What about bad actors which swipe the phone, and it’s behind the biometric lock? Too many failed attempts may or may not be a sign of it not working well, so if it bases part of it on the failed attempts, it would lower the chances of being further protected. I know they would ask for the pattern/pin or password to re-enroll the biometric, but let’s assume that’s already known, then game over.

You can always use something like SSHwifty It retains your logins through your browser’s session data and never on your server, but it will allow you to remote into your local system from anywhere on the WWW if you desire to do so. With Tailscale, once you are connected into your Tailnet, you can pretty much SSH into any of your devices as long as the subnet sharing flag is turned on I believe. I’ve never had any issues with mine not allowing any SSH connections.

For terminal, the first thing I install is Midnight Commander - dual pane file manager. https://midnight-commander.org/

For all of my physical Linux machines - Cockpit and Cockpit-File Sharing plugin.

Desktop

• Thunderbird

• Firefox

• Vivaldi

• Gnome

• Chromium I use Firefox, wife uses Chromium and My WFH job I use Chrome. Vivaldi is a backup browser, I’ve been messing around with.

• QEMU/LibVirtd - So I can run a Windows VM for my old Canon Lide 60 scanner which scans clearly there, otherwise in Linux, it’s contrasted super grey for some reason.

• Kopia-UI - Backup system which supports NFS Shares - set and forget type of setup.

• VLC - Need I say more? Lol

• OnlyOffice - Better aesthetically IMHO than LibreOffice

• PDF Arranger - Works well to re-arrange pages or rotate them after scanning them in. (I self host Sterling PDF and will probably switch to that later)

And for some inspiration - the “Awesome Linux Software” list (Not mine) similar to the other Awesome lists you see around. https://github.com/luong-komorebi/Awesome-Linux-Software

If after 9pm M-F, and I plug it into AC Power (Not USB on desktop), then it mutes all system sounds until I unplug it from the AC power. During said time, if certain people call, it raises the ringer to full so I can answer it.

I still have this enabled, but rarely ever use it, it came in handy about a year ago though - when near any of the WiFi hotspots at my work, then turn volume off, upon leaving the range, volume comes back up. Also, enabled my work profile which set an Autonotification to set a timer on my phone and watch for my break and meal periods. I now am full time WFH, so neither of these come in to play.

While connected to Car bluetooth, cancel my work timers (above).

I was working on but had to put on pause, a Google Voice interceptor - the goal behind it is to auto use Google Voice to make outbound calls if you are not calling a contact in your list otherwise, if you called one of your contacts, it would use your normal phone number.

Taskernet share for above (Google Voice Robot) If link is broken, it should be searchable. It’s not guaranteed to work.

In one way, I’m happy this is happening, in another way, I’m not - I’ve given well over 2 decades of my life to the call center way of living. Let me give you a sneak peak into what really happens in the daily life of a call center worker.

• You live by the time on your telephone, it’s your punch in and punch out system in most centers. Don’t clock in more than 8 or 15 or whatever insane metrics they set past your clock in time else you will be considered tardy. This includes all breaks and clocking out.

• If you are a first contact person and taking phone orders, your ‘talk time’ is measured. Anything more than the standardized 5 or 6 minutes is considered excessive and they tell you to move the calls along faster.
  If you are customer service, your talk time is loosened but you are also the first and last contact the customer should have for the issue.

• Your phone calls are monitored and/or recorded (For Real!). If you are like me and hate to your your voice, woe be it to you when they play back your last call or two so you can hear yourself talking to the customer. If not recorded, then it is up to the monitoring person to be nice. You are then told what you need to do to speed up your talk time, or increase sales etc…

Telemarketing

Oh dear God, this is a life sucker and has the highest turnover on jobs. You quickly learn more about human nature in an odd sense. The sheer pressure on booking that next sale is insanely high and if you don’t meet the sales minimums for the day or even hour, you are sent home without pay. I worked for a company which sold HR Manual trials, I was never more relieved and happy to be fired when I was for not making the per-requisite sales quotas for the half day.

TIPS

I don’t think I’ve encountered a single call center rep in my years of service where a CSR decided that today, they would be a jerk. All we ever want to do is get through the day and earn our wages and go home.

One thing I will say with confidence, is everyone you work with has something in common, you aren’t there necessarily because you enjoy it, you are there because it puts food on the table and beats living off of unemployment benefits. It’s a thankless job.

If you receive great service from a call center rep (CSR) and are happy, politely ask to speak with their supervisor and when you do, be sure to leave them a good review. It doesn’t always help to do this after a bad call, but sometimes rebounding to a new agent by calling the company back and asking for a supervisor will make a big difference if you take issue with them about the poor quality of service you received.

