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Monthly Meanderings: July 2026

2026-08-01T00:00:00Z

Another month, another roundup post. This month has been very… exercise-y. Which is, for the record, not normal for me. For the previous year my only source of exercise has basically been walking, but that’s not a great fitness activity for me. When my regular walks entered the 10-15km territory it got more and more annoying to find the time and/or an interesting route.

I also managed to injure my knee while walking through a particularly muddy field, and spent a few months going slightly stir crazy. Coming out of that I started running three times a week, bought a bicycle, and added in some strength exercises along with the ones the physio recommended. If you told me a few months ago that I’d be annoyed at not being able to exercise too much on rest days I’d think you were mad.

Website updates and other projects

Before we talk even more about exercise, let’s do the usual topics I cover in these posts. The only website update this month has been a post about… exercise. Maybe I have a problem. Anyway, in Tracking PBs without the dark patterns I talk about building a slimmed-down, single-player Strava to track my personal bests, without all the nonsense that annoys me.

Other than the PB tracker, I’ve not been working much on personal projects. I’ve not really had any other itches that need scratching, just the usual background noise of dependency updates and other project maintenance.

Entertainment

Behold, the section where I normally talk about the films, TV programmes, and board games that have kept me entertained this month: […]. Yep, not a single one.

I have played a few games, though. A friend and I finally got around to trying out Escape Simulator 2, and it’s just as good as the original. The rooms feel a bit more detailed, and there are a few cool interactions that probably wouldn’t be possible in the old version. There’s also a hard mode for all the rooms which we’ve not yet tried, but sounds like it’ll keep us amused for a bit longer.

I’ve also been playing a bit of World of Warcraft, but it’s now in the awkward stage where I’ve done most things I can reasonably do this season, and there’s not really any point in doing anything else. All the gear will become mostly irrelevant in a few weeks when season two releases, and we’ve hit the major milestone achievements for Mythic+. Feels a bit anticlimactic to get to a fairly good stage and then just… not play for a bit.

Fitness

Given how much exercise I’ve done, it probably deserves its own section in these monthly posts. I have the vague idea of aiming to run a marathon before I turn 40 (i.e., within around 15 months). That’s both scary and yet not completely impossible. I’m going to work up through the distances and see how it goes. A 5k at the start of September, 10k in November, half marathon around Easter next year, then a full marathon just before my birthday in October. That way even if it gets too tough or something goes wrong I’ll have accomplished something.

New hobbies mean new toys. My bike is nothing particularly special: a hybrid from Halfords that’s about one step up from entry-level. But it gets the job done, and has helped me remember how much I enjoy cycling. The infrastructure around here is pretty terrible, though. There are lots of little bits of multi-use paths and a few dedicated bike lanes, but they’re not joined up or signed well in the slightest. In most cases it’s easier to just stay on the road and deal with the traffic. It’s a bit sad that they’ve spent time and money to do something and it’s not very useful.

On the running side, I picked up a Garmin Forerunner 165 watch. I’ve been wearing an Apple Watch for a little over a year now, but using the touchscreen to navigate screens and start/stop activities while running is annoyingly fiddly. The digital crown keeps getting gummed up with sunscreen and requiring cleaning, too. The Forerunner has physical buttons, and is much better at showing the data I want to see in a clear format, and letting me set things up like target pace or distance on the watch itself, instead of via a phone app. Oh, and the battery seems like it’s going to last for a week rather than a day, which is a nice change of pace.

I’m going to need to make a nice widget to show off my monthly runs and bike rides, but for now here’s some artisanal stats:

I went out for 14 runs, totalling 48km, although a significant portion of that was walking for warmup, cooldown or recovery.
My longest actual run was a 20 minute straight run covering 2.5km.
My average running pace is 8min/km, which is a “conversational” pace for me right now.
I went for 9 cycle rides: 2 on rented mountain bikes, then the rest on my own bike. They covered 128km.
When cycling I made 8 coffee shop stops, which works out to exactly one every 16km on average.

