My name is Evgeny, I live in Moscow, Russia, work as a software developer, and no longer teach at a medical university. This is my website.

What can be found here?

  • Chiefly my blog,
  • but also some software I develop in my spare time,
  • as well as my reactions that I send webmentions from,
  • and various little things, such as
    • my PGP key for confidential messages
    • or links to my various accounts (under the picture above).
  • The Fediverse handle is @evgenykuznetsov.org@evgenykuznetsov.org, but RSS is a better way to subscribe.

Recent posts:

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As I have previously stated, voice messages are evil. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of evil in this world and it can hardly ever be eradicated so we should find a way to live with it. Fortunately, there’s no stopping the progress and the new tools can make the living a little bit more comfortable.

Yesterday I suddenly realized that on a modern phone whisper.cpp should run rather well, and one could perhaps make a convenient local tool to parse voice messages. Of course, I know that Telegram, for one, has this built in, but I don’t feel like paying for a subscription for this purpose only, and then again voice messages are not exclusive to Telegram. To a local tool, on the other hand, one could send voice messages from any messenger app (at least all the apps I use allow to “share” a voice message as an audio file).

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В этом году не то, что интернет — даже SMS отключили, а то вдруг чего. Бездельники в метро интересуются мало не каждым рюкзаком. Да и людей с автоматическим оружием на улицах сильно больше, чем комфортно.

Боятся. До дрожи в коленках боятся Великие Победители праздновать Великую Победу.

Хорошо, что дед не дожил: ему бы было больно на всё это смотреть.

How Not to Configure Your Mail Server

As I reported earlier, I run my own email server; I still do. The server is fine, and I keep using it for my personal mail. I also have a “server” at home, and that server has been serving mail for even longer. I chiefly use it for outgoing mail — the automatic notifications my various computers generate — but it also serves as a backup MX for my main email server, so the SMTP port is open to the Internet at large.

Most discussed:

Trusting the Digital Assistants

There are things that are nice and interesting to do, yet there are things you’d rather not spend your time and effort doing. People are different, and my categorization may not match yours, but on average, there are a lot of things in today’s life that one would like to delegate to some extent. Hiring a person or a team for this is something very few of us can afford, but technical progress gives some hope to wide audience, too.

Leveraging IndieWeb to Avoid Storing Others' Data

Owning your own data is great. I’ve been using this website as the central IndieWeb point of my online life for over five years, and I love it. However, the joy of owning your own website comes bundled with great responsibility: as the website owner, I am responsible for what’s on my site and for what’s stored “under the hood” to make this website work.

It’s not a huge issue as long as I only post my own content on my site, but the cool thing about the IndieWeb — as opposed to “regular” Web — is its social aspect, the ability to interact with other people running other websites. To do that I usually need to put some of the data that belongs to other people onto my website. And that always makes me uncomfortable.

Namecheap Is Silencing Anti-Putin Voices in Russia

Russian users are receiving letters from Namecheap stating they have until March 6 to transfer their domains to another provider.

For pro-regime users, it’s a nuisance, of course. Not a major one, though, since the pro-regime Russians tend to have their domains in the .ru zone, and have them registered at the Russian providers.

Anti-regime users, including bloggers, foundations, and other organizations, on the other hand, need to have their domains registered abroad, and have no other choice. Roskomnadzor, the Russian communications watchdog (serving as the censorship agency for the regime) is blocking anti-Putin publications left and right, and has, on numerous occasions, subpoenaed the domain registrars based in Russia to stop providing services to those violating the Russian regulations1.

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Felt like giving @Fastmail a try, got “internal error” trying to register. Now their server thinks my domain is already registered, so I can’t give it a second try. Looks like they have enough customers without me. OK, any other hoster worth trying?