Deleted Podcast Show

April weather over in Sweden - a couple of degrees and windy. Building a porch for my Dad.

Last week I talked about DNS - and I have also mentioned my Email-project even if I haven't done a deep-dive into it yet. Related to both of these are SPF and DKIM. 

SPF - stand for Sender Policy Framework - this is a policy you can set that will hinder spammers  and scammers from sending email as you. 

It is a short text string that you can add to the DNS for your domain. Mainly three sections - SPF-version, allowed ip-ranges and what should happen if not a match. 

IP-ranges means which mail-servers that are allowed to send email for the domain. That should only be your email-providers domain. The policy or what should happen can be everything from do nothing - to block. The harder you set this rules the less spam will be sent and impersonated as your domain. 

This works by receiving email servers checking the SPF-records before accepting an email - spam filters can also use this data and score unmatched records higher if block is not on. 

DKIM - stands for DomainKeys Identified Email - it reminds a lot of SPF but takes it a bit further. 

Also with this standard you enter a text message into your DNS. This time it contains a bit more information - but the important part is a public key. This should be a key generated by the sender domains email-server(s). When sending email the email server will sign the message using the private key and receiving email server can then use the key in the DNS to verify that it was sent by an approved sender. 

This is a bit more technical to setup than SPF and it also requires that the email server supports DKIM-signing. 

DMARC - stands for Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance - this is the glue that ties it all together. 

In DMARC - again a DNS-text record, a policy can be defined what should happen when a message is breaking the SPF-policy or is missing or has a false DKIM signature. This can tell the receiving email-servers as an example to quarantine or block the message and also report back to a specific email adress. 

I am using SPF and DKIM - I have not yet setup a DMARC policy - it is probably something I should do together with DNSsec to improve my overall domain security. Are you using any of these techniques to stop spam and spoofing from your domain? 

The most common reason to not implement SPF or DKIM is not knowing that it exists or the belief it will be hard and risking the correct email to be rejected. Domains with good SPF and DKIM setup has a better chance to pass spam-filters since they are specifically configured to not allow uncontrolled senders. o the internet a service and set it up on your domains today. 

I hope you enjoyed todays episode of Martin Uncut. 

- Nothing like waiting for new toys - I was hoping my new NAS was arriving today - but no - not even shipped. 

- DNS - Domain Name System 

- PhoneBook of the internet translates human readable names (domain-names) to IP-adresses that can be used by computers. 

- It works like a tree - with root servers - top–domains - domains and hosts or subdomains. To find a name you traverse the tree (or the DNS-server you use traverses the tree).

- Caching is used to make the loads lower. 

- DNS is interesting since it old and built by trust - and today that is not very safe. 

- We can secure our DNS-data by signing it - hindering DNS-servers providing wrong information or spoofing DNS-names. 

- We can encrypt the DNS-querys increasing privacy. 

- Which DNS-server are you using - who can se what you access? Google? Your telco? 

- I have switched to use Quad9 - that provide a non-logging DNS-server to secure your privacy. You can also use their DNS-over-TLS or DNS-over-HTTPS solution to increase your privacy more. 

- Quad9 also have block-list that stops you from getting to malicious sites (optional). 

