Abhijith PA | അഭിജിത്ത് പി എ

Patience could've saved me time.

Tue, 28 Apr 2026 06:33:00 +0000

If I had been patient, it would have saved me time. One such instance is following.

From my early blogs, you might know I am using mutt to do email. Just after I get along with mutt, I started using notmuch. Because limit search in mutt is always a pain when you have multiple folders. And what better tool out there than notmuch-mutt to bind both these.

notmuch-mutt provide three macros by default.

macro index <F8> \
"<enter-command>set my_old_pipe_decode=\$pipe_decode my_old_wait_key=\$wait_key nopipe_decode nowait_key<enter>\
<shell-escape>notmuch-mutt -r --prompt search<enter>\
<change-folder-readonly>`echo ${XDG_CACHE_HOME:-$HOME/.cache}/notmuch/mutt/results`<enter>\
<enter-command>set pipe_decode=\$my_old_pipe_decode wait_key=\$my_old_wait_key<enter>" \
      "notmuch: search mail"
macro index <F9> \
"<enter-command>set my_old_pipe_decode=\$pipe_decode my_old_wait_key=\$wait_key nopipe_decode nowait_key<enter>\
<pipe-message>notmuch-mutt -r thread<enter>\
<change-folder-readonly>`echo ${XDG_CACHE_HOME:-$HOME/.cache}/notmuch/mutt/results`<enter>\
<enter-command>set pipe_decode=\$my_old_pipe_decode wait_key=\$my_old_wait_key<enter>" \
      "notmuch: reconstruct thread"
macro index <F6> \
"<enter-command>set my_old_pipe_decode=\$pipe_decode my_old_wait_key=\$wait_key nopipe_decode nowait_key<enter>\
<pipe-message>notmuch-mutt tag -- -inbox<enter>\
<enter-command>set pipe_decode=\$my_old_pipe_decode wait_key=\$my_old_wait_key<enter>" \
      "notmuch: remove message from inbox"

One for search, one for reconstructing threads and one for manipulating tags, which I missed.

Now my impatient part. I have already mapped f6 for my folder movements and in my initial days of notmuch, I only use just search. So I never cared about the f6 macro provided by notmuch-mutt. As time goes by I got very comfortable with notmuch. I was stretching my notmuch legs. I started to live more on notmuch search results date:today tag:unread than more on the mutt index. To the problem, since notmuch-mutt dump all results to a temp maildir location, can’t perform flag changes back to the original maildir which was annoying, because we need to distinguish what mail you read and what not when you subscribed to most of all debian mailing list.

I was under the impression that, the notmuch-mutt is not capable of doing so and I just went like that without checking docs. I started doing all crazy hack to sync these maildirs.

I even started reading notmuch-mutt codebase.

Later, I settled on notmuch-vim. Cause I can manipulate flags sync back from notmuch to maildir.

And while searching for something, I accidentally revisited the the the notmuch-mutt macro page and saw the tag manipulation. I was like :( .

If I read about the third macro patiently when added that to config, I could’ve saved time by not doing ugly hacks around it.

I think I learned my lesson.

Removing spams from your local maildir

Wed, 23 Jul 2025 08:26:00 +0000

I have been using Disroot as my primary email ever since openmailbox.org stopped. I am very grateful for Disroot’s service and I occasionally donate to them.

Recently, my Disroot inbox has been flooded with spam. On an average day, I used to receive around 90% spams on entire email count. However, the situation has improved since then. I contacted the Disroot team, and they informed me that they are aware of the situation and planning to migrate to Rspamd from Spamassassin.

I don’t know whether they deployed Rspamd, even if so that only going to process incoming mails, I am looking for a way to identify spams and purge that are already entered my Imap folders.

Later I found this script nh2/rspamd-move[1], which seems fit my need.

I made couple of trivial changes in the script for my use case. I wasn’t sure of directly running this on my Mail/ dir, so I cloned my entire local mail directory to another directory and made available to podman container where the script and rspamd instance exist. I trained rspamd from the /Spam. Later, I manually moved couple of mails to /spam folder/. I requested friends to share their spam folder in the #debian-in channel, but that didn’t happen :P

$podman run -it --mount
type=bind,source=/home/abhijith/$MAILS/,target=/container-mail-clone
id:latest
$script.py

(It took some time since I have around 10000+ emails)

Wow, it was quite a successful attempt, I was able to catch most of it and move to spam/ and couple of false positive in a different folder. Now I want to do the same in the actual maildir yet very skeptical. While going through the cloned folder with mutt -f I remembered that the mails are already indexed by notmuch.

So all I need to do is operate tagging and deletion with notmuch and it will be synced back to the original mail dir. Ta-da. I cleaned by Inbox.

