My Last Post on This Domain

OK guys,

I think that it is time for me to publish the last post on this blog using WordPress as a domain. As you probably already know, GitHub is my favorite company and I have decided to switch my blog to a completely new domain.

I have published a couple of posts exclusively on the new domain and backed up every post from this domain to my new address (with one exception, but I’m working on it). I feel confident now to make the switch and I started to feel really comfortable using GitHub + Jekyll as a blogging platform, so I’ve decided to drop by and say good bye to my old domain.

From now on, you can follow me on r3bl.github.io. Be sure to use the http version of the site because https version is currently not properly implemented in the code. If you run into some issue while browsing the site or you miss a feature that I had implemented on this domain, feel free to report it here.

As always, you’re more than welcome to contact me anytime on aleksandar.todorovic@mail.ru. I hope that you’ll continue to read me on my new address.

Sincerely,
Aleksandar Todorović

Changing the design of my blog, desktop and twitter account

I feel pretty cyberpunk-ish lately so I’ve decided to change the whole look of three most important things to me: my blog, my Twitter account and my desktop.

I’m really feeling this concept art by a great artist called Andree Wallin. The art I like the most is called Headphones so I’ve decided to use it as my main inspiration for the design. So this is how my desktop looks like right now:

So what I did is I changed the background and then started to edit my Gtk theme and Purple Rain Conky configuration file. I did loose a couple of hours doing that, but I’m pretty satisfied with it right now and I’m getting a lot of positive feedback all over Google+ and Reddit for it.

Next thing I freshened up the design of my blog. So I’ve changed the theme and customized it a little. Hope this design works better for you. If not, contact me of course.

My Twitter is also re-designed, which means I basically only changed my avatar, header photo and the colour scheme, so I don’t have a lot to talk about that.

Oh, and the translation of elementary OS is going great! Although, I have to admit that I’m not a huge fan of Launchpad as a tool for the translation of such a big project.

 

What I’ve been doing lately? Translating elementary OS!

So, apart from writing my first semi-professional paper (which I wrote about – although in Bosnian – here) and organizing a contest on my blog where you could win a couple of Office 365 licenses for free, I started to fall in love into programming again. It’s been a couple of months since I programmed anything.

The last project I’ve been working on is working, but it has a hell of a lot of bugs. It’s called Sensitive Data Grabber and I’ve already written about it on my blog here. So, why ain’t I finishing it?

Well, the thing is that I’ve created that project using Visual Basic inside Visual Studio. You probably know that this kind of environment is Windows-specific. I’ve been spending most of my time lately using Linux as my primary operating system. I’ve found my perfect distribution and it’s called elementary OS (I already covered the reasons why here – again, in Bosnian language).

Now, because I don’t have enough knowledge in any programming language that can be run in my perfect distribution, I’m still adjusting. While I’m doing that, I’ve decided that I want to do something for the elementary community before I’m good enough to program some apps. Because of that, I’ve decided to start translating elementary OS to Bosnian language.

I’m not just getting started, I’ve already finished translating a lot of elementary-related projects. Now I only have seven (out of 37) projects left. That’s a little more than 2.5k strings to translate. It does seem like a lot, but I’m pretty confident that I will be able to finish that by the end of the year. Most of the operating system is already translated. By the time I finish it, I’ll probably be able to program some useful apps and then I’ll start to publish them using my own ppa.

I feel very optimistic right now. As the narrator says in the end of this great video:

I don’t know why, but.. I feel very excited about the future. Anything is possible now.

 

Update:

The translation of elementary OS is almost over! Only a couple of programs until you can use elementary OS without any problems if you come from Bosnia & Herzegovina!

elementary OS – Savršena distribucija za mene

Sada sam tek shvatio da iako mi je blog pun postova o Linuksu, trenutno nemam niti jedan post posvećen u potpunosti distribuciji koja je zadovoljila sve kriterijume da bude savršeni operativni sistem za moje potrebe: elementary OS.

Već sam pisao ponešto o svojem putu koji me je doveo sve do elementary-a kada sam se pridružio #budiUbuntu akciji blogeraša sa naših prostora u ovom postu, tako da se neću puno zadržavati tu nego ću vam ispričati zašto je baš elementary OS savršena distribucija za mene.

