sahal

Speed up Anna's Archive Downloads

• Visit Open Shadow Library Uptime Monitor for latest links to Anna's Archive "📚 The largest truly open library in human history."

Gather links

• Visit the slow partner links to gather the slow download URLS

Create a .meta4 file in the following format

sahal

export subscriptions.csv

Visit Google's Takeout site to download your youtube subscriptions.

run convert.sh

• Note: This depends on GNU date to output the correct date format. I don't use BSD utils, so YMMV. You might want to update the date line to a hard coded value (e.g. Mon, 02 Mar 2026 14:37:58 -0600, though I don't think it matters.)

chmod +x convert.sh

sahal

notes

Software: lighttpd 1.4.79 on Debian 13

This could be used on other distros with some modification.

Not sure what the service names for lighttpd are in your particular distro. Also, www-data is the group in debian that runs the lighttpd daemon, it might be different in your particular distro.

Add redirects from users home directory

I want to be able to manage 302 or 301 redirects from my home directory

sahal

Backup your Public and Private Gists

Use bash+curl+github api to download your gists. Gists are not exported when you Download your account data via export, unfortunately.

For more details check out the documentation on REST API endpoints for gists and gist comments

Token

Get your fine-grained personal access token. Make sure you have access to gists.

sahal

Google voice short code analysis

I'm trying to move away from Google products but one I have yet to move away from is Google voice. I have found an alternative, yay: voip.ms. During the transition though, I do not want to lose any shortcode based two factor authentication. I wish all services provided TOTP, but alas this is not the case, unfortunately.

Grab a dump of your Google voice data

sahal

Why Linphone?

• Sources are freely available online (GPL'd)
• https://gitlab.linphone.org/BC/public/linphone-android
• Can install from F-DROID and Play Store

UPDATE: 2026-03-21

I am totally against using Linphone on Android (or Linux for that matter).

sahal

Using Joplin More Securely

I recently watched a digital security training and I learned a few things about the software that I use on a day to day basis. One of the links listed for further readings included this link Beyond pen and paper: Secure note-taking apps for journalists.

Joplin has geo location information enabled by default and sync is not encrypted end to end by default.

sahal

Clean up PDF metadata two ways

Using exiftool and qpdf

(not recommended)

$ cp output.pdf output_test-1.pdf
# When using clean_pdf_metadata_v1()
$ pdf-clean.sh output-1.pdf

sahal

My / (i.e. root directory) on my system is 25GB and I intend to keep it only 70% full.

Here are some strategies to do that. Some of the strategies might be useful on other distributions too.

Avoid using / for cache

Package Cache

Keep your pacman/AUR helper cache outside of the root disk

sahal

PocketCasts makes it hard to migrate

Why are you doing this?

😮‍💨 PocketCasts will save "starred" podcasts in your device storage -- but not let you access them. I want more control over my podcasts than PocketCasts gives me, so I'm probably moving away from using this app.

Before I migrate away, I want to create an archive of saved podcast episodes. Unfortunately, unless you have PocketCasts Plus (which has