16 january 2018

New Year's Resolutions

They say encryption is hard

Encryption is hard. I've started and failed before. I had to revoke my keys so often, and just as often I've been unable to revoke them...

Anyway, I resolve to create and maintain the facility to send and receive email securely, that is, to use GPG effectively, with the public key published appropriately, with backups of the private key, etc.

Previous attempts have shown me that I am able to maintain systems that I use. If nobody sends me any encrypted mail and nobody receives any from me, then I won't maintain the system... I'll forget the passphrase, for example... Would anybody like to be my crypto buddy? I imagine that would mean that about once a month, I'd encrypt a message for that person and decrypt one they wrote for me. This is akin to workout buddies who compel each other to go to the gym, I suppose.

Meatspace

Speaking of the gym, I also resolve to quit smoking and lose some weight.

The fleet

I'm going to catch up on technical debt regarding my various machines. Why does metalbaby still run i3 when every other machine is running stumpwm now? Laziness, that's why. I resolve to clean up my fleet.

Old disks

I also resolve to continue my backup/archival work. That box of harddrives isn't getting any more compatible with readily available hardware. ...Well, it's probably more possible to bit-bang IDE (not ATA) these days than ever before, but why bother when I can still locate physical IDE hardware? ...or can I?