Random Notes

Viewing posts for January 2016.

Use WhatsApp via Your IRC Client with BitlBee


NOTE 2016-09-21: It seems whatsapp-purple has been abandoned by its maintainer. So the things in this guide may stop working over time, and your mileage may vary. This guide is left here for posterity.


Perceptive readers may know that I use a Jolla as my phone. This places quite a few restrictions on what programs can be used on it. For WhatsApp I used to use a native application called Mitäkuuluu by coderus. Unfortunately at some point the program was discontinued, the official Android® version did not run well on the phone and the whole thing was a hassle. So I searched for an alternative way of using WhatsApp, since it has some people I would have trouble contacting otherwise. Since my IRC client is always running (on my server) and is something I check often, I looked into what BitlBee had to offer. I got a setup working and decided to document it for others.

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Automating Let's Encrypt with simp_le

Let’s Encrypt is the new free, automated and open certificate authority, that I talked about in a previous post. The part that I’m focusing on in this post is automated. Let’s Encrypt is all about automating the certificate request and renewal process, and they encourage this to the users by offering a good client – and by only giving out certificates with a maximum of a 3 month validity.

I’m not good at remembering things months down the line, especially if I have to deal with multiple different subdomains. That’s why I wanted to automate my certificate renewal process.

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