As you may have noticed, my site is now secured by Let’s Encrypt. They’re an EFF-backed org who provide free certs to encrypt. There’s still plenty of fine tuning to do still, but it’s pretty simple to use so I’m not concerned. In the first place, I’m not familiar with the practicalities of using encryption on my server, so there’s still plenty to learn.

About a year ago, I played so much LLSIF that the earphone jack on my phone broke. The jack is right where I hold the phone and I guess it didn’t appreciate the constant pressure. At the time I only just got the phone so I didn’t feel like returning it for fixing, so instead I bought bluetooth earphones. This proved to be a good choice, since a few months later I started going to the gym every day and not having to carry around my phone to have music is great there.

I bought Jabra Rox, and it’s working just fine to this day. Its batteries last for 2-4 hours depending on volume, which is sufficient for me as I mostly listen to music commuting and in the gym (which totals a little over 2 hours). The sound is all right too. There’s enough bass to satisfy me and the rest works just fine too.

I’ve been using Sony Xperia VLs ever since I switched to a smartphone, and so far I haven’t found anything that’d perform better. Most devices fail my very first test: don’t be fucking huge. With the VL’s 4.3″ display, I can barely just reach the top left corner of the screen with my right thumb – anything bigger counts as inconvenient.

Naver’s LINE is basically the mobile communication platform in Japan at this point. Teens aren’t sharing email addresses anymore, it’s their LINE usernames. Just a while ago, we had new recruits coming to the studio for training, and they’d all write down their names, phone numbers and LINE names.

Obviously I use it too. Thing is, it’s not so obvious how to use it on a computer. There is an official client for Windows that works, but there’s none for Linux. I hate writing long messages on my phone, so the effort of having to compile a Pidgin plugin for the LINE protocol is worth the effort.

It was quite an effort too, since I purged my system a while back, and I had no dev packages, or even git installed. Needless to say, it took almost an hour to get everything up and running. Most time taken by the Apache Thrift install, that would keep failing with C++ when using the 0.9.1 tarball, no matter what I did.

Luckily the git latest worked fine, and the plugin seems to work okay too at this point.