The Nifty Minidrive is a Nifty Hack

I know it's fashionable to hate on the Nifty Minidrive: "overpriced SD adapter!" "I can get an equivalent one for $2!". Truth is, it's an ingenious hack; a well executed, high-quality concept conceived by two local Manchester lads with a Kickstarter campaign. I've tried the cheap alternatives and they just don't compare.

Yesterday I was in Staples (aka Home Depot) for various reasons, and on a whim I picked up a Sandisk 128GB SDXC card to replace the 64GB one I was already using with Nifty. A quick swap, and now I have a grand total of 640 GB of space on my MBPr. That was just too easy!

(This said, I hope Apple hurries up with the MBPr refresh so I can buy a new laptop with 1TB disk. I was really disappointed by the lack of hardware announcements at WWDC; my current MBPr is now 4 years old but I'm not going to drop two grand on a new machine with chips from 2014...)

Change your login background in OSX

A little something for my long-suffering OSX readers: a simple script to change your login background. Note that images must be in PNG format.

Copypaste the code above, save it as /usr/local/bin/set_login_background.sh, and execute like this (the first line is necessary only on first usage):

sudo chmod a+x /usr/local/bin/set_login_background.sh
sudo set_login_background.sh /path/to/my-new-image.PNG

WebCrypto and GPG - yet another missed opportunity

(Preface: I’m not good at crypto. My brain is just not big enough to juggle the necessary math. What I can do, in most cases, is juggling the basic concepts (private/public keys, certificates, chain of trust, hashing, signing, salting, encrypting, ciphers, etc) and parsing crypto-jargon enough to get by. I like to believe I belong to the silent majority of web plumbers out there — as far as I know, the world of real cryptographers and crypto-developers is still very small. If anything I say here is wrong, by all means let me know in comments.)

I’m yet again dismayed at the stubborness of crypto-nerd in making things as awkward as possible for the rest of us.

I’m currently trying to setup a simple browser extension to verify signed data, given public keys. A fairly mundane problem, one would think; and sure enough, browser vendors recently started to implement secure interfaces for this sort of operation. Great!

So let’s import a public key to verify some data. What is the most popular key manager/generator out there, something that has been around for 25 years in various incarnations? PGP/GnuPG, of course. So I export a standard RSA key in the classic armoured format and… nothing. SubtleCrypto.importKey() does not support it. Most examples I got from googling (like these excellent ones) use JWK, yet-another-JSON-format-invented-yesterday. There are a bunch of tools out there to convert OpenSSL PEM keys to JWK (for Node.js, unsurprisingly), but nothing straightforward for PGP/GPG. No biggie: considering GnuPG is only at the core of software distribution for (almost) the entire world of Linux, it’s understandable that it could be overlooked... /sarcasm

In the end, one could probably get by using hacks like the one described here. To be honest, I’ve not tried — by the time I found it, the evening had gone and the level of frustration was too high.

Projects like Let’s Encrypt demonstrated very clearly that everyday cryptography is held back by inconsiderate and hostile interfaces; once you remove them, people adopt it extremely quickly. It is understandable that legacy implementations (X509 and so on) will be awkward; but brand new interfaces which are supposed to gain widespread popularity outside the small circle of crypto specialists, designed in the last decade, should be better than this.

OSX Nostalgia

I have to say, I really don’t like the direction the OSX interface is going. All this flatness is tremendously boring. I’ve found myself very nostalgic of the old ”Aqua” interface several times in the last few months.

Unfortunately, Jony Ive’s iron grip is so tight, all theming/customization hooks have been removed from recent OSX releases. There is now no application (that I know of) which could reskin windows, toolbars and scrollbars.

The only avenue left to UI tinkerers is icons. You can still use LiteIcon to override system icons, and of course copy-paste on individual folders. I’m currently using icons from the classic Iconfactory World of Aqua series, and I just love them.

Some programs will thankfully allow you to customize them. There are plenty of Aqua themes for Firefox, I use a slightly cheesy one. iTerm2 has an ”Aqua” option for its tabs.

If you are an app developer — please consider some skinning support. For all the talk about ”consistency” from UI nazis, the first thing people do on a new computer is still to customize the desktop background...

how to fix jEdit 5.3.0 on OSX with Retina screen

jEdit is a great little editor: very flexible, much plugins, such macros, so java.
However, for some reason jEdit developers strenuously refuse to fix their OSX package to support Retina screens. Three years since these screens started getting popular, you still have to repeat the following procedure after each jEdit installation or update, in order to avoid getting blurry fonts everywhere:

1. quit jEdit if open
2. in Finder, right-click on jEdit in Applications, select Show Package Contents
3. go to the Contents folder, then edit Info.plist by adding these two lines at the end of the file, just before </dict>:
   <key>NSHighResolutionCapable</key>
   <true/>
4. force OSX to re-cache the plist by executing the following command in a terminal:
   defaults read /Applications/jEdit.app/Contents/Info.plist
5. Restart jEdit. Icons will still look crappy (the "classic" theme slightly better than "tango"), but the rest will be ok.

On a more positive note, jEdit 5.3.0 (running on Java 1.8.0_66) seems to have fixed the crashes I've had for a year. Welcome back, "little editor that could".