mediocrelabs.net

Hi, I’m Antonio Aguilar

Just a mediocre hacker with delusions of software engineering.

freetail links linux troubleshooting web

  • The Beauty of Links

    You wouldn’t browse the web from the command line would you? Well, today I found yet another reason to.

    Paywalls.

    We all hate them. I get it, companies want to be paid for their products. But do I really need to sign up for a subscription to see one article I am interested in? You would think big news outlets would figure out a way to use micro-transactions to allow a-la-carte access to articles by now. Nope.

    And that’s where Links comes in.

    Links is a command line web browser, and as it doesn’t support JavaScript, websites using JavaScript to block users may not be able to. At least in my testing you can bypass some paywalls. I suspect there might be other uses for that too, but I’ll leave it to your imagination. Just don’t do anything illegal with it.

  • Farewell to Freetail – For Now

    Well, it turns out I only have time for a single project at a time. I’m putting Freetail to the side for a moment to focus on a different project I’ve wanted to complete first.

    Stay tuned.

  • July 12, 2024 Freetail Update

    This update is pretty small, thanks to life stomping on my development plans. I removed the “save” and “open” buttons from the settings page since I plan to move that functionality to the main menu. I also finally got around to creating the latest Windows build. Just out of curiosity, does anyone know why Microsoft makes it so hard to develop any non-Microsoft produced languages on Windows? Asking for a friend…

  • July 2, 2024 Freetail Update

    Today’s update is very small. I just added a very small tweak to the Requests screen in Freetail. Now after you send your first request, if you navigate away and then back to the screen it should retain your last values in the target, headers, and body fields. This update was applied to the Linux build. I’ll add it to the Windows build soon as well.

  • Logos

    Just a small note to point out that I’m using a new logo. My oldest kid, Lila, makes amazing logos and I’m happy to use the new one she made for me. It matches my name perfectly.

  • June 30, 2024 Freetail Update

    I made a big update to Freetail Beta version today. There were a few aesthetic things like a new icon that my oldest child made, but I also fixed a number of “undocumented features” in the requests, tested with a vulnerable API to ensure it was sending JSON properly, and fixed one little usability issue in the encoding and decoding screen. I plan to try to create a Flatpak release of the Beta version soon and release to Flathub. In the meantime though, there’s now a Windows release!

    Yes, I built a Windows version. I’m not sure why but I did. I also added dark and light icons to the release folder along with the Windows build.

    Freetail welcome screen
    Freetail encode/decode screen with menu showing

  • Fixing web-kit issue with online-accounts in Linux

    OK, so this isn’t a usual post for me. This has nothing to do with Freetail (my little web and API testing tool I’m building). But I’m a Linux user and have been frustrated with Gnome Online Accounts lately. Judging by the number of other posts I see out there about it, others are too.

    For those who’ve seen it, lately web-kit seems to be hanging when trying to authenticate to Google after entering your credentials. This screen will just hang and you won’t get prompted for MFA.

    So the solution I found here was to simply right click and refresh the screen. Serious. That’s all you have to do. Hopefully this helps one of my fellow Linux nerds out.

  • June 21st, 2024 Freetail Update

    A new version of Freetail (still in Beta) is out. I found another “undocumented feature” with headers and fixed that, as well as updating the landing page. That’s all!

    Also I may migrate my website soon so there might be a small glitch in the page in the next week or two. Otherwise I’ll keep pushing out new versions of Freetail until I feel it’s ready for a proper release, and then on to the next project which is already in the works.

  • June 13th, 2024 Update

    I discovered an “undocumented feature” with setting custom headers and it’s fixed. Freetail now also contains a string matching feature in the Requests screen. You can specify a string for the application to look for in the response body, and if the string is found that will be reflected in the information bar above the response body area.

    The match will is also reflected in the logs screen.

  • June 10th, 2024 Freetail Update

    Today’s update is pretty small. I’ve added support for PATCH and DELETE methods in the Request screen. I mistakenly thought that the Dart library I was using for HTTP requests didn’t support PATCH, and hadn’t added the back-end functionality for DELETE while still having it as an option, but both have been added now.