It seems I have a new PC. Well, a new ‘box’, anyway. It’s a long story. Hence, here’s the short version: The Short Version My old box broke, I bought a new one. The Long Version Machine playing up, occasionally random crashes, tried new RAM, new PSU, etc. Nothing seemed to help; eventually the thing… (read more)

I’m curious to know a little about what length passphrase people use for GPG and SSH. If you’re happy to answer these questions, please leave a comment below: How many characters long (approximately) is your passphrase? How often do you type it correctly? For comparison, my passphrase is approximately 50 characters long and I type… (read more)

For the second year running, I went to LinuxWorld Expo at Olympia in London. This was quite fun: and fortunately I managed to meet a few more people this year. When I arrived, the first person I found was Matt Bloch from Bytemark Hosting (this is the company this and other sites I own are… (read more)

Hot on the heels of SSH goodness, here are some tips relating to the use of GPG. Almost everyone who uses SSH probably uses ssh-agent to manage their SSH passphrase. However, until Friday, I’d never done the same thing for GPG. You use your GPG passphrase for digitally signing email and decrypting messages, for using… (read more)

Ronnie Barker has died. Fantastically funny man, he will be missed.

Despite what I said previously, when I opened my PC to replace the RAM inside, I found two 512MB sticks rather than a single 1GB stick. This meant that I only needed to discard the faulty module and could keep the good one. Added to the newly-purchased replacement RAM, I have three 512MB sticks now:… (read more)