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Jonas Voss

Jonas Voss

Jonas Voss

Jonas Voss

How I Quit Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and Amazon

Interesting article on what steps to take to ditch the services of the big five. Spoiler alert, ditching them all is doable but not straightforward.

Jonas Voss

@KVBeats Congrats on the release my friend! To everybody reading this, checkout KV's "The Breadwinner" - solid trueschool hiphop with some great appearances on the mic. It's on Google Play Music, Spotify, and you can get it on vinyl as well over here: https://www.fatbeats.com/products/kvbeats-the-breadwinner-lp

Jonas Voss

It looks like the Data Portability Project site got hacked. At least Google thinks so (https://i.imgur.com/ZN03g7S.png). Either way, the wiki that should hold all the info about the project, is unreachable. @chrissaad do you know what happened?

Jonas Voss

Jonas Voss

Jonas Voss

HP Chromebook x2 Shows Up With 3000×2000 Display

This looks like a very promising competitor to the Google Slate. I might prefer having a ChromeOS based device, rather than an Android Based device.

Jonas Voss

Mario Cart in Google Maps today

Mario Cart in Google Maps today

To celebrate the anniversary of Mario, you could turn your arrow in the navigation into Mario Kart.

Jonas Voss

If it's a longer post, I rarely compose directly in the CMS, and never in Known.

I typically type up my posts in an editor (anything will do really), and save the file in a folder that I keep on Google Drive. I normally don't format a lot of my text, so that makes it easier. It would be marvellous if I could get Markdown to work with Known though, because I'm familiar with that, and that would allow me to compose no matter which application I'm typing up the content.

Jonas Voss

Migrating from LastPass to KeePass

4 min read

I've been a LastPass Premium user for a couple of years, and I've really enjoyed it. It's a good product, very user-friendly, and the apps are well-done. I've been wanting to switch to another password manager for a while, due to security concerns. Plenty of compromised cloud companies out there, and LastPass might as well be next.

Over the last few days, lastpass has been down, or running a suboptimal service for many users, including myself, and since my last attempt at renewing my LastPass Premium subscription was declined by my bank for some reason, I figured now was as good a time as any, to make a move to something else. 

I've dabbled a bit with Master Password App, which is a stateless password manager. I really like the idea, but then what do I do with all the logins and secure notes I already have stored in my lastpass vault? I don't see a simple way of storing those in Master Password. My alternative then was down to a stateful password manager, and here's where KeePass comes in. KeePass is an open-source password manager from the 00s. Initially for Windows, but ported to a staggering variety of platforms, most likely including the one you are reading this on. It saves its content in an encrypted database, which you can then stick on a server, and get access to it through as many apps as you like.

Getting your vault out of LastPass

I wanted to export my Lastpass vault, and import it into some form of Keepass port. Here are the steps I followed:

  1. Logged into Lastpass on the web, clicked on "More options" and selected "Export"
  2. Saving the resulting page doesn't help you at all, so you have to select the content of your now unencrypted lastpass vault, and paste it into a text file (any empty document in an editor will do)
  3. Save that text file and give it the extension .csv

Getting your vault into KeePass

The next step was to get my LastPass csv-vault into a KeePass database format. It turned out finding an app that supports direct import of plain csv-files was not so easy (most required XML files), but in the end I managed to find one called KeePassXC which accepts csv-files. Handy. Alternatively, if you can't find one that will import csv-files on your platform, you can use lastpass2keepass.py to convert the .csv-file to XML, which will then hopefully work for you.

Once imported, you will have a kdbx-file, which is the encrypted KeePass database, and somewhere along the process you have to create a password for the database-file. Think of it as your master password from LastPass, the one password that gives you access to your vault. Need help picking a good password?

Putting your file where all your apps can access it

Obviously you can keep the file on your local device, being laptop or phone or wherever you'd like it to be, but the real value from password managers are when they are available to you whenever you need them, which means to stick them somewhere on the internet. The benefit of Keepass is that you can stick it on a bunch of different services. Dropbox and Google Drive seems to be the most commonly used, but if you have one, you can also host the database file on your own server, and access it via sftp. You simply upload the database file to a place on your server, and it's then dependent on the app you use, if it supports sftp.

Mobile and web apps and Chrome browser extension

I'm mainly an Android and ChromeOS user, and for Android there's a number of options. I ended up going with KeePass2Android Password, and that does the job for me. If you need access to the file from a computer that is not your own, you can use KeeWeb, and point that to where your file lives (easiest if you have it on Dropbox or Google Drive).

For Chrome (and thus ChromeOS), there's an extension called CKP - which provides you with readonly KeePass password database integration for Chrome. You simply point it to your file, type in your master password, and you are away. 

An IndieWeb Webring 🕸💍

Jonas Voss