notabot

For those, like me, who hadn’t heard of him before: Richard Jewel.

Richard Allensworth Jewell (born Richard White; December 17, 1962 – August 29, 2007) was an American security guard and law enforcement officer who alerted police during the Centennial Olympic Park bombing at the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, Georgia. He discovered a backpack containing three pipe bombs on the park grounds and helped evacuate the area before the bomb exploded, saving many people from injury or death. For months afterward he was suspected of planting the bomb, resulting in adverse publicity that “came to symbolize the excesses of law enforcement and the news media”.

That’s looking pretty good, especially if it’s your first go! The feathers look nicely shaped, even, and at the right angles. The one thing I’d say is, make sure you leave enough space at the back of the shaft, you’ve got these very near the end, and by the time you’ve cut the nock (the groove the bowstring sits in) there’s not going to be enough space for your fingers on the bowstring if you have then near the nocking point.

Including the URL isn’t to act as a check on the contents of the QR code, but to act as an alternative for those who don’t want to scan it at all.

The problem is “cuteness” is very much in the eye of the beholder for things like this, and I’m with neatchee here, it’s not cute, and it makes it basically unshareable, and hence unusable in a lot of contexts. I appreciate the effort that’s gone into the project, but the name and publicity massively detract from that.

That’s a good article, thanks. The core beliefs they articulate at the end really resonate for me, but it was getting hard to convince people they were worthwhile even ten years ago, long before LLMs were infecting people’s minds.

• Things that are worth doing are worth doing well.
• Things that are done well require time and effort.
• You make meaning through the doing.
• Ideas are common; effort is not.
• There are no shortcuts.

An airgapped machine is certainly going to be most robust from external attack, but even then you should probably encrypt your files to ensure privacy should you ever discard, or otherwise lose control of, the storage media.

An encrypted partition may be sufficient, but your journal entries will still be “plain text” when it is mounted, and so you will be able to read them without extra effort. If you want to make it so that once an entry is written it is encrypted and can only be read with deliberate effort, you could use GPG encryption.

First generate a key pair with a really strong passphrase, and store it on a USB drive. Then import just the public key onto your journaling machine and store the USB drive somewhere safe. With just the public key on your machine you can encrypt files, but you can’t decrypt them. Ideally you’ll set up your journalling tool to only write via GPG, but if not, you can just encrypt each entry after you write it.

As to what journalling tool to use, I like VIM, although I know not everyone gets on with it. You can have it start up with a template ready to go, not write temporary files, and save via GPG so the plaintext never hits persistent storage.