Posts in Category "tech"

Everyone who even casually follows the tech industry knows, intellectually, that Google builds an enormous dystopian profile of everything you do in order to sell ads¹. But I think there's a difference between knowing that Google Analytics is a shameless back door to do cross-site tracking and actually coming face-to-face with your own profile. Yesterday, CNBC featured a story about a new Google UI which shows you a list of every purchase that you've made in the last few years: https://myaccount.google.com/purchases. For me, wide variety of commercial activity — every purchase I've ever made at a …

My current PGP/GnuPG key is expiring, so I've rolled a new one. The ID of the new key is 0x3C7775DD37811E62 (full fingerprint: 1ED5 E5A3 01C3 D109 9040 2289 3C77 75DD 3781 1E62) and it should be in your favorite keyservers, cross-signed by my old key. You can also find it at https://files.roguelazer.com/roguelazer.gpg. It has also been attached to my keybase.io account and my Github profile. My previous key (0xAEE8F2454A41B87D) has not been revoked and has not been compromised, but you should still stop using it if possible. The new key is a 4096-bit RSA key with SHA-2 digest signatures — I'm not quite bold enough to switch to ECC for a long-lived key yet.

My signed transition document is below, and can also be found at 2019-04-27-key-transition-statement.txt.asc if you prefer to download it directly.

Additionally, I have generated a separately-signed key with ID 0x233E5EAF0EC3ABA9 (full fingerprint: 14E8 9660 188D BC9B 2C17 67AA 233E 5EAF 0EC3 ABA9). This key should not be used for communication, but will only be used to sign VCS commits/tags/&c (in Git and perhaps in Pijul¹). It's going to be on my [managed] work computer², so treat it with a grain of salt.

Here's a quick post on how I use and configure Firefox on my Macs. The last time I posted about any of this was in 2011, and things have changed a fair bit since then. First, a screenshot (from my new iMac):

Key extensions for this setup:

Vim Vixen

Vim keybindings for Firefox. Not quite as good as Vimperator, but works with modern Firefox, and getting better all the time. The only thing I really miss is macro recording, which I used all the time in Vimperator.

Tree-Style Tabs

Our monitors are widescreen; why would you try to stack tabs …

For the first time since early 2010, I have a desktop computer again!

It's a 2019 5K Retina iMac with an Intel Core i5-9600K (9th Generation, 6 physical cores), 16GB of RAM, AMD Radeon Pro 580X, and a 1TB SSD. Geekbench isn't exactly scientific, but it reports this computer as 50% faster single-core, 150% faster multi-core than the computer it's replacing.

I don't know if you're aware of this, but Twitter hasn't been a very good company in the last few years. Between the aiding and abetting of white supremacists, the continued hosting of our obnoxious orange tweeter-in-chief, and the ongoing user-hostile platform changes, it's just not as fun of a place as it was when I joined on November 14, 2007. So, uh, I'm not there any more.

No, I didn't delete my Twitter account. However, I have started trying to use a new microblogging system in its stead: Mastodon. Mastodon is an interesting idea: it's a federated social network …

Here's an amusing iOS 11 bug:

If an iOS device is set to the en-US locale and Siri is set to a British voice, when reading dates aloud, Siri transposes months and days. For example, given the command Remind me Wednesday Morning to buy milk, Siri responds with OK, I added it for Wednesday at 10/11/17 7:00. When reading this aloud, Siri reads it as OK, I added it for Wednesday the 10th of November two thousand and seventeen at seven o'clock.

It seems kind of crazy to me the Apple is parsing the raw text shown on screen rather than having some kind of machine-readable tagged data. So weird!

I reported this to Apple. I guess we'll see if it gets fixed in iOS 12.