Next month I’m hoping to ramp the running up to hit 5k by the very end. I’m mostly following the NHS Couch to 5k plan but I’m tweaking it a little bit as otherwise I’d finish on 3.75km at my current pace. I guess “Couch to 30 minutes of running” isn’t quite as catchy. I made a Couch to 5k page to track my progress and adjustments.

Around the web

Blogging Can Just Be Stating The Obvious

I often look at my own posts and think, “There’s nothing novel, or important, or deep in here at all — is this even worth saying?”

I’ve written before about The Curse of Knowledge and Blogging, and this is a very similar take from Jim Nielsen, but it’s still super interesting to see a similar idea expressed in another way by another person.

I Built a Voice Opening Door to Moria (My Garage)

A YouTube video documenting a really cool project. What grabs me is the amount of disciplines he dabbles in: he’s part blacksmith, part carpenter, part electrician, part programmer, and so on. It’s one of the best examples of maker culture I’ve seen in ages.

There’s one bit in particular that sticks in my mind: he tried to find a rendering of the door online, and realised all the existing ones were gibberish or illegible, so he downloaded a font and worked out the exact inscription himself. It makes my inner perfectionist feel validated.

Linus Torvalds on AI in the Linux kernel

LLMs are very divisive, and there are a lot of unsettled moral and ethical issues. But at the end of the day they’re a tool that’s not going to go away any time soon. There are people on crusades to try and ban LLM tools in projects, boycott any projects that accept contributions, and so on. It’s a bit like militant veganism. I can understand where they’re coming from, but also please stop shouting at me. Anyway, this take from Linus seems pretty spot on to me.

Buttons

An interactive, graphical history of how buttons have been rendered in various operating systems and desktop environments over time. Maybe it’s just my age and nostalgia, but it really does feel like they peaked around the late 90s/early 2000s. I’m not quite sure why we went from elegant skeuomorphic buttons to ugly plain squares with weird accent colours when you click them.

Rotating sandwiches

For some reason I expected this to be static pictures of sandwiches which spun in a circle, but it’s actually recordings of sandwiches rotating on a turntable. It’s oddly mesmerising. I wonder why I’ve never seen a restaurant menu with gifs like that?

Tracking PBs without the dark patterns

2026-07-23T00:00:00Z

I’ve recently been bitten by some kind of strange exercise bug. I’ve gone from being mostly sedentary to struggling to not go out for a cheeky bike ride on a day that’s meant to be a rest day. Maybe this is what a midlife crisis feels like?

Anyway, one of the things I’ve enjoyed about this development is seeing my personal best efforts gradually go up. There’s something incredibly rewarding about doing a run, and then seeing a nice little gold medal because as part of that you ran your fastest 1km ever. Unfortunately the only software I’ve found that does that is Strava, and boy do I not get on with it.

The many shortcomings of Strava

Strava is basically the app for running and cycling. Everyone talks about it. It sounds like they like it. But I really, really don’t. It’s like someone went through a catalogue of user-hostile behaviours and said “we’ll take them all!”.

The problems started in the setup wizard: it touts a load of privacy features, but doesn’t offer any way to enable them. All your activities are public by default, and you have to spelunk around in the settings to turn that off. I wasn’t actually sure if I wanted my activities to be public or not, and ended up flip-flopping around a bit. There is a clunky workflow to bulk change past activities, but it’s arbitrarily time-gated so you can’t use it too often…

The bulk operations are extremely limited, too: you can set the activity visibility, and your heart rate visibility, and that’s it. Want to bulk delete things? You’re out of luck. Bulk rename? No chance. You either do them one-by-one or use some janky third-party script. I think I pressed around 300 little ‘delete’ links in the course of trying to get my activity history imported in a way I liked.

Those problems give a bit of a signal about Strava’s priorities, but I could live with them. Once I’ve stopped faffing with the initial import I’m not really going to want to change the privacy settings or bulk edit things. Alas, the problems didn’t end there.

