First Log: Hardening My Digital Setup, and Preparing For More

Today is a nice day. I get to take the day off, and I just finished creating the log feature for this website.

My hardened setup is now complete with BitWarden as my password manager.

BitWarden is an open-source (meaning you can self-host it!) password manager run by a private company, created in 2016. It is a secure way of managing your passwords—instead of remembering a password for each site—you get to remember one master password, and place that into BitWarden for them to be able to remember your other passwords, and even generate random passwords for every site for more security! This means, you just have to remember one super secure password that you know you will remember—instead of being forced to remember a password for every site, and end up making your passwords less secure, with more re-usage across sites. BitWarden encrypts your other passwords based on your master password with a secure algorithm

Your browser's password manager has a chance to be unencrypted/stored in plain text, and probably is. With a password manager, it also is able to synchronise across your devices, and is encrypted by default—in case of a breach, the attacker can't access any of the passwords without your master passphrase. Make sure to look for one where even the provider can't access your keys without entering your master passphrase.

I've moved to Proton Mail.

Proton Mail turns on privacy by encrypting your emails through E2EE (end-to-end encryption)—meaning, even Proton can't access your mail. Google, is an advertising company. Yes—you, as a consumer are not the customer of the service. The advertiser is. The advertiser pays Google and says "Hey, can we have the user's data and what they have done, please!", Google feeds this that information from the scary amount of data they have collected and used to build a profile about you. Google also displays ads that disrupt your experience, and also uses it to change things about the platform you use for 'personalisation'. This applies to Gmail as well. This is exactly how Google makes their money, and is able to keep everything free. On the other hand, Proton is a privacy respecting company who also provides other freemium privacy services like Proton Mail and they are a Swiss-based company. They have a free plan, but also pricing tiers. Tuta Nota is also an option too. This is true for search too, and Kagi explains it here.

Continued configuring my Matrix account

Matrix is a decentralised communication protocol similar to Discord, but with many homeservers, and a central one. You can use Matrix by selecting a client (the UI you will be using), and creating an account on a homeserver. Matrix provides a homeserver themselves, so you can use that or you can self-host it as well. It's free and open-source. Matrix provides E2EE in their protocol, so your messages are safe.

I will continue tinkering with Bevy and experimenting with SSR soon. Maybe even working on something within Rust, or exploring something else.

Bevy is a game engine, written in Rust. It is blazingly fast 🚀, based on the ECS paradigm, installable as a single cargo crate. It's not production-ready yet, but I think it will be fun to work with. It's different to some other game engines—it's open-source, free, and does not rely on large inheritance trees.

I didn't do much today. I also configured a couple of browser settings.

I hope you enjoyed reading my first log, even if it didn't convince you to use any of the things I listed here—though, I recommend it, it's been useful for me!