Bitwarden

2021-02-02

I’ve been a happy LastPass user for many years. Its a great tool and was one of the first tools of its kind to provide no-knowledge security in a profoundly secure way. I don’t know that there’s anything currently wrong, but when LastPass was purchased by LogMeIn a couple years back, everyone paying attention got a little bit nervous. LogMeIn isn’t a bad company, but they definitely don’t inspire confidence when it comes to high security tools.…

Just keep swimming

2020-10-08

Earlier this year keybase was purchased by Zoom. Keybase is basically dead, and while I’m not running away from it, I am moving slowly away from it. This week Digital Ocean announced an apps platform , and have a free tier for static sites. This site is now static thanks to Hugo so I’ve moved. The root domain is broken right now (codemichal.net) but www works for now. I will fix that as soon as they have support for root domains on the app platform.…

I finished HL: Alyx

2020-06-23

I finished Half-life: Alyx, a VR game, over the weekend. My mind was blown, it was an amazing experience (steam says I played 11 hours, but I think it was closer to 15). I regret not playing through Episodes 1 and 2 before playing this, I had replayed the original Half-life and Half-life 2. I feel like I would have enjoyed having the knuckles controllers, the game was definitely designed for them.…

Talk a Little

2020-03-30

Not that anyone cares, just documenting the fact that I’m intentionally shutting down talk.codemichael.net. No one but me was using it, and I have better places to talk to myself (like this blog). I’m no longer running my blog in Digital Ocean, and as no one was using the talk forums, there wasn’t any reason to continue spending money on the hosting space. Reach out on Keybase if you want to chat.…

Alyx

2020-03-23

I’m pretty excited for post-work VR today. Half-life Alyx is released today. While I haven’t sprung for the latest VR tech (yet) I’m pretty sure this is going to be a hell of an experience. I’m a little sad I don’t have the knuckles controllers as I’m sure that will add another level of excitement. Maybe I’ll sneak in a peek over lunchtime.

Game Over

2020-03-22

Most board games don’t take three years to finish, but I knew I was signing up for a long haul with Kingdom Death: Monster game when I agreed to start a campaign with my friends in Chicago. …

Trying Out Hugo

2020-03-21

Ghost has been a reasonably nice blogging platform, but I don’t really need the work of managing or maintaining it, or the cost of hosting. I do a lot of my work in text editors, so I’m going to try Hugo for a bit. I tried this about 2 years ago with a tool called Hexo . I’m not sure if this will go better or worse (they’re very similar tools).…

Twenty plus years of Linux

2020-02-11

Ok, it’s actually been longer than twenty years, but we seem to like base-10, so it’s a catchier headline. I can’t exactly claim that my early years were terribly productive, so maybe twenty years is more appropriate anyway. I feel like that’s a pretty long time and given how some technologies come and go it is pretty interesting that a lot of the fundamentals still hold true today (and are still good).…

Doing more

2020-01-23

I’m going to attempt to have a very productive year, personally and professionally. I have a new role at work which means I get to spend more time designing, and less time building. It’s exciting but I really do feel like I have to do some training to keep up with everything that we’re looking at doing this year. That’s where I’ll be spending a lot of time trying out Kubernetes and related technologies.…

Bye bye Dropbox

2019-10-13

This week I did a bunch of work on cleaning up my digital life. Earlier this year I picked up a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device along with a battery backup to give myself highly reliable local storage. I’ve also take the time to set up multiple encrypted backup locations, with versioning, so I’ve got high data integrity and strong disaster recovery. I’ve slowly been organizing my decades old backups and I think I’ve got everything pulled together in one organized location.…