Look at me! Look at me! GIVE ME ENGAGEMENT!

The most obvious one is that everything is an upsell. Vast swathes of the app are premium-only, and they don’t ever get out of your way: they stick around acting as adverts. We’re all used to freemium apps that try to hawk upgrades, but the sheer amount of screen real estate taken up by these is egregious. I started a premium trial, expecting things to get a lot better, and… they didn’t really. All the premium features are still branded as such, so now instead of “look at what you could have if you paid us” it’s “look at what you’re getting for paying us (don’t even think about cancelling)”. Subscribing also makes your avatar get a premium outline, and there’s no way to disable it. I really hate that. Now I’m an advert myself. I don’t want to be part of their weird dark patterns, thank you very much.

And while we’re talking about dark patterns: there’s so much engagement bait that I physically cringe at it. You get a notification for logging an activity with a vague call to action to check it out. You get a separate notification when you break or come close to one of your PBs, but it doesn’t tell you which; there’s plenty of space in the notification for it, but they want you to hit the app instead. It all just feels so slimy to me. I don’t know whether it doesn’t bother other people as much, or if they’re desensitised to it, or just don’t realise how pleasant things could actually be.

Making a replacement

I realised pretty early on that if I only want automatic PB tracking, I could just write something myself to do it. I already use Health Auto Export to exfiltrate data from Apple Health, including workouts. I can just make a service that receives that data, crunches some numbers, and activates the dopamine receivers in my brain when I set a new record. But I didn’t really want to bother doing that if I could avoid it. I tried a whole slew of different apps and none of them did the thing, at least not without a subscription. And Strava had soured me on fitness subscriptions. I finally resigned myself to making something.

And by “myself” I mean “an LLM”. This is one of the first projects where I’ve not written a single line of code, and I’ve barely even reviewed anything produced by the LLM. I gave it an overall architecture and some sample data, and had it write a plan. I critiqued the plan, had it broken down into a few different phases, and then had it work through them. I occasionally stopped it when I saw it doing something stupid, and gave it a couple of technical steers, but my feedback has mostly been functional. I’m probably not going to be releasing it publicly any time soon for that reason — I don’t want to publish it under my name when I’ve not even looked at the code. I also wouldn’t be comfortable making software this way if other people were going to rely on it, but for non-critical, personal-use-only software I’m happy with the approach.

Anyway, I called it “Pompei Band”. Project names are hard. One of my common techniques is to put a term into an anagram finder; in this case “PB dopamine” anagrams to “Pompei Band”, and it even abbreviates to PB. Weird, but I like it. This is how it shows recent activities on the homepage:

Dashboard entry for a recent run in PB

You can click through to see the standard activity details most tracking apps show: a map, heart rate, pace, gradient, and heart rate zones. You can also click on each effort to see a history of them, which gives a nice overview of progress:

1 mile run PB history

It pretty much does exactly what I want, and has none of the annoying behaviours that Strava leans into. When I first drafted this post I wrote “there’s a few more bits I’d like to add at some point, but I can happily prompt them into existence when I want them”, but in the time I spent procrastinating before taking screenshots I ended up implementing them all. My favourite is this little history widget I added to the homepage, shown here next to Strava’s:

Recent activity calendar in Pompei Band and in Strava

The Strava one just confuses me. I’m not sure what the scale of the circles means. I’m guessing it’s time, which in effect means it just highlights my bike rides which are longer than runs. The colours for the line charts don’t work for me, and I’m not sure what three zig-zag lines are meant to represent. Pompei Band’s version uses distinct, obvious colours for different activities, and scales the brightness independently for each type of activity based on length (so long cycle rides don’t affect the short runs). I also flipped the axes so it looks more like a GitHub activity timeline, because that’s how my brain works. Nothing groundbreaking, but also none of the paper-cuts the Strava version inflicted on me.

