It has been a very long time since I posted anything here. I’m still alive! Work has kept me very busy and joining the Debian Project has obliterated any spare time I previously had. We’ve also recently moved. If I were you I wouldn’t expect to see an update here for another few years!

I’ve created a sort-of wiki which I hope to keep more up-to-date than the articles in this blog. Some of my articles, particularly my travels with GnuPG, seem to be used as references by various people—but these are growing increasingly dated. A wiki should help with this.

The “wiki” is in fact documentation generated using Sphinx from reStructuredText files stored in Git and hosted on GitHub. To edit wiki pages, clone my repo and submit a pull request!

Every time I mention how much storage I have at home, someone inevitably asks what I use it for or comments how big my porn stash must be. So, this post sets out the whys and hows of my rather vast home storage system.

As of 2013-08-04 I have 32.86 TiB of storage in my home server, with a relatively luxurious (for me) 16.28 TiB free.
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I have been sent a package from the US, for which I need to pay £22.34 VAT and Duty. That’s fine, that’s the law and while it’s never nice to have to pay extra to bring something in from abroad you kind of expect it. Fine.

What you don’t expect is to have to pay an extra £8 to Royal Fail for their “handling” of it going through customs. They should be utterly ashamed of themselves; this is daylight robbery.

Of course this is the only company that will refuse to even deliver the item until the fee is paid, so you can’t even dispute it after you get the item – you either have to cough up or do without the item you paid for.

No wonder they’re profitable again if they pull tricks like this.

Now that I’m using OpenPGP cards for GnuPG, I may as well start using them for their other bells and whistles too. The first and most useful such extra feature of those cards is using the authentication key for SSH. Continue reading →

I have recently started to become much more involved in the Debian project, maintaining my own package (ulogd2) and doing a pair of uploads to other packages. Debian uses GPG / OpenPGP keys widely for signing the archive, authenticating uploads by developers and so on, so I needed a secure GPG key that I could use for my interactions with Debian. Continue reading →

A while ago, I built a Media Centre / Home Theatre PC (HTPC). In my case it’s a small Mini-ITX computer that sits under the TV, whose sole purpose is to play DVDs and other media from our extensive collection. People have been asking me to write up about the hardware and software and how it’s all built, so here is the post about the hardware.

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