Why I Decided to Take Stewardship of "TrueCrypt"
For many privacy-conscious people, the name "TrueCrypt" is more than software. It carries weight. And how it folded is still one of the internet's great unsolved mysteries. Some background, briefly. I
Chris McGimpsey-Jones 🏴☠️👻
Ground Zero
Latest articles
H-Linux: Building an Operating System, Not Installing One
There is a temptation within the Linux community to compare one distribution against another. In truth, many distributions share the same foundations, with their differences often coming down to packa
Building VPN Server Galaxy: Scraping and Parsing 9,000+ OpenVPN Files into a Searchable Web UI
I really didn’t set out to build a VPN server observatory. All I actually wanted was a clean, searchable reference for VPN exit nodes across three providers — AirVPN, ExpressVPN, and NordVPN. All thre
Making a Dynamic System Application Menu for Blackbox-hwm — The Right Way
For years, people have said that Openbox menus can't really be dynamic. They're half right. Openbox was never designed for runtime mutation of its menu tree. There's no native live API, no hot-reloadable menu graph, no reactive hooks. Most attempts t...
H-Linux Preview Updates: Blackbox-hwm, XLibre, Reverse Cache Sweep Execution, and More
In my first blog post introducing H-Linux to the wider community, I accidentally omitted something important. As it turns out, that omission was fortuitous—I didn't realize I'd embark on an intense 72-hour development sprint that would give me plenty...
H-Linux Preview
H-Linux isn't the first custom Linux distribution I have embarked on developing. Previously, I had launched Nest Linux and its upstream sister build NEXT Linux. Both ultimately lost momentum because I got lazy and embarked on a project not out of lov...
When Your Package Manager Breaks: Why Linux Needs True Redundancy
In all the years I’ve been working with Linux (and breaking it), I think I’ve only truly broken the fundamentals of a package manager once—maybe twice, at most. Yesterday, I did it again. A long time ago I managed to break APT beyond any reasonable s...
Rediscovering the Internet Through Libraries
As I delve deeper into academia for my studies, I feel like I’m making so many discoveries about information accessibility that it’s as if I’m rediscovering the internet all over again. And it’s not just online—I’ve also been rediscovering access to ...
Ephemeral Sandboxes and Trusted Authentication: Rethinking Application Security
It's amazing how sometimes when you just stop, take a step back, and do some thinking—or in some cases stop thinking altogether—you can manifest an epiphany when it comes to creation. I started working on a new experimental form of something I refer ...