Yet again, it has come time to rotate my PGP/GnuPG private key. My old key (1ED5E5A301C3D109904022893C7775DD37811E62) actually expired a couple of weeks ago, and I've been procrastinating writing up this transition. The new key is 0xC6496DEB3DA8E9B5 (full fingerprint: 24F8AA354990F3F562EC014BC6496DEB3DA8E9B5) You can also find it at https://files.roguelazer.com/roguelazer.gpg. It has also been attached to my keybase.io account¹ and my Github profile. It is cross-signed by the old key.

My signed transition document is below, and can also be found at 2022-05-28-key-transition-statement.txt.asc if you prefer to download it directly.

After more than two years of successfully dodging it, COVID-19 finally hit my family the week. On Tuesday my wife woke up with a migraine, which isn't unusual for her; on Wednesday morning, she woke up with a low (100.4°F fever) and we belatedly realized that she might be sick. She took an antigen test¹ and the TEST line turned blue basically instantly.

Shit.

Quarantine ensued. Isaac (our son) has been home from school² and we've all been cooped up on the property for the past few days.

So far, Isaac and I have continued to …

As you might recall, my son Isaac was born a couple of years ago. This was obviously an occasion for joy and family happiness (and an end to regular sleep) — but beyond that, it was the beginning of a capitalist glut, a massive influx of new Stuff. So, uh, I figured I'd write about that in case any of my readers ever have a kid and want to know about various baby support items.

In general, we had a few constraints:

• our house is relatively small (~1200sqft) and has little storage
• when we were making most of these decisions, my wife and I spent a relatively large amount of time traveling (both via local transit options like BART and AC Transit, and on planes to visit our far-flung families)
• money/price is… not a chief concern

Some of my go-tos for researching items before buying them were the Wirecutter, Baby Gear Lab, Consumer Reports but, frankly, none of these had quite the same set of priorities as we did. We also went to some local retail stores (shout-out to the now-defunct Tot Tank in Alameda) and of course talked to all of our friends with kids. For non-safety-sensitive things, Berkeley Parents Network has been a good resource for used items.

Anyhow, read on for all the big-ticket items!

Hello dear readers! Like most of you (and as I've written about before), I've been stuck working from home for the last year and a half, out of the little converted covered porch on my house. For the last six months or so, I've been doing so with my butt firmly planted on an HON Basyx pleather-upholstered office chair that I rescued from my office when we moved out. This chair is, uh, not in the best condition¹:

This chair actually originally belonged to Curse, a now-defunct company that made some kind of WoW fansite. They used to be …

Yesterday, California released their Digital Vaccine Record system for securely verifying residents' COVID-19 vaccination status. I took a look at it and thought I'd write up my findings here. At a high level, the DVR consists of a QR code which contains a cryptographically-signed assertion in JSON Web Token (JWT) format. I'll walk you through how to get one, how to decode it, and what it contains in the rest of this article.

Getting one of the tokens is pretty easy; you just go to the Digital Vaccine Record website and put in your name, date of birth, and the …

Yesterday around 10am, I got my second shot of the ModeRNA COVID-19 vaccine (unsurprisingly, I got my first show four weeks ago); at this point I'm in the countdown to be "fully vaccinated"¹. So far, the side effects have been pretty mild:

• I was maybe a little tired yesterday afternoon
• Yesterday evening I had an elevated temperature of 99.7°F, but no clinical fever
• This morning my arm feels like I lost a really intense game of Punch Buggy

I know the pandemic is nowhere near over and people are dying by the thousands around the world, but …