Day 15 of the #100DaysToOffload Series:

Yesterday I gave my own thoughts on the recent acquisition of Keybase by Zoom. As I said yesterday, and will probably keep saying until Zoom discontinues Keybase, I’m not going to delete my Keybase account and will continue to see what Zoom does with it. That doesn’t mean I’m not eyeing other products to see if one of them might be a worthy successor to Keybase. Is keys.pub the one?

I should start this out by admitting that I know next to nothing about keys.pub, but it has caught my attention. Maybe it’s just the timing, or maybe it’s the fact that the name sound similar to Keybase (they both have “key” right?), but it’s been in my mind lately.

So, is keys.pub the next thing?

Let’s look at what it does (this is copy and paste right from their site).

• Manage cryptographic keys, sigchains and user identities.
• Search for keys, verify and import them.
• Securely store passwords and secrets.
• Encrypt, decrypt, sign, verify (using Saltpack).
• Create a secure connection (Wormhole) between 2 computers (using Noise).
• Most features available in both the app and on the command line.
• 100% open source (github.com/keys-pub) and cross platform (macOS, Windows, Linux).

So, it seems to have some of the same features Keybase has. It’s missing quite a few of the others, like integrated chat, git, and even crypto-currency.

It appears to do exactly the stuff I never use Keybase for and doesn’t do all the stuff that I do use Keybase for. That’s not a good sign. There’s also this which concerns me:

WARNING

This project is in development and has not been audited.

What it does have over Keybase is it’s not currently owned by Zoom (that’s a big one), and it’s fully open source.

It’s got a big list of features coming soon.

Coming Soon

• Other key types like age?
• Legacy/pgp?
• Better documentation
• More services (Facebook, Website)
• Inbox
• Import SSH ed25519 keys
• Wormhole through relays (syncthing)
• Syncthing integration

As well as these:

• Coming soon: Backup keys/secrets to your private self-hosted storage on S3, GCP, Dropbox, etc.
• Coming soon: Support for hardware keys like SoloKeys, YubiKeys, FIDO2.
• Coming soon: Mobile apps.

There’s a lot of stuff in this list I like. Maybe this combined with something like Matrix will suite my needs? It’s hard to say right now. There’s a lot of promises but it’s still pretty feature light.

I guess I’ll add this to my wait and see list too. I’ll wait and see what Zoom does with Keybase and I’ll wait and see what keys.pub does with it’s feature list.

Day 14 of the #100DaysToOffload Series:

I’m guessing that most people who care about #privacy have heard about the recent aquisition of Keybase by Zoom. It’s hard to escape since it’s been all over the news. Since I’m a user of Keybase, I thought that I’d offer up my thoughts on the matter.

I’ve been using Keybase for about four years now. Despite it’s not entirely Free and Open Source solution, I support the idea of having an easy to use encryption method that anybody could use for file sharing, chat, and even git repositories.

Sure, Keybase has it’s issues, and there are other solutions on the market that will do this too, but I thought that Keybase had the best chance of success with their solution. I’ve been hoping that they’d resolve their open source issues eventually and really become a solution for everybody.

Then Zoom bought Keybase.

This move is certainly explitive worthy.

Don’t get me wrong. This isn’t going to make me delete my account. When it comes to that, I’m with my friend and partner in crime Kev, and I’m going to wait and see how things go. I will say that I used to have a great deal of optimism regarding Keybase’s future. That optimism has taken a huge hit by this purchase. Just read the articles. They’re all telling us what Keybase can do for Zoom, but there’s literally nothing about what this could do for Keybase’s products moving forward.

I’m going to wait and see, but right now it feels like I’m waiting to see when the other shoe will drop.

Day 13 of the #100DaysToOffload Series:

Jackie Craven defined a “smart house” for an article she wrote for ThoughtCo. as “a home that has highly advanced, automated systems to control and monitor any function of a house; lighting, temperature control, multi-media, security, window and door operations, air quality, or any other task of necessity or comfort performed by a home’s resident.”

This definition seems to be pretty widely accepted, but I’m going to say that if this is what a smart house is, very few actually exist.

If you Google “smart house”, you’re wasting your time. You’re going to get a bunch of links to some old Disney show. Don’t do that.

If you Google “smart home”, you’re probably going to get better results.

Kinda.

What you’re going to get is a lot of links to products to help you automate your home. Thermostats, security systems, speakers, voice assistants, light bulbs, plugs, stuff. All these things are supposed to make your home a “smart home” by helping you automate tasks. Turn your lights on and off, configure temperatures to know when you’re home and get used to your habits to “save you money”.

