing solutions, their opinion, and their recommendation. As the CNIL article is quite long and in French, I’ll propose you a summary with some opinion about it.

July 26, 2022 - 14 minutes read time

The Mazinger Saga - Mazinger Z

After writing about the French Goldorak graphic novel, I think it’s time to talk about what could be my first Japanese animation series ever watched. I’m not completely sure about this, but Grendizer, or Goldorak in France, may be the first anime I could have seen, at least the oldest I can remember, back to the end of the 80’s. I’ve always had a crush about the mecha animes. To be honest, I’ve also never been into what we call the shônen à la Dragon Ball (and later the Naruto, One Piece, and so many other titles that never interested me).

July 25, 2022 - 6 minutes read time

Goldorak (Bande Dessinée)

Goldorak is a French bande dessinée (graphic novel) released in 2021, based on Gô Nagai’s UFO Robot Grendizer TV show (known as “Goldorak” in France), written by Xavier Dorison and Denis Bajram, illustrated by Denis Bajram, Brice Cossu and Alexis Sentenac, and colorized by Yoann Guillo. This graphic novel is made by people who were kids during the telecast of the series in France, and who are now writers and illustrators and had their project green lit by Gô Nagai.

July 17, 2022 - 5 minutes read time

How to photograph Fireworks

If you follow my Photo Blog (if you don’t I won’t blame you), you may have seen two recent entries with the 14th July fireworks took in two cities. Taking pictures of fireworks is quite easy actually, but if you wonder how to do it, here is how I proceed. This tutorial will be for Reflex or Hybrid cameras. The equipment Because you will take long exposition pictures, a tripod is mandatory.

July 16, 2022 - 6 minutes read time

Chrono Cross - The Radical Dreamers Edition

Chrono Cross is a Japanese Role-playing Game developed and initially released in 1999 by Squaresoft for the Sony Playstation. It is the sequel of Chrono Trigger, released on Super Nintendo Entertainment System in 1994 and based on the text game The Radical Dreamers released in 1996 on the SNES Satellaview service. Chrono Cross has never been published in Europe until the Radical Dreamers Edition that came out in 2022. I’ve played this game in 2001, thanks to importation and the boot-CD that allowed my European Playstation to run foreign games.

July 11, 2022 - 11 minutes read time

How to fail at your software project

Instead of buying a market product for its business needs, a company may improvise itself as a software publisher and will develop its own solutions. But they quickly forget that software publisher, software developer, or software project manager are actual professions. Sometimes, it would be a success, and they consider to take profits from this development by commercialize it or enhance it by publishing the software with an open source license.

July 7, 2022 - 9 minutes read time

About Twitter Notes feature

That’s not really a big news as the feature is in development since some times, but you may have heard about “Twitter Notes”. To summarize, this feature will allow its users to write actual blog posts without the well-known 280 characters limitation. I’ve never liked Twitter, and generally the social medias based on the audience, magical algorithms, and immediate reaction generating shitstorms, and also selling their users like a vulgar bag of meat.

June 25, 2022 - 5 minutes read time

Final Fantasy XIV New Game+ : Stormblood

Having finished Heavensward, let’s chain with Stormblood New Game+ mode. Stormblood starts right after the fall of the Baelsar’s Wall conducted at the end of the Heavensward main story line. As the Eorzean Alliance does not wish to engage a frontal a war against the Empire, they send the Scions and the Warrior of Light, who are neutral, to contact the various Ala Mhigan resistance factions behind the newly opened border.

June 24, 2022 - 10 minutes read time

The importance of the methodology over the tools

Some months ago, I’ve made a series of articles about the misbrands, a collection of brands logos derivations that put a name onto the logo of a competitor product. They were really fun for me and I’ve put some on my work laptop. Curiously, it took some times to have somebody noticing the wrongness of these pictures. Ubuntu with Debian logo - license CC-0 Some purists didn’t like these images, but it was for me a nice opportunity to explain one of my work principles.

