"The long-awaited 17,000km undersea fibre optic cable has finally landed in Uganda.The cheap high speed bandwidth provider SEACOM launched the cable’s services in Kampala on Thursday." More at http://www.newvision.co.ug/D/8/13/688992
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For many years I've been curious about how encrypted e-mails work, but I never took the time to figure it out. A few years ago I installed Enigmail, which I thought was everything I needed for encrypting e-mails in the popular Thunderbird e-mail client. But after a few minutes I realized it was not working, and I forgot about it.
I also never took the time to understand what this thing about public key and private key means.
So finally I have set it up, and I thought I could share some links and explain the idea, maybe someone is motivated to try it out.
What is encrypting an e-mail? When you encrypt an e-mail, the content is transformed so it's not readable anymore without the use of a password. Why do that? People often send passwords or even credit card and bank information by e-mail, which is like a post card. People working at companies might send confidential information around. People sometimes save the password in their browser, so anyone accessing their computer could read all the e-mails... maybe there are details about a surprise birthday party someone should not see :) or health issues or thoughts which are meant just for one person, and not for others.
One interesting thing I did not know is that you encrypt a message for only one person. So this person first has to give you a thing called public key, which is a short text. You will use this public key every time you want to send an encrypted message to this person. The same way you collect e-mail addresses in your address book, you will collect public keys of people, so you can send them encrypted messages.
To set up encryption in your computer, normally you need two programs. One is the encryption program itself, which is command line software. To avoid having to use this command line software, you normally install a second program that makes it easy to use the command line tols, for example Enigmail for Thunderbird.
Another important thing is creating public and private keys for yourself. The public key is what you have to give to any person when you want that person to send you an encrypted e-mail. This public key is not secret. You can send it by e-mail, you can put it on your website, or print it in your t-shirt. To create this keys you use one of the programs you installed. You basically have to enter your name, e-mail and a passphrase, which is like a long password that you will have to type every time you want to read an encrypted e-mail sent to you.
This is a great tutorial about how to install PGP in Mac OS X.
There you will find that the first program you need is macgpg (I clicked the link 1.4.9, which was the newest now).
Later, you can install Enigmail for Thunderbird or another option for Apple Mail as explained here.
If you are interested I can help you find other options for PC or other programs. Here is my public key. -
"Seurasaari is an island and a district in Helsinki, known mostly as the location of the Seurasaari Open-Air Museum, which consists of old, mainly wooden buildings transplanted from elsewhere in Finland and placed in the dense forest landscape of the island." (from the Wikipedia article).
You can not get the feeling of entering a 300 year old wood house from a photograph. Nor the smell, the sound of the wood when you walk, the very small size of some of the rooms... I really enjoyed visiting them. Nice Finnish women dressed with traditional clothes explained all the details about these constructions, the way they lived back then, the purpose of each room... one mentioned that these houses could last hundreds of years more.
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Picked up at midnight by someone I never met before, fun party with dressed up people. Dressed up with leather and other great costumes. Slept with a beautiful girl. And her mom. But in different beds. I mean, I and them. Kalevala book. Good food at the gas station. Island with 300 year old wood houses, that were transported to Helsinki from all over the country. Beautiful and old. Open air concert. Walk in the forest after the rain. Different amazing smells. Ray of sunlight in a dark forest. Sunset.
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Last days we had some autumn weather in summer. Colder, rain, wind. Sunset are still surprising. Today I photographed some strange light reflection in the sky, no idea what causes that.
Soukka, the place where I stay, is 20 km west of Helsinki. It's next to the sea. But when you are at the beach you don't see the horizon, because it's all surrounded by islands, so it feels like a lake. I stay in the sixth floor of a building. From the windows I can only see trees up to the horizon, and then some other buildings here and there. The air is very clean, since you probably have millions of trees, flowers and plants per habitant here.
I think nothing much happens in Soukka. There are many old people living here, and then families with kids. It's not like Helsinki or Berlin. It's calm, almost too calm. Now in summer it's even more quiet because people are gone for vacation. So I wonder what people think of the weird foreigner with the video camera in the head :) I mean... even taking photos here is kind of strange because there are no other tourists. And other people don't just wander around like I do. I must be very suspicious :)
If I only had the sound gun here! then I'm sure they would think I escaped some mental hospital :D
So the guy with the camera in the head is me. I found a helmet in the second hand store, and mounted the video camera on it. I did this because when I ride the bicycle the image I see with my eyes looks pretty stable, so I thought my head must be pretty stable. And the camera in the head should be pretty stable too :) But after checking the results I realized it's not as good as I thought. My head is not so stable :P Which in turn means that my eyes or brain have some kind of built-in stabilizer system.
Since the resulting video from the helmet camera was still a bit shaky I searched for some free software to stabilize the random motion. I found VirtualDub, and a plugin called Deshaker. You can see what came out of the first experiment here: Check the other two videos too. I guess with a bit of practice the results will be better.
Too bad food can't be currently shared on-line. I did a strawberry cake with fresh strawberries from the garden and I must say it's delicious!! :D
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Today I picked up the Flip Mino HD I ordered last week. It's a HD video
camera you can put in your pocket. Very small and light. I won't explain
the technical details because you can find them in the net. For testing
I rode my bike to my grandmas garden and later to the beach. I shot 66
videos, which means over 2 gigabytes of data! I'm going to need a big
hard disk :) I already tried recording while riding my bike, with the camera mounted
in my tripod, and the tripod attached to my jacket. It was pointed too
low, so the result was not the best, but next time it will be better. I
want to have some nice video rides surrounded by trees. I have many
ideas already: mounting the camera in a second hand helmet, putting the
camera in a small airplane I have, hanging the camera from a string so I
can fly it in the forest surrounded by trees... Let's see what comes out
of all this :) Now I have to learn how to do interesting videos... I'll search for
tutorials. My editing possibilities are a bit limited in this Linux
laptop, but I'll try to do something nice.
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After a week of work the result is a dismantled flat. The piano will be the last. I still want to make some more noise.
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Date 03.07.2009
Time 00:10
Exterior temperature 22ºC
Blood pressure 113 - 71
Pulse rate 54
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Unfortunately I don't have any photos but you are gonna have to trust me on this one.
I was walking towards my bicycle when I saw big mosquito heading towards my head. Since my mouth was slightly open, I decided not to risk it and put my lips together. I don't really know how it happened, it was all very fast. The fact is that the mosquito was between my lips. Was it a kiss? If she had introduced herself first she might have had a chance. It wasn't the case, so you can imagine my reaction. I still hear her flying out of my mouth (not by own merits) screaming "I love you I love you!".