[1] - https://github.com/nh2/rspamd-move

Bug squashing party, Kochi

Fri, 09 May 2025 16:46:00 +0000

Last weekend, 4 people (3 DDs and 1 soon to be, hopefully in coming months) sit together for a Bug squashing party in Kochi. We fixed lot of things including my broken autopkgtest setup.

It all began from a discussion in #debian-in of not having any BSPs in the past in India. Then twisted in to hosting a BSP by me. I fixed the dates to 3rd & 4th May to get packages migrate naturally to testing with NMUs before the hard freeze on 15th May.

Finding a venue was a huge challenge. Unlike other places, we have very limited options on hackerspaces. We also had some company spaces (if we asked), but we may have to follow their office timings and finding accommodation near by was also a challenge.

Later we decided to go with a rental apartment where could hack all night and sleep. We booked a very bare minimal apartment for 3 nights and 3 days. I updated wiki page and sent announcement.

Not even Wi-Fi was there in the apartment, so we setup everything by ourselves (DebConf style :p ). I short listed some newbie bugs, just in case if newcomers joined the party. But it was only we 4 people and Kathara who joined remotely.

We started from May 2nd night, stacked our cabin with snacks, instant noodles and drinks. Arranged beds, tables and started hacking and having discussions. My autopkgtest-lxc setup was broken. I think its related to #1017753, which got fixed magically and now I started using autopkgtest-podman.

I learned

reportbug tool can use its own SMTP server by default
autoremovals can be extended if we pinged to the bug report.

On last day, we went to a nice restaurant and had food. There was a church festival nearby, so we were able to watch wonderful procession and fireworks at night.

All in all we managed to touch 46 bugs of which 35 is now fixed/done and 11 is open, some of this get status done when it reaches testing. It was a fun and productive weekend. More importantly we had fun.

A lazy local file sharing setup

Mon, 01 Jul 2024 06:42:00 +0000

At home, I have both a laptop and a *desktop PC. Most of my essential things, such as emails, repositories, password managers, contacts, and calendars are synced between the two devices. However, when I need to share some documents and I am lazy enough to go pick a flash drive, my only option is to push them to the Internet and download them on the other system, which is sitting at 20~ meters away. Typically, I do this either through email attachments or a matrix client.

Occasionally, I think about setting up a network storage solution at home. But then I ask myself do I really need one.

In my home network, I already have a Raspberry Pi running as my Wi-Fi router, doing DNS level ad blocking with Dnsmasq and DNS over TLS with stubby. Rpi has a 16GB memory card. I can mount RPi remote directory to both machines.

I use pcmanfm as my file manager. It has the ability (like every other file managers) to mount remote storage over ssh. But one annoying thing is that whenever I open the mount directory, by default it shows the root file system of the remote device even when I explicitly mentioned the path.

Then I discovered sshfs. I wrote the following script, which mount remote directory and open that in pcmanfm.

#!/bin/bash
LOCMOUNT="/home/user/Public"
sshfs raspberrypi:Public $LOCMOUNT
pcmanfm $MOUNT

I haven’t enabled any encryption for the memory until now since other than some logs RPi wasn’t writing anything to it. I set up fscrypt on Rpi storage now. And ta-da, a lazy person’s local sharing solution.

*Desktop - Well, technically it’s an old laptop with a broken keyboard and trackpad, connected to a monitor, keyboard and mouse. I don’t feel keeping it on a shelf.

abhijithpa.me to abhijithpa.in

Sat, 22 Jun 2024 06:33:00 +0000

I let go my domain abhijithpa.me. It was getting expensive and I don’t fancy that anymore. I never actually purchased this domain but came with a package offer. I then kept it for couple of years.

I have now bought a new domain abhijithpa.in and pointed everything to it.

So if you are seeing abhijithpa.me with lot of contents, that is no me. Its either domain squatters or someone impersonating me.

A new(kind of) phone

Fri, 09 Feb 2024 10:53:00 +0000

I was using a refurbished Xiaomi Redmi 6 Pro (codename: sakura . I do remember buying this phone to run LineageOS as I found this model had support. But by the time I bought it (there was a quite a gap between my research and the actual purchase) lineageOS ended the suport for this device. The maintainer might’ve ended this port, I don’t blame them. Its a non rewarding work.

Later I found there is a DotOS custom rom available. I did a week of test run. There seems lot of bugs and it all was minor and I can live with that. Since there is no other official port for redmi 6 pro at the time, I settled on this buggy DotOS nightly build.

The phone was doing fine all these(3+) years, but recently the camera started showing greyish dots on some areas to a point that I can’t even properly take a photo. The outer body of the phone wasn’t original, as it was a refurbished, thus the colors started to peel off and wasn’t aesthetically pleasing. Then there is the Location detection issue which took a while to figure out location and battery drains fast. I recently started mapping public transportation routes, and the GPS issue was a problem for me. With all these problems combined, I decided to buy a new phone.