June 18, 2022 - 6 minutes read time

Review of Vivaldi Mail Client and Calendar

Along with its version 5.3, the Vivaldi Browser also released a stable 1.0 version of its Mail, RSS Feed reader and Calendar client. With this feature, the browser is now closer to its ancestor, Opera pre-chromium era, which was a comprehensive Internet Suite instead of a simple Web Browser (including Mail client, Torrent, IRC, etc). Let’s test this feature. Enable and setup the mail account If that’s the first time you’ve installed Vivaldi, you’ll be welcomed by the “How much Vivaldi do you want ?

June 12, 2022 - 6 minutes read time

I've tested Murena Cloud

Murena Cloud is a service provided by the French company Murena, founded by Gaël Duval who is also behind the /e/ Foundation, the maintainer of the /e/ OS, a “deGoogled” Android build focused on privacy protection, and a long term FLOSS advocate as he was one of the co-founders of the late Mandrake Linux distribution. The company also sells smartphones with the /e/ OS pre-installed (Fair Phones, third-party models, and refurbished models) and recently announced its own model (based on a partner design), the Murena One.

June 7, 2022 - 8 minutes read time

Organic Maps

Last week, I’ve been visiting the city of Venice in Italy. During this trip, I’ve wanted to test an application I’ve installed a couple of weeks ago : Organic Maps. So, here is a feedback and what you can do with it. Organics Maps is a smartphone application available for iOS and Android, based on OpenStreetMap and MapsWithMe data. It’s main interest is to provide an offline maps application able to create travel plans for tourists, hikers or cyclists without using online resources, so reducing the risks of over costs and limit battery usage.

June 3, 2022 - 4 minutes read time

Final Fantasy XVI New Game+ : Heavensward

Following the ending of Final Fantasy XIV : A Realm Reborn in New Game+ mode, I’ve naturally chained with the first expansion : Heavensward. Heavensward starts directly after the ending of ARR. The Scions of the Seventh Dawn and the Warrior of Light get trapped into a political machination and they’re now a band of fugitives who found refugee at the Holy See of Ishgard. During the last chapters of ARR, we helped to defend Ishgard against the dragons and the heretics who are led by Nidhogg, a mighty dragon of the first brood who is now just hatred and revengeful for reasons that will be developed in the story.

May 28, 2022 - 6 minutes read time

Installing the BL-Touch on a Creality Ender 3-V2

It’s been a year since I’ve bought the Creality Ender 3 v2 3D Printer. Before that, I’ve made my first steps with the Dagoma Disco Ultimate, a French brand. The Disco Ultimate was nice, but it was a old model (despite being a new one for the manufacturer, it was still based on a old frame, the screen was an option I’ve had to buy because it’s very useful, and the build grip wasn’t durable) and I wanted to experiment new features like the heating bed.

May 22, 2022 - 8 minutes read time

The Daily Fortune said by a Cow

Let me share you something useless I’ve made the last week. I like the fortune command on Linux that displays a message randomly taken from a text database (definitions, jokes, nerd references, and so on..), and I like cowsay that makes a cow (or something else) saying something in your terminal. So here is my own implementation of these two commands : The Daily Fortune ! Everyday (at 00:00 UTC), a Cow or Tux will display the daily Fortune message.

May 11, 2022 - 2 minutes read time

Final Fantasy XIV New Game+ : A Realm Reborn

The previous expansion of Final Fantasy XIV added a feature that is pretty rare for a MMORPG but fairly well-known among RPG players : the New Game + mode. The idea is simple : when the feature is enabled, the player can replay the main campaign story, or the Job quest lines, or some side quest lines like the raids stories or independent stories, while retaining their level and current progression.

May 8, 2022 - 6 minutes read time

Pacific Rim : The Black

Pacific Rim : The Black is an adult American animation series produced by Netflix based on the Pacific Rim franchise. The first season was released on the 4th March 2021 and the second and final on 19th April 2022 for a total of 14 episodes. The series has been animated by the Japanese studio Polygon Pictures, famous for its 3D CGI animation style. The series is set in an alternate version on the Uprising movie that was the sequel of the first one.

