so i’ve played with PGP in the past, and was completely overwhelmed and confused. for me, the tools were arcane, the documentation assumed much knowledge that i didn’t have, and wasn’t very helpful for the novice.

that was probably ten years ago. PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) has gone away, and in its place is GPG (GNU Privacy Guard). there are distros of GPG for pretty much every major platform, and there’s even a firefox extension to help integrate gpg into gmail, making things That Much Easier. i’ve used it a bit (though i only have three friends who use gpg at the moment), and the process isn’t as hard as i once thought, especially with the tools in the state they are today. if you’re curious, you might find it a little easier than you thought. it basically works like this:

1. install GPG for your OS.
2. with your newly installed software, use the key manager to create a key pair for a specific email address. this includes a private key that you never share with anyone, and a public key that you do share with everyone that you want to exchange mail with.
3. get your friends’ public keys. if you want to exchange mail with people, they need to be using gpg as well. that’s the drawback. import these keys with your key manager.
4. you’re now ready to encrypt things to other people! when you encode something, make sure you encode it using the public key of the person you want to send it to. that’s the mistake i made early on, and wound up encrypting a bunch of stuff with my public key that only i could unencrypt. nurrr.

fireGPG works will for firefox, and integrates some handy buttons into gmail so that you can sign, verify, encrypt, decrypt, and send — all without having to leave your browser. when i installed GPG4Win on my XPSP2 box, it dropped right in and worked like a charm. however, i also installed it on my suse 9.3 box at work. in that case, it complained of not being able to find the gpg binary, even though i pointed the extension right at it. on the fireGPG forums, this seems to be a known issue for some people (on both windows and linux) with no solid solution yet, so it may or may not bite you. the developer is working on it, so there’s still hope.

another thing i found myself wanting to do is have my private key on two different machines (home, work) so that i could send encrypted mail from both places. i found a really awesome command-line gpg cheatsheet that helps a lot when doing more of the fiddly bits, and i recommend reading it. tip for you windows users: after installing GPG4Win, running cmd.exe to get a terminal will let you do these command-line items.

so that’s been my past couple days, aside from a lot of super mario galaxy with sara. oh, and tiger woods pga tour 2008. which, while a nice game, has one of the worst interfaces in the known universe. cheers, and if i hear from you, i hope to hear from you via gpg!

i’m finally stepping into this world.  my email address is: the username that this entry was posted by, at gmail.


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so i got my M3 DS Simply the other day, and i’ve been playing with it a lot the past week or so. here’s a summation:

i paid $90 at themodchipstore.com for the M3 and a 2gb microSD card. i bought it as a package so that i could be sure to have a microsd card that would work error-free (see Scorpei’s DS wiki online for details). if i had been more brave, i would have bought the R4 (exact same hardware as the M3) somewhere cheap ($30), and ordered the kingston 2gb card from amazon (even cheaper than the $40 i paid). however, i’d just sold a bunch of stuff i didn’t need, so it was worth it.

setup is a little arcane, since the chinese english is so terribly bad, but once you get understand what files go where, it’s very easy. i even made my own skin, since the default one is pretty stark and ugly. now that i have it all nicely configured, though…

1.) DS Games: i have all the carts that i own (and maybe a few others) on the card, and gameplay is simple and awesome. i can even cheat, thanks to the M3. online gameplay doesn’t work for everything, but for most it’s great.

2.) DS linux: boot linux, ssh to home machine, OR run any of a multitude of precompiled apps. i use dslinux to ssh to my home machine and then connect to my screened terminals. \m/ very easy install, also.

3.) homebrew apps: a very nice irc client, a good organizer app, and even an xm tracker, among other things. running apps is just like putting a game rom on your card.

4.) homebrew games: one word: lemmings. playing lemmings was never so awesome. also, check out the ports of nethack and SCUMMVM for the DS.