But choosing a phone wasn’t easy. There are far too many options in the market. However, one thing I was quite sure of was that I wouldn’t be buying a brand new phone, but a refurbished one. It is my protest against all these phone manufacturers who have convinced the general public that a mobile phone’s lifespan is only 2 years. Of course, there are a few exceptions, but the majority of players in the Indian market are not.

Now I think about it, I haven’t bought any brand new computing device, be it phones or laptops since 2015. All are refurbished devices except for an Orange pi. My Samsung R439 laptop which I already blogged about is still going strong.

Back to picking phone. So I began by comparing LineageOS website to an online refurbished store to pick a phone that has an official lineage support then to reddit search for any reported hardware failures

Google Pixel phones are well-known in the custom ROM community for ease of installation, good hardware and Android security releases. My above claims are from privacyguides.org and XDA-developers. I was convinced to go with this choice. But I have some one at home who is at the age of throwing things. So I didn’t want to risk buying an expensive Pixel phone only to have it end up with a broken screen and edges. Perhaps I will consider buying a Pixel next time. After doing some more research and cross comparison I landed up on Redmi note 9. Codename: merlinx.

Based on my previous experience I knew it is going to be a pain to unlock the bootloader of Xiaomi phones and I was prepared for that but this time there was an extra hoop. The phone came with ROM MIUI version 13. A small search on XDA forums and reddit told unless we downgrade to 12 or so it is difficult to unlock bootloader for this device. And performing this wasn’t exactly easy as we need tools like SP Flash etc.

It took some time, but I’ve completed the downgrade process. From there, the rest was cakewalk as everything was perfectly documented in LineageOS wiki. And ta-da, I have a phone running lineageOS. I been using it for some time and honestly I haven’t come across any bug in my way of usage.

One advice I will give to you if you are going to flash a custom ROM. There are plenty of videos about unlocking bootloader, installing ROMs in Youtube. Please REFRAIN from watching and experimenting it on your phone unless you figured a way to un brick your device first.

Running Debian on my phone

Fri, 30 Jun 2023 17:53:00 +0000

You might have already read my blog titled ‘Running PostmarketOS on my phone’. After running pmOS on phone, my mind kept talking “run Debian”. So I started preparing for that.

At the moment no straight way tool exist in Debian like postmarketOS’s pmbootstrap. Well I can compile what is already available, do debootstrap rootfs. But I don’t know how to build the final image that can be flashed from recovery.

One crooked idea I had is, extract the pmOS image, find the packages and its configurations. For eg: usbmodem package in postmarketos are configured to connect to host network when plugged.

I deboostrap’ed the rootfs, compared with postmarketos and installed extra packages and copied configuration. I repacked and compressed to new image. Then flashed with twrp.

The phone was booting. So I connected the usb cable and run,

ssh abhijith@172.16.42.1

abhijith@172.16.42.1's password: 
Linux arm64 3.10.107-Cherry #1-postmarketOS SMP PREEMPT Sat Dec 18 13:08:52 UTC 2021 aarch64

The programs included with the Debian GNU/Linux system are free software;
the exact distribution terms for each program are described in the
individual files in /usr/share/doc/*/copyright.

Debian GNU/Linux comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY, to the extent
permitted by applicable law.
abhijith@arm64:$ 

Yay!. I have a working Debian phone. I quickly installed lxde and that is working perfectly.

Attending FOSSASIA 2023

Sat, 29 Apr 2023 06:53:00 +0000

I attended FOSSASIA 2023 summit held at Lifelong Learning Institute, Singapore. A 3 day long parallel talk filled conference. Its my second time attending FOSSASIA. The first one was 2018 summit. Like last time, I didn’t attend much talks but focussed on networking with people. A lot of familiar faces there. PV Anthony, Harish, etc.

I vounteered to run Debian Booth at the exhibition hall distributing stickers, flyers. Rajudev also helped me at the booth. Most of the people there used debian or its derivates or know debian already, its easier for me that way, that I don’t have do much explaining compared to other booths. Thanks to Parth for looking after booth in my breaks.

Sometimes our booth also act as cloak room :). Ours was close to the entrance door and we may be similar faces to folks. So people come and drop their bags before they go to talks.

One thing I love about the such conference is that people have very different hardwares that I never able to see otherwise. I remember KDE booth had a Steam Value portable gaming board running KDE plasma. Then a person have this eyeglass which act as a monitor. Then the usual DJI drones but custom programmed. It was very lovely to meet and play around with exotic hardwares.

Kurian whom I met during a Debian packaging workshop in Kerala was a speaker at FOSSASIA. He presented a talk titled “OpenAI Whisper and it’s amazing power to do finetuning”. I was his unofficial PR guy, taking pictures :).

Weather

Clear sky, little hot and humid. The weather was quite nice for me except the surprise rain and small thunderstorms. Comparing to my place’s temperature, its wonderful.