May 8, 2022 - 4 minutes read time

Big Tech Corp dependency evaluation - Round 2

Two years ago, I’ve made a self evaluation of my dependency regarding the Big Tech Companies (article in French). I think it would be nice to re-evaluate it regularly to see how is it evolving, or possibly regressing regarding various online services usage. Legend Each item will be marked with one of the following icons : ✅ : I’m completely independent of a Big Tech Corporation ❎ : I’m partially dependent of a Big Tech Corporation ❌ : I’m dependent of a Big Tech Corporation 🚫 : I don’t use this service anymore Personal definition I don’t like the “GAFAM” acronym because it’s reducing to a small variety of corporations and ignore others who may still be preeminent in their respective domain.

April 30, 2022 - 5 minutes read time

Futurama

Futurama is an American animated TV show designed by Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons, initially launched on March 1999. It features the story of Philip J. Fry, a 25 years old immature yet good-hearted pizza delivery boy who is accidentally cryogenically preserved at the first seconds of the 2000 year and wakes up one millennium later. The show initially ran for four seasons on Fox network until its first cancellation.

April 27, 2022 - 8 minutes read time

How to remove the vignetting on a photo with Darktable

The vignetting in photography is a reduction of the image’s brightness or saturation toward its periphery. It is usually an unintended or undesired effect caused by the lens, camera settings, or exposure. If you look at this article title photo, you’ll see the corners are darker than the middle of the picture : it’s the vignetting. In fact, I usually like this effect and I don’t often remove it because it’s a nice way to draw interest to your subject, for example with portraits or pointing specific part of a landscape.

April 23, 2022 - 3 minutes read time

Make cool slideshows with Hacker Slides and reveal.js

A couple of years ago, I offered to the team where I was working at to train them to Ansible. However, I’ve never been a big fan of slideshows tools like Microsoft PowerPoint, LibreOffice Impress or Google Slideshows. I’ve wanted to be simple, content oriented, and good looking (because built-in template are not my favorites), and also the presentation could be easily shared and reused. I’ve remembered a training I had some times ago and the teacher was using a kind of web-based slideshow.

April 18, 2022 - 3 minutes read time

act for testing Github Action locally

Following my previous article about GitHub Actions, here is a new one that will explain how to locally test your Actions. Unlike the good old Jenkins on which you can copy/paste your pipeline code in a test job and run it (that’s dirty but it works), GitHub Actions requires to always commit and push your changes and wait for the runner to take it. When you’re like me and using a die and retry development process, it’s a waste of time.

April 16, 2022 - 7 minutes read time

Monster Hunter Stories 2 : Wings of Ruin

Monster Hunter Stories 2 : Wings of Ruin is a RPG video game developed by Capcom and release in 2021. It is a spin-off of the Monster Hunter series and a sequel to the 2016 game released on Nintendo 3DS. The game is available on Nintendo Switch and Steam. Around the world, the Rathalos has disappeared and large pits emit some fearsome pinkish light that make Monsters going crazy. The player character is the descendant of a famous Rider named Red.

April 8, 2022 - 4 minutes read time

The Rubber Duck Debugging method

As far as I remember my career beginnings, I’ve almost always seen someone with a rubber duck on their desk. Some former colleagues had an entire collection populating their workstation, but I must admit I’ve never understood why the rubber duck had that kind of popularity. Even I have one, a goodies obtained during a training session. I’ve 3D-printed the helmet for the fun. So, after some quick search, I’ve discovered an idea which I was already using without knowing it : the Rubber Duck Debugging method.

April 3, 2022 - 3 minutes read time

Github Actions

GitHub Actions is a Continuous Integration, Delivery, and Deployment workflow manager made by the code repository hosting service GitHub. GitHub was a little late in the CI/CD pipeline management compared to its competitor GitLab and the good old Jenkins. After a beta testing period, the service opened in 2018. GitHub Actions is fully integrated with the service, accessible via the “Actions” tab on a repository (if the owner enabled it). The workflows are written in YAML with a declarative language describing the event triggering the pipeline, the runner kind, some environment-related informations, and the jobs definitions.

