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A Mobile Life

Being hell on machines, I recently had to retire my 24″ iMac. This isn’t all bad — I still have: trusty Ebichu, the Mac­Book; Ragamuffin, the Ubuntu-jamming net­book; a keen desire for a truly port­able and (reas­on­ably) secure life. Now with added incent­ive to make it happen.

The goal was to be able to switch com­puters at will, and have everything I need just there. Since I live in the com­mand line, this is largely a mat­ter of keep­ing a con­sist­ent envir­on­ment. I need to be able to move between my OS X and linux-based com­puters seam­lessly. Ulti­mately, I’d like to add Win­dows, and guest com­puters into the mix.

The clever squir­rels at Drop­Box keep my data port­able, but I’m not sold on feed­ing them my actual envir­on­ment. I’m not about to store private keys in the cloud. And I don’t want to have to install the cli­ent and sync crap down, just to work on a computer.

USB Flash Drive to the res­cue, natch.

To ensure I keep it with me, I bought a pendant-style drive. The cap remains attached to the chain, while the drive itself pulls freely out. Its big, and gawdy, shaped like beetle, and covered in rhinestones. <3

Format­ting with FAT32 ensures that its read-writable any place I stick it.¹

Stor­ing a backup in our safe ensures that I’m not incon­veni­enced should I mis­place it.

Encrypt­ing any sens­it­ive data ensures I’m not screwed should I mis­place it.

The Flash Drive thus far contains:

• an encryp­ted tar­ball with my SSH keys & config.
• a mod­est bash environment
• my mutt environment
• an encryp­ted file with my email passwords
• my vim environment
• a shell script to set things up

More on how each piece actu­ally works, to follow.

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