I mentioned briefly my efforts to set up GPG encryption with OS X’s Mail.app yesterday. There are extents I will go to in order to, say, procure a particular variety of sandwich or locate a specific item nestled within the labyrinthine confines of our computer room closet whose resulting outcome is of less importance than the color of underwear I choose to don in the morning. Yet when it comes to something that has actual significance—for example securing communications of a sensitive nature over untrusted networks in an insecure medium—my typical intensity level involves a lot of shrugging.

But being aware of this fact, I decided today that no amount of mental deficiency would stop me from achieving my goal. Thanks to the industrious folks at MacGPG the initial set-up of the software was pretty painless. The main GPG disk image was a straightforward install, and with the help of one Bruce McKenzie and a site called Zeitform.info I was able to get the initial key generated.

A couple of other utilities from my dawgs at MacGPG (whom, I presume, flow fresh from the nizzle for rizzle) helped get a few other things set up and then I was directed to the PGP plugin for Mail.app, Sen:te. This is where the asphalt and the steel-belted radials unite because my comprehension (and accompanying deficiencies) was not put to the test during the previous steps. It wasn’t until I was required to display some sort of critical analysis of the pertinent data and come up with a course of action that I kind of lost my way.

I don’t mean to disparage Sen:te, because it is a fine product that cleverly replaces $100 worth of software without cost, but the first few times I tried to send a signed message it crashed Mail.app. Crashing apps is an event/experience that I have as much familiarity with as the next guy—I doubt very much that more than a handful of us escaped from the treacherous clutches of Windows 95/98—but my iBook is typically not the cause of these types of circumstances.

A key problem with using or attempting to use new software, especially if its function is also new (as opposed to using a new email client or something where the interface and features may be foreign, but at least the fundamental purpose of the software is old hat), is that when things go wrong there is often a terrifying period where one senses a floating unease: Something is wrong and without any buoys to guide or markers to point the way to shore, the only hope is to pick a random direction and start swimming, trying as hard as possible not to think that you just may be paddling with all your might out into the depths of the ocean, away from land. In this case I deleted the original key and generated a new one with a different passphrase. I’m still not sure which of those elements contributed to the subsequent success, but that success was had at all seemed plenty sufficient for me.

Since I was sending these tests to myself using my myriad of email addresses, I then generated a new key for the recipient address and sent a final mail from that account, now not only signed but fully encrypted.

So I am now capable of sending and receiving GPG/PGP-encrypted email. My public key is even on my Contact page if you’re into that sort of thing. If not, I suspect you’re unmercifully bored at this point already. Makes you wonder why you’re still reading, doesn’t it?

An Abrupt Change of Subject

• They try to spin it like this is normal, a very common occurrence with first-round draft pick Quarterbacks, but I ain’t buying it. I still say they should have picked Aaron Rogers.
• The video game sites have been a-titter about what madness Nintendo has in store for their upcoming next-gen console. They are fond of making veiled references to a new paradigm in interaction with the system and then giving coy smiles and playing coquettishly with their skirts—er, I mean, suit jackets. The last time Nintendo said some stuff like that they dropped the DS on us which, by all accounts wasn’t exactly the herald of the coming apocalypse as we might have believed if we got all our information from gamer message boards (shudder the thought) and it certainly doesn’t make the DS a first-person shooter dynamo, even with the incredibly dorky-looking thumb nubbin, but it does have some interesting and clever uses. One suspects that this time around the Revolution controller is probably going to have some kind of similar effect where at first everyone says they don’t get it, then everyone says it is clear that Nintendo’s collective brains have leaked from their nasal passages and finally everyone agrees that it is interesting but not really that big of a deal. At any rate the speculation has been intense, in the way that nuclear fusion is “intense” but so far everyone seems to be trying to out-stupid each other. (Which, coincidentally, is pretty much what I think human beings do as a general rule all the time anyway.) But today I saw something that actually had—if not creedence—at least a modicum of plausibility about it: Centrifugal resistance.

  Yes, yes, the photo is a total sham, but that doesn’t change the fact that this is probably the most on-target suggestion I’ve seen yet (you really have to be a news-following gamer to comprehend the vast quantities of theories that have been postulated in the last few months about this; the extent to which people have no lives is staggering). Combining some type of tilt detection in a standard controller could help bridge the gap that I mentioned in my previous rant between the third dimension in gaming graphics and the input mechanisms we use to interact with that dimension. The article mentions that there is actually a precedent for this type of thing in the WarioWare game, which furthers the plausibility. Adding some resistance to that tilting control device could make for some interesting gameplay possibilities, so long as the entire library of games doesn’t disintegrate into a bunch of those marble-maze games where you had to roll the marble along a wooden platform and avoid the holes with two axis controllers.