As I mentioned in my article on building rapport with your neighbors, I have recently become interested in making those around me – especially my friends and family – better prepared. After this article they’ll only be slightly better prepared, but that’s a heck of a lot better than nothing. And maybe it’s the start of something bigger…
Five Steps to Protecting Your Home Address
Achieving comprehensive personal privacy is a complicated goal involving a lot of complex, discrete steps. On this blog I spend a lot of time focusing on the highly specific, individual steps. Often we fail to provide a lot of context for why we’re doing them, or how they fit into the bigger picture. This was called to my attention recently when an old friend contacted me. He has a legitimate safety reason to wish to be more private, and asked me for advice. Unfortunately, I don’t have a single blog post I could offer him that effectively introduces the basic steps of protecting your home address.
MXG Gear Knife Clips
This is just a quick, in-between-posts post about a gadget that I really dig. I recently changed my EDC knife to a Spyderco Para Military 2. As soon as I got it I immediately disliked the clip. It was shiny, and very high-riding. Fortunately, the PM2 is one of the most popular EDC knives on the market, so there were plenty of replacement options. This led me to MXG Gear.
VMs Part III: Snapshot Management
In the last installment in the virtual machine series, I discussed the basic setup of Ubuntu. Today I am going to talk about snapshots, why they’re important, and how to manage them. This tutorial will walk through my workflow for working with snapshots.
Self Defense Law Folk Lore
Greg Ellifritz recently wrote a post about the phrase, “I’m in fear for my life.” In it he concluded that saying (which is not the same thing as being) you are in fear for your life is, “not a shortcut to provide some sort of instant justification for shooting someone.” I recently got a comment on one of my other blogs (the “gun blog”) that I’m going to talk about today because it is another great example – though a less common one – of ‘self-defense law folk lore.’
Micro-Preparedness: Staging Your Clothing
This post is going to launch what (I hope) will become a recurring series on “micro-preparedness”. Micro-preparedness refers to very small processes that incur little to no time or financial penalty, but that may have a large impact on your overall level of preparedness. Today’s step is going to cover staging your clothing and belongings before you go to bed at night.
Nighthawk Custom Carry 5K Range Report
Eleven months ago I posted a “First Look” at my Nighthawk 1911. I had just 750 rounds on the gun at the time. I have since increased the round-count to just a little over 5,250. I have also carried this gun more or less daily for 10 months (so far). This is a follow-up report on the performance of my Nighthawk Custom carry.
ProtonMail Five Years Later, Part III: Security Features
I have been using ProtonMail full-time for over five years, and recommending it for almost six. My contact form forward emails to a ProtonMail account, and any of you that have interacted with me have done so through ProtonMail on my end. A lot has changed since ProtonMail’s beginnings. This post will cover the basics of ProtonMail: how it encrypts your data-in-motion, data-at-rest, and some other features.
EDC Flashlight Review: EAGTAC D25A Mark II Clicky
Another month, another flashlight. Today’s light is the EAGTAC D25A Mark II Clicky (I’m told “EAGTAC” is short for “Eagle Tactical”). I’ll tell you right up front, this is not the light for me. That said, it has some real cool features and might be the light for you. I really wanted to make this light work because for every feature it’s missing, something else about it is really cool.
My Special Becker BK10 & Sagewood Sheath
The Becker BK-10 “Crewman” is a very common survival/bushcraft knife and there’s nothing special about most of them. I’m sure I’m the one-millionth person to write a blog post about the Becker BK-10, however, mine is a little special. That’s partially why I’m going to write this article; the other part is just because I want to.