New Wireguard Peer in 10 Minutes

I have been using Wireguard for about 4 years now. I started with the basic Wireguard setup, where I did everything manually and used the ip link and ip addr commands to create new links and assign addresses to them. The wg-quick utility is open-source and has built-in SystemD support. So, I switched to using the configuration file that wg-quick requires. With an ad-blocking DNS server, I was able to use the setup for a long time without having to change anything at all. The client support was excellent on Linux, Android and (even) iOS. I never really noticed whether I had my VPN enabled. I kept it enabled at all times except when I needed to access some geofenced service. However, I was still writing the wg-quick configuration files manually and most of them were very similar. This caused me to put off adding new peers to my network as soon as I needed to. Recently, I wrote a Golang CLI tool which generates wg-quick compatible configurations for Wireguard peers, based on a simple JSON input file. Using this tool, I was able to add a new Wireguard peer and create a new network in less than 10 minutes. The path to that CLI tool is what this post is about.

Conversion from HTML to ePub Format

Recently, I have taken to reading magazine articles and long newsletter posts on my Kindle by converting them to the ePub format, rather than reading them on the computer, where the process of making highlights and taking notes differs from the process that I use for all the e-books that I read. As I started doing this for some long articles (such as this one), I realized that the best online options out there are not good enough. I have been using dotepub.com which seems popular and converts to both the generic Epub format, and the Kindle-specific Mobi format. While it does a good job with all the text, this particular article was particularly heavy on images, and all the images were required to understand the text. When I converted the page to an Epub format, it told me that it would not include all the images from the article. So, I set out to write a few scripts which could fix that problem and actually export web pages as self-contained epub files.

Review - Darkness at Noon (Koestler)

Rating: 5/5

This novel starts off with an imprisoned protagonist thinking of the past where the prisoner was part of the very Revolution that has now imprisoned them. As the story progresses, philosophical ramblings come at increasingly frequent intervals and the novel reveals the most valuable plot point: watching the protagonist go back and forth between the belief that the “Revolution” was a good thing, which will eventually attain its original goals; and the belief that the Revolution was incorrect to say that “an individual is the product of one million divided by one million.”

Better Personal Data Management

I switched from Ubuntu 22.04 to Debian 11 earlier this year. I was using Ubuntu’s LTS OS versions for nearly 9 years before that, since 2014. The switch to Debian was because I stopped liking what Ubuntu had done with the OS: The GUI has become a strange mix of Ubuntu’s old desktop environment (Unity) and the Gnome Desktop Environment, which is standard and popular. I generally use the i3 window manager, so the Desktop environment was not too annoying; I could have lived with it if not for Snaps. The introduction and use of Snaps was a continuous thorn in my setup. Each snap sets up a new loop file.¹ So, the output of df is polluted with these strange loop devices that I don’t care about. Also, Firefox installed using Snaps does not work well with the KeepassXC Browser integration. So, the recommended way for installing programs on Ubuntu was actively getting in my way. (There is also some Ubuntu bloatware but an equivalent of that is there in almost every other non-base distribution, so it can’t really be counted against any single distribution.) I wanted to do a few things differently with this reinstall.

Review - The Book of Form and Emptiness (Ozeki)

Rating: 4/5

Ozeki’s novel is good at the beginning and good at the end. The middle drags on for a little too long; I had at least a mild interest in figuring out how the characters end up. However, the interest levels get pretty low. It is a book about books, art, culture, the decline of reading, the increase of consumerism, capitalism, and the incredibly high number of things that are now a fixture in the lives of a few people. It is a portrayal of the present, as a dystopia, by a Book; that shows both the ability to buy things that jobs give people, and the precarious nature of those jobs in a society with no safety net. The novel is mostly sincere, but sometimes it crosses over into the cheesy. The novel has a character whose background is identical to Marie Kondo and whose philosophy is very similar (I guess) to Ozeki’s.

Notes and Review - Lost Daughter (Ferrante)

Rating: 5/5

One should never arrive in an unknown place at night, everything is undefined, every object is easily exaggerated.

