Hopes (Resolutions?) for 2024
2023-12-27 - [52] 10:12
I'm trying to keep things decently simple for 2024 in terms of habits or projects I want to do. Of course there will be more things I plan to do, but the following are 3 things I certainly want to make progress on.
- Get to the point where I only use my home desktop on Sunday and only up to a few hours on Sundays
- Create secure authentication scheme that uses only paper and pencil
- Finish at least a few more Game Boy tarot card designs
Sunday only for home desktop computer usage
I had dial up internet at home until about 2011 or 2012. Before then, if I wanted to use the internet, I would usually go to the public library. Sometimes I'd use the internet at home, but you can definitely feel 7KBps max speeds... I felt like I had a healthier relationship with the internet back then and I want to try to get back to that. My goal is to only use the internet from my home computer for up to a few hours a week and on Sunday afternoons/evenings only. It'll probably take me a decent amount of time this year to get to this point though.
Because I don't trust other computers by default when it comes to typing in things like passwords, this will let me heavily limit account usage for social media things as well. I also won't have my RSS feed list available to me at the library, so this will hopefully break my habit of wanting to know information as soon as possible, at least a break that habit a little bit.
Create secure pencil & paper authentication scheme
As stated a little bit further up in this post, I don't trust other computers by default when it comes to typing in my passwords. I will still want to sometimes write a journal post, but will likely end up making a system so I can publish a journal post from the public library's computer. To prevent others from being able to post on my behalf without my permission, I'll need a way to authenticate myself. I don't want to type in a password, because of that lack of trust thing I mentioned...
A solution is to create an authentication scheme, essentially a MAC (message authentication code) where there is a shared secret between my web/gemini/gopher server and myself. I would combine that secret with a randomly generated message the server will produce to create a 1-time hash that I would input instead of the shared secret. It's important to me that I must be able to calculate the hash via pen and paper and that I need to be able to generate any shared secret using dice. It should also be relatively fast for me to calculate the final hash by hand with only paper and pencil.
I'm currently looking at the "Human Computable Hash Function" by Manual Blum as an initial inspiration, although my modifications to make it dice friendly so far have unfortunately allowed for leaking of secret data information... This will take me some time to figure out a secure scheme...
Finish some Game Boy tarot card designs
For 2-ish years now, I have been slowly working on Game Boy 2-bit artwork for the Rider-Waite tarot deck illustrated by Pamela Golman Smith. I have gotten through a lot of the "easy" designs so far, so each card is going to take me considerably longer to do than before. I want to get at least a few more cards done. At the moment, I only have the following cards finished:
- The Fool
- The Magician
- The High Priestess
- The Hermit
- Justice
- The Hanged Man
- Ace of Wands
- Ace of Swords
Maybe I can get a handful of the major arcana done along with a full minor arcana suit. I feel like up to 1 card a week is reasonable, although I will make no promises on that... it'll probably be up to 20 cards rather than up to 52 cards in 2024 if I even have the motivation.