Software doesn’t have to be awful

This blog post has been rattling around in my head for a few days. I didn’t want it to just be a litany about Strava being bad, and I didn’t want to sound like an LLM hype piece, which made it tricky to figure out what I was actually trying to say. I think the core of it is: software doesn’t have to be awful.

Everyone’s heard of enshittification, and it’s so prevalent that it’s easy to accept it as a fact of life. That’s just how late-stage capitalism works, right? But we can just make better software. And as LLMs slowly become more and more capable, that “we” grows to a broader and broader group. It’s easy to be negative about that: we’re going to drown in vibe-coded products, much like we’re already drowning in written LLM slop. On the other hand, a future where you can just say “make me single-player Strava without all the dark patterns” and get something that works just how you want it is pretty exciting.

The one thing I can’t decide: if everyone can whip up their own individual software, will the existing platforms actually improve? If Strava didn’t have all the dark patterns and engagement bait I would have just have paid for it. Will they realise that? Or will they double down even harder, try to lock you into their platform, and build moats around user data? Now I’ve said it, it seems pretty obvious they’ll try to do that. But I hope they won’t.

An interesting Tailscale + Docker gotcha

2026-01-29T00:00:00Z

As I’ve written about before, I use Tailscale for a lot of things. I thought I had it set up in a reasonably secure manner, but I recently noticed a problem.

I use Tailscale’s ACLs to limit what each node can access, based on the tags I apply to it. So an app node can’t access anything via Tailscale, while an integration or server node can access things tagged with either app or integration. This is expressed pretty simply in the Tailscale ACL JSON:

{
	"tagOwners": {
		// Servers that can be SSH'd into
		"tag:server": [],
		// Applications that are exposed on tailscale but never connect out
		"tag:app": [],
		// Things which talk to other services over tailscale (connecting to apps etc)
		"tag:integration": [],
	},
	"grants": [
		{
			// Users can access everything
			"src": ["autogroup:member"],
			"dst": ["*"],
			"ip":  ["*"],
		},
		{
			// Servers and integrations can access integrations and apps
			"src": ["tag:server", "tag:integration"],
			"dst": ["tag:integration", "tag:app"],
			"ip":  ["*"],
		},
	],
}

Over the past week I’ve been setting up a private Forgejo instance behind Tailscale, complete with an actions runner that runs things using a docker-in-docker container. I didn’t want the runner knowing anything about Tailscale, so I had it configured to speak to Forgejo direct over HTTP (forgejo:3000) instead of using full Tailscale HTTPS URL that I use when accessing it (http://git.example-net.ts.net/)¹.

Everything was going fine, until I forgot to do that translation… and it worked. My Forgejo action runners could access anything on my tailnet. I run several things on Tailscale that just have authentication turned off, on the basis that only authorised devices can access them. Things like the admin interface for this website. I definitely didn’t intend for any workflow I run on my git server to have access to edit my website!

This wasn’t just limited to Forgejo, either. Any docker container I was running could access the tailnet. In hindsight it’s fairly obvious why: the host is running Tailscale, connected as a node tagged with my server tag. That creates a tailscale0 interface, and automagically sets up iptables rules to route Tailscale traffic over the interface. Docker also automagically sets up iptables rules to bridge traffic, and apparently these two sets of rules interact in such a way that traffic from Docker containers is allowed to route via the tailscale0 interface.

I say it’s fairly obvious in hindsight — there’s no reason why Docker would special case any particular host interface after all — but it still feels pretty surprising. Because both bits of software inject their own iptables rules, I never really had a good mental model for how they interact. The host Tailscale node was a completely separate building block to Docker. It would be a pain to use either of them if they didn’t do these rules, but it’s also one of the reasons I don’t really like “magical” things².

