Abhijith PA | അഭിജിത്ത് പി എ

Patience could've saved me time.

Tue, 28 Apr 2026 06:33:00 +0000

If I had been patient, it would have saved me time. One such instance is following.

From my early blogs, you might know I am using mutt to do email. Just after I get along with mutt, I started using notmuch. Because limit search in mutt is always a pain when you have multiple folders. And what better tool out there than notmuch-mutt to bind both these.

notmuch-mutt provide three macros by default.

macro index <F8> \
"<enter-command>set my_old_pipe_decode=\$pipe_decode my_old_wait_key=\$wait_key nopipe_decode nowait_key<enter>\
<shell-escape>notmuch-mutt -r --prompt search<enter>\
<change-folder-readonly>`echo ${XDG_CACHE_HOME:-$HOME/.cache}/notmuch/mutt/results`<enter>\
<enter-command>set pipe_decode=\$my_old_pipe_decode wait_key=\$my_old_wait_key<enter>" \
      "notmuch: search mail"
macro index <F9> \
"<enter-command>set my_old_pipe_decode=\$pipe_decode my_old_wait_key=\$wait_key nopipe_decode nowait_key<enter>\
<pipe-message>notmuch-mutt -r thread<enter>\
<change-folder-readonly>`echo ${XDG_CACHE_HOME:-$HOME/.cache}/notmuch/mutt/results`<enter>\
<enter-command>set pipe_decode=\$my_old_pipe_decode wait_key=\$my_old_wait_key<enter>" \
      "notmuch: reconstruct thread"
macro index <F6> \
"<enter-command>set my_old_pipe_decode=\$pipe_decode my_old_wait_key=\$wait_key nopipe_decode nowait_key<enter>\
<pipe-message>notmuch-mutt tag -- -inbox<enter>\
<enter-command>set pipe_decode=\$my_old_pipe_decode wait_key=\$my_old_wait_key<enter>" \
      "notmuch: remove message from inbox"

One for search, one for reconstructing threads and one for manipulating tags, which I missed.

Now my impatient part. I have already mapped f6 for my folder movements and in my initial days of notmuch, I only use just search. So I never cared about the f6 macro provided by notmuch-mutt. As time goes by I got very comfortable with notmuch. I was stretching my notmuch legs. I started to live more on notmuch search results date:today tag:unread than more on the mutt index. To the problem, since notmuch-mutt dump all results to a temp maildir location, can’t perform flag changes back to the original maildir which was annoying, because we need to distinguish what mail you read and what not when you subscribed to most of all debian mailing list.

I was under the impression that, the notmuch-mutt is not capable of doing so and I just went like that without checking docs. I started doing all crazy hack to sync these maildirs.

I even started reading notmuch-mutt codebase.

Later, I settled on notmuch-vim. Cause I can manipulate flags sync back from notmuch to maildir.

And while searching for something, I accidentally revisited the the the notmuch-mutt macro page and saw the tag manipulation. I was like :( .

If I read about the third macro patiently when added that to config, I could’ve saved time by not doing ugly hacks around it.

I think I learned my lesson.

Removing spams from your local maildir

Wed, 23 Jul 2025 08:26:00 +0000

I have been using Disroot as my primary email ever since openmailbox.org stopped. I am very grateful for Disroot’s service and I occasionally donate to them.

Recently, my Disroot inbox has been flooded with spam. On an average day, I used to receive around 90% spams on entire email count. However, the situation has improved since then. I contacted the Disroot team, and they informed me that they are aware of the situation and planning to migrate to Rspamd from Spamassassin.

I don’t know whether they deployed Rspamd, even if so that only going to process incoming mails, I am looking for a way to identify spams and purge that are already entered my Imap folders.

Later I found this script nh2/rspamd-move[1], which seems fit my need.

I made couple of trivial changes in the script for my use case. I wasn’t sure of directly running this on my Mail/ dir, so I cloned my entire local mail directory to another directory and made available to podman container where the script and rspamd instance exist. I trained rspamd from the /Spam. Later, I manually moved couple of mails to /spam folder/. I requested friends to share their spam folder in the #debian-in channel, but that didn’t happen :P

$podman run -it --mount
type=bind,source=/home/abhijith/$MAILS/,target=/container-mail-clone
id:latest
$script.py

(It took some time since I have around 10000+ emails)

Wow, it was quite a successful attempt, I was able to catch most of it and move to spam/ and couple of false positive in a different folder. Now I want to do the same in the actual maildir yet very skeptical. While going through the cloned folder with mutt -f I remembered that the mails are already indexed by notmuch.