Running PostmarketOS on my phone

Thu, 15 Dec 2022 09:53:00 +0000

Couple of weeks back I installed PostmarketOS on my idle phone Leeco Le 1s , which was paper weight for some time now.

It all started with a roadtrip to Pondicherry (I will soon write about this trip). As I was sitting on the front seat where Praveen’s Librem 5 kept charging on the car dashboard. And we had a small discussion about PostmarketOS and how much new ports are available now.

My idle phone came to my mind. After reaching home I started setting up porting pmOS to this device. Going through pmOS website, to my surprise there is already a port for this device.

The OEM unlock is quite easy even though a little hiccup at begin (I suspect it is solely of my cable). The Xiaomi users knows the pain of unlocking bootloader.

With the pmOS community preferred practice of using pmbootstrap, I built image for my device, flashed it. And phone boot stopped with pmOS logo. I thought I went to bootloop. I tried sxmo, xfce4, everything same nothing happening after boot logo splash.

The pmOS troubleshooting wiki is quite good. They have documented most issues. Though screen is stuck I can still ssh to the phone. From wiki I came to know its a screen refresh problem. I installed msm-fb-refresher package and ran it as a daemon.

Voila, I have a mate desktop.

Mate desktop is not at all touch friendly even though I tried to scaled up to read and tap things on the screen. Wiki suggest xfce4 is little more touch friendly. I started moving to xfce. Then again same problem, stuck at boot loop.

This time it was with lightdm, I turned off CanGraphical issue warning and now I have xfce desktop. pmos xfce seems great comparing with mate.

Nothing works as of now from a Mobile phone point of view. The phone maintainer says the battery is working, but I couldn’t get it working. Its always in battery mode and 50% status.

I thought the hardware buttons will never work. But with xev, I can see the hardware key event triggering.

Laptop refreshment

Tue, 04 Oct 2022 09:53:00 +0000

(Sorry if you have read this already, due to a tag mistake, my draft copy got published)

I recently bought a refurbished thinkpad x260. If you have read my post of my previous laptop. Its a big jump from 1 gen Intel processors to 6th Gen.

I really love my old laptop. In fact I am actually writing this from my old laptop. Its OK for my day to day task. But its not convenient to carry around when I am travelling.

I was thinking a lot of buying a new machine. But always end up not because of how much minimal hardware ports and how hard for normal users to open it for usual maintenance. But during Debconf22 someone made fun of my laptop, he mentioned its more of a printer than a laptop. And there I decided get a new machine.

Thinkpads always fascinated me. Look sturdy, more I/O ports, nice keyboard and easy to open up for usual maintenance. But I never arrived on which model should I pick. Lenovo has only limited number of models available in India and with right specs, its way out of budget for me. I was planned for taking a liberated.computer. But should I go again to old model. Then I decided to get something little more recent. I know Marhaba computers from whom I already bought a thinkpad for my brother.

Deciding to pick X260 took around an evening. I have bugged a lot of my friends especially Kiran. I might’ve have made him mad because of how much back and forth I asked questions to him regarding this. Finally we arrived at X260.

I chose the minimal storage and memory as I will be changing that anyway. So mine had 320GB SATA HDD, DDR4 4 GB memory, Intel i5 6000 , 6th gen processor. I have a 120GB SSD lying around. I quickly swapped it with stock HDD and installed Debian. More memory will be loaded soon.

cons

Resolution is 1920*1080 and scaling seems very small and it started to give me a hard time for my eye. So I decided to adjust it.

abhijith@Adebian  cat .Xresources
Xft.dpi: 120%

I was using libinput drivers for the trackpad. Turns out it was horrible for my model. So I decided to move back to synaptics.

So far I haven’t decided on full transition. So its my travel laptop for mail, IRC, RSS, matrix reader/client.

Trip to misty mountains in Munnar

Thu, 04 Aug 2022 09:53:00 +0000

Munnar is a hill station in Idukki district of Kerala, India. Home to 2nd largest tea plantation in the country. Lot of people visit here on summer and in winter as well. I live in the neighboring district of Munnar though I never made a visit. In my mind I pictured Munnar as a Tourist trap with lots of garbage lying around.

I recently made a visit and it changed my perception of this place.

Little background

I never liked tea much. I am also not a coffee person either. But if I have to choose over two that will be coffee because of the strong aroma. Going to relatives house, they always offered hot tea defacto. I always find difficult say ‘no’ to their friendly gesture. But I hate tea.

A generation before me drinks lot of tea here at my place. You can see tea stalls in every corner and people sipping tea. I always wondered why people drink lot of tea on a hot country like India.

The book I am currently trying to read has a chapter about Munnar and how it became a Tea plantation under the British rule. Well, around the same time. I watched a documentary program about the tea and Munnar.

Munnar

Too much word here and there I decided to do a visit. I took a motorbike and started a journey to Munnar. Due to covid restrictions there weren’t much tourists, so this was to my advantage. There are many water falls on the way to Munnar. Some are very close to road and some are far away but can be spotted. Munnar travel is just not about the destination because its never been a single spot. Enjoying the journey that the ride has to offer.

