2020 has been a crazy year! You don’t need me to tell you that. The pandemic. The movement against civil injustice. The crazy polarizing election cycle. The January 6th 2021 attack on the Capitol. Those are all headline grabbing crazy items. But it’s also been a crazy year on a more personal level. Mostly seeing…
Category: Living
How I got COVID-19 and beat it!
This is my story on how I got COVID-19. And recovered without infecting anyone else in my family. So if I missed your birthday, didn’t call, ignored your emails etc. – now you know why! I’m putting this down in a blog post not for any sympathy (no, thank you!) but just to document an…
File based SSH keys and agent forwarding in Windows and WSL
This is a follow-up to the hardware based SSH keys post, to document the reverse i.e. from hardware SSH keys to file-based SSH keys. File based SSH keys are weaker since they’re on your hard drive in the clear but they are also convenient. Windows 10 Disable automatic startup of start wsl-ssh-pagent.bat if you added…
Modern online safety for parents of young kids
April 2020. The ongoing global corona virus pandemic has affected everyone in far too many ways. We’re not getting into the broader discussion but kids are now learning remotely over connected devices so today I’ll be covering online child safety while allowing kids to be productive learners. Disclaimer As is with most security and safety…
SSH on Windows with private key on Yubikey
These are my notes (mostly for myself!) on getting SSH authentication through GPG under a variety of Windows 10 environments like native SSH (see c:\windows\system32\openssh\*), Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) and minGW / GIT Bash. Why? So you have a single, GPG based identity on a secure, removable hardware key store like a OpenPGP card…
Importing GPG Key pairs with OpenPGP Cards
This allows you to use the GPG private key on your yubikey (or any OpenPGP security card) on a new workstation. Note that the secret key will continue to live on the card – just as we typically desire. Since we’re using the gpg tool directly, this should work on Windows, macOS and linux. 1….
Review of Alfa Romeo of San Diego: How NOT to do business
TL;DR : Buy an Alfa from somewhere else. Or don’t buy an Alfa. Last year Poonam and I decided to switch things up a bit and look at the Alfa Romeo Guilia instead of the usual BMW route. It was mostly my idea and to be honest, I really love the car. It’s a great…
Fix rusted gym weights
I needed additional Olympic weights for my home gym and I saw an amazing local deal by someone trying to get rid of their set. The catch was the weights was neglected and rusted. Functionally, the old weights would work (gravity don’t care!) but I was concerned about aesthetics. Looking for a weekend project to…
Fix your CalSpa hot tub (error code SF)
So, I was going to relax in my spa the other day when I saw it would trip over and flash “SF” on the control panel. Here is what I did to fix it. SF stands for safety Suction Failure. It comes up when your hot tub doesn’t suck. Typically when something doesn’t suck, it’s…
The treadmill desk experiment
In recent years, I’ve been sitting at my desk for over 12 hours a day (and night). That’s a lot of time that I am NOT active – a big change from my daily gym routine from earlier. So when I came across a lot of internet buzz on standing desks and saw senator Janel…