April 2, 2022 - 6 minutes read time

Use Vivaldi Sync to share tabs between instances

As you may know, I’m a Vivaldi user and I love this browser. Since a couple of months, I’ve finally created an account to use the Sync feature. Sync is a synchronization service provided by Vivaldi that permit to upload your Bookmarks, some settings, passwords, autofill, history, extensions, reading list and notes to Vivaldi’s servers. Sync is fully end-to-end encrypted and the decryption key is mastered by the user, not the publisher.

March 29, 2022 - 4 minutes read time

Misbrands : pip and npm

This new entry in the “misbrands” series will be about two packages managers : pip and npm. pip is the package installer for Python and npm is a registry and the default package manager for Node.js based softwares. This parody displays the npm logo with “pip” written inside instead of “npm”. These two package manager are similar in their goals and purposes but their functionalities can differ. pip pip is a package manager written with and for Python.

March 28, 2022 - 6 minutes read time

Misbrands : GitHub and GitLab

This third entry in our misbrands series will be about GitHub and GitLab, two famous code hosting (and other) services based on the Git SCM. This parodied version combine the GitHub name, written with the correct brand’s font, but associated with GitLab’s logo and with the same trademark layout. GitHub and GitLab are both competitors in the “DevOps platform” market by providing source code hosting services, Continuous Integration pipelines and runners, and Artifacts hosting.

March 25, 2022 - 6 minutes read time

Misbrands : Ubuntu and Debian

Our next entry in the misbrands series will be about Ubuntu Linux and Debian. This parodied logo is Debian’s, having “Ubuntu” written with the same font and disposed like Ubuntu’s. Unlike the previous article about Vim and Visual Studio Code that are two stand alone softwares with a similar purpose, Ubuntu shares a parent link with Debian. Debian Debian Logo, license LGPL v3 and CC BY-SA 3.0 Created in 1993, Debian GNU/Linux is one of the oldest Linux distributions that’s still existing.

March 21, 2022 - 6 minutes read time

Misbrands : Vim and Visual Code

A couple of weeks ago, thanks to the Developers Memes bot on Mastodon, I’ve discovered the Misbrands logos. And I’ve printed some of them to decorate my laptop 😁. Just as I could expect, some of my colleagues hated it, other loved it, and the rest didn’t understood. I’ve added the “pip/npm” and “Azure/AWS” logo since. As you can see, the idea is simple and fun : associate a logo to a similar brand, like GitHub associated with GitLab logo.

March 20, 2022 - 4 minutes read time

From TT-RSS to FreshRSS

One of the first things I had self-hosted was a RSS Feeds subscriber and reader. More than a decade ago, I was an Opera user, an Internet suite that integrated a RSS reader. When Opera 12 died, I had to find something else. This something else was Tiny Tiny RSS, a PHP-based RSS Feeds subscriber and reader service that you can self host. I’ve heard about FreshRSS on past January, following some toots telling about it on Fosstodon.

March 13, 2022 - 4 minutes read time

Result of my migration from dedicated server to VPS

At the end of the last year, I’ve decided that my dedicated server was too much overkill regarding my needs. So I’ve migrated my self hosted tools to a VPS and some Cloud storage. I’ve finished the job on past January. Hey, that’s the first time I use this shortcode ! This migrated was motivated by two main goals : Reduce the time consuming maintenance tasks (hypervisor, VMs, backups, etc) Reduce my hosting costs From where I started In the beginning of times, between the dinosaurs and the Egyptian civilisation who told some random aliens how to space travel and build pyramids, I was renting a server hosted by OVHCloud.

March 5, 2022 - 3 minutes read time

My favorite VSCodium extensions

Like a lot of people, I use Microsoft Visual Studio Code for development and code writing since a couple of years… Before that, I was mainly a Notepad++ user when I was restricted to Windows usage. But to be more specific, I use its free software version named VSCodium. VSCodium is a rebuild of the Microsoft software (that is released under MIT license too, but the binaries are licensed under a not-FLOSS license, which can be contentious) that disable the telemetry by default.