- Quad9.net

• Fun to be back - yesterdays episode (Ep 122) - was recorded at home in the closet, on my iPad, while taking care of my sick 3 year old. That explains the not ideals sound quality.
• Situation before I started this project
  • Office (or man cave) - old Linksys WRTG router. NAT.
  • Home - telco provided switch (technicolor) - had it for 6-7 years - never changed any passwords. Super slow
• At home I got a set of Netgate WIFI 6 router and satelites (from Dreves)
• Wanted to be able to connect with the network at the office remotely epecially since I'm planning to have statiotionary equipment there lika a computer and a NAS.
• NAT being an issue.
• Looked around and found pfSense (open source fw ).
• Wanted an applience - not a computer around - especially not at home.
• 2100, 3100/4100 and 6100 - choose the expensive one (because the amount of data it can push through)
• Probably over did it a bit - but atleast it will not dissapoint me
• One at home and one at the office
• Currently for firewall and routing and also a OpenVPN connection between the sites where I route traffic.
• Currently main use of that tunnel is to have access to my NAS from both directions. The NAS it not overly used since it is 10+ years old and I don't trust it to live - thus it will be exchanged very soon.
• How is it done?
  • Basic setup of the unit
  • Configure the interfaces
  • On the home unit - configured as an OpenVPN server with a preshared key
  • On the office unit - configured as an OpenVPN client
  • Home has a fairly static IP (same for at least 3 years now) - easy for the office to connect to that.
  • I also setup some watch dogs
• Problem with working when I was in the office - but stopped working as soon as I left. Pluggin out my laptop from LAN1 caused the interface go down and with that the network.
• What will I do
  • Changed DNS provider - setup a local resolver that will forward to Quad9. Local routing to push all DNS-traffic to the local resolver.
  • Setup a OpenVPN Server for road-warrior setup - this way I should be able to get to the office and the NAS/Computer from whereever I am and also from my iPad.
  • Additional security review and modifications - IDS and monitoring?
• What is my thoughts so far
  • I have used it for a month now.
  • Stable - hardware and software. Tunnel never gone down.
  • Insanly over powered for me
  • What would I have done differently - probably gone with the 4100 instead.

• The elefant in the room - let's go back to short more frequent episodes
• There has been a lot going on the last few months
  • Automations for handwritten notes
  • New Mac Studio is ordered
  • Firewall and VPN project
  • Privacy - changing email provider
  • NAS
  • And tons of other things
• Hugo - a static site generator
  • Static vs Dynamic
  • Pro: Speed - faster since no computation, just serving
  • Pro: Simplicity - server setup and components - focus on content, security
  • Con: Dynamic functionality - contact form, comments etc
  • Con: Harder to start
• Want to learn more - I'm currently preparing an online course
  • April 14th 7pm GMT+1 - English, no pre-registration needed - but get in touch to get the link.
  • Why: Love Hugo, Trying out some concepts related to course creation and setup

Todays episode is, again, not recorded in the studio. I am travelling but brought some stuff...

Todays topics will be:

1. The new project building a new podcasting studio
2. Moving away from Google
3. Important to empty your head

• What I have right now
• Why I want to change
• What I plan to do
  • Split the room in two
  • Create sound absorbation plates
  • Table to have the Microphones
• Requirements

• Talk about my last de Google Attempt ( 2019-06-11 - https://martinhaagen.se/ungoogleing-the-blog/)
  • Website
  • Tutanota
• This time
  • Leave all personal accounts - keep only company and potentially one for youtube
  • Protonmail - you can use external tools if you want (bridge app)
  • Migration process - DNS, SPF, DKIM, DMARK, MX (All in DNS), Import Emails and Labels from Gmail.
  • Migration of 700 emails - roughly 1hr
  • Två domains for my account.
  • Plan for other account (mbh.se)
  • Plan for Tutanota

I was in Italy for a wedding last week and there was something that really hit me.

When you travel to new places - you get a lot of new impressions (this doesn't have to be achieved by travel - meeting people, exercise, having a hobby) - this will make your brain associate and you will likely find new similarities and patterns. You will be creative. But if your head is already full with thoughts and things you need to remember. You don't have room and this will not happen as frequently.

Thoughts tend to come in the "wrong" place. In the shower. Batteries for the flash light when the power goes out. Bread when you are at work and the important task when you are at the store.

You may get great ideas but you loose them as fast.

Create a habit to quickly capture things and keep them outside of your head. Device tools and strategies to do it easily. I use

• Pen and Paper. Note taker wallet.
• IPhone voice recorder - standard app.
• Drafts - voice-to-text functionality.

Make sure to capture them and store that capture in a place you trust. You will need to come back to it and decide what it means to you and if, and if so, what to do with it.

This Episode was fully recorded and edited on the iPad Pro 11". The sound files was not modified at all outside of the iPad.

