It's the end of the year that was...
and it's probably unnecessary to say
more than that.

Random bits of happenstance in
visiblink-land:

1. I'm reading Emma Goldman's My
Disillusionment in Russia[1] and
Anarchism and other Essays[2]. I
really wanted her take on the
Bolsheviks, but that led me into
reading some biographical material
on her. Then I wanted to know more
about anarchism as well.

2. Ever since my VPS fiasco, it's been
on my mind to set up another server at
home. Rather than buying a new
device, I decided to upgrade my old
ThinkPad X120e, for two reasons:
its power consumption is very low;
and I already own it, so I can avoid
purchasing as much new stuff and
contributing to the further
production of future e-waste. So
the Christmas gift cards have
been going out to buy some used RAM
and a bigger SSD. My intention is to
host my own synchronized storage and
set up 'unfederated' email and XMPP
servers.

3. It's as if hardly anyone ever
thought of the idea of an unfederated
email server. What I mean by that is
an email server that allows users to
send email only to other users on the
same server, much like the outposts at
circumlunar.space. That's easy enough
to do if the users have shell access
(it seems that all you need to do is
install mailutils on Debian), but a
bit more involved if you want to allow
IMAP/SMTP access to remote email
clients. Nonetheless, with a couple of
sessions of searching out config file
info on postfix and dovecot, I think
I've figured out how to configure the
setup that I want. If it all works as
intended, I'll post a step-by-step
how-to with the config files.

4. ThinkPad L440 setup information.
The ThinkPad L440 is a great
alternative to the T440P, in that it's
part of the last generation of
ThinkPads that permits CPU upgrading.
There's no soldered RAM, screen
replacements are easy, and there's
that fantastic hardware maintenance
manual...

If you head over to my gopher site,
you can find a ThinkPad L440 setup
guide[3] that started out as a phlog
entry here about setting things up on
Debian with LXDE and Openbox. It
includes the following information,
some of which is useful regardless of
your choice of Desktop Environment:

* configuring the screen brightness
 keys
* setting up the touchpad (one and
 two-finger clicking, as on Macbooks)
* window snapping using keyboard
 shortcuts
* sharp fonts
* compton (to permit terminal
 transparency)
* bluetooth activation
* Getting your file manager access to
 ftp, samba, and webdav shares
* setting battery charging thresholds,
 so that the battery doesn't start
 charging until it drops below a
 certain percentage and then stops
 charging at a pre-defined upper
 percentage.


[1] http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/60315

[2] https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Anarchism_and_Other_Essays

[3] gopher://gopher.visiblink.ca/0/thinkpad/setup