March 4, 2022 - 3 minutes read time

Something that made me prefer Final Fantasy XIV after World of Warcraft

I’ve wrote a little about Final Fantasy XIV on this blog (most of these articles are in French), because that’s a game I really like. Also, it’s the first MMORPG on which I continue playing after being five years on World of Warcraft, that I’ve left on 2009. After WoW, I’ve tried other MMORPGs like Aion and later Guild Wars 2 that was really promising, but I haven’t get that much invested on it (I’ve played a lot on the first Guild Wars).

February 27, 2022 - 6 minutes read time

Got a vinyl Turntable

To be honest, I’ve never been into the nostalgic fashion of vinyl discs. I’ve used them during my youth playing my parents and grand parents collection, along with the audio tapes, then the audio CD, then the digital music (MP3, Flac, streaming…). In fact, I haven’t manipulated a vinyl disc since my teenage period, twenty years ago (Outch 🤕). I’m not an audiophile, because its definition does not apply to me.

February 26, 2022 - 3 minutes read time

The homepage lost some weight

Recently, I had the curiosity to check if this blog was not too heavy to load, because it’s something I don’t like to endure. So, I’ve checked on GTMetrix and the result was … 😱 The total page size was 27MB, that’s terrible. Of course the main problem is because I use images to illustrate my article (and I like it). Previously, I’ve made the effort to reduce their size and optimize them to the excepted display size.

February 26, 2022 - 2 minutes read time

Star Citizen

Star Citizen is a still in-development massively multiplayer online video game set in a futuristic universe called The Verse. The game intends to be a simulation of living in a universe where flying, trading, fighting, and exploring Space should be the common daily routine of each player. It’s a highly ambitious project launched more than a decade ago but still in development and alpha test. The pre-production of Star Citizen began in 2010, and then the production started in 2011.

February 24, 2022 - 8 minutes read time

Lego City Undercover

Lego City Undercover is an action-adventure video game released at first on Nintendo Wii U on 2013 as an exclusive game for the system. It was developed by TT Games, the British studio behind almost every Lego franchise video games and mixes the gameplay we are used to see for these games in a big open world city : Lego City. I’ve done this game on Nintendo Wii U at this time, but as it was remastered and released on various consoles and PC, I bought it again on Nintendo Switch when it was on sales.

February 15, 2022 - 5 minutes read time

Redshift for Night Colors with Cinnamon DE

As a computer nerd, I can spend hours tinkering things or writing stupid stuff on this blog. However, our computers and smartphones screens can be very agressive because of the light they can produce. Today, most of the operating systems integrate a feature to reduce the blue light exposure, accused to have some nocive effects like sleep trouble when you are too much exposed to it. Night Light settings in GNOME DE.

February 10, 2022 - 3 minutes read time

This year, I'll switch to an electric car

I must admit one thing : I’m one of the monsters that still likes cars. Yep. My favorite kind is the compact sport hatchback because it’s not too big, and not too small. A decade ago, I had a company car that was in the lower tier and I felt very uncomfortable. I’m not claustrophobic, but I always had the feeling to be in a tight tin can in this car.

February 9, 2022 - 4 minutes read time

Pinephone Keyboard Case

I’ve recently bought the Pinephone Keyboard Case from Pine64, a new accessory for the Pinephone that came out on past December 31st. Photo Gallery So, what is the Pinephone Keyboard ? It’s a case replacing the standard back cover by inserting the Pinephone (and Pinephone Pro, they’re both compatible) inside. Inserting and removing the Pinephone can be a little tricky because the case is clipped just like the back cover. You need to correctly insert it and ensure the pogo pins on the back are all connected because you may have issues if not.

February 4, 2022 - 4 minutes read time

L'actualité française n'est pas drôle...

En ce moment l’actualité française n’est pas drôle… Donc je préfère en rire. This days, French press news are not fun, so I prefer to make fun of them.