5.) moonshell: this is a shell that launches from the m3′s boot screen, and it handles txt, jpg, and a lot of music files (including mp3s), as well as video (if properly converted). the txt viewer is about what you’d expect, and the jpg viewer is so-so (ComicBookDS is better, IMO), but there is very little that beats listening to NES and SNES soundtracks in their original form. i’m listening to final fantasy VI right now, and it’s freaking awesome. also effortless, since the tracks auto-advance (it ignores looping).

all in all, this is one of the best purchases i’ve made in a long damn time.

so i’ve been living here in LA for, what, almost 4 years now? and i’ve never been to the LA Film Festival. how utterly sad, right? yes. sad. but! this year i went, and was well rewarded for my attendance.

so there’s this thing that’s been happening: www.buffysings.com, where a theater full of people sing along to the eternally awesome Buffy: the Vampire Slayer episode “Once More, With Feeling”. it’s like a modern-day Rocky Horror Picture Show, but without so much of the food-throwing. there was a showing this past wednesday night, and sara and i went with our friend rita. not only was it so much freaking fun (we’re going again in september when the show comes back to LA), but at the end, the MC guy (the same guy that runs the site/blog from the previous link) says that he wants to introduce someone, and all of a sudden hands the mic over to Marti Noxon. holy crap! the place went wild. Marty was really cool and right away told us that she was indeed wearing underwear. she seemed very flattered at the number of people who showed up, and after saying a little more (i don’t remember much, i was frantically snapping pictures), she turns around and invites Joss Whedon to come down and say a few words. He stands up at the very back and the entire theater goes absolutely NUTS.

it was an awesome evening. my friend rita’s blog really captures it all, thanks to her for having her EOS with her that evening. *awesome* photos she has there, and i’ll post some of mine as soon as i have a chance to get them up to the server. in the meantime, hit rita’s blog and check out the Whedon Fandom at critical mass.

yeah, there’s been a lull. i don’t post as often as i used to. mostly because i haven’t had anything to impart. that, and it’s been pretty busy here at work. i’m involved on the R&D team for the work we’re doing on an unnamed movie, and that’s taken up a LOT of my time. i’ve moved to a bigger and better office, though, and that’s nice. i likes a bigger space fo’ sho. the sad thing is that my MAME cabinet got the axe, and i had to take it home with me. on the downside, there’s a lot of people who played on it that are sad because now they’ve got to do something else on late nights or during lunch. it was a fun service to provide for people, and it wasn’t distracting (we had pretty strict rules about use in order to keep from bothering people nearby). on the upside, i have a nice MAME cabinet in my apartment now, that i can play on whenever the hell i feel like it. :)

also, i’ve been teaching myself some php and mysql, which has been challenging but very rewarding. it’s for my own project for myself and some friends, so it’s nothing huge, but it’s a good experiment. speaking of my friends, i’ve made a bunch of new ones. i’m going to be an enforcer for PAX’07 this coming august, and i’ve been chatting a lot with other enforcers, both new and veteran. they’re a great bunch of people, and i’m stoked about volunteering at yet another awesome convention.

i’ve still been drawing, but not as often. the drawing level has dropped since i’ve been involved in this more technical project, but once it’s done, i expect the pendulum to swing the other way again. i’ve read scott mccloud’s books and i bought myself a giant awesome volume of facial expressions (one of my weaknesses), and i’m excited about drawing more soon. maybe when i scan in some of this fun stuff i’ll share it up.

thanks for listening/reading.

So… at a small cafe in pacific heights today, sara and i saw mary mcdonnell having lunch. it was nice. i wanted so badly to be all fanboy, but i knew i’d just come across all weird. the friends we were with were all like “omigod it’s the president!”

