ROllerozxa
I'm a university student currently studying software engineering as well as an open source developer. You may know me as the project maintainer of Principia or for my contributions to Luanti (formerly Minetest).
This is my site where I write about what I do and about whatever else interests me, in the case that someone else finds it interesting.
Wanna read more about me or about what I do?
Latest blog posts
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TOTP - The most misunderstood 2FA method
Time-based one-time password (TOTP), RFC 6238, is an authentication method commonly provided as a means of 2FA for many services. It is a great alternative to other 2FA methods such as SMS.
It is unfortunately also very misunderstood due to the common misconception that it requires a phone or a proprietary app, but the algorithm is fully open and the process to generate a code does not depend on any external sources other than the fabric of time itself.
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Uninstalling system apps on Android with ADB (No root required)
If you've ever owned a couple Android devices you're definitively familiar with the kind of pre-installed system "bloatware" apps that may come with it from your manufacturer. Or maybe you're lucky and only get the base Google apps, or sometimes even that is too much for you.
Rooting your Android device usually makes you able to write to the system partition and delete system apps, but as time has gone on rooting has come with more headaches than the niceties it used to give you. While there are some that still choose to root their Android phone for the freedom it gives, a lot of us who may have done it in the past no longer do so just for the peace of mind of not having to deal with apps that check the device's "integrity".
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Managing your Android storage with SSHFS
As you're on your phone you may be downloading memes, files, taking pictures, writing notes and whatnot. But after a certain point you'd want to go through these and move anything you want to keep to your computer since let's face it, your phone is not for permanent storage.
This blog post shows you how to mount your storage so you can manage it from your computer using SSHFS by running an SSH server on your phone, as well as the motivation for why I manage my phone's storage this way rather than other traditional methods one may otherwise use.
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El Telco Loco
When developers need to put placeholder strings or values in code, they tend to be very creative in what they come up with. Sometimes it may be obscene and cause issues for their company when it eventually shows up in binaries or released source code. But most of the time it is nothing more than an amusing joke, maybe an inside joke in the development team with a backstory.
Such was likely the case with El Telco Loco, a fictional mobile operator that used to exist as a placeholder name in Android, and was inadvertently exposed to users through a peculiar turn of events.
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The Line Ending Wars - Carriage Return
This is an amusing story about line endings. Originally written as a post for the Voxelmanip Forums, extended and improved as a post on this blog.
Carriage Return, also known as CR, also known as
\r, also known as0x0D, is the bane of every developer working on both Unix-like and Windows systems, as well as the bane of every web developer working with forms. -
Installing Let's Encrypt certificates on old versions of Android
If you have tried to use any older Android device running Android Oreo 7.1 or below, you might have noticed insecure connection errors when trying to access websites in the browser, or Webview boxes in apps that show a blank page. The problem you are running into is likely that the site uses Let's Encrypt for their HTTPS certificates, who began dropping support for Android 7.1 and below in February of 2024 as a result of dropping the certificate that provided compatibility for older versions of Android.
While there are alternative browsers such as Firefox that bundle their own CA store and will still work without any further configuration, you can also manually install the missing certificate to make websites function again without security warnings in all apps that rely on the system's CA store.