February 1, 2022 - 1 minutes read time

Photo Blog is Back

Some times ago, I’ve made a photo gallery with Hugo and the AutoPhugo template. But I didn’t maintained it because I wasn’t really satisfied by the process behind. Recently, you may have seen I’ve done some photo report posts. As the format was close to what I expected for a Photo Blog, I’ve decided to create a separated blog with a more photo-friendly template that was still permit to do some narrative stuff.

January 30, 2022 - 2 minutes read time

The Free Software licenses

Free Software licenses, here is a topic that could seems to be easy to understand, but not really when you go deeper in their details. Indeed, among the various existing licenses, the rights and obligations are not always the same and it’s always a nice debate topic among the communities to determine which one is the most “free license”. This article will try to present with a synthetic and vulgarized way some licenses families and what do they permit or not.

January 26, 2022 - 13 minutes read time

I've shared my Hugo shortcodes on GitHub

A couple of weeks ago, I’ve made an article about how to use Hugo shortcodes and integrate them. I’ve decided to share them on GitHub, you can find them here : https://github.com/Wivik/hugo-shortcodes Until now, there are two of them : The exif metadata reader I’ve made previously. And another one I’ve never had the opportunity tu use : a Toot integration. Just copy a toot link to integrate it in your post.

January 23, 2022 - 1 minutes read time

Is video a good information support ?

Videos are used since many years on Internet and became a very common information media. However, I’m always wondering about their relevance regarding all of the use cases we can see. I’m myself a subscriber of various Youtubers and also from other platforms, so I am a video consumer too. But sometimes, I think the video, or audio, format is not necessary in some cases. Most of the Youtubers I follow do a great work with very good and interesting informations (that’s why I follow them, I don’t care about the so-called influencers that are just advertising companies prostitutes).

January 21, 2022 - 3 minutes read time

Bumped Simple.css version

As you may know, this site use the Simple.css framework for its visual template. A new version of the framework was rolled out recently and is now live here. Because of the cache server behind this blog content, you could encounter some buggy display. Ensure you have reset your browser cache (ctrl + F5) and it should be okay. I’ve also took the opportunity to correctly split my customization of this framework into a dedicated CSS file to avoid any future conflicts.

January 17, 2022 - 1 minutes read time

I've made some cleanup in this blog mess

It doesn’t seem like that, but this blog is 3 years old since past December. Indeed, the first article about the video game Factorio was published on December 19th 2019. At this moment, Garbage Collector was a Plume instance, because I was very curious about federated blogging tools and I wanted to have again my little corner on the Web to express my useless thoughts (it’s something I like since high school in early 2000’s - having useless thoughts and express them).

January 16, 2022 - 3 minutes read time

Setup your own DNS over HTTPS server

DNS over HTTPS (DoH) is a protocol for Domain Name System resolution using HTTPS to secure the communication between the client and the name server. It was proposed by the IEFT and is still a work in progress. However, DoH has been quickly implemented by the Big Tech corporations like Google, CloudFlare and also Mozilla Foundation which enabled the protocol by default in the United States of America in Firefox.

January 15, 2022 - 16 minutes read time

Joined Fediring

I’ve recently discovered the Fediring initiative, which is a webring for personal sites of Fediverse members. You can browse the ring by clicking on the Previous and Next buttons on the footer of each page of this blog. It’s nice to see how old Web ideas are still alive despite the permanent user lock-in inside the Big Tech online services. 👍

January 13, 2022 - 1 minutes read time

No multilingual posts anymore

I was happy to setup Hugo’s multilingual support for this blog, but after a few articles written in both French and English, I’ve understood it’s not really fun to do it like this. I had the sentiment to always do the job twice and it took more time to write an article in both languages. Also, the other limitation is the English part of this blog looked really empty comparing to the French one, giving a false sentiment of empty site.

January 12, 2022 - 1 minutes read time

How to start a Podman Container at system startup

In my article about containers, I had a few lines regarding Podman. In fact, I use this container tool since more than a year after discovering it on Fedora while searching for installing Docker on it (because, you know, habits). I’ll maybe write something about Podman one day, but if you wonder why I heavily prefer it instead of Docker, here is a few reasons : Daemonless : there are no daemon for Podman, the tool communicates directly with the required APIs.