This is a beautiful line. Every time I am booking a ticket to some new place, I remember this line. I remember the dread and uncertainty of arriving at night. Despite knowing that arriving at night is unwise, I arrived in Italy late one night in 2019. It was a timely reminder of my lack of wisdom; a line like this makes the lesson a memorable one. Seeing the confused characters in this book, my first instinct was to clamp down on their inability to decide and brand it rashly as immature indecisiveness; then, gradually, I would see the lens fog up and doubt creep in. Were they really indecisive, or do they appear unclear to us only in hindsight?

It was like a slight twinge that, as you keep thinking about it, becomes an unbearable pain. I was beginning to feel exasperated.

The Unstoppable March of Technology

Every conversation that I have been in over the past 3 weeks outside the home has been about generative AI, and the vein of all these conversations is quite similar. Most of the people I met are optimistic about this new “technological advancement.”¹ I met a few skeptics who believe that generative AI is adept at generating only a summary of what’s already out there and incapable of coming up with something original.² I agree with those skeptics, based on the screenshots that abound on Twitter and my brief experience giving a handful of prompts to ChatGPT. The apparent inevitability of the “next thing” in technology is can not be understood as one that stems from rational thought: Rather, it is a cultural (almost religious) belief, and it pervades in the social psyche. For a while now, there has been this unstated acceptance that new technologies will come along, and those who don’t use them will be left behind in the dust. What if one were to ask the question, what if the dust is good enough? One wouldn’t even think of it; when has dust ever been “good enough”?. Is the cutting edge really something you want to be on? You better want to be there, or you will be left behind. Even if you are standing still on the travelator of technological advancements, you will be pulled along, dragging and screaming, on the unstoppable march of technology.

What To Do With All This Media Theory?

There has been a lot of media theory talk over the past year in the mainstream (newspapers, news websites, television) and on the intellectual sidelines (podcasts and blogs). The discourse is heavy on the origins and consequences of the continuing, effectively unstoppable, decay of communication over traditional media. (Savvy authors might use terms like “signal to noise ratio.”) However, all this discourse is suspiciously devoid of any advice for us, the spectators. Repeatedly, there is the defeatist assertion that most people will probably be addicted to their screens despite knowing how the screens manipulate them. I don’t think this defeatism is necessary. What should people do to avoid the consequences that authors are expounding on? Should they try to cut their information intake? Should they go “off the grid,” a concept that Opinion writers have made a cottage industry out of talking about?¹ The discourse has no response. Here’s my non-defeatist take.

Notes and Review - The Castle (Kafka)

This novel is humorous. The characters and their interactions, the presumptions that they make about each other based on trivial details, the protagonist’s (His name is K.) strange obsession over every single alphabet in the letters that he receives, characters that have a job which they do only when they want to. Everything in the novel is humorous. On the surface. Just underneath the surface, lurks the boundless struggle and omnipresent hopelessness of a life in the world that K. inhabits. (The world that he is in is eerily, and perhaps intentionally similar to our own.) This is not a dystopia; the bureaucratic hell that K. is subjected to is one that many are familiar with. The nightmare does not stop when you have procured every new document that the government has ever issued to its citizens; it continues, for the government takes great relish in moving the goalposts and confusing people; keeping them inside their Web browser until their citizens are exasperated enough to just close the tab and move on. The only difference between the citizens of our world and K. is that K. does not move on.

Why Do You Read Entertainment Supplements?

The newspaper represents the canonical form of media. This medium is devoid of the strangeness inherent in 24-hour TV¹, and has been around long enough for its form to reach a state of equilibrium; a state that can be understood. Of all the pages in a newspaper, I want to talk about the entertainment pages. What is the point of the entertainment supplement that accompanies newspapers? These supplements often start with a headline in which an actor is promoting a movie. The key however is that the actor says something unrelated; or “reveals” a secret about their work or life so that the reader is first trapped into reading the article. Eventually, the reader will find out that they are promoting a movie. I did not know this for a while; when watching television shows where guests would come on the show as “judges,” I was not able to recognize immediately that the people who came on the show were there only when they were promoting something. Once I realized that actors go on TV shows for only that reason, the connections were much easier to draw. Whenever a new movie comes out, the people associated with the movie try to get as much footage as they possibly can. This is simply the way marketing works; a banal truth. Is this media blitz anything except marketing? Why do the media organizations become tools in this marketing? Why do people fall for this not immediately obvious marketing ploy, despite years of formulaic use? Those are the questions I am going to attempt to answer in this post.