Demoing VR

2016-12-12

Earlier this year is succumb to the pressure of technology and purchased an HTC Vive, fulfilling my childhood dream of being a reckless adult who buys toys. It’s been a thrilling ride. This holiday I spoke to my management about taking a day to bring in and demo room scale VR for some people at work. I was given the green light and I started planning. It wound up being quite a bit of effort (but fun), and one of the things I produced was the document below.…

Getting my SSL Labs A+

2016-12-09

After setting up codemichael.net I’ve been doing some tweaking here and there; one of the things I wanted to do was get an A+ rating from SSL Labs . Turns out it’s pretty easy to do if you’ve only got Nginx as your only front end. I was looking at enabling http/2 and I stumbled upon a very useful guide on Digital Ocean that included some security benefits. It specifically mentions at the bottom that if you do configuration right you’ll end up with and A+, but I ended up tweaking a couple of extra items based on the recommendations on the cipherli.…

Kingdom Death: Monster

2016-12-02

I heard about Kingdom Death: Monster (KD:M) back during the original Kickstarter. It was notable for it’s ambition of creating a long form and very high quality game. It was far too pricy to invest in, especially given the lofty goals. Since it’s successful original Kickstarter it has gotten good reviews and has been spoken of as a fantastic experience, providing organic storytelling in the way the game plays. The core game campaign covers thirty lantern years, and each year takes around one to three hours to complete, meaning that a KD:M campaign is a big undertaking requiring many play sessions.…

Writing for different types of games

2016-12-01

After a year of running a Dungeon World D&D themed game, I find myself with the exciting opportunity of running two completely different games. I’m running both a Shadowrun (SR) game and a Dresden Files game (DFRGP). These systems are incredibly different, and prepping for them seems to require a completely different set of skills. I love that cyberware addiction is a thing in 5e SR is a formulaic game, contacts call shadowrunners, shadowrunners meet Johnson, shadowrunners go into the mission with need-to-know only, shadowrunners get into trouble because of what they didn’t know, shadowrunners get out alive (barely) and yell at Johnson for not telling them everything, Johnson tries to not pay up.…

2-factor authentication comes to Protonmail: it's time to switch

2016-12-01

As it stands today, email is the center of your digital life. Just about everything (important) you do comes back to your email account. And your most important accounts (financial) are vulnerable if your email account becomes compromised. Remember, nearly all services on the internet today use your email account to authenticate you, either primarily or as a last resort. That is why 2-factor authentication (2FA) is so important for your email account and why I can’t really recommend a service that doesn’t support it.…

Drowning in a digital ocean

2016-11-30

Well, that was fast. In an effort to ever expand my experience and knowledge, and to test my own implementations, I’ve decided to go ahead and flip from AWS EC2 to DigitalOcean (DO). Mostly because EC2 is overly complex for what I need/want. It’s good exposure, but I’d rather have a simpler product that easy to understand. DO provides that. So I went ahead and created an account, if you want to do one you can get $10 of service by using this link for signup (and I’ll get a referral boost).…

Matthew Green on Phone Encryption

2016-11-24

Matthew Green is worth following, but if you don’t here is a post he did about phone encryption that is worth looking at. TL;DR Google is still not doing it right on Android phones, but that won’t matter for most people.

the Investigatory Powers Bill in the UK

2016-11-24

Protonmail blogged about the Investigatory Powers Bill, it’s worth a read. While you’re at it you might want to check out the EFF’s comments about it as well. This is some poorly worded and deeply troubling law, and it’s going to make companies that have to do business in the UK less trustworthy, and make us all less secure in ways both subtle and overt.

Setting up codemichael.net on AWS

2016-11-18

When I realized that I wanted to throw together a personal blog site again I started looking at my hosting options. Dreamhost has been providing me with cheap hosting for a long time, but I’m a lot pickier than I used to be about what I want to do with my host. I’d been running my role-playing blog on their DreamCompute platform, but I realized that I really should be moving to AWS.…

lets encrypt!

2016-11-17

Once upon a time website encryption was a privilege, for a hobby site, it probably didn’t make sense to spend hundreds of dollars on a certificate from one of the Certificate Authorities (CA). Even as early as a few years ago getting a free cert was difficult and annoying at best. No longer. Now we have Lets Encrypt , a free certificate authority who provides a secure programatic method for setting up you Domain Validation (DV) Certificates, for free*.…