There are lots of ways to fix this, but none of them feel particularly great. You can configure both Tailscale and Docker to not automatically fiddle with iptables and handle the rules yourself, but I really hate dealing with iptables³. As a stopgap I did hold my nose and add some iptables rules to drop traffic to the tailscale0 interface if it originated from the IP ranges that Docker was configured to use:

iptables -I DOCKER-USER -s 192.168.0.0/16 -o tailscale0 -j DROP
iptables -I DOCKER-USER -s 172.17.0.0/12 -o tailscale0 -j DROP

The DOCKER-USER chain is a nice little escape hatch; it comes before the main auto-generated DOCKER chain, and Docker leaves the rules in it alone.

So I added these rules, and felt pretty good about myself, and then… everything started breaking in weird ways. After some debugging I realised the problem was DNS⁴. The server’s DNS resolver is 100.100.100.100, a special Tailscale address. This is so that it can resolve tailnet hostnames via MagicDNS (and so I don’t have to configure my custom DNS servers manually on each device; Tailscale does it for me). My new iptables rules inadvertently dropped all the DNS packets coming from docker containers. D’oh.

Obviously the solution here is to double down and add MORE iptables rules:

iptables -I DOCKER-USER -s 192.168.0.0/16 -d 100.100.100.100 -o tailscale0 -j ACCEPT
iptables -I DOCKER-USER -s 172.17.0.0/12 -d 100.100.100.100 -o tailscale0 -j ACCEPT

This got DNS working again, but it all feels a bit gross. Not least because to actually make these persist you need to use iptables-save, and then you also get all the rules that both Docker and Tailscale have inserted. I came across a script to filter out the Docker ones, but… yuck⁵.

I realised a cleaner idea might just be to lock down what server tagged nodes could access within Tailscale itself. That way I can avoid touching iptables at all. It’s handy to be able to curl services from the host when debugging, but it’s not really necessary. So I removed that access, and… stuff broke again. I’m using my Forgejo instance as a registry for some of the docker images I run, so the docker daemon needs to be able to reach it. I ended up making a new tag for infrastructure, which can be accessed from server devices. This does still allow all the docker containers to reach Forgejo, but I already have it set up with appropriate access controls and public/private repository splits. Forgejo is a service designed to run publicly, so this seems a reasonable trade-off for convenience. I used the tests feature of Tailscale’s ACL config to make sure I’d got the rules right:

{
	"tests": [
		{
			// Servers can only access infrastructure
			"src":   "tag:server",
			"proto": "tcp",
			"allow": [
				"tag:infrastructure:8080",
			],
			"deny": [
				"100.84.16.43:8080",
				"me@example.com:8080",
				"tag:server:8080",
				"tag:app:8080",
				"tag:integration:8080",
			],
		},
	],
}

The whole situation still feels a bit messy. If I ever get around to switching to nftables I might loop back and manually craft some rules for routing traffic, instead of leaving Tailscale and Docker to do their own thing.

I discovered later on that logging into the container registry at forgejo:3000 actually issued a redirect to https://git.example-net.ts.net/ so this was all basically for naught… ↩︎
I didn’t use Tailscale’s MagicDNS for a long time just because the word “magic” put me off. Only when I eventually got around to learning how it worked, and seeing that it wasn’t really that magical under the hood, did I change my mind. ↩︎
nftables seems far better in lots of ways, but I can’t really be bothered migrating. Maybe next time I reimage the server for whatever reason… ↩︎
It’s always DNS… ↩︎
Again, nftables would almost certainly help here. It actually has (gasp) configuration files. But again, I really didn’t want to spend the time migrating. ↩︎

Exposing game servers over Tailscale

2025-12-07T00:00:00Z

I’ve recently been playing a lot of Factorio with a friend. I’ve been hosting, but my desktop computer is behind far too many layers of NAT, and I can’t be bothered dealing with setting up port forwards. Up until today we made do with Steam’s networking support, which in our case ended up relaying the connection via one of their servers. This is amazing as a free, no-hassle service, but the performance was so-so. We’d get random lag spikes, or the initial map download would crawl along at about 1/100th of the speed we should be able to get. We’re both fans of Tailscale though, so maybe there’s an easy solution there?

