I tried to set this up so I could use my yubikey as a portable authenticator following the Debian guide, and ran in to a bit of an issue. Despite what I was doing, ssh-agent would auto start, set environment variables and give me lots of trouble. Killing ssh-agent and manually setting the $SSH_AUTH_SOCK to my gnupgp socket fixed the issue, however I couldn’t get ssh-agent to stop starting and setting that variable on login. …

So i was recently at a convention run by friends. I tend to align myself to the position of least uselessness, so I like to be helpful. Somehow this lead to my good nature being exploited for mediocre software1. One of the problems at these things is that while we go to great effort to produce a lovely convention booklet, no one actually reads it until the week after. Having the event schedule in there feels like a bit of a waste of time. …

Part 1 of this post is available here! This is the overdue second post where I look at what albums I listened to. I’m having a drink with this one. It might get nonsensical by the end. The way albums are calculated is that each track play counts towards an album play - the number given is the cumulative count of all track plays from the same album. Albums Total Number of Unique Albums Logged: 1,327 …

This has been a few days of mildly successful radio fidgeting. Few issues diagnosed in the setup, few things fixed and a few things done. First up, the 6" cable I use to connect the FT-100 radio to my tuner has broken. This was replaced (thanks to Ed) and things tuned nicely. This must have been borked for some time - I’m now able to tune up my (roughly) 20m dipole on 30m and 40m no bother - both matching with swr of less than 1.1. No bother. …

Following on from yesterday’s post, it’s probably worth thinking about sanitising more than my phone. I’m getting quite tired of travelling with 2 laptops - one for work, one for personal. Sometimes I travel with 3 - work, personal and restricted site (specific softwre/hardware requirements depending on the… sensitivity of where I am). Carrying that many machines gets annoying. I also get a little stressed taking my personal laptop through customs in some of the countries I go to. There exists a worry that the more extreme states like the UK won’t take kindly to “Asylum for Snowden”, Anti GCHQ stickers and other hacker-related nonsense. Mixed with my regular browsing habits, who I talk to, and the media collection on my laptop, I’m happier if it doesn’t come to the Middle East. …