Ako ste ikada čuli za elementary OS, već znate da je prelijep. Nastao je kao fork Ubuntu-a sa željom da ga učine ljepšim. Prva verzija se zvala Jupiter i nemam ama baš nikakvih iskustva sa tom verzijom. Nakon toga slijedi Luna, i dalje aktuelna verzija elementary-a bazirana na Ubuntu 12.04 verziji i tu počinje moje putovanje, koje se sada nastavlja sa beta verzijama sledjećeg u nizu odličnih proizvoda elementary porodice: Freya.

Pa šta ga izdvaja iz većine toliko da ga smatram savršenim operativnim sistemom? Prije svega, naravno, moram da izdvojim njegovu ljepotu. Dosta je minimalističan sistem, nakon svakog mog klika operativni sistem se odaziva istovremeno, nešto na šta nisam baš navikao koristeći KDE distribucije i Prozore u prošlosti. Tu je i odličan Ubuntu repozitorij programa, tako da se uopšte ne brinem za to da postoji neki program pisan za Linuks platformu koji ja ne mogu da pokrenem.

elementary koristi vlastiti DE pod nazivom Pantheon, DE koji radi savršeno i dolazi pred-instaliran sa svim programima koji će vam ikada biti potrebni: za slušanje muzike, gledanje videa i fotografija, čitanje dokumenata, pretraživanje interneta, čitanje mailova i slično. Svaki od programa je jednostavno prelijep i većinu nisam nikada ni promjenio, međutim neki od tih programa jednostavno ne pružaju dovoljno mogućnosti za mene, tako da konstantno preferiram Firefox umjesto Midorija, Thunderbird mi zamjenjuje Geary, a što se filmova tiče jednostavno nikada ni na jednoj platformi nisam uspio da se odviknem od korišćenja VLC plejera, bez obzira na to koliko je Audience savršen program i radi bez ikakvih poteškoća.

Sistem jeste uveliko zatvoren i na sve strane se može čitati o tome kako njegovi developeri u dizajnu u mnogo čemu kopiraju Mac, međutim ne smatram ga kopijom Mac operativnog sistema iako postoje neke sličnosti koje ne mogu da se ne primjete.

Jednostavno obožavam to što je sistem minimalistički i funkcionalan. Ukoliko se pronađe neka stvar koja mi ne odgovara (tipa nedostatak minimise opcije u programima), poprilično je lako pronaći rješenje za tako nešto. Ukoliko se javi neki problem koji je potrebno riješiti, to što je sistem baziran na Ubuntu-u je veliki plus i većina rješenja se može naći tako što se u internet tražilici unese opis problema i na kraju doda riječ elementary ili Ubuntu.

Postoji neka draž u praćenju razvoja nekog operativnog sistema. To sam po prvi put osjetio kada sam instalirao Beta 1 verziju nove verzije operativnog sistema pod nazivom Freya. Iako mi se nakon same instalacije operativnog sistema promjene nisu činile toliko drastične da je potrebna nova verzija operativnog sistema za tako nešto, ekipa koja stoji iza elementary OS-a radi svakodnevno da donesu neke nove funkcije, neke nove izmjene u dizajnu i riješe neke nove bagove koje su mučile ovaj operativni sistem. Danas, nekoliko dana od Freya Beta 2 verzije, novi elementary se polako oblikuje u nešto fantastično. U nešto nevjerovatno. Neopisiv je osjećaj ponosa koji imam zbog toga što sam pratio to sve i učestvovao u njegovoj izradi prijavljivanjem ponekog baga i učestvovanjem u diskusiji u odličnoj službenoj Google+ zajednici (koja je i jedini razlog zašto koristim Google+ kao društvenu mrežu). Skoro svaki dan se iznenadim vrteći standardne komande za update-ovanje sistema u Terminal-u otkrivajući nove mogućnosti koje mi ovaj operativni sistem pruža.

