Recently I've been helping out with a fork of mmsd (located here) since MMS is, unfortunately, a crucial thing I need working on a phone in 2021. Anyways, one of the painful things about hacking on mmsd is that receiving a MMS for testing is a manual process. The simplest way to get an MMS is to ask a friend to send you one. Or perhaps purchase a second SIM to use in a second phone to send yourself one. After a while, your friends, family, people you just met, etc will stop responding to your requests to have them send you a MMS. Before you know it, you're sneaking off with your partner's phone while they are sleeping so you can get some work done. This is rock bottom.

Well, the previous attempt to solve this problem was a bust, for the following reasons:

• The template only applied to new mails, not replies
• The round trip thing where messages had to get filed on the server, then pulled down again by mbsync was slow and annoying

Update:

See part 2 for a better solution.

Original post:

I recently moved to using aerc for email after using mutt (and then neomutt) for some number of years. Today I decided to go beyond a simple maildir for organizing mails locally, and use the notmuch backend for aerc. I use neomutt + notmuch for $dayjob, so I'm no stranger to creating tag 'rules' and searching, etc. What I was unprepared for is that aerc does not care about sent mails after pushing them to smtp. Contrast this to mutt and it's record setting that will save sent mails to some configured location.

One interesting change from Purism recently was to enable something called "ship mode" on the Librem 5's USB charge controller chip. Ship mode causes the chip to cut all power to the rest of the phone, solving the problem of the phone completely draining its battery even when it is "off." This mode is enabled by setting some bits in certain registers on the chip, and should only be enabled on shutdown and not on system reboot. This is key, since their script enables ship mode with a delay... if it's enabled on reboot then power to the phone will be suddenly cut off when the phone is booting back up.

I purchased a Garmin Edge 130 last year to use for recording cycling trips, one of the main reasons for choosing this device was that it didn't require any special/proprietary software for accessing recorded activities or adding tracks. When the device is plugged into a computer via USB, it shows up as a mass storage device! Perfect!