I stayed at a hotel, little far away from town, though I never recommend hotels in Munnar. Try to find home stays and small establishments away from the town. There are British Era bungalows inside the plantations still maintained in good condition which can be booked per room or entire property.

The lush greenery on the Mountains of tea plantation is very refreshing and feast to our eyes. The mornings and evenings of Munnar is something to watch, mountains wrapped in mist slowly uncovering with sunlight and again slipping to mist by dark evening. I planned only to visit places which are less explored by tourists.

People here live a simple life. Most of them are plantation workers. The native people of Munnar are actually tribal folks but since the plantation boom many people from Tamil Nadu(neighboring state) and other parts of Kerala settled here. The houses of this plantation workers resembled Hobbit homes in Shire from Lord of the Rings as they are in the hill slides. The Kannan Devan hills, the biggest hill in area covers more than half of Munnar.

Two famous Tea companies from Munnar are Tata Tea and KDHP(Kanan Devan Hills Plantations Company (P) Limited) tea. KDHP is actually an employee owned Tea company ie a good share of this company is owned by the employees working there. This was interesting to me, so I bought a bag of speciality tea from KDHP store on my return. I don’t drink tea on a daily basis but I will try it on special occasions.

Changing LCD screen of car infotainment system

Wed, 16 Jun 2021 05:53:00 +0000

I have a 2013 model used car that I bought two years ago. It came with a 7 inch touch screen infotainment system on its dash board with features like navigation, Bluetooth phone connectivity and a good FM AM radio. Except the radio I rarely use navigation or Bluetooth phone sync. After couple of months the touch started to become non-responsive. Since all important things such as call termination, mute and volume control have physical switches, I was happy with it.

During a periodic car check up on a local workshop, mechanic pulled battery terminals making the infotainment system locked. Now it ask for 4 digit pass code. Its one of their ant-theft mechanism and in order to enter those digits you need a touch responsive screen. So now I am completed locked out.

I visited service center of this car to get it changed, turns out they don’t repair it and only change by the unit. And will cost me Rs 50,000. Considering my usage is restricted to radio. That price is way too much.

So my next options were,

Use a normal cheap car radio player. I dropped this plan, since stereo players comes in very small size and I might need plastic placeholders to close rest of the area from the 7 inch screen. This can mess aesthetics of dash board. And it also affect value of the car if I will sell in future.
Use a 7 inch third party infotainment system available in the market. I did enquired with local car accessories shop and I dropped this plan as well because most of them are android and comes with enormous number of pre installed apps which I never gonna use it anyway. And I don’t need one more device that need to be connected to the Internet. Also the wiring at the back of these devices are different than what I have already so it need rewiring.
Last option was to change the infotainment system parts my own. I was under the impression that these units are in-house made, tightly assembled and sealed with screws that you never see in your life and you will never able to be open it up, let alone fix parts.

Couple of articles showed me that car infotainment system sizes and wiring at the back are actually standardized. This particular system’s OEM is LG

After gaining confidence from several youtube videos and articles, I chose the 3rd option and started to disassemble head unit. Luckily all those screw driver heads were with me. After taking everything apart I could see back of touch screen glass bulged and pushing against the display. The back of the display had a label with its manufacturers name Innolux display and its model number AT070TN94. You might know this company from all those raspberry pi displays in the market. Also Tesla car makers use Innolux display in their infotainment unit.

I was able to spot an online reseller in Hong Kong. I only need a touch screen display but to be on the safe side I also placed order for display as well(Price difference were negligible) Took 1 month to reach at my hand due to COVID restrictions. I assembled everything together and collected radio pass code the very same day I received the item. Everything is working now. yay!

The touch screen + display cost me Rs 6000/-. I can easily get an average android infotainment around this price. But it was the price I paid for avoiding e-waste.

So if you have a broken head unit in your pre 2015 era car. Try to change the parts yourself. Its not complicated like our mobile phones.

Part-2 Transition from Thunderbird to Mutt

Thu, 06 May 2021 19:25:00 +0000

If you read my last blog. You might know that I moved my email away from thunderbird to mutt. I thought I will miss thunderbird, nope, not even for a bit. This transition was very smooth. Only things left in thunderbird was my calendar and RSS reader.

Couple of weeks ago I switched to calcurse for handling my calendar and To-do list. Like its name, it has a curses TUI. They have its own to-do list and native support for syncing with caldav servers. The to-do list seems buggy when sync between OpenTask Android app. And newsboat is my RSS reader.