Remember, if you can’t resolve an issue with a CSR, It’s not always that they don’t want to resolve the issue for you, their hands are probably tied and in fear of losing their job or being reprimanded, they simply won’t budge.

Kindness goes a long way with us as well, if you are respectful and kind, we reflect the same back to you and often have tools at our disposal to grant you an extra discount and/or savings. We genuinely want to see you happy!

ON THE OTHER HAND

If putting AI in front of the call centers will help screen out the most common issues, then by all means do it. Also, if the stupid bean counters out there which insist of outsourcing to third world countries as it’s cheaper, can find it to be more cost effective to use AI, and keep the jobs local to their country of operation, then I’m in favor of it.

Homebox - before we relocate - whenever that is, I will be printing labels and putting them under and behind my stuff, scanning it into there and then will use that to keep track of our items after the move to know what is in which box etc.

NocoDB Self Hosted (I use this for a few things) - started out with my network ip’s I have on my servers and ports for my containers and most recently a sleep log.

Just a couple there.

Grafana + Prometheus dashboards can be quite addicting or useful. Noted.lol put together a nice tutorial for getting started.

For most of my services though, I simply use Uptime Kuma which then sends an alert to Gotify when my services go down or whatnot, Gotify then instantly notifies my phone so I can be aware. It helps keep the spouse happy when their go to service for some reason crashed. :)

From their readme. I asked about that last night and he replied an pointed me to it. :)

Kiosk mode

Kiosk mode can be activated by a checkbox on the page. Note that there is no way out of kiosk mode (except refresh or closing the browser), and the play/pause and other controls will not be available. This is deliberate as a browser’s kiosk mode it intended not to be exited or significantly modified.

It’s also possible to enter kiosk mode using a permalink. First generate a Permalink, then to the end of it add &kiosk=true. Opening this link will load all of the selected displays included in the Permalink, enter kiosk mode immediately upon loading and start playing the forecast.

I didn’t see IIS mentioned, but I didn’t take a close look at the code. They give you a docker run command to set it up, so I converted it to a docker compose file so I can run it later. All of this is running on a Debian 12 system, so if IIS is needed, I’d wager that is if you are running a Windows setup.

I have mine embedded in Home Assistant now as an iframe using the Kiosk mode setting which works.

Looks nice! I set mine up and have it as an Iframe in Home Assistant. The app is a fork from https://github.com/vbguyny/ws4kp with his demo site here: https://battaglia.ddns.net/twc That version has the music we all came to know and love from back then.

Authentik is my IDP provider so I put it in front of all my publicly facing Apps which support OIDC login. For example, I can log into my Portainer instance from an external network, but to do so, I log into Authentik First which sends it to my service.

For the apps which support HTTP headers, like I said, Pomerium acts as the service which passes my credentials to the device. I admit - Authentik does this also without the need for Pomerium, (through their flow settings) but I found Pomerium to be much easier to set up for this than Authentik and haven’t looked back or felt the need to change it.

With that, I use Pomerium for apps which accept a HTTP Headers, for example, my Fresh Tomato firmware flashed router, it has a HTTP dialog. This allows me to login from the road if I need to manage something like rebooting it or updating firewall rules etc.

My access flow is this :

router.example.com —> Cloudflare Tunnel —> Pomerium IP —>Authentik —> Router’s Gui.

It works flawlessly. I don’t often use it, but when I do, it helps. I also had it enabled for AdguardHome but moved to Technitium DNS which I prefer and that doesn’t have the HTTP Headers so it’s not fully compatible with Pomerium that I’m aware of.

I use Ferdium on my desktop and self host my server for it, then just add it through there. Works quite well. Plus, with Ferdium, I can add other services such as Discord, and Mastodon so, it’s sort of my go to hub for a lot of my social media.

I came pretty close to death I think - I was home recovering from a surgery and woke up early in the morning, short of breath, my heart was racing, and literally felt like it stopped. Naturally, at that time, my bladder decided it need to be relieved so I stumbled breathlessly into the restroom and did my thing. When I stood up, started to lose my hearing and vision for a few seconds, and felt myself starting to collapse, but I managed to catch myself and things restored, I face planted on my bed which got my wife’s attention and 911 was called. All of this was due to a massive pulmonary embolism choking my heart I later learned. The embolism was caused by a clot which traveled up my leg.

Lesson learned: Keep moving after recovering from surgery at home kids! Your life depends on it.

I’ve always felt that we are like clumsy giants to them lumbering on throughout the home with the great strength and dexterity to manipulate objects. In spite of all of this they can swing from loving you to down right cold shoulders on a whim!

My obligatory cat tax. :)

For those that don’t want to go back to the Dark side (Reddit), the post referenced a theme (Grey Layout global theme) which got KDE Dev’s involved who in reaction removed the listing from the store.

