tux0r

With the release of the 1.5 series of 42links (first announced here), my own approach at writing a bookmark collector has finally surpassed the functionality of its inspiration Espial: As you can see in the screenshot, deleting multiple links at the same time right from the index page is possible now. 🎉

I have been using 42links myself almost every day and I think I have now found and fixed the most embarrassing shortcomings. I would still very much welcome more users contributing ideas and/or people contributing code. :-)

I kept my promise and wrote something in Lisp.

FWIW: Not counting third-party libraries, READMEs and build-related stuff:

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Language                     files          blank        comment           code
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
LISP                            12            205            330           1028
HTML                            16             69              6            698
CSS                              1             19             11             92
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
TOTAL                           29            293            347           1818
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

This has a few rough edges yet, for which I’m sorry. I’m proud enough to release it though. Please don’t consider this to be “finished software” yet. :-)

Als Ergänzung zu meinem vorherigen Maimai vielleicht noch eine Erklärung dazu, was mich am Parlamentarismus eigentlich stört.

Wo bleibt eigentlich die Revolution?

For a reason not worth mentioning here, I would like to write a somewhat more complex awk script in which I would have to explain in detail what I am doing. (If only so that I'll still know next week.) There doesn't seem to be a way to wrap a list of conditions in GNU awk, right?

This is what I tried:

command-that-prints-a-table | awk '
    NR>1 &&                # Skip line 1
    NF>2 &&                # Skip lines with only one column
    substr($1,1,1) != "("  # Skip lines that start with a "("
    { print $1 }
'

Alas, that does not work - awk skips the conditions entirely and only runs print $1. It seems that escaping the newlines does not work either, which makes sense as the end of the lines are comments.

This would work:

command-that-prints-a-table | awk '
# - Skip line 1
# - Skip lines with only one column
# - Skip lines that start with a "("
    NR>1 && NF>2 && substr($1,1,1) != "("  { print $1 }
'

But - my original code has a few more conditions - it is rather annoying to read and maintain. Is there an elegant way to fix this?

SPRICH

TL;DR: I made the switch an hour ago and thought I'd share my motivations and experiences here in case anyone wants to do the same.

A few years ago, when the number of devices in my LAN threatened to get out of hand for reasonable maintainability, I made the switch to network-wide ad blocking. An older Raspberry Pi model connected directly to my router turned out to be a good solution. After checking the available options, I ran AdGuard Home on it for a while, which is (in my opinion) a nicer solution than the top dog Pi-Hole, but essentially does the same thing: every DNS request is forwarded to a customisable DNS server and filtered using equally customisable blocking lists, plus there's a nice web interface.

Third-party DNS servers have some advantages, but they are not protected against censorship (e.g. the attacks by corporations against Quad9) and surveillance. Because what used to be called ‘paranoia’ can now be called healthy caution again, my own DNS server wouldn't be such a bad idea, I thought. The most obvious solution, setting up an Unbound in addition to AdGuard Home, did not seem wise to me for two reasons: Firstly, I have had rather mixed experiences with setting up and running Unbound on my mail server, and secondly, the concept of having to run two different services on the same device for the same purpose, which then have to talk to each other, seemed ill-conceived to me: not only is it quite complex and seems partially redundant, it is also more error-prone than a standardised solution.

Shortly afterwards, I accidentally found the answer to my doubts with the Technitium DNS server. Technitium (they have more products, but I'll cut it short for now) is something similar to AdGuard Home and Pi-Hole: you start a software and this software then acts as a DNS server. Technitium does not (necessarily) use a third-party service, but sends all queries directly to the root nodes. This takes a little longer than usual the first time a domain is called, but is censorship-free and then (naturally, because it is within the local network) lightning-fast.

Technitium works without further configuration, right after starting (and setting the admin password) it is fully operational. Fine-tuning is possible, there are also some plugins, I myself have actually only set up a few ad filters, because Technitium can also use these by default. I like it.

I regret not having started until 2025. I was always put off by Unbound. If I had known that something like Technitium existed (for over five years now), I would probably have skipped AdGuard Home straight away. I am happy to recommend it.

"Bitte fortzen Sie jetzt."

(Aus: Bruder-Festware-Aufdatum-Weichware, macBS, heute)