Some brief proposals for how to make the OpenPGP encryption standard more widely used (by alaric)

The OpenPGP standard isn't perfect, but it's good enough - and it's sufficiently widespread (in geek circles) already that it might be possible to push it into widespread usage.

Here are some ideas on things we could do to push it beyond the realm of geeks emailling each other to become a more pervasive security infrastructure.

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Learning basic manual metal arc (stick) welding and MIG welding (by alaric)

A long time ago now, when this blog was in its infancy, I wrote about how I had picked up a cheap manual metal arc welding set from B&Q since I needed to make some tools that would survive within the environment of the furnace. My existing metal-joining technology, silver soldering (aka brazing) would produce joints that would melt like butter at 600 degrees Celsius or so, which is a far cry from the thousand-degree environments I play with...

But as I mentioned slightly earlier, arc welding is easy to get wrong. I learnt from a book, so had only written descriptions to go by, and I was hard put to know what I was doing wrong that made my welds all messy.

Well, today I attended the Insight into Welding course at the Rural Skills Centre, which is near Cirencester, a short drive away from where I live. I had been looking for a welding course for a while - most of the courses I saw advertised at local colleges were formal affairs that took several days and ended up with you taking some kind of assessment, and ending up with an NVQ. All rather formal and constrained.

The Rural Skills Centre, however, does lovely little one-day or several-evening informal courses in all sorts of useful workshop skills. My welding course began with the instructor asking what the seven participant's past experience was, and what they hoped to learn - and then taught us just what we wanted to know, starting at the right level for us. Rather than having a fixed syllabus to be assessed against, we were basically paying to spend a day in a workshop with an experienced welding instructor. Which was perfect!

He quickly sorted out my arc welding problem - I held the electrode too far from the work, so it spattered all over the place and didn't heat the metal properly, thus creating a weld consisting of lots of little blogs sitting on top of the metal rather than bonding into it. Easy once you've seen how it's done properly 🙂

So having already got my money's worth before lunchtime, I practiced with the manual metal arc machine for a while, then moved up to try MIG welding - Metal Inert Gas. This is a much fancier setup than arc welding; the machine feeds a metal wire and shielding gas into the work for you when you pull a trigger, rather than you needing to manually control the distance between the end of an unweildy electrode and the work to within a few millimetres. As long as you have the voltage and wire feed speed controls on the machine set correctly for the wire you're using, the metal you're joining, and the kind of join you're doing, it's point and click - just hold the tip of the tool to the metal, pull the trigger, and keep the tip moving along smoothly, and you end up with lovely nice welds. Of course, knowing how to set the controls up right is the hard part, but we were taught foolproof techniques to home in on the correct settings.

So I spent much of the day practising with that, producing various kinds of joins in various thicknesses of mild steel. I'm quite taken by MIG welding - the equipment is a bit more expensive to buy and run than manual metal arc kit, but it produces vastly superior welds, and can be used on aluminium (manual arc can't do that).

But the best process for aluminium is TIG welding. A TIG welder doesn't put any metal out at all - it just produces intense head by driving an arc from a tungsten needle to the workpiece, while spraying the area with shielding gas like a MIG welder does. You have to feed your own extra metal in by hand to make the joint. But it's incredibly neat; the arc is tiny, and still - in the other processes the arc always seems to jump about a bit. The TIG arc was like a little flame a few millimetres long, and underneath it, the metal melted into a shiny puddle. Since it was so small you couldn't go very fast with it, but it produced incredibly neat welds! However, sadly, the TIG welding equipment is quite expensive, since the power supply needs to do some quite specialist regulation to create that easy-to-control neat arc!

So I'm going to keep practising my arc welding - but I'll be keeping my eye out for a MIG welder if I find one cheap or if I get rich... and I certainly wouldn't say not to a TIG if I somehow manage to find one I can afford!

A nice toolboard for my workshop (by alaric)

As an exercise in her art class, Sarah made some pictures by cutting out shapes in coloured paper:

Coincidentally, at about this time, I was thinking that I ought to screw a bit of wood to the wall in my workshop and hang tools from it to make them more accessible, and to store them more compactly than having them sitting on a shelf (which is the worst way of using a shelf EVER). So I was delighted when Sarah announced that she'd thought her pictures could be stuck to a piece of wood to make me a toolboard...

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Backups and Archives (by alaric)

I'm always slightly frustrated in my attempts to create efficient backup and archival systems for my stuff; because the way filesystems are managed works against me.

The contents of my disks boil down into a few different categories, for backup purposes:

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Building a Web of Trust is fun (by alaric)

Well, I've now done two ORG keysignings: the original one at Imperial College Union and another one at OpenTech.

Both worked out quite well - they've both been informal ones, where pre-registration of your key on the Wiki page is optional; at an appointed time and place, a bunch of strangers meet up and look at each other's legal proofs of ID and details of their digital identity, then go home and issue cryptographically signed statements that they think the legal ID and the digital ID match. Which, as I have mentioned before, is just one way of building trust webs. Anonymous check-my-ID keysignings copy a real-world statement of identity into a digital identity framework, which is scaleable since total strangers can sign each other's keys. Verifying digital identities based on pseudonyms involves linking a reputation to a digital identity, which is a little slower to scale since it takes time to check a reputation (generally, you can only do it for people you have formed a relationship with, even if it's just reading their blog), but in many ways more valuable.

So, I'd like to keep organising key signings, until people stop turning up!

My hunch is that, after a few parties, everyone in the region who wants to attend one will have, and will then be thoroughly rooted in the local web of trust. So attendance will drop off, as the only people who keep coming will be people who want to come and meet up and chat anyway (even if they've already swapped signatures with everyone else present) - and new people who create an identity and want to link it into the Web (and perhaps meet other local cyphergeeks).

London's certainly big enough to provide a suitable population, I think, if I organise bi-weekly or monthly regular signings at a nominated public location; I'm in London at the beginning of every other week for the foreseeable future, so I'm going to propose that I establish a routine!

But I'm also keen to get more involved in the Bristol and Glocuester geek scenes, too, what with it actually being near where I live. Perhaps just monthly. I'll see what interest I can raise...