I don’t publish very frequently and it’s because I feel like this site represents my public image and the things I put here should be somewhat polished since it’s “how the world will see me.” If I write something here I tend to keep a draft for months. Write it and rewrite it again and save it to reread later and decide it’s not good enough to publish. But in truth, I’m not always polished....

How many people feel like they have a handle on their digital selves? I remember years ago before I embarked on a journey of “digital hygiene” that I knew that I was just leaking information everywhere. Facebook, Snapchat, Google/Gmail.. Data everywhere, under control from big corporations. It was a feeling of being bare and vulnerable but I didn’t quite understand why I should care. Google’s motto was “Do no evil” so they’re trustworthy, right?...

It’s been a while since I’ve posted! Thought I’d give an update on a recent change I made in my home lab I’m calling “The Great VM Migration” but do it as a thinly veiled demonstration of something far cooler, ChatGPT. I asked ChatGPT to write this post through a conversation. It got some things wrong, and I corrected it by saying “Not quite what I meant, …” and explaining where it got it wrong....

Like the title says, how do you decrypt a headless server at boot time that has it’s root partition LUKS encrypted.. while not on site? I’ve been running my server for almost two years and I knew this problem would come up eventually so it’s been at the back of my mind for a while. And you know it had to come up at the most inopportune time… 15 minutes before I leave town for a weekend away....

I have probably installed Arch Linux ten times in as many years. I see other distros every once in a while that I want to try out but I always end up back with Arch. There’s something very satisfying in knowing exactly what is running on your system down to the process. Having everything hand picked to be exactly what you want just makes it feel like home. My main computer for a long time was a 2014 13-inch Macbook Pro....

NetworkManager unfortunately doesn’t have a kill switch in case your VPN connection drops but you can achieve the same effect through firewall rules. I’m using ufw here but you can achieve the same using iptables or firewall-cmd. I haven’t looked into automating this when VPN connects yet but opening Gufw and switching the profile hasn’t become annoying yet either. If I ever get around to that I’ll post an update....

Let’s talk about hardware wallets. For the uninitiated, a hardware wallet is a device which keeps your Bitcoin safe while also keeping them easily accessible. There are a few trusted varieties so far. Trezor and Ledger are the two I have experience with personally. Hardware wallets work by storing your private keys in a secure chip in the device. When you use the device, your unsigned transaction is sent from the computer to the wallet which then signs the transaction with your keys and sends it back....

What will the Internet look like for colonists on Mars? It seems like a silly question since we’re far away from having boots on the ground on our red planet neighbor. We’ll likely need a moon base, which is itself likely decades away, before we can even think about attempting a manned trip to Mars. The problem is Mars is so far away the best possible latency is around 16 minutes round-trip....

I learned about Bitcoin in 2013. I watched it for a while before I entered the market in 2014. I dabbled in day-trading (bad idea, just don’t if you like sleep at all…) I even wrote a Python trading bot back in the day that made some decent profits before my 24 year old self got nervous about playing with more money than I’d ever had at once and turned it off....