Three sections:

1. Editing a podcast using Ferrite on the iPad
2. Cal Newports book "Deep Work"
3. SMART goals 

Ferrite can be found in Apple AppStore.

Ep 53 - Mar 17 - Testing Hindenburg Journalist

The "Incoming Book Episode" - Ep 113 - Jun 16 - Incoming books

The Data Detective by Tim Harford - Ep 117 - Jun 28 - The Data Detective by Tim Harford

The show has a new format. Todays topic will be: 

1. Presentation of the new format
2. The iPad Pro 11", Magick Keyboard and what it can be used for.
3. Obsidian has been released for iOS for public use. 

Links to previous episodes mentioned in the show: 

• Ep 93 - May 17 - Moonlander has landed
• Ep 75 - April 20 - All out of Evernote
• Ep 103 - May 31 - 3 Obsidian plugins

Back in Ep 74 – April 19 – Working with emails I talked about an email application called MailMate. It is a small stand alone emailing application that I have been using for the last 2 and something months. Yesterday the trial ended – there must be something wrong with that counter since 18 of April to 28 of June is way more than 30 days. But I don’t complain.

Before I decide which app to use I wanted to try out some other ones as well. One of these are AirMail and that is what I will talk about today.

AirMail is a small Mac OS, iPad OS and iOS mail client. You can use it for free on iOS and iPad OS but to also use it on the desktop you need to subscribe. You get 3 days trial if you jump on a monthly plan. I did and my plan is now to run the application for two months as a trial.

As I have been talking about in the past, I have a lot of email accounts. I may not be getting so much email on them – but it is a pain to check them all. I usually do that with different browsers and different browser profile in Brave to keep the sessions (especially for Office 365) separated. I prefer to not be working with emails in the browser since I find my self to easily distracted.

I will be running the application on both MacOS and iOS – and the experience seems to be quite similar. Here are some things I find quite interesting with the applications:

1. Multiple Accounts

As many stand alone applications it is possible to add multiple accounts. I have added Google and standard IMAP accounts so far. It is left to also add a couple of O365 accounts (if allowed) so that I can a full email overview.

There is a few things here that I really liked. It will store the email account settings and sync them over iCloud. That means that it is super fast to setup the accounts on both my laptop and in my iPhone – the only thing I need to do is to authenticated since the password (or token) is not stored on iCloud.

It is possible to give each account a color. When you look in the combined Inbox it is super easy to see what email belongs to what account. A small but nice feature.

1. Smart Mailboxes

Just as with MailMate it is possible to setup smart mailboxes. And I use that to get an overview of what I have stored in my “Action Support” and “Waiting For Support” folders to quickly get an understanding of what I need to do or what I am waiting for. I talk a bit more in detail about this in Ep 74.

1. Nice looking UI

This is maybe not the most important feature for an application but it never hurts. It is a beautiful application. On both systems. The normal user interface is quite bare with only a few buttons and functions available. But it is highly configurable. This makes it really powerful. The down side is that the configuration pane is huge. So much settings.

1. Templates

Maybe not something I will use a lot on the Mac since I use Keyboard Maestro to do text expansion. But on iOS I probably will be using it more. Just as you would expect, you can create text templates that you insert into your emails. Save time and brain power to fix standard type of emails.

1. Editing

You have a range of choices to edit your emails. Both a HTML/WYSIWYG editor that seems nice and simple to use. But, if you want to, you can also create your emails with Markdown. This was one of the feature I really liked with MailMate – but I also realised most of my emails are quite simple and plain text will do fine. For me this isn’t a killer feature anymore.

1. Sharing

You can interact with a lot of applications from AirMail. The ones I will do to start off with is OmniFocus, DevonThink, Drafts and Bear. Probably in that order when it comes to how much as well. But there are many more application that it is possible to work with. The opportunities here are huge compared to MailMate. This works on both platforms.

