Raspberry Pi 4 Dinner

October 29, 2020

A friend of mine is really into using their Pi for personal computing. They’re also really into privacy and security. It is kinda great considering their career isn’t technical. It’s impressive stuff and makes a nice change to hear someone be genuinely concerned about passwords.

They use a Pi so why can’t i?

This morning I had a RaspberryPi 4 sitting around at home. Installed on it was Raspian Lite which is a terminal-only version of Raspberry Pi’s Linux variety.

Despite all the great benefits of a terminal, I think a GUI will be needed if I intend to do things like visit websites and write code.

Side note: I’ve just noticed my hand is going a little numb due to the position of my arm against the desk.

From Lite to GUI Raspian

First of all I had to “upgrade” out of Lite and get the GUI. There are a few options, but I just wanted the simplest and least-hassle. I followed the tips at raspberrytips.com to make this dream a reality:

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade
sudo apt install raspberrypi-ui-mods
sudo apt install lightdm
sudo apt install xserver-xorg
sudo reboot

Most or all of the things were already installed. After reboot I found that I had to run sudo raspi-config and edit System Options > Boot / Auto Login. I set this to Desktop AutoLogin (SCARY).

After I changed this, a quick reboot proved that I now jump directly to the desktop.

It’s important to get the basics set up quickly on a new machine. For me this is:

Install a 1Password client
Login to GitHub
Write a new blog post (yeah that’s this, and this is a joke)

1Password CLI

I have bitten the bullet. After many years of wondering what it would be like. I have finally gone in and done that thing and gone with CLI-only for 1Password.

Until I’d put about 3000 commands through the thing I wondered if I had totally missed the point. Basic use cases are hard to achieve first time around. I’ll try and summarise those important ones now, for me in the future.

Login

This is all you need to login. Obviously if you’re not using my.1password.com then you’ll know about that. Otherwise, go wild. This single command is all you need.

eval $(op signin my.1password.com)

Search

This was not immediately obvious to me when I started. I was looking around for the truth, then I realised that they have really handed over all the logic to jq. That is pretty smart.

Install jq:

sudo apt-get install jq

Then you probably don’t remember the exact names of the items in your vault, or the UUIDs, I certainly don’t. If that is the case you want to make use of the contains() function of jq to find your stuffs.

Follow that with a command to get the actual password.

op list items --vault Personal | jq '.[] | select(.overview.title | contains("Github"))'
{
  "uuid": "123123123123123123123123",
  "templateUuid": "001",
  "trashed": "N",
  "createdAt": "2000-01-01T08:00:00Z",
  "updatedAt": "2020-09-10T07:16:38Z",
  "changerUuid": "345345345345345345345",
  "itemVersion": 8,
  "vaultUuid": "45646456456456456456456456",
  "overview": {
    "URLs": [
      {
        "l": "website",
        "u": "https://github.com"
      }
    ],
    "ainfo": "matthewcanty@gmail.com",
    "ps": 84,
    "tags": [
      "imported 17/10/2016 10:39"
    ],
    "title": "Github",
    "url": "https://github.com"
  }
}

op get item 123123123123123123123123 --vault Personal | jq -r '.details.fields[] | select(.name == "password") | .value'

Ask me about adding or editing items. I haven’t got the muster to write about it now. Also if you get this far, you can probably manage… hint op create item Login --help

pbcopy / xclip

I’ve found one thing particularly annoying compared to Mac.

On a Mac there is the handy cmd button. With this button I can do copy & paste commands in the terminal. Perhaps someone can tell me how to do this on Raspian. I’ve always also liked pbcopy which is useful for seamlessly sending piped output to the clipboard on Mac.

echo "hello!" | pbcopy
# then go and cmd+p somewhere

On this occasion I opted for xclip (sudo apt-get install xlip). I’ve never used it before, but I was immediately disappointed at how verbose the basic command is:

xclip -sel clip

How am I meant to remember -sel and clip in the heat of the moment. I know I won’t. So it’s time to add my first function to this machine. I created ~/.functions and added it to my .bashrc with echo "source ~/.functions >> ~/.bashrc"

In ~/.functions I added:

clip() {
  xclip -sel clipboard $1
}

Now I can just | clip to my hearts content. In fact I used it just now to to copy that last code snippet (cat ~/.functions | clip)!

Self-Documenting Awesome History

I thank Martin Kiesel forever for this tip. Just use fzf.

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/junegunn/fzf.git ~/.fzf
cd `~/.fzf`
./install

Now in the terminal ctrl+r becomes this wonderland of things you once knew but can never remember. You do not need to remember anymore.

SSH Keys

Remember everyone. New SSH key for each machine. Private means private. For the machine, not for you.

Make it strong, sure it takes longer, but what else did you have planned for those 3.8 seconds?

ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096 -C yourName@email.address

Set a password. Make it 64 characters and very complicated. Put the password in 1Password.

It is safe. Do not worry about it. Log in to you Github account or wherever you need that SSH key and plop it in to start coding.

cat .ssh/id_rsa.pub | clip

All done

Who did I write this for again?