But here’s the deal. Almost all of these products come with a cloud service. Your data is being stored on someone’s server somewhere and they know when you’re home, when you’re not. They know when you go to bed and when you leave for work. They know how often you drink coffee or vacuum your floor.

When I was in college not everybody owned a computer. Most people didn’t in fact. To give students access to their campus email, there were dumb terminals all over campus, and labs of them in the engineering buildings. They were called dumb terminals because they were basically just a screen and a keyboard. All the hard work was done on a server these terminals were connected to.

That’s what these “smart home” devices are too. They’re not doing the hard work. They’re connecting to a service on the Internet that’s doing all the hard work. That means that besides being a #privacy nightmare, they’re useless without Internet. That means, if you’re using these products, your home is a “dumb home”, not a smart one.

If you want a true Smart Home, all your services need to be self contained. They need to work just as well with or without Internet access. As long as the network in the house is working, your automation should too.

I’m not sure this kind of home exists for the lay person.

• I’ve looked around at bulbs that don’t require Internet. Even tried LIFX, which worked some of the time and then would randomly lose connection to the network, meaning I would need to turn things on and off the old fashioned way. Not that smart.
• I haven’t seen a single thermostat that would operate without cloud services while still allowing “smart” features.
• The only voice assistant I know that can pull that off is Mycroft with it’s Selene, but I haven’t even tried that one yet.
• I don’t know of any plugs that work without the cloud, but I haven’t looked much either.

There’s just no motivation for today’s “smart home” appliance makers to build devices that don’t require their cloud services. They’re getting information about you while selling you a product, so they get to double dip with minimal expense.

The fact of the matter is, if we want a “smart home” instead of a “dumb home”, we’ve got a lot of work ahead of us, and the current cadre of hardware manufacturers are unlikely to give us any aid.

Day 12 of the #100DaysToOffload Series:

I’ve been using Linux for a long time. I know some very brilliant people on Fosstodon and in real life that weren’t born when I started using Linux. For as long as I remember, Linux has been vacillating between 1% and 3% of the desktop market, so when I see numbers that show me a rapid change in the market, I take it with a grain of salt.

I’m a huge fan of Linux. I would like nothing more than to see Linux succeed massively in the desktop computer market. Microsoft has been bleeding the market dry for years for operating systems and office suites. It would never have been able to do that if it didn’t already have a monopoly on the market before it became a staple to the modern home.

Recently it was in the news that Linux had a sudden and massive spike in usage. In fact, even macOS has been seeing an increase.

Look, I’d really love to see Microsoft start a steady decline and have an Linux take it’s place as the most used desktop OS in the world. I know there are people that don’t. Some people like the exclusivity of the whole thing, and others just think that having all those extra people would make Linux the same dumpster fire that Windows is right now. I get both those arguments, but I’m not one of those people.

Despite that, please forgive me if I’m not ecstatic about this recent development. I think it’s a good sign, sure, but I need to see this go on for six months to a year before I believe that there’s any significant shift in the current market norms.

I hate being the guy that ruins the party, so forgive me for my dire attitude. Fingers crossed that this is actually the new normal. I sincerely hope that’s the case.

Day 11 of the #100DaysToOffload Series:

Text editors are a funny thing. Something so simple can inspire such loyalty and even vitriol. Which editor you use can be as polarizing as talking about religion or politics at Thanksgiving dinner. So why not jump right in with both feet?

I didn’t get my first computer until around 1993. My parents thought computers were a passing fad, and a waste of money. I played with a couple when I was fortunate enough to be in a store that had one, or at a friends house if they owned one, but never had one of my own. That’s why up until around 1993, I don’t have an editor of choice.

In 1993 I bought my first computer. It ran Windows 3.1, so naturally I gravitated towards “edit” at the DOS prompt. I honestly can’t remember why. Probably because sometimes I had to deal with system stuff and edit files without the benefit of a GUI, so I picked the best possible option. I rarely, if ever, used Notepad for anything significant.

When I went to college, first years CS students all got accounts on the local VAX/VMS system, and we were expected to use it to code. To edit that code, we all pretty much used the EVE editor. I don’t really remember much about the EVE editor to be honest. It was what we used, and that’s why we used it.

After the first year, we moved over to a Digital Unix server, and we vastly broadened our horizons from there. We were given a choice in our editors, and the server had a selection. There was vi, emacs, pico, and nano. Probably some others, but I settled on emacs.

Here’s where things get super dicey. I used emacs for a while, but it was slow and felt clunky. I didn’t like it much, so I switched over to nano or pico. I think it was pico, but it might have been nano. Neither one left much of an impression.

