--- layout: index title: Index excerpt: "I am a Highly Sensitive Autistic Pirate with Linux experience from 2008. I am familiar with git and unemployed." ---

Photo of meMikaela Suomalainen

I am a Highly Sensitive Autistic Pirate with Linux experience from 2008. I am familiar with git and unemployed. My pronoun.is/she

I speak Finnish, English and a little Esperanto. I am currently learning Czech.



I am not good at talking about myself especially unprompted on my index page. Offline I will generally make a bad first impression, but the second impression will generally be better. All my self-introductions also always feel like they are outdated the next day.

As said I have used Linux since 2008, I begun with Ubuntu 8.04 and have used various other distributions after that, currently I am on Debian Testing, but I did also spend a long time with Arch. I am a bit of distro and DE-hopper, even if currently I am currently using i3 which is just a window manager.

What do I do? My time flies with learning (languages and there is always something new on ICT field) where autism may be a bit of help, I am Instant Messaging manager at Piraattipuolue (Pirate Party Finland) which possibly talks about my interest towards messaging platforms and in addition to their servers I run a VPS, even if automagic mostly takes care of everything, but as anything could happen keeping an eye on what is happening won't hurt in moderation.

I like setting up OSes to always get updates from the closest point and as everyone should encrypt everything, I also use https with apt no matter how much someone else might say that to be unecessary, needrestart is also helpful. I generally also run dnscrypt-proxy to encrypt DNS and have moved my internal connections mostly to Yggdrasil network having Tor onion services as a backup for SSH access. I always require key authentication.

The only traffic I am not encrypting is probably my WLAN. For some reason my router requires a reboot once per hour with WPA2 encryption while on open network I only have to reboot it once per day (I have asked about this confusing behaviour from wiser people on IRC and they weren't able to explain it either). I support the Open Wireless Movement and think that if someone really wanted to cause me harm, they could break into the network anyway and that would be more difficult to prove on consumer grade device than the network being open. There are firewalls on all networks and while a passerby would be able to observe unencrypted SNIs, isn't that also being done by international security agencies already while even Finland has given permission to monitor traffic crossing our borders ((TODO: better link in English as the situation develops)and how much of traffic doesn't do that?). I also don't like being somewhere where the only available WLANs are printers and smart thermostats :)


Around the web/contact

IndieWeb wishes this listing to exist on my index for cross-linking and IndieAuth, so here you go. You may also use the Verify-me browser extension to verify the bidirectional links with a single click, even if there are some false negatives due to services not supporting rel=me.

Development

Table of version control system hosts and similar services that I am on sorted alphabetically. I may be a bit more active in issue trackers, support channels and forums, but this list is diverse for decentralization (it's not a good idea if everyone is on the same commercial platform). I also feel like I should list even smaller single project hosts here in case there is overlap between them and Privacytools.io, because it's only fair that the people involved with those projects can verify that I am the same person as the PTIO team member.

Account on service It is My activity
Mikaela on Codeberg Gitea A free collaboration platform for researching, creating, archiving, and preserving knowledge, code, and to document its development process. -
Mikaela on Blesmrt Gitea Open Czech service which admin I know online and where my main XMPP account has ended up to. My personal repositories.
Mikaela on GitHub A big git host owned by Microsoft and following the US trade restrictions. Mostly on Privacytools.io and some other projects.
Mikaela on Frostnerd Gitlab Home of Nebulo DoT/DoH app for Android. Issue reporting for Nebulo.
Mikaela on Gitlab.com Possibly GitHub's biggest competitor, hosted on Google Cloud Platform and thus following the US trade restrictions. -
mikaela on Launchpad.net Ubuntu Linux's code host and bug tracker. -
Mikaela on Nixnet Gitea A public Gitea and other services host, one of the DNS providers that I use. -
Mikaela on Open HUB A measurer of project and commit activity, thus missing a lot of what I am doing. Partial overview of others.
Mikaela on Privacytools Gitea Mostly a mirror of Privacytools.io repositories. Gitea doesn't count mirrors towards user activity.

Forums

Instant messengers

I currently have only XMPP in autostart, because I have a policy of not autostarting Electron apps due to them including Chromium browser and thus being very heavy, especially if you run multiple ones. I cannot prioritize e.g. Wire and Signal, so I find it easier to start none. Another policy I have is keeping my email at 0 unreads, so it has became a way to hopefully reach me at least once a day at best. (In other news email is insecure and should be replaced with not-electron solution.)

Team chat

Team chats applications have a strange habit of being too heavy for my Nokia 1 and they are all Electron (see instant messengers above) or too distracting (IRC (to-be-listed, but mainly freenode and PirateIRC)), so I may not reply with them timely.

Misc

Social media

I am not very big social media user and may randomly switch the "primary" account. I prefer the idea of Hubzilla's nomadic identity, but I often find it too complicated and end up to Mastodon or Pleroma.

Wikis

Note: due to the natures of wikis, they can be edited by anyone (often even unidentified users), this section may not be very reliable or not reflect my views.