Blog: 2022-01-16

With the goal to get to bed before 2am, and to start tomorrow with a cleaner slate of projects, here are the tabs I'm closing.

https://github.com/FiloSottile/age - want to replace gpg in my password store. gpg was hanging and I had to kill the gpg agent to unstuck it. age would let me use an rsa private key, so there are fewer moving parts for a password system.

I wish that age didn't have a name where it looks like one english word and is pronounced differently (aghe) but it seems to be the logical successor as per https://latacora.micro.blog/2019/07/16/the-pgp-problem.html

Though I'm sure I could do the ssh-public-key message appending thing they do with raw ssh, somehow... and leave out that dependency entirely. Maybe I'll do that, and credit their design. In any case age is way better than the forest of confusion: gpg, pgp, gnupg...

Even SSH has its issues; why does it write the private key with no extension and the public key with .pub? Makes it way too easy to accidentally use the private key, and lacks discoverability.

There is also this issue of ssh having all these choices, whereas a solid crypto system does not allow using weak primitives. For backwards compatibility this is annoying though; you don't want to upgrade your ssh binary and not be able to log in to old servers. Think signal: no crypto choices are left to the user.

It looks like https://blog.gtank.cc/modern-alternatives-to-pgp/ recommends nacl and references keybase, so I'm interested, though id_ed25519 is the new hotness and I wanna be able to use an ssh key since I already have to manage ssh keys. https://saltpack.org/ looks cool; I'd like encrypted files to have a simple way of saying "hey I'm encrypted with x" for easier discoverability.

I had been looking at the bitcoin whitepaper trying to see what key they use; it doesn't seem to specify. I like the 12-word-seed approach, makes storing keys on paper tractable.

Drawing tablets

Ok new topic, drawing tablets! My new friends at the game dev meetup brought my attention to a couple ideas:

- I could use a tool like inkscape to copy a phone image of a game asset

- I could use an ipad as the drawing medium

- wacom has a tool that lets you draw in real pencil and paper over their tablet and it copies that in

- https://krita.org/en/ is an open source artist tool

- https://www.toonboom.com/products/harmony is a pro art maker, not free

- https://www.fmod.com/download#fmodstudiosuite for video game music

editor testing

I'd like to be able to query tmux for the active program name, (https://superuser.com/questions/879349/tmux-detect-which-process-runs-in-the-active-pane) to see if the editor process is still running for editor-testing (https://git.sr.ht:~razzi/editor-testing). I could also capture the pid of the process started and check if that is running, which would be easier and not involve using tmux commands.

Side note: tmux has a really inscrutable cli. no tmux --help or tmux -h. Sometimes I use -s for session and sometimes -t then session name: `tmux new -d -s vim` versus `tmux attach -t vim`... It seems that all the articles talking about a tmux replacement are talking about tmux as a replacement for screen. Could make a wrapper, call it remux

The tmux approach to terminal editor management is working way better than the console approach, though it was fun to see a little terminal printed out in pure python, and the full mess of escape sequences produced by starting vim.

new board game spot in town

https://fortuna.cafe/create-your-website-with-blocks/about/

Gotta love not-so-exorbitant rent meaning people can make board game cafes without having legacy rent prices. Though perhaps 30 years from now Iowa City will be so expensive, this point will be moot...

thinking about legacy admissions

Want to end these. Of course there are underlying issues, but legacy admissions stick out. Read https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/11/right-wing-militias-civil-war/616473/ a bit but opened it after 2am, gotta take a break.

Wish I could share this stuff with Ajay but I'll have to find somebody else to...

Could write up some of the old convos we had, I doubt he'd mind. He was a sharp one.

docker-compose for nginx reverse proxying to multiple data catalogs

learned docker-compose can combine multiple yaml files, that's cool. Here's the official tutorial: https://docs.docker.com/compose/gettingstarted/. Wish Their example wasn't so much python code. Got distracted thinking about why flask takes the __name__ argument, and if any examples are out there that don't require this. There are some async ones but I think sanic is a bad brand for a web app framework; memes like that tend to not age so so well. Flask is classy in comparison. Bottle is pretty minimal: https://bottlepy.org/docs/dev/ - pretty good. Weird that bottle and flask are the same type of thing. If I made a competitor I'd riff on that: potion perhaps

fin

and that's a wrap! Next time I'd like to get "hello world" examples with emacs, vim, and nano for my editor-testing project.

Today I was listening to "because" by the beatles, mmmbop by scary pockets, cool by dua lipa, and dvp by pup. Rock on!

Weather report from 1/14 was a good one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UB4sZtihEeo