Mikaela

Photo of meMikaela Suomalainen

I am a Highly Sensitive Autistic Pirate with Linux experience from 2008. I am familiar with git and unemployed.

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 All my self-introductions also always feel like they are outdated the next day.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.

Development

I am mostly active on GitHub, but many projects also have their own instances and reqeuire separate registrations. During the "panic" of Microsoft buying GitHub, I started mirrorring some repos to Blesmrt's Gitea while not personally being bothered by it.

Forums

Instant messengers

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.

Misc

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.