Tailscale even have an article on sharing a Factorio server but it’s a ten minute long video¹, and focused on setting up an actual dedicated server in Docker rather than just clicking the convenient “Host” button in the game client. What we did instead was:

I shared my desktop’s Tailscale node with my friend, by creating a sharing link in the Admin console
My friend accepted the link, and could then see my machine in their admin panel
I used tailscale lock to sign my friend’s desktop’s node key, as I have tailnet lock enabled
I added a grant to my tailnet’s ACL to permit access from my friend to the specific IP/port on my tailnet:

		{
			"src": ["friend@example.com"],
			"dst": ["100.0.0.42", "fd7a::42"],
			"ip":  ["udp:34197"],
		}

After this, my friend could connect to Factorio by entering the Tailscale IP address, or the Tailscale hostname (as they use MagicDNS). Running tailscale status shows that Tailscale managed to establish a direct connection despite the many layers of NAT involved, and the performance improvements were significant and immediate.

We did a bit of testing, and confirmed that no other services on my machine are accessible. And sharing a machine by default only allows it to accept incoming connections, so I can’t get unwanted access to anything on my friend’s Tailnet, either.

I’ve written before about all the different ways I use Tailscale; this is yet another new way it’s solved a problem for me.

I’m not a fan of video tutorials at the best of times, but especially not when I want to do something as quickly as possible so I can get back to ~~my addiction~~ growing the factory. ↩︎

Securing all the things with 1Password

2025-11-26T00:00:00Z

For many years I’ve been a keen user of Bitwarden. Recently I’ve had a lot of small paper-cut problems. The browser extension was redesigned and just doesn’t quite work how I expect any more. The prompt to save new login info misfired more than it worked. The mobile app stopped background refreshing properly. No one issue was enough to make me want to leave Bitwarden, but it definitely wasn’t sparking joy. Then there were rumblings about a price increase. I don’t think they’ve announced anything, but the numbers I saw were a jump from $10/year to $24/year. A nearly 2.5x price increase for a tool that was actively getting worse over time did not seem like a good deal to me¹.

I spent a while looking at alternatives, but there were very few that met my needs. Nordpass is highly praised but doesn’t support saving TOTP codes on personal plans². All the nice open-source/self-hosted solutions fall down when you want reliable synchronisation to an iOS device (which is fair enough). Proton Pass looked like it had all the features, but the pricing was asinine. Different pages showed different prices, the prices were introductory rates that jumped up on renewal, but that was hidden away in small print, etc. Yuck. The prices are also pretty high. More or less the same as 1Password, which I’d been discounting due to the cost, until now…

After eliminating basically every other option, I took a serious look at 1Password. It seemed to tick all the right boxes, I’d often heard good things about it, and it wouldn’t actually be much more expensive than Bitwarden if they went ahead with the rumoured price increase. I started a trial to give it a test.

Initial impressions

1Password is — as you’d expect for something that originated as a Mac app — very pretty. But it’s also highly functional. The looks don’t get in the way, they’re nice extras on top. When it’s locked, you get a large version of the 1Password logo, which is a front-on view of the barrel of a lock, next to the password input. When you authenticate, the barrel turns as though you’d put a key in and rotated it, and then the background splits in two and opens like a vault door. Does a password manager need to do that? No. Does it make me a little bit happy every time I see it? Yes. Look at it, it’s amazing!

The design philosophy carries through the rest of the app. Despite using Bitwarden daily, I often clicked on the wrong thing when I wanted to do anything other than autofill; in about a month of using 1Password I don’t think I’ve ever misclicked or been confused about the UI. The browser extension just feels snappier than Bitwarden, too. I’m not sure if it’s actually faster or if the design just makes it feel that way.