January 12, 2022 - 6 minutes read time

Use Hugo Shortcodes to read pictures EXIF metadata

If you’ve read my previous article about a Champagne cave visit, you may have noticed that all the photos are displaying their technical metadata : Camera and Lens model, aperture, speed, etc. Sorry to deceive you, but I haven’t written all these text manually, I’ve used one of the resourceful Hugo feature : the shortcodes. What are shortcodes Basically, Hugo shortcodes allow you to create custom tags that Hugo will read and interpret during rendering based on a template you’ve provided.

January 11, 2022 - 5 minutes read time

Linux and the malwares

There are no viruses on Linux ! – A fool You may have seen this endless urban legend in news comments regarding some vulnerabilities or malwares targeting Microsoft Windows. “Linux cannot be harmed by malwares”, “there are not viruses on Linux”, “you don’t need an antivirus on Linux”, blah blah blah. This magical spell was also spread on MacOS world because of its BSD derivative Unix foundations. All of this is false, Unix systems and Unix-like, just like Microsoft Windows, are targeted by malwares attacks.

January 8, 2022 - 8 minutes read time

Update automatically a Linux Server

One of the basics in security is to have updated servers with the latest security versions. In a company, you may have access to variant automation tools for this, but for a personal usage or hobby, maintaining for server could be redundant and not very fun. Here is some scripts and procedures to simplify your life. Be careful, this article will mostly concern the Red Hat family like CentOS or Rocky Linux, and some of these tools might not exists, or with another name, on other Linux Distributions like Debian.

November 29, 2021 - 4 minutes read time

I don't like AppImage

Nowadays, a lot a Linux softwares are distributed as AppImage binaries. This way has a lot of advantages either for the user and the developer… But also introduce other issues than can annoy me when they’re occur. This article will expose my point of view for this distribution method. What is AppImage Some history AppImage is not recent, the project was born on 2004 under the name “Klik”. Klik was intended to integrate itself with the web browser and provide an interface that would fetch the prerequisites for a software and build it into a .

November 21, 2021 - 8 minutes read time

Test of Infomaniak's Mail Service

A few times ago, I’ve tested Infomaniak’s kDrive service to see what was going on it. Beside of this, I’m using their mail service since a little more than one year. Today, I propose you an experience feedback. The Offer Infomaniak’s Mail service is offered in two versions : one free version with an @ik.me address, and a paying one. Currently, at the moment I’m writing this article, the free offer contains the following items :

October 24, 2021 - 6 minutes read time

Garbage Collector gets a new skin

Following the migration to Hugo, I’ve used the Casper3 theme until then. Now I’ve wanted my own personal theme, and it’s done ! I haven’t written HTML and CSS code since a while, so after some evenings I came up with something I liked. The CSS framework is based on Simple.css that is very lightweight and easy to use. At first, I’ve tried doing something with Bootstrap but it was horribly complicated to do very simple things with it, I gave up.

October 8, 2021 - 1 minutes read time

Manage Jenkins Access and Roles with OpenID

Introduce Jenkins doesn’t seem to be necessary for me as this software is one of the usual in the continuous integration domain. When you are an organization with several teams and a shared Jenkins instance, you may need to separate them into dedicated workspaces to avoid configuration or job modifications by other teams. That’s what Jenkins role based access control is made for, but that’s not really simple to apprehend. Here is a tutorial to show you how to interface Jenkins with an OpenID Identity Provider that will manage users dans roles access.

October 2, 2021 - 6 minutes read time

Create a multilingual blog with Hugo

Writing in your native language allow to stay in your comfort zone. But on the Web, it can limit our audience. That’s what I’m telling myself since a couple of time, so I took a look to the multilingual options in order to translate some posts in English. Typically, this article is the first one. As this blog is made with the static website generator Hugo, I propose to explain how I proceed to activate its multilingual support.

September 17, 2021 - 6 minutes read time