Category Archives: Computers

A video and audio calls alternative with XMPP/Jabber

Computers, , , ,

Maybe you are using video or audio calls with Signal, WhatsApp or something else which is based on a centralized server and usually from the US of A.

And maybe you are interested in some more digital sovereignty or just curious for alternatives.

XMPP does exist since a long time (1999) and was previously known as Jabber.

Maybe you’ve never heard of it but I believe XMPP is still relatively popular in Germany.

With the current Geo-political tensions in the world it might be interesting for some people to be more in the drivers seat then before when it comes to digital dependencies and maybe also slowly move towards using more open source software.

I’d like to split blog posts into :

  1. Using XMPP with Conversations app or Monal app.
  2. Self-hosting, looking at Snikket and briefly at Yunohost.

Let’s start with the by far easiest, nummer 1.

For Android users, go to the Conversation IM site and click on Buy now on GooglePlay.

Yes, even though the Conversations app is open source, the developer Daniel Gultsch has chosen to go for paid support for the project (And that serves him well since years). I think the app is quite cheap.

For F-Droid users the app is free of charge. The overview page is here (Note : recommended to install it via F-Droid app).

After Conversations app is installed, open it and sign up for a free account at conversations.im which is the default choice it will auto-suggest after you started typing your preferred username. So you won’t have to type that in.

For Apple iOS users, install Monal IM app, open it and sign up for a free account at conversations.im which is the default choice it will auto-suggest after you started typing your preferred username. So you won’t have to type that in.

When this is done you would first start a text chat conversation with the person you want to chat with. Now comes a slightly tricky part : If your contact is on a different XMPP server then it is possible that video or audio calls will not work. The XMPP server needs to support that feature. So let’s assume your contact also has a free account on conversations.im.

Start the text conversation and say “hello!” to your contact, and ask your contact to reply to your message. After you’ve exchanged some words you should see a green lock icon besides the exchanged chat messages.

After this start a video or audio call.

Nice feature : during the call you can minimize the video window with Conversations on Android and then for example look up something on your phone that you needed during the call. Haven’t tested whether Monal can do that as well.

Read more ?

On Conversations

On OMEMO (whether any other XMPP app does support OMEMO or not)

 

A little Linux “commandlinefu” fun to share – for geeks & nerds

Computers

Let’s imagine that you wanted to make Proton Drive work in Linux because the people from Proton only appears to provide Proton Drive apps for MacOS, iOS, Windows and Android. And you found this blog post Sync Proton Drive on Linux with Rclone and you went ahead without reading all that carefully first and created a new folder

~/ProtonDrive

Then after reading some more (and you see that you need to first configure rclone), you realize you were pretty tired already and wanted to do other things, including this wonderful thing called sleep.

And you think “Let’s remove that new folder” so I will not be distracted by that tomorrow when I’m busy with other computer things.

You type in :

rm ~/ProtonDrive

And you get an error because it is a directory and the rm command needs more powers from you to be able to remove a directory.

Now instead of getting annoyed and wanting to remove all that you had typed in, you can simply add the needed “minus rf” to what you already typed, so it will look like this :

rm ~/ProtonDrive -rf

You see ? Linux can often be very flexible.

And how do I know this ? I liked to experiment and do crazy things in the past, e.g. testing whether little Linux tools would use -h or –help and whether –hel would also work and for some tools it turned out it really DID. Now that I’m a bit older I don’t do that anymore (jk).

I mentioned commandlinefu in the title, here’s a site only about real commandlinefu :

https://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/browse