So all I need to do is operate tagging and deletion with notmuch and it will be synced back to the original mail dir. Ta-da. I cleaned by Inbox.

[1] - https://github.com/nh2/rspamd-move

Bug squashing party, Kochi

Fri, 09 May 2025 16:46:00 +0000

Last weekend, 4 people (3 DDs and 1 soon to be, hopefully in coming months) sit together for a Bug squashing party in Kochi. We fixed lot of things including my broken autopkgtest setup.

It all began from a discussion in #debian-in of not having any BSPs in the past in India. Then twisted in to hosting a BSP by me. I fixed the dates to 3rd & 4th May to get packages migrate naturally to testing with NMUs before the hard freeze on 15th May.

Finding a venue was a huge challenge. Unlike other places, we have very limited options on hackerspaces. We also had some company spaces (if we asked), but we may have to follow their office timings and finding accommodation near by was also a challenge.

Later we decided to go with a rental apartment where could hack all night and sleep. We booked a very bare minimal apartment for 3 nights and 3 days. I updated wiki page and sent announcement.

Not even Wi-Fi was there in the apartment, so we setup everything by ourselves (DebConf style :p ). I short listed some newbie bugs, just in case if newcomers joined the party. But it was only we 4 people and Kathara who joined remotely.

We started from May 2nd night, stacked our cabin with snacks, instant noodles and drinks. Arranged beds, tables and started hacking and having discussions. My autopkgtest-lxc setup was broken. I think its related to #1017753, which got fixed magically and now I started using autopkgtest-podman.

I learned

reportbug tool can use its own SMTP server by default
autoremovals can be extended if we pinged to the bug report.

On last day, we went to a nice restaurant and had food. There was a church festival nearby, so we were able to watch wonderful procession and fireworks at night.

All in all we managed to touch 46 bugs of which 35 is now fixed/done and 11 is open, some of this get status done when it reaches testing. It was a fun and productive weekend. More importantly we had fun.

A lazy local file sharing setup

Mon, 01 Jul 2024 06:42:00 +0000

At home, I have both a laptop and a *desktop PC. Most of my essential things, such as emails, repositories, password managers, contacts, and calendars are synced between the two devices. However, when I need to share some documents and I am lazy enough to go pick a flash drive, my only option is to push them to the Internet and download them on the other system, which is sitting at 20~ meters away. Typically, I do this either through email attachments or a matrix client.

Occasionally, I think about setting up a network storage solution at home. But then I ask myself do I really need one.

In my home network, I already have a Raspberry Pi running as my Wi-Fi router, doing DNS level ad blocking with Dnsmasq and DNS over TLS with stubby. Rpi has a 16GB memory card. I can mount RPi remote directory to both machines.

I use pcmanfm as my file manager. It has the ability (like every other file managers) to mount remote storage over ssh. But one annoying thing is that whenever I open the mount directory, by default it shows the root file system of the remote device even when I explicitly mentioned the path.

Then I discovered sshfs. I wrote the following script, which mount remote directory and open that in pcmanfm.

#!/bin/bash
LOCMOUNT="/home/user/Public"
sshfs raspberrypi:Public $LOCMOUNT
pcmanfm $MOUNT

I haven’t enabled any encryption for the memory until now since other than some logs RPi wasn’t writing anything to it. I set up fscrypt on Rpi storage now. And ta-da, a lazy person’s local sharing solution.

*Desktop - Well, technically it’s an old laptop with a broken keyboard and trackpad, connected to a monitor, keyboard and mouse. I don’t feel keeping it on a shelf.

abhijithpa.me to abhijithpa.in

Sat, 22 Jun 2024 06:33:00 +0000

I let go my domain abhijithpa.me. It was getting expensive and I don’t fancy that anymore. I never actually purchased this domain but came with a package offer. I then kept it for couple of years.

I have now bought a new domain abhijithpa.in and pointed everything to it.

So if you are seeing abhijithpa.me with lot of contents, that is no me. Its either domain squatters or someone impersonating me.

A new(kind of) phone

Fri, 09 Feb 2024 10:53:00 +0000

I was using a refurbished Xiaomi Redmi 6 Pro (codename: sakura . I do remember buying this phone to run LineageOS as I found this model had support. But by the time I bought it (there was a quite a gap between my research and the actual purchase) lineageOS ended the suport for this device. The maintainer might’ve ended this port, I don’t blame them. Its a non rewarding work.

Later I found there is a DotOS custom rom available. I did a week of test run. There seems lot of bugs and it all was minor and I can live with that. Since there is no other official port for redmi 6 pro at the time, I settled on this buggy DotOS nightly build.