(wow, this post is a lot longer than i had intended. i hope you enjoy it anyway.)

so kim and i and jared and kemer suffered an abortive attempt to snag a wii on saturday morning. as it turns out:

hot tip about ebgames getting wiis early != actual hot tip.

but sara got to play with the wii at friday’s holiday party (thanks, kurt!), and so around 9pm on saturday, we decided (after much debate about how we were definitely Not Too Old To Do This Kind Of Thing) to go crazy and camp out for a wii on sunday morning. we showed up at Toys’R'Expensive at about 10pm and got chased off by the security guard (long story). we went for coffee and donuts, sat in the car in the parking lot and watched DVDs until midnight, and then set up camp after the security guard left. we came prepared with many many layers of clothes, many many things to do, but we did not come prepared for idiots. we were first in line (a dubious honor), but the guy right behind us could NOT shut up, and the the word ‘confirmed’ must have been on the vocabulary list in his weekly ‘How To Talk Good’ class. 40 consoles were ‘confirmed’. his place in line was ‘confirmed’. his wife was #11 in line at target, that was also confirmed. i wanted to see if he could confirm my sleeping bag stuffed up his ass, but i was pretty cold at the time and needed the extra covering. his underdeveloped sense of humour (don’t ask for examples, as i can’t give them anymore — my ‘cringing’ muscles are now broken) and poor social skills just about sent sara and i over the edge. and his crazy wife, oh my god. this woman’s every other word was a conjugation of the term that denotes intercourse between two individuals. she was waiting in line just up the road at target, called him about every ten minutes to ask if they’d gotten vouchers yet. i shit you not. there’s more to that story, but you really just don’t want to know.

anyway.

so we sat in line, people trickled in to wait in small groups until about 3:30am, and then there were about 20 people. after that, people really started showing up, and the stupid level just continued to rise. jeff foxworthy’s mentally incapacitated and pulchritudinally challenged twin brother showed up, and demonstrated his lack of ability to go 10 minutes without a cigarette. he and confirmation guy became best buds, and they and about 5 other guys had the same conversation for the next five hours:

1. how many Wiis there were
2. the probability of getting a Wii tonight
3. boy, it was too bad they couldn’t go to work tomorrow because they’d be too busy playing with their Wiis, ha ha ha.
4. how many Wiis there were
5. when they would get their vouchers (6am).

lather, rinse, repeat until your ears bleed.

i managed to sleep from about 4-5 (yayy headphones), covered in lots of clothes and a sleeping bag. sara didn’t fare quite as well. we were both suffering from the aforementioned imbecilic auditory proximity, but i was better able to tune it out.

anyway, about 6am we got up and waited for the manager to come out and hand out vouchers. we should have just kept playing cards, because he didn’t come out until 7:30, but whatever. the time spent between 6am and 7:30 we mostly watched Captain Confirmation and his sidekicks race back and forth in front of the store windows, tracking every move the manager made to see if he was Actually Coming To The Door This Time. you know when you walk past someone’s house and they have a fence and a dog or two? and the dog keeps up with you as you go past, or if you turn around and go the other way? it was a lot like that, only with more drool.

we finally got our voucher, there were about 40 Wiis, maybe 60-70 people in line. when we actually got into the store (8am-ish, after some coffee and warming ourselves up at pavilions), everything went very smoothly. we got two more wiimotes and nunchucks for a total of three. behind the counter they had a literal PILE of extra Wiimotes and nunchucks, so if you guys have been looking for one, i would bet that they actually have a few left (you should probably call them first to make sure).

then we went home, hooked it up, and played until our elbows gave out. we went out to go see Agamemnon at 3pm with friends, and that’s when i was able to catch up on my sleep. idiots and their kin notwithstanding, it was fully worth the wait.

so yay! christmas wish fulfilled! i hope you all enjoyed my diatribe.

This is the first release of a widget I’ve written for wordpress. It’s nothing spectacular, it’s just a script that reads in lines from your fortune database and spits out a random one in your sidebar. I love the fortune program, and I’m just tickled to make it into a widget. Basically it does what you see in the header up at the top of this page (reload the page to make it change), but in a list item in the sidebar.

Requirements:

• A theme that supports widgets
• Henrik Aasted Sorenson’s fortune.php script
• a local install of the unix fortune program, or local access to the fortune database files.

instructions for installation and usage are in the downloadable file.

Download it now: .zip .tgz