Digital Neanderthal

Trust the developers, not the code hosting infrastructure. ~Linux Kernel Maintainers PGP Guide

Why GPG?

“The distinction between what is public and what is private is becoming more and more blurred with the increasing intrusiveness of the media and advances in electronic technology. While this distinction is always the outcome of continuous cultural negotiation, it continues to be critical, for where nothing is private, democracy becomes impossible.” ~ Privacy Conference, Social Research, New School University

Too often these days with technology, insecurity lurks in the shadows of complexity. Getting back to primary tools is useful for reconnection to self and to freedom of expression. Quality of life is in direct correlation to the artifacts at our disposal.

Open Source GPG/GnuPG (Gnu Privacy Guard) and it’s proprietary pal PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) can be called upon to encrypt email, passwords, files, storage tombs, logical volumes and partitions. Moreover, GPG is required to sign git commits in collaborative work situations.

“I generally sign all of my mails because I believe it’s important. More than once it helped to prevent identity theft with people using a ‘similar’ email address to mine.” ~Anonymous

My primary motivation for setting up GPG is for use with Pass: The Standard Unix Password Manager where each password or document is stored as an encrypted file. This guide will ensure that you are set up to encrypt, sign and authenticate with GPG.

Markdown has gained much traction due to it’s simple syntax and ease of use. You can edit Markdown in plain text, unlike HTML with it’s taggy surrounds. Hyperlinks to other documents and urls are retained without affecting readability. Other attributes will be color-coded in your text editor. Nowadays, markdown is widely used for project documentation, jupyter notebooks and rendering static webpages (like this one!) on modern web frameworks. It is super useful for vimwiki, a personal text-based wiki plugin for Vim.

This guide will help you get to grips with writing markdown for yourself.

30 years ago, when Sir Tim Berners Lee needed to name his invention, he settled on the World Wide Web because it:

“…stressed the decentralized form allowing anything to link to anything. This form is mathematically a graph, or web. It was designed to be global in reach.”

On the first ever webpage he decribes it like so:

…a wide-area hypermedia information retrieval initiative aiming to give universal access to a large universe of documents.

Building a website takes dogged determination. If you stick with it, you wind up with a platform to show off your awesome brand; you! Choose a ready-made plan like Wordpress or Wix and you are stuck with a convoluted system of extensions and dependencies. The compromised security and longer loading times may negatively affect your search engine rankings.

A website running on the newer JAMstack architecture delivers better performance, higher security, lower cost of scaling, and a better developer experience. A Static Site Generator (SSG) is an automated build system that can quickly serve pre-baked markdown stored to a Content Delivery Network (CDN) and has none of the moving parts of a traditional LAMPstack. A CDN is a geographically distributed group of servers which work together to provide fast delivery of Internet content, rather than being stored on a single server. A CDN augments traditional web hosting, by caching content at the network edge, which improves website performance.