Transition from Thunderbird to Mutt

Sat, 16 Jan 2021 04:37:00 +0000

I was going OK with Thunderbird and enigmail(though it have many problems). Normally I go through changelogs before updating packages and rarely do a complete upgrage of my machine. Couple of days ago I did a complete upgrade of system which updated my Thunderbird to latest version and throwing of enigmail plugin for using their native openPGP support. There is a blog from Mozilla which I should’ve read earlier. Thunderbird’s builtin openPGP functionality is still in experimental, atleast not ready for my workflow. I could’ve downgrade to version 68. But I chose to move to my secondary MUA, mutt. I was using mutt for emails and newsletters that I check twice in a year a so.

So I started configuring mutt to handle my big mailboxes. It took three evenings to configure mutt to my workflow. Though the basic setup can be done in less than an hour it is the small nitpicks consumed much of my time. Currently I have isync to pull and keep mails offline. Mutt to read, msmtp to send, abook as the email address book and urlview to see the links in mail. I am still learning notmuch and virtual mailbox ways to filter.

There are ton of articles out there to configure mutt and all related things to it. But I find certain configs very hard to get. So I will write down those.

As a long Thunderbird user, I still want my mailbox index to look in a certain way. I used;
```
 set date_format="%d/%m/%y %I:%M %p"
 set index_format="%3C | %Z %?X?@& ? %-22.17L %-5.50s %> %-22.20D"
```
This gives following order - serial number, various flags (if there is an attachment, it will shows ‘@’), sender, subject and to extreme right there will be date and time (12h local) of mail
If use nano to write mails you can use
```
set editor="nano --syntax=email -r 70 -b"
```
to get 70 char length and mail related syntax highlighting

mutt has a way to make new mail notification. The new_mail_command can be used to execute a custom script upon new mail, such as running notify-send. There are many standalone mail notifier such as mailnag, mail notification etc. It all just felt bulky for me. So I ended up making these.

#!/bin/sh
accounts="$(awk '/^Channel/ {print $2}' "$MBSYNCRC")"
for account in $accounts; do
     acc="$(echo "$account" | sed "s/.*\///")"
     new=$(find "$MAILBOX/$acc/Inbox/new/" -type f -newer "$MUTT/.mailsynclastrun" 2> /dev/null)
     newcount=$(echo "$new" | sed '/^\s*$/d' | wc -l)
     if [ "$newcount" -gt "0" ]; then
             for file in $new; do
             # Extract subject and sender from mail.
             from=$(awk '/^From: / && ++n ==1,/^\<.*\>:/' "$file" | perl -CS -MEncode -ne 'print decode("MIME-Header", $_)' | awk '{ $1=""; if (NF>=3)$NF=""; print $0 }' | sed 's/^[[:blank:]]*[\"'\''\<]*//;s/[\"'\''\>]*[[:blank:]]*$//')
             subject=$(awk '/^Subject: / && ++n == 1,/^\<.*\>: / && ++i == 2' "$file" | head -n 1 | perl -CS -MEncode -ne 'print decode("MIME-Header", $_)' | sed 's/^Subject: //' | sed 's/^{[[:blank:]]*[\"'\''\<]*//;s/[\"'\''\>]*[[:blank:]]*$//' | tr -d '\n')
             displays="$(pgrep -a Xorg | grep -wo "[0-9]*:[0-9]\+")"
                     for x in $displays; do
                             export DISPLAY=$x
                             notify-send -i $MUTT/mutt.png -t 5000 "$account received new message:" "$from: <i>$subject</i>"
                     done
             done
     fi
done
touch "$MUTT/.mailsynclastrun" 

And hooked to mail_new_command. This code snippet is from lukesmith’s mutt-wizard, I barely modified to meet my need. Currently it only look in to ‘Inbox’. I need to modify to check other mailbox folders in future.

So far, everything going okay.

Cons

some times mbsync throws EOF and secret key not found error.
searching is still a pain in mutt
nano’s spell checker also check things which I am replying to.

More to come

Well for now I moved mail from part of the Thunderbird. But Thunderbird was more than a MUA to me. It was my RSS reader, calendar and to-do list manager. I will write more about those once I make a complete transition.

Workstation setup

Sat, 18 Jul 2020 04:37:00 +0000

Hello,

Recently I’ve seen lot of people sharing about their home office setup. I thought why don’t I do something similar. Not to beat FOMO, but in future when I revisit this blog, it will be lovely to understand that I had some cool stuffs.

There are people who went deep down in the ocean to lay cables for me to have a remote job and I am thankful to them.

Being remote my home is my office. On my work table I have a Samsung R439 laptop. I’ve blogged about it earlier. New addition is that it have another 4GB RAM, a total of 6GB and 120GB SSD. I run Debian testing on it. Laptop is placed on a stand. Dell MS116 as external mouse always connected to it. I also use an external keyboard from fingers. The keys are very stiff so I don’t recommend this to anyone. The only reason I took this keyboard that it is in my budget and have a backlit, which I needed most.