The phone was doing fine all these(3+) years, but recently the camera started showing greyish dots on some areas to a point that I can’t even properly take a photo. The outer body of the phone wasn’t original, as it was a refurbished, thus the colors started to peel off and wasn’t aesthetically pleasing. Then there is the Location detection issue which took a while to figure out location and battery drains fast. I recently started mapping public transportation routes, and the GPS issue was a problem for me. With all these problems combined, I decided to buy a new phone.

But choosing a phone wasn’t easy. There are far too many options in the market. However, one thing I was quite sure of was that I wouldn’t be buying a brand new phone, but a refurbished one. It is my protest against all these phone manufacturers who have convinced the general public that a mobile phone’s lifespan is only 2 years. Of course, there are a few exceptions, but the majority of players in the Indian market are not.

Now I think about it, I haven’t bought any brand new computing device, be it phones or laptops since 2015. All are refurbished devices except for an Orange pi. My Samsung R439 laptop which I already blogged about is still going strong.

Back to picking phone. So I began by comparing LineageOS website to an online refurbished store to pick a phone that has an official lineage support then to reddit search for any reported hardware failures

Google Pixel phones are well-known in the custom ROM community for ease of installation, good hardware and Android security releases. My above claims are from privacyguides.org and XDA-developers. I was convinced to go with this choice. But I have some one at home who is at the age of throwing things. So I didn’t want to risk buying an expensive Pixel phone only to have it end up with a broken screen and edges. Perhaps I will consider buying a Pixel next time. After doing some more research and cross comparison I landed up on Redmi note 9. Codename: merlinx.

Based on my previous experience I knew it is going to be a pain to unlock the bootloader of Xiaomi phones and I was prepared for that but this time there was an extra hoop. The phone came with ROM MIUI version 13. A small search on XDA forums and reddit told unless we downgrade to 12 or so it is difficult to unlock bootloader for this device. And performing this wasn’t exactly easy as we need tools like SP Flash etc.

It took some time, but I’ve completed the downgrade process. From there, the rest was cakewalk as everything was perfectly documented in LineageOS wiki. And ta-da, I have a phone running lineageOS. I been using it for some time and honestly I haven’t come across any bug in my way of usage.

One advice I will give to you if you are going to flash a custom ROM. There are plenty of videos about unlocking bootloader, installing ROMs in Youtube. Please REFRAIN from watching and experimenting it on your phone unless you figured a way to un brick your device first.

Running Debian on my phone

Fri, 30 Jun 2023 17:53:00 +0000

You might have already read my blog titled ‘Running PostmarketOS on my phone’. After running pmOS on phone, my mind kept talking “run Debian”. So I started preparing for that.

At the moment no straight way tool exist in Debian like postmarketOS’s pmbootstrap. Well I can compile what is already available, do debootstrap rootfs. But I don’t know how to build the final image that can be flashed from recovery.

One crooked idea I had is, extract the pmOS image, find the packages and its configurations. For eg: usbmodem package in postmarketos are configured to connect to host network when plugged.

I deboostrap’ed the rootfs, compared with postmarketos and installed extra packages and copied configuration. I repacked and compressed to new image. Then flashed with twrp.

The phone was booting. So I connected the usb cable and run,

ssh abhijith@172.16.42.1

abhijith@172.16.42.1's password: 
Linux arm64 3.10.107-Cherry #1-postmarketOS SMP PREEMPT Sat Dec 18 13:08:52 UTC 2021 aarch64

The programs included with the Debian GNU/Linux system are free software;
the exact distribution terms for each program are described in the
individual files in /usr/share/doc/*/copyright.

Debian GNU/Linux comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY, to the extent
permitted by applicable law.
abhijith@arm64:$ 

Yay!. I have a working Debian phone. I quickly installed lxde and that is working perfectly.

Attending FOSSASIA 2023

Sat, 29 Apr 2023 06:53:00 +0000

I attended FOSSASIA 2023 summit held at Lifelong Learning Institute, Singapore. A 3 day long parallel talk filled conference. Its my second time attending FOSSASIA. The first one was 2018 summit. Like last time, I didn’t attend much talks but focussed on networking with people. A lot of familiar faces there. PV Anthony, Harish, etc.

I vounteered to run Debian Booth at the exhibition hall distributing stickers, flyers. Rajudev also helped me at the booth. Most of the people there used debian or its derivates or know debian already, its easier for me that way, that I don’t have do much explaining compared to other booths. Thanks to Parth for looking after booth in my breaks.

