WangLu's Notes

[Updates 2025-01-20] The original blog post assumes that all passwords are stored in one password manager, and the password manager either unlocks everything or nothing (e.g. Keepass). After discussing with friends, I realized that if I use something like pass , and I use a hardware GPG token, I can actually store and sync all encrypted passwords to all devices, because I will only decrypt the passwords on demand, and the computer will not see the GPG private key. The compromise is that the computer will see the list of all password entries (e.g. accounts), as well as a few other issues . I've been using Keepass for many years. I don't use online password services because I cannot fully trust them. Besides, I may not always have Internet connection, which is why I also don't use a self-hosted service. Everything has been working fine, until I turn my paranoid knob to the max. Here's the thought experiment . The Imaginary Scenario Let's say I have 100 PCs for differe...

Windows 10 will soon reach its end of life, and my 1-gen Surface Pro is not supported by Windows 11. I (finally) decided to install Linux to it. Fortunately, it's a not-so-easy nice adventure: The device has only one USB port, so I have to bring back my 10+-year old USB hub. My live USB drive cannot boot directly, I have to disable Secure Boot first, by holding Volume Up during boot. I think years ago I learned that booting on USB might not work through a USB hub, but fortunatelly it worked well with my setup. This is done by holding Volume Down during boot. Wifi adapter was detected in the live Linux environment, but not functional. And I don't have a USB-Ethernet adapter. Luckily, nowadays we have USB-tethering from Android phones, which works out-of-the-box. Originally I planned to following this guide to set up root on ZFS, however, the system froze when building the ZFS kernel module. Then I decided to just use EXT4, yet I still learned a lot from the guide about disk par...