monovergent 🛠️

  • 3 Posts
  • 13 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: November 27th, 2023

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  • I wish I found a guide like that back when I first made the move to FDE. Regardless, I was adamantly against reinstalling and painstakingly replicating my customizations, so I came up with a hacky way of tacking on FDE.

    It went something along the lines of:

    1. Shrinking the root partition as much as possible
    2. From Live CD, dd root partition to external drive
    3. Perform minimal encrypted install of Debian
    4. From Live CD, open LUKS container of the newly-installed Debian and overwrite the root partition within with my old root partition.
    5. Update fstab, crypttab, initramfs, and grub
    6. Cross my fingers and reboot


  • The text editor shortcut on my taskbar runs a sort of autosave script in ~/.drafts. I wanted my text editor to function more like the one on my phone so I can just jot down random thoughts without going through the whole ritual of naming and saving. It creates YYYYMMDD_text in ~/.drafts (or YYYYMMDD_text_1 etc. if it already exists) and launches Pluma, which I also have configured to autosave every 10 minutes.

    The other thing extends beyond Linux itself a bit. I like to joke that I have the most secure NT 4 / Windows 95 lookalike ever put together. Aside from the encrypted and hardened Debian base (/boot is also encrypted), I was in part inspired by Apple’s parts pairing (yikes!). So my coreboot is configured to only accept my boot disk. If it’s swapped out or missing, or if I want to boot something else, it will ask for a password. In the unlikely event my machine gets stolen, the thief must at a minimum reflash the BIOS or replace the motherboard to make it useful again. Idk, it amuses me every time I think about it.







  • Ideally, 256 GB + microSD. 128 GB today gives me ample room for my offline maps, music collection, podcasts, and Kiwix libraries. No gaming, only the occasional video, and one photo per day on average, so 256 GB would future-proof it.

    As for a minimum, 32GB. For several years, I had a phone with 4GB of internal storage. Didn’t use the microSD slot since it seemed to drain the battery. Android takes up much more space nowadays, but I wouldn’t be too upset having ~16 GB usable space for myself.

    The SD card would be separately encrypted as a portable backup of everything important to me, accessible on-the-spot whenever I need it.