This is still something I haven’t used too much yet so it will be great to understand how well it works in reality. One thing that is super interesting is to see if it manage to get “Deep-linking” between OmniFocus and AirMail – e.g. when linking a task to an email to find the references.

There is so many more features in here that I need to explore. I really hope it does work as well as it looks like and that it isn’t just surface.

The price for a month is just shy of $3/month or $10/year. And then you get a pro for all your devices. To use it on your MacOS desktop you must have pro. On your devices it work, but is limited, for free.

I will have an episode with a more in depth review sometime in august when I have gotten some mails through the system.

I hope you had a great weekend. I had a long one. One day extra makes it feel so much longer. Almost like you got two Sundays. I am a bit extra happy since yesterday I got my first covid shot. Yeah!

Last week I actually finished two different books. One of them is the The Data Detective by Tim Harford that I will talk about today. 

This books is a book a about statistics. But don’t worry, there is almost no math at all in it. When Harford was young – or at least younger, he read Darrel Huffs book “How to lie with statistics” and loved it. This is a classical book talking about how statistics commonly is being used by fraudsters and tricksters to manipulate people. Statistics has gotten a pretty bad name and Harford claims this has had negative consequences on peoples life and wellbeing. The fight to prove that cigarettes where causing cancer was one of these classical evidences. Harfords intentions with this book is to persuade the reader that statistics can be used to illuminate reality with clarity and honesty.

The book is split up in ten main chapters or the 10 rules. I personally don’t like when books are being split like this. Why is it always an even and nice number – wouldn’t it make sense to have 12 rules or 8?

I have studied quite a bit of maths at the university and statistics being one of the subjects. Thus a lot of the things he discussed was things that wasn’t anything new to me. But if you are less well versed in math I think it gives a pretty good insight into the world of numbers and what do matter.

The chapter that spoke most to me was the fifth rule. This was addressing survivorship bias and related to this publication bias. And how these two biases impact modern science and especially the softer sciences like psychology.

Harford talks in the book about research being done and we only see the result, the successful experiments. We don’t see what was done and didn’t work. This sometimes leads to what is called HARKing – it means Hypothesizing After Results Known. And it means that a scientist does his experiments – looks at the data and then makes the hypothesize – and it will then of course be true. It is nothing wrong looking at data and making hypothesizes – but they then needs to be validated using different experiments.

Daniel Kahneman, nobel laureate and author of thinking fast and slow, and others have been pretty vocal about the state of the science and especially the experiments done. It is a “Train Wreck” to happen. And these discussions has lead to scientist pre-registering their experiments so that HARKing becomes harder. There is also a global effort to retest well known experiments and trying to replicate them. This has in some cases lead to some corner stone research to be questioned when it wasn’t possible to be replicated. The Ego Depletion theory is one of these. But in this specific case the debate is still ongoing since it wasn’t the original experiments that where being replicated. It is quite interesting to follow the discussion and se how the research is done.

A second section I like was when Harford talks about illustrated statistics and this in the form of graphs. He here talks a lot about Florens Nightingale – the British nurse that brought hygiene to military hospitals and completely changed medical history. What many people probably doesn’t know was that she was a statistician and created one of the first really successful graphs that is called the rose diagram. This was specifically to illustrate the severe state in the military hospitals. And it really worked. She got her message through. Which is an extraordinary feat since she was a woman and succeeded in a heavily man dominated space. A great roll model.

I don’t think the book will change my life in any major way. I learned a great deal about statistics – especially linked to the scientific space. Most of the other areas he talks about was not, to me, any major news. But if you think statistics is an area held in shadow or potentially a bit magical. This is a great book to give you some guide lines and things to think about when you are approached with statistics: watch your feelings, be curious.

It has been a very busy week that has been different in many ways. Many reasons why I have not been releasing much the last few days. But after this weekend I hope I will be able to release regularly for at least a week before the summer holiday starts for real. But today I…

It has been a very busy week that has been different in many ways. Many reasons why I have not been releasing much the last few days. But after this weekend I hope I will be able to release regularly for at least a week before the summer holiday starts for real. But today I…