I have a Micromax MM215FH76 21 inch monitor as my secondary display which stacked up on couple of old books to adjust the height with laptop stand. Everything is ok with this monitor except that it don’t have a HDMI point and stand is very weak. I use i3wm and this small script help me to manage my monitor arrangement.

# samsung r439
xrandr --output LVDS1 --primary --mode 1366x768 --pos 1920x312 --rotate normal --output DP1 --off --output HDMI1 --off --output VGA1 --mode 1920x1080 --pos 0x0 --rotate normal --output VIRTUAL1 --off
# thinkpad t430s
#xrandr --output LVDS1 --primary --mode 1600x900 --pos 1920x180 --rotate normal --output DP1 --off --output DP2 --off --output DP3 --off --output HDMI1 --off --output HDMI2 --off --output HDMI3 --off --output VGA1 --mode 1920x1080 --pos 0x0 --rotate normal --output VIRTUAL1 --off
i3-msg workspace 2, move workspace to left
i3-msg workspace 4, move workspace to left
i3-msg workspace 6, move workspace to left

I also have another Viewsonic monitor 19 inch, it started to show some lines and unpleasant colors. Thus moved back to shelf.

I have an orange pi zero plus 2 running Armbian which serve as my emby media server. I don’t own any webcam or quality headset at the moment. I have a boat, and Mi, headphones. My laptop inbuilt webcam is horrible, so for my video conferencing need I use jitsi app on my mobile device.

Debian packaging session

Tue, 01 Oct 2019 04:37:00 +0000

Hello web,

Last week I conducted a workshop on Debian packaging at MES College of Engineering, Kuttipuram in accordance with Frisbee 19, yearly conference by IEEE cell of this college. Thanks to Anupa from ICFOSS who contacted and arranged me to take this session. I was accompanied by Subin and Abhijith from FOSSers. The time span was from 9:30 AM to 04:30 PM. Since it was a big time slot we took from the Free software evangelism –> GNU/Linux –> Debian –> how contributing to community projects can help your career.

Subin introduced Debian history, philosophy and release processes to the students. I started with a hello world program packaging and later to ruby gem packaging with gem2deb. Abhijith helped students who got stuck while packaging. At the end of the session we did a small quiz and gifted them with debian stickers and conference merchandises.

Thanks to the volunteers for setting up the prerequisites.

DebUtsav Delhi

Tue, 02 Apr 2019 08:24:00 +0000

Hello.

Three weeks ago I attended DebUtsav-Delhi organized by the Debian and free folks in North India.

Debutsav-Delhi is the third edition of its kind. Initially Mozilla Delhi backed the Debutsav-delhi when they pitched the idea but later they withdrew for some reason and just became a supporting member. I must say Debian India events are happening frequent now. Some years ago in India Debian hang around with other FLOSS events. Now its DebUtsav giving chance to other FLOSS people to meet around Debian.

As the usual way of DebUtsav, this one also was two day event with separate track for Debian related talks and for general FLOSS talk. I gave a talk about Debian LTS project. On first day evening some speakers and organizers gathered for dinner.

Its funny that most of the Debian people gathered there were contributing/contributed to Ruby and JavaScript team . There is a strong reason for that. All the contributors to Debian from India after 2014 were branched out from a single person who do mostly Ruby and JS - Pirate Praveen. You can expect a blog post from him about Debutsav. He is contesting in upcoming Lok Sabha Elections and quite busy with that.

On second day there were talks from SFLC - Digital Security and Privacy. Srud conducted a interactive session with topic Gender diversity in FLOSS projects. We reserved afternoon sessions for Bug Squashing Party and introducing packaging tutorial to newcomers. All together it was a wonderful gathering. I also met isaagar whom with I have corresponded in matrix a lot but finally able to meet him IRL.

Special appreciation to Hamara Linux for sponsoring the event.They are becoming the de facto sponsors of every Debian events in India.

I am Debian Developer now

Wed, 19 Dec 2018 14:45:00 +0000

Hello World !

I am a Debian Developer since November 28. When I joined Debian in 2015. I didn’t had any plans to became a DD. Back then my contributions were uploading screenshots to the screenshots.debian.net and I mainly done this to escape from boring college lab projects (my most respected teachers, sorry).

Fast forward to 2018 many things changed in my life and Debian played a good portion in it.

A time line will be good.

In middle of 2014 - Introduced to Debian
January 2015 - Made my first contribution
July 2015 - First ITA submitted (cortina)
July 2015 - Got a beautifully written demotivating email
July 2015 - Learned packaging with the help of Pirate Praveen and balasankarc
September 2015 - Joined Ruby team, first ruby package
October 2016 - Became Debian Maintainer
Janury 2018 - Joined LTS, security team
November 2018 - Became Debian Developer

FOSSASIA experience

Thu, 05 Apr 2018 06:54:00 +0000

Hello Everyone !

