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The PGP Problem

n-gate.com dixit:

The PGP Problem
July 16, 2019 (comments)
The Hackernews Beauty Pageant Gold Medalist is mad about PGP. Hundreds of words are recycled about all the problems. As usual, the only solution offered to replace email (a protocol in use by approximately the entire internet) are a bunch of centralized all-or-nothing silos that interoperate barely or not at all. No new information appears in this particular rehashing of the PGP Temper Tantrum, so Hackernews has a well-practiced collection of canned responses and anecdotes agreeing with and reinforcing the tantrum. A few Hackernews bring up the profound level of shittiness of Signal as a replacement for email, but the subject is quickly changed to avoid angering the resident security hucksters. None of the people recommending Signal protocol products have any Signal protocol contact information in their profiles. All of them have email addresses. One of them has a PGP key.

Digital Minimalism

I think the main gold nugget of Cal Newport’s book on digital minimalism is the tech screening when deciding to apply technology to your personal life:

I’d also like to add a question for situations where other people decide to apply tech to my life (think: automation & digitization):

Owning things

Scope lens cap

OpenSCAD script:

$fn=360;

height = 16;
strength = 3;
widthEye = 5;
depthEye = 16;

module eye(){
    difference() {
        cube([widthEye, depthEye, height], true);
        cube([0.35*widthEye, 0.5*depthEye, height], true);
    }
}
module cap(innerDiameter) {
    rotate([180, 0, 0])
        translate([0, 0, -height]) {
            difference() {
                cylinder(h = height, d = innerDiameter+strength);
                cylinder(h = height-strength, d = innerDiameter);
            }
            translate([0.5*innerDiameter+0.5*widthEye, 0, 0.5*height])
                eye();
            translate([-(0.5*innerDiameter+0.5*widthEye), 0, 0.5*height])
                eye();
        }    
}

// unit: mm
cap(innerDiameter = 57);

[Update 20190616:]

printed with black polyflex filament, seems to work just fine - estimated cost 2,10 €

ambrowse

I published ‘ambrowse’ to releases.fireandbrimst.one and my git server, superseding the old ‘amParser’. It can be used to extract book metadata from amazon.com, .co.uk and .de pages.

It watches the folder ‘ambrowse’ inside HOME for newly written HTML files, extracts the metadata and removes the files afterwards. The metadata are added to a list in ‘books.yaml’. You can thus peacefully browse books online, but are not as tightly bound to the seller. You also have a temporal buffer, which allows you to rethink your impulse purchases. Pressing CTRL+S and Enter seem like a manageable workload compared to an in-browser solution.

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