Sometimes our booth also act as cloak room :). Ours was close to the entrance door and we may be similar faces to folks. So people come and drop their bags before they go to talks.

One thing I love about the such conference is that people have very different hardwares that I never able to see otherwise. I remember KDE booth had a Steam Value portable gaming board running KDE plasma. Then a person have this eyeglass which act as a monitor. Then the usual DJI drones but custom programmed. It was very lovely to meet and play around with exotic hardwares.

Kurian whom I met during a Debian packaging workshop in Kerala was a speaker at FOSSASIA. He presented a talk titled “OpenAI Whisper and it’s amazing power to do finetuning”. I was his unofficial PR guy, taking pictures :).

Weather

Clear sky, little hot and humid. The weather was quite nice for me except the surprise rain and small thunderstorms. Comparing to my place’s temperature, its wonderful.

Running PostmarketOS on my phone

Thu, 15 Dec 2022 09:53:00 +0000

Couple of weeks back I installed PostmarketOS on my idle phone Leeco Le 1s , which was paper weight for some time now.

It all started with a roadtrip to Pondicherry (I will soon write about this trip). As I was sitting on the front seat where Praveen’s Librem 5 kept charging on the car dashboard. And we had a small discussion about PostmarketOS and how much new ports are available now.

My idle phone came to my mind. After reaching home I started setting up porting pmOS to this device. Going through pmOS website, to my surprise there is already a port for this device.

The OEM unlock is quite easy even though a little hiccup at begin (I suspect it is solely of my cable). The Xiaomi users knows the pain of unlocking bootloader.

With the pmOS community preferred practice of using pmbootstrap, I built image for my device, flashed it. And phone boot stopped with pmOS logo. I thought I went to bootloop. I tried sxmo, xfce4, everything same nothing happening after boot logo splash.

The pmOS troubleshooting wiki is quite good. They have documented most issues. Though screen is stuck I can still ssh to the phone. From wiki I came to know its a screen refresh problem. I installed msm-fb-refresher package and ran it as a daemon.

Voila, I have a mate desktop.

Mate desktop is not at all touch friendly even though I tried to scaled up to read and tap things on the screen. Wiki suggest xfce4 is little more touch friendly. I started moving to xfce. Then again same problem, stuck at boot loop.

This time it was with lightdm, I turned off CanGraphical issue warning and now I have xfce desktop. pmos xfce seems great comparing with mate.

Nothing works as of now from a Mobile phone point of view. The phone maintainer says the battery is working, but I couldn’t get it working. Its always in battery mode and 50% status.

I thought the hardware buttons will never work. But with xev, I can see the hardware key event triggering.

Laptop refreshment

Tue, 04 Oct 2022 09:53:00 +0000

(Sorry if you have read this already, due to a tag mistake, my draft copy got published)

I recently bought a refurbished thinkpad x260. If you have read my post of my previous laptop. Its a big jump from 1 gen Intel processors to 6th Gen.

I really love my old laptop. In fact I am actually writing this from my old laptop. Its OK for my day to day task. But its not convenient to carry around when I am travelling.

I was thinking a lot of buying a new machine. But always end up not because of how much minimal hardware ports and how hard for normal users to open it for usual maintenance. But during Debconf22 someone made fun of my laptop, he mentioned its more of a printer than a laptop. And there I decided get a new machine.

Thinkpads always fascinated me. Look sturdy, more I/O ports, nice keyboard and easy to open up for usual maintenance. But I never arrived on which model should I pick. Lenovo has only limited number of models available in India and with right specs, its way out of budget for me. I was planned for taking a liberated.computer. But should I go again to old model. Then I decided to get something little more recent. I know Marhaba computers from whom I already bought a thinkpad for my brother.

Deciding to pick X260 took around an evening. I have bugged a lot of my friends especially Kiran. I might’ve have made him mad because of how much back and forth I asked questions to him regarding this. Finally we arrived at X260.

I chose the minimal storage and memory as I will be changing that anyway. So mine had 320GB SATA HDD, DDR4 4 GB memory, Intel i5 6000 , 6th gen processor. I have a 120GB SSD lying around. I quickly swapped it with stock HDD and installed Debian. More memory will be loaded soon.

cons

Resolution is 1920*1080 and scaling seems very small and it started to give me a hard time for my eye. So I decided to adjust it.

abhijith@Adebian  cat .Xresources
Xft.dpi: 120%

I was using libinput drivers for the trackpad. Turns out it was horrible for my model. So I decided to move back to synaptics.

So far I haven’t decided on full transition. So its my travel laptop for mail, IRC, RSS, matrix reader/client.