Occasionally, someone asks me whether we should encourage use of the
--ask-cert-level option when certifying OpenPGP keys with gpg. I see
no good reason to use this option, and i think we should discourage
people from trying to use it. I don't think there is a satisfactory
answer to the …
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OpenPGP User ID Comments considered harmful
Most OpenPGP User IDs look like this:
Jane Q. Public <jane@example.org>This is clean, clear, and unambiguous.
However, some tools (
gpg,enigmailamong others) ask the user to provide a "Comment:" field when they are choosing a new User ID (e.g. when making a new key). These …It's Advertising all the way down
Today i saw a billboard on the side of a bus. It was from a cable TV channel, bragging about how well-connected their viewers are (presumably on the internet, social media, blogs, etc).
It shows a smiling, attractive man, with text next to him saying something like "I told 9000 …
Make a Woolly Mammoth (thanks, inkscape!)
I feel like i've done a lot of blogging recently about failing to do things with proprietary software. That's annoying.
This post is about something i made successfully with free software (and some non-software crafting): I made a Woolly Mammoth for my nephew!
I documented the pattern (with pictures!) that …
proprietary software activation fail
i have a colleague who is forced by work situations to use Windows. Somehow, I'm the idiot\^W\^W\^W\^W\^Wfriendly guy who gets tapped to fix it when things break.
Well, this time, the power supply broke. As in, dead, no lights, no fan, no nothing. No problem …
visualizing MIME structure
Better debugging tools can help us understand what's going on with MIME messages. A python scrap i wrote a couple years ago named
printmimestructurehas been very useful to me, so i thought i'd share it.It reads a message from stdin, and prints a visualisation of its structure, like …
in memory of Aaron Swartz
I was upset to learn about Aaron Swartz's death last week. I continue to be upset about his loss, and about our loss. He didn't just show promise of great things to come in the future -- he had already done more work for the public good than many of …
universally accessible storage for the wary user
A friend wrote me a simple question today. My response turned out to be longer than i expected, but i hope it's useful (and maybe other people will have better suggestions) so i thought i'd share it here too:
Angela Starita wrote:
I'd like to save my work in a …
libasound2-plugins is a resource hog!
I run mpd on debian on "igor", an NSLU2 -- a very low-power \~266MHz armel machine, with no FPU and a scanty 32MiB of RAM. This serves nicely to feed my stereo with music that is controllable from anywhere on my LAN. When playing music and talking to a single mpd …
set default margins for OpenOffice as a sysadmin?
I'm maintaining a lab of debian squeeze machines that run OpenOffice.org (i'm considering upgrading to LibreOffice from squeeze-backports). I'd like to adjust the default page margins for all users of Writer. Most instructions i've found suggest ways to do this as a single user, but not how to make …