I was able to attend this years FOSSASIA summit held at Lifelong Learning Institute, Singapore. Its a quite decent sized, 4 day long conference filled with lot of parallel tracks that cover vast areas from fun tinkering things to huge block chain and data mining topics (which I consider as big topic). Way too much parallel tracks that I decided to attend less talk and meet more people around the venue. The atmosphere was very hacker friendly.

I spend most of my time at the Debian booth. People swing by the booth and they talked about their experience with Debian. It was fun to meet them all. Prior to the conference I created a wiki page to coordinate Debian booth at exhibition which really helped.
I met three Debian Developers - Chow Loong Jin (hyperair), Andrew Lee 李健秋 (ajqlee) and Héctor Orón Martínez (zumbi). Andrew Lee and zumbi also volunteered at Debian booth from time to time along with Balasankar ‘balu’ C (balasankarc). Hyperair was sitting at HackerspaceSG booth, just two booth across from us.

All in all it was an amazing conference. I want to reach out to the organizers and thank them for FOSSASIA.

Singapore

Singapore is a beautiful city with lots of tourists and tourist attractions. All places are well connected with public transport system. People can reach every corner of Singapore with Metro trains and buses. you can find huge variety of food in Singapore. Stalls serving light meals and restaurants are everywhere. On top of that you can find stores like 7-eleven where you can get instant noodles and similar stuffs. Anish (a Debian contributor, also friend of me and balu from kerala who now lives in Singapore) taught me how to use chopsticks :). I also brought home a pair of chopsticks as souvenir that came with my lunch.

My Laptop

Fri, 30 Mar 2018 08:32:00 +0000

My laptop is an old used Samsung R439 that I bought for around Rs 12000/-(USD 185) from a local store when I was in second year in my college. It have a 14” screen, 2GB of RAM, a Pentium p1600 processor, and a 320GB HDD.

Recently it started showing performance issues like loading applications take a while and firefox freezes. I quite fond of this laptop and have some emotional attachment for it. I was reluctant to buy a new one but the same time I need the VT-x (virtualization) feature that my pentium p1600 lacks. So I chose to upgrade it from the ground. The hard part of upgrading is to find a compatible processor for the board. My friend Akhil Varkey whom I met during a Debian packaging session helped me to find a processor that suits my board. I bought the suggested one from Aliexpress, cause I found it cheaply available. I disassembled and installed new processor myself. During disassembling I totally destroyed two screws(stripped) including the holes :(. Now I need to be more careful when carrying laptop around. I already have changed my laptop battery and keyboard couple of months after I bought it. I will be upgrading RAM and hard disk soon.

Going to FOSSASIA 2018

Wed, 14 Mar 2018 12:43:00 +0000

I will be attending FOSSASIA summit 2018 happening at Singapore. Thanks to Daniel Pocock, we have a Debian booth there. If you are attending please add your name to this wiki page or contact me personally. We can hangout at the booth.

Swatantra17

Wed, 31 Jan 2018 13:49:23 +0000

Its very late but here it goes..

Last month Thiruvananthapuram witnessed one of the biggest Free and Open Source Software conference called Swatantra17 . Swatantra is a flagship triennial ( actually used to be triennial, but from now on organizers decided to conduct in every 2 years.) FOSS conference from ICFOSS. This year there were more than 30 speakers from all around the world. The event held from 20-21 December at Mascot hotel, Thiruvananthapuram. I was one of the community volunteer for the event and was excited from the day it announced :) .

Current Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan inaugurated Swatantra17. The first day session started with keynote from Software Freedom Conservancy executive director Karen Sandler. Karen told about safety of medical devices like defibrillator which runs proprietary software. After that there were many parallel talks about various free software projects,technologies and tools. This edition of Swatantra focused more on art. It was good to know more about artist’s free software stack. Most amazing thing is through out the conference I met so many people from FSCI whom I only know through matrix/IRC/emails.

The first day talks were ended at 6PM. After that Oorali band performed for us. This band is well-known in Kerala because they speak for many social and political issues. This make them best match for a free software conference cultural program :). Their songs are mainly about birds, forests, freedom and we danced to the many of the songs.

Last day evening there was kind of BoF from FSF person Benjamin Mako Hill. Half way through I came to know he is also a Debian Developer :D. Unfortunately this Bof stopped as he was called for a panel discussion. After the panel discussion we all Debian people gathered and had a chat.

Debian {Developers, Maintainers} in Kerala

Tue, 02 Jan 2018 09:42:23 +0000

We have three Debian Developers and two Debian Maintainers here in Kerala.

Debian Developers

Balasankar C (balasankarc)
Praveen Arimbrathodiyil (j4v4m4n)
Ramakrishnan Muthukrishnan

Debian Maintainers

me :) Abhijith PA (bhe)
Sruthi Chandran (srud)

I haven’t met Ramakrishnan Muthukrishnan yet and not sure whether he is still in Kerala. But I know rest of them. We always meet on almost all FOSS conferences in Kerala.