In short - the theme ran code to run a rm -rf on the user’s drive which wiped everything during install. Aside from backing up your data religiously, be sure to inspect the code instead of blindly installing for now. KDE Dev’s said they will need to do better so I expect some changes are afoot to provide better security.

https://www.youtube.com/@cooptonian His Authentik videos are top notch and they (Authentik) have also had him make some for them. One of those videos, I can’t recall shows you how to do this, I think it may be the 2FA/MFA one. I use Authentik and can login with fingerprint login without using my UN/PW first. It’s pretty slick.

I am a former IT Desktop drone…er…support worker… I used to swap towers for my local municipality back when Windows XP was being replaced with 7. I saw passwords on post-its attached to the monitor, mouse pad, and even under the keyboard or keyboard drawer (I had to get under desks to do the swap). Our policy was to remove those whenever we saw them and trash them in a different can across the building or a different one. They have a standard 90 day password cycle and most people couldn’t handle that. I would answer the phone often to 'unlock" their account after 3 attempts. My all time favorite when I would help an end user with software was when I would encounter someone’s “God Mode” icon for some of the registry hacks that used to float around. Everyone had Admin privileges (ironically), so it wasn’t really needed anyway.

Their primary server admins and IT folks in the main office were Top notch though. Never any downtime and the main security guy was very strong in making sure everything was adhered to. We, as desktop support didn’t have the master password to decrypt a laptop which was GPG protected and had to bring it to him if we had a user which locked themselves out. With great consternation, only a few machines would be allowed to XP and those were VLAN’d and isolated from the outside world.

The rest of the server admins handled everything with ease seemingly. The fun part was when they had a third party come in and do a security audit. No problems on the server side, but it wasn’t a success. They did the 'ol drop a flash drive randomly in different locations test. Knowing human nature, they knew someone would pick it up, plug it in and be baited with an excel file which looked like it had financials. Unbeknownst to the user, it sent a ping to their reporting server and the drive ID. Which was later reported back. They also did physical security penetration tests - walk in behind you type of thing. I remember seeing a group of guys non company ID badges try to follow me into the main IT office. I stopped them and asked who they were and what they wanted (this was a Govt building), and the look of confusion mixed with satisfaction from them that I stopped them was priceless. I let the head IT guy know who was at the door and left it up to them to unlock it for them.

I now work in a help desk position for a software company and miss those days of desktop support. But, I know for a fact that I.T. Guys an Gals don’t get enough recognition. They are the understated backbone of a company’s well-being especially when holidays and weekends are prime time for systems to fail and they are practically on call no matter what.

I am testing it and it seems to run every 5 minutes to sync. Handles standard IMAP and POP inboxes. No auth for main page, so they caution appropriately to avoid public facing web exposure. They are planning on adding more support for Gmail and the like:

https://github.com/bandundu/email-archiver/issues/6

It installs by default in debug mode which may or may not be a red flag depending on your security model.

The email search is fast, but could use work, I will say it is VERY early in development. But for downloading email for later storage, it should do. It stores your e-mails in a SQLite database in the same directory as the installer, so if you want to manipulate the compose file a bit, it should be able to point to your desired storage directory. With that said, I also was able to add a TZ= directive so my logs at least are a bit cleaner with timestamps to match my timezone, something they have not added.

If you wish to access this remotely before they add a public facing login, protect it with a SSO solution or other front facing login setup so it would not be accessible. Or securely access it via Wireguard, TailScale, or Headscale.

I use Proxmox and don’t use Truenas. My setup is basically to install Cockpit on the host server via apt-get and then the 45 Drives cockpit-sharing plugin. This provides the NFS and Samba sharing I need and use. I host Home Assistant in a VM and Docker containers in a few LXC containers which host about 10 containers each. Then, in combination with https://tteck.github.io/Proxmox/ you can set up pretty much anything you need from there.

This is on in computer terms, ancient; a 13 year old Dell Optiplex 990 with 16gb Ram and software such as Authentik and Vaultwarden from different dedicated LXC containers. Never have any issues with overload of the system resources or running out of memory. It’s pretty much rock solid.

I have a policy - only those who should know my phone number is family and they are very strict about asking me before giving to anyone who asks. So, it’s usually not given. Then for businesses and other places which require a phone number, I use a Google Voice number. From doctors, to banks, or other places. I rarely get the scam calls.

HOWEVER

I get around 6-15 SPAM text messages daily. All 100% Political for Trump, Biden, Harris, or whatever scammer tries to get me to support on my non-shared number. A lot try to guilt you into “donating” to them too! I feel bad because while I won’t fall for it, I know many people already do. I have to use Google Messages to effectively block those automatically.

I have AT & T and complained to them about it to be told that I could change my number, but it would be $40.00 to do so. That’s a big scam in itself and I refused.