Functionality-wise, 1Password does everything Bitwarden did for me but slightly better. Bitwarden kicked you to its web interface for some operations (like checking compromised passwords); 1Password has that all built into the app. Instead of editing entries in a fiddly little browser popup, 1Password just summons forth the desktop app and you edit it there. It does a good job of detecting QR codes for TOTPs and offering to save them. I think the only small complaint I have is that the browser extension doesn’t have an autofill keybind. You can rig that up via the desktop app, but it feels like 1Password leans towards you using the UI it adds on login forms. To be fair, that UI works really well, and is very useful when you have multiple accounts on a site. My muscle memory for autofilling is strong, though.

Diving deeper

At this point I’d decided to switch fully to 1Password, so I started digging into what else it could do. The “Watchtower” feature combines a bunch of reporting about passwords (weak, breached, reused, and so on), but also lists sites where 1Password knows you can use passkeys or 2FA and don’t have them set up. I’d previously disabled passkey support in Bitwarden because it just appeared one day and got in the way of me trying to use a YubiKey, but decided to give them a go with 1Password. “Passkeys” is basically just a marketing term for FIDO2’s WebAuthn with automatic discovery bolted on top. The big problem is how you synchronise or export them. It’s all well and good letting your iPhone create a passkey when the Amazon app arbitrarily prompts it to, but what happens when you log in on a different device, or swap to Android, or whatever? Having 1Password deal with them fixes that³.

The passkey flow is very smooth: 1Password pops up an account selector, with obvious options to create a new account or pass the request through to another device like a YubiKey. It’s smart enough to guess the right account most times, even when you’ve got 17 different Google accounts for $reasons. Using them is equally simple: it just shows a popup and you tap to confirm you want to use the passkey. The Watchtower functionality made it really easy to go through and add passkeys everywhere that supports them. The thing I really appreciate is that they make the data that powers it public. It’s obviously partially a marketing thing for them, but it’s also a useful resource they could have kept proprietary.

Passkeys are a bit basic, though. 1Password has many more fun offerings. There’s an entire developer section with various goodies. At first I thought “that’s nice but I won’t use it”, but now I’m using basically everything it offers. The first thing to draw me in was the CLI. It’s pretty straightforward, but like the browser extensions it can nicely integrate with the desktop app so you unlock them all at once, deal with auth prompts in the GUI, and so forth. I have a couple of command-line tools that need passwords (e.g. for dealing with encrypted backups); now instead of prompting for the passwords, they shell out to op read and I authorise it via a popup in the 1Password app. Simple, but a nice quality of life improvement.

Next up there’s a beta feature called “Environments”. This lets you define groups of environment variables within 1Password, and have them exported automatically to certain destinations. At the minute it supports exporting to the AWS SecretsManager, and local .env files. When making a local file it actually makes a named pipe, so the credentials aren’t just sitting on disk (and won’t end up accidentally committed to anything). When the 1Password vault is locked, anything trying to read from the file will cause an authentication popup, much like with the CLI tool. I used to have the mentality that if something could read arbitrary files on disk, it was basically “game over” from a security point of view. Recent events made me realise there’s some value in defence-in-depth there, though, and 1Password provides a nice solution.

Fingerprints + Linux = Sadness

One feature of 1Password had me feeling a bit left out. Instead of entering your vault password to unlock it every time, you can have it invoke the system authentication library. On an iPhone this uses Face ID, on a Mac it can invoke Touch ID, and on Linux it uses Polkit. In the default configuration, Polkit just asks for your local user password, which is not much of an improvement. A fingerprint scanner seemed like the obvious solution here: it’s both a lot more convenient than typing a long password, and provides some assurance that it’s actually me doing the action⁴. Unfortunately, fingerprint readers on Linux seem to be a bit of a sorry affair.

Don’t get me wrong: there’s support. libfprint has a big list of supported devices, but I found it almost impossible to actually find a device I could buy that had one of the listed sensors. Most of them seem to be exclusively built into laptops. A lot of the cheaper devices just use whatever sensor they can get their hands on, so it’s pot luck if you receive a version that will work with libfprint or one that won’t. There’s also not a lot of information beyond that published by libfprint. I guess it makes sense: external fingerprint readers just aren’t a thing most people care about. While that makes me feel all special, it’s somewhat prohibitive to getting an actual working solution.