Kombinacija prelijepog minimalističkog izgleda, ogromna količina dostupnog softvera, lakoća prilagođavanja sitnih problema koji me muče, lakoća pronalaska rješenja za probleme sa kojima se susrećem, odlična zajednica i fantastičan izgled (nešto što se ne može dovoljno puta naglasiti) su bila dobitna kombinacija za mene. Sada stojim u potpunosti iza elementary projekta, finansijski ih podržavam kad god sam u mogućnosti, i preporučujem elementary projekat svakom prilikom na koju naletim, pa tako i sa ovim postom.

Nisam počeo da pišem ovaj post sa ciljem da vas nagovorim da pređete na elementary (mada, naravno, jedna preokrenuta duša za mene znači mnogo). Smatram da je odabir prave distribucije proces sa kojim se svaki potencijalni Linuksaš sam treba suočiti i istražiti mnoge opcije prije nego što se odluči za konačno rješenje. Ovaj post pišem čisto iz razloga da navedem neke razloge zašto je elementary OS savršen operativni sistem za mene.

Cloud Wars from a Consumer Perspective

So, I’ve got two primary cloud providers: Mail.ru cloud and OneDrive. I’ve been using both of them for quite some time. Mail.Ru cloud supports Linux and gives 100 GB for free. They’ve also had a promo action that lasted for a month and anyone who clicked on a certain link got 1 TB for free. Yup, 1 TB of cloud storage absolutely free. The only problem: the interface is in Russian. Not a big deal and once you get a hang of where things are located using the app is quite easy. They support pretty much any platform you can think of and Linux integration (tried it on Kubuntu and elementary OS) as well as Windows integration works perfectly.

But, sometimes I just want to share my files with someone. I’m not sure if that is possible with Mail.Ru cloud, but I know a place where it is: Microsoft OneDrive. As I’ve explained before in this post, I’m not a big Microsoft hater even though I’m a Linux user and I trust them far more then I trust Google. I have an Office 365 subscription for about a month or two and I got 20 GB of cloud storage because of that which, combining with 7 gigabytes for free
and synchronizing my Windows 8.1 sums up to 30 GB. Well, not so bad, but still, too far from 1 TB for free that I got on my other cloud service.

But, recently, Microsoft lowered the price of their storage and I also got 1 TB for free using OneDrive thanks to my Office 365 subscription.

So, how to integrate OneDrive with Linux? Well, I did try to use OneDrive-D but I got a strange error which I’m not capable of fixing, so I decided to find some other solution, and I did manage to do so.

The service is called Storage Made Easy, it offers free account where you can add up to three cloud providers and it supports Linux nativelly with it’s free aplication.

To sum things up, I’ve got 2 TB of cloud storage by practially paying nothing, and I have no idea what the hell am I supposed to do with that much of a storage.

Back to Kubuntu

So, in the last 48 hours I was again, looking for a new distro. Don’t know why, but I just felt I should be using something else.

And again, I was search for the perfect distro for my needs. As you know if you’re following my blog, I’m a big security researcher kind a guy. So, naturally, my first choice was Kali Linux. But, the problem is that I don’t like GNOME interface. Don’t know why, but it’s just not right for me. So, I tried compiling my own Kali Linux .iso file with KDE interface. Well, it’s easy to say that that didn’t work as planned. I did not manage to get it working. So I tried installing regular Kali Linux and replacing GNOME interface with KDE. That also didn not work as planned.

I felt kinda noobish. Even though I’ve tried a lot of distros and even though I did install Kali Linux before as my main operating system, I just could not get it to work perfectly with my Windows 8.1 and a TrueCrypt-encrypted shared partition. So I decided I should use some other KDE-based distro and fill it up with security software. I installed openSUSE but I just could not get their password manager. So I decided I should stick with Kubuntu because I wanted that apt-get so badly! It took me at least three or four clean installs to get it to work right. I kept changing my repo server that messed things up. Once I even stopped the upgrade command in progress and that messed things up for me.

But, finally, I managed to get it to work. And it feels great and robust just as I hoped it will. So, I’m back with Kubuntu, I really like the job the Kubuntu developers are doing and I’m also considering about joining the community and participating in Kubuntu development. But first, a couple of days of trying it out, just to make sure I don’t mess anything up. Again.