In the infamous Y2K I got a job working for a financial company, and all our servers ran Linux. It was the start of something beautiful. Not only did I start using Linux daily, I taught myself to shell script in my spare time. The guy that helped me out when I had questions suggested I give vim a try instead of pico/nano/whatever. So I did, and I’ve never looked back.

To this day, vim is my default editor. Even when I have to use Windows, I install the Windows version. It’s always there. It’s a coin flip whether emacs will be installed on a Linux machine by default, but vim is always there.

Day 10 of the #100DaysToOffload Series:

My #Mycroft Mark I hasn’t been working lately. Yesterday I had a few minutes tonight to plug in an external monitor and start it back up and see what I could see, and it wasn’t good. RIP Mycroft. Until today. Here’s my process for bringing Mycroft back to life!

This is really about as straight forward of a process as it can be. I’m going to go through this process, but this is going to be more show than tell.

1. First things first, I download the latest image and “burn” it to the SD card I’ve retrieved from the Raspberry Pi that is the basic hardware of a Mark I.

2. After I have the image burned to the SD card, it’s replaced into the Pi.

3. I put the case back together, plug it in, and turn it on.
4. It goes through the standard start process like it’s a brand new device.
5. Register it with the Mycroft’s server
   • There is a version of the Mycroft server you can run out of your home. It’s a project that I’d love to spend more time on, but so far I’ve only used the centralized version.
6. Once it’s registered, Mycroft starts updating.

7. After the updates are installed, the standard requisite reboot is performed.

8. Once it’s back online and at the current version, it pulls down the skills for every day use.

9. Once the skills are installed, Mycroft is back up and running.

And that’s it! Nice to have you back little buddy. Now enough slacking!

Day 7 of the #100DaysToOffload Series:

People can be passionate about their tools, myself included. I have two, maybe three tools that are absolutely essential to my day. My browser, and my shell (and if forced, my work email client). For years I used bash simply because it was the default and it did everything I needed it to do. Then, I switched to xonsh.

I guess the main reason I was even interested in switching was a moderately recent decision to learn Python. It’s been on my “To Do” list for a while, and it just never seemed to get done. Finally, I managed to scrape up the motivation to start.

My biggest problem is I don’t have a lot of free time on my hands, and I wasn’t using Python on a day to day basis, so even when I learned something, it would fade quickly and I’d be back at the beginning. I needed to find a way to force myself to use it daily.

xonsh

I ran across an article on opensource.com titled Why I Love Xonsh. It was written by Moshe Zadka, and it showed me a different kind of shell. It looked and worked a lot like other shells I was more familiar with, but it was based on Python. It can use Python specific syntax like this:

$ print(“Mike Was Here”)
Mike Was Here

Or it can use bash style sytanx:

$ echo “Mike Was Here Too”
Mike Was Here Too

It can even use them together!!

$ for i in range(3): echo “Mike Was Here”
Mike Was Here
Mike Was Here
Mike Was Here

xontribs

There are also xonsh contributions (called xontribs), which means I can install powerline with a simple command.

xpip install xontrib-powerline

There are a wide variety of xontribs for you to use, and installing them is just as easy.

Annoyances

There are some things about it that still get me. One of my personal habits is I like to look at “ls” output on a clean screen. My fingers have gotten used to the “clear;ls -al” over the years I use it so much. This command does not work in xonsh. I had to create a function that accepted parameters to emulate this functionality. So now I type “mls” or “mls -al” and it clears the screen prior to output.

Not Unique

Most of the functionality in xonsh can be emulated or replicated in bash or ksh. Other than the tight integration of Python, xonsh’s features can be replicated with scripts or additional apps. Still, I’ve really enjoyed using it. If you’re open to looking into new shells or even if you’re just not super tied to the one you’re using, I’d recommend giving it a try.

Day 6 of the #100DaysToOffload Series:

I’m going to branch out a little bit today. Here in the United States, April is National Poetry Month (#NationalPoetryMonth).

National Poetry Month was launched by the Academy of American Poets in April 1996 to remind the public that poets have an integral role to play in our culture and that poetry matters. Over the years, it has become the largest literary celebration in the world, with tens of millions of readers, students, K–12 teachers, librarians, booksellers, literary events curators, publishers, and, of course, poets, marking poetry’s important place in our lives.

Since today is the 30th of April, and it’s the last day of National Poetry Month, I thought throw something out there into the world. I’m not much of a poet (or any kind of a poet), so I’m going to stick to a haiku.

No throwing tomatoes.

Windows is installed
BSODs everywhere
It’s Linux for me

OK, now that I’ve done that, no more poetry from me until at least next April. I apologize in advance.