I’d given up on finding an answer to this when I stumbled upon an article by Scott Laird. He uses a YubiKey Bio to do it, via pam_u2f. The Bio isn’t actually a fingerprint reader: it just has an on-board reader to secure the credentials. The OS doesn’t get involved in the process. But because it can provide a fingerprint-secured U2F key, and pam_u2f can require that key to perform system operations, you basically get the same result. Maybe it’s actually even better than using a “real” fingerprint reader, as the data is secured on the hardware device…

The YubiKey Bio was a bit more pricey than I really wanted, coming in at around £90, but it felt like a worthy investment to add a bit of security and avoid typing a password dozens of times a day. The setup was simple: the official app that you use to enrol fingerprints is packaged in the Arch User Repository, and it worked perfectly. I already had pam_u2f set up as I used a (non-Bio) YubiKey to gate access to sudo, so I just generated a new key on the Bio, updated my config to use that, and added it to the Polkit policy. Now when I need to unlock 1Password or authenticate something, it prompts me to scan my fingerprint. Perfect!

Biometric all the things \o/

One of the other things Scott mentioned in that article was SSH keys. I’d seen 1Password supports acting as an SSH agent, but didn’t really see why I’d want it to. I used a resident key on my old YubiKey, so I didn’t have much to gain from a security point of view. Scott’s article made me realise I could have some big convenience gains, though. Currently every time I need to use the key, I enter a PIN and then physically touch it. I don’t mind this for the most part, but it turns out git-lfs does something like four different requests every time you do a git operation, none of which reuse the same SSH connection for some reason. That gets painful when each request involves a PIN and a touch. I also liked the idea of using pam_rssh for sudo authentication, but didn’t want to have to do the PIN-and-touch dance every time I used it.

You can probably see where this is going: I generated an SSH key in 1Password, and then… spent literal hours disabling all the other SSH agents that were running on my system, and trying to figure out where SSH_AUTH_SOCK was being populated. I didn’t manage to figure that out in the end⁵, and ended up just overriding it to point at 1Password’s agent socket. I added the new key to GitHub, and did the usual ssh git@github.com test, and it worked perfectly. 1Password prompts to allow access to the key, showing the process requesting access, and authorising it requires a fingerprint read:

can haz ssh key?

I’m not sure why Kitty doesn’t get an icon in the prompt; other applications do. You can expand the details section to see the key fingerprint being requested, as well as the exact process name and PID requesting the key. With the proof of concept done, I generated a couple more keys: one for normal SSH, and one for gaining root access using pam_rssh. Using different keys ensures I get prompted for them separately, and means a malicious app couldn’t sneakily ask for a Git key but actually pivot to SSH into a server. Not sure that’s ever likely to be a problem, but it’s basically no additional work for a bit more defence-in-depth, so why not?

I also took a moment to configure pam_u2f for both lightdm and xfce4-screensaver, so I can now log in and unlock my PC with my fingerprint. It’s not quite as smooth as Touch ID on a Mac, but it’s pretty close.

As an aside: this is not the first time I’ve been in this situation. Both Spotify and Todoist have focused on features I don’t want or need (including, but not limited to, pretty much everything branded “AI”), and then hiked the price up afterwards. It’s not quite standard enshittification, but it’s clear that our incentives no longer align properly. ↩︎
Or didn’t, at the time I looked. It now says “All plans” on the website but the docs only exist for business accounts, and there doesn’t seem to be any announcement explaining the change. ↩︎
Having Bitwarden deal with them would also have fixed that, but it got in my way instead of helping me, so… ↩︎
or it’s not me, but I’ll be busy dealing with the presumably-undesired removal of one of my digits, so probably won’t care about whatever is happening on the computer. ↩︎
Although I’m pretty sure the answer starts and ends with “systemd, somehow”. ↩︎