July 2, 2020
I debated installing ‘firefox-esr’ since Qutebrowser just wasn’t working with YouTube’s sign in page at all. It turns out that the dumb blanket error message they give when you try logging into YouTube with Qutebrowser, “you’re using “a browser […] that doesn’t allow us to keep your account secure” is totally a lie.
They just want more control over your browsing experience to monitor your viewing habits, and to make ad revenue, plain and simple. This is explained more in detail within the following workaround found here from Qutebrowser’s GitHub page: https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/issues/5182
Here’s the workaround you have to use within Qutebrowser itself to make it work with YouTube’s Google Sign-In page: :set -u https://accounts.google.com/* content.headers.user_agent ‘Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:57.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/57.0’
What does this workaround do?
From the looks of it, it utilizes a Mozilla based agent that makes it seem like you’re using a Mozilla based browser to Google, when in reality, you’re still using Qutebrowser.
What does this prove?
Don’t depend on Google for anything. I literally only login to maybe check related content to see if there’s anything else cool within the Linux YouTuber scene these days to add to my RSS feed list. However, like most based Linux users nowadays, I mostly just download videos from RSS feeds from Newsboat with ‘youtube-dl’ to be later viewed with ‘mpv’ anyway because streaming videos is a waste of internet bandwidth, time, energy, and patience.
Just in case you’re one of those people stuck into the “Oh, but I NEED Google for things like Gmail, Google Drive” etc, then you need to read these blog posts and wake up to an improved user experience for better alternatives: https://www.kylepiira.com/2020/01/09/why-i-quit-google/
Also, here are better ‘Gmail’ alternatives, or even ‘Outlook’ for that matter since I despise Microsoft as well: https://tutanota.com/ https://protonmail.com/ https://posteo.de/en
I personally have used ‘Fastmail’ so far, and I like it a lot. However, for good things come a price, so even though its not free like all of these other email clients where YOU are the product, it does give me a little peace of mind at least. The middle tier plan they have is $50 a year, and seems worth it. If not, I’ll probably just host my own email server later on a VPS next year if I don’t like it, but I’ll keep it for now: https://www.fastmail.com/login/
Regarding ‘searx’: Oh man, what a fail this was too.
Why is it that every deployable web app just does NOT work nicely with Ubuntu 20.04? This is the second fail I’ve had this week since the first was Jitsi Meet which just did not play nicely with Ubuntu 20.04 + Apache running this site.
Now, after a few hours of trying, I just could not get Searx to work at all.
It was so frustrating because they changed literally EVERYTHING about their installation process within a month of Luke Smith’s video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oufXi3e-VuA
This makes his recent video absolutely useless in comparison. Even though there are installation scripts, its just mindboggling how nice and easy the installation process was a month ago via the instructions on screen on Luke’s video vs the current mess that exists: http://asciimoo.github.io/searx/admin/installation-searx.html
I DID however find a guide on how to deploy this on the Raspberry Pi, but this would be for a local instance, and not necessarily a public instance for people in my family unfortunately: https://raspiblog.noblogs.org/post/2018/01/27/installing-searx-with-apache-and-morty/
Let’s just say I am not going to be attempting deploying another web app for family any time soon. I would be more inclined for changing the entire backend of this website to ’nginx’ instead of Apache2, which I aimed to do at some point anyway, so this is probably just a lesson to never use Ubuntu as a server basis, and to finally overhaul Apache with ’nginx’ instead.
The only thing I’d have to recreate is the bare Git repositories I created earlier, but that can ALWAYS be re-done.
Anyway, moving on to more positive things and projects, and will just label this as another attempt I guess. The best way to learn is to fail, so I plan on just moving on.