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