hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr1357.txt

Episode: 1357
Title: HPR1357: Whats in my bag, and other stories
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1357/hpr1357.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 00:09:35

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Hello, my name is James Michael Dupont. This is my submission for the hacker public radio
on the topic of what's in my bag. The short answer is, I don't have a bag and if I have
a bag, I carry as little as possible with me in the bag. So let me explain myself. First of all, I
carry my bag not in the car, but on my person, I walk to work or ride my bicycle or take the bus,
and because of that, I carry as little as possible with me. I lived in Europe for a long time,
and I learned to live without a car, and therefore I reduced the amount of things that I carry with
me to a minimum or what I won't be afraid to lose. So let me go over some tips on how to travel
bag-less or with as little as possible. Well, first of all, you might ask yourself, well, how do I
go without a laptop? I am an old-school type person, so you might ask, how can I live without
being constantly online? Well, the first thing is, is that there's a wonderful invention called
newspapers, and I like to read newspapers. So I'll carry a newspaper in my hand, actually, and walk
around with a newspaper in my hand, or under my arm, and okay, maybe I'll have a little bag
to carry a newspaper or a couple of papers with me in a plastic bag or something I've picked up
at a shop. So for those are just disposable bags, as opposed to my backpack or laptop bag.
Otherwise, I might have a book with me that I'm reading, and I'll read that book while I'm
traveling, and I like to read while I travel, because it's a nice, quiet time to focus on a book,
and I don't have to worry about network signal strength, or Wi-Fi passwords, or constantly
writing status updates, or obsessively taking pictures of etc., and posting that to websites.
So some other things that I do is I'll print out a map, or my itinerary, I'll print out important
information, and what I've done is I've created mobile accounts. I mean, I do have a mobile phone,
now I finally broken down, and we have a smartphone, which I generally don't carry around with me,
but on my smartphone I'll have a separate account for my email, and all my other accounts that I
only use from the smartphone, so if the smartphone is compromised, or lost, I'm not afraid of losing
my main account authentication. So basically, what I'm trying to say is that you want to use a separate
account with an easy password, basically a disposable account, and on that disposable account,
you only put information that you don't mind losing, or having someone else read, especially if
you're mobile. So you don't need to carry passwords with you, you can carry the password to your
mobile account in your head. I don't suggest using passwords that you can remember for your
accounts. I use generated passwords. I use the program APG, or automatic password generator to
generate passwords, and I use unique passwords for all my different online accounts. Now you might
say, well, where do you store those passwords? Well, there's different tools for storing passwords.
I won't recommend any right now because I don't have the optimal solution for it, but basically,
even if you were to store them in a encrypted file on your hard drive, or use a different password
management tool, I don't suggest that you carry those passwords around with you on a laptop in case
you lose them or keep your files. This is where we're going, that the idea is minimal amount of
information being transferred, and minimal amount of information being traveled around with,
and minimal travel. Personally, I try and travel as little as possible, and also to reduce my fuel
costs, and I think twice before traveling, not having a car is also great for that because,
especially in America, not having a car is a real interesting challenge, and I'd like to talk
about that some more if you have time. So this is going from what's in my bag. I already told to
us in my bag, nothing, and now we're going to just explain why I have nothing, and the whole
philosophy behind nothing. So basically, when I go to work, I do not carry my laptop from home to work,
so what I do is I VPN, or even SSH into a server at work. Luckily, I'm working for a company that is
enlightened enough to allow me to do that. Other companies required me to carry a laptop home with me
in order to even log onto their corporate site, so I opted when possible not to carry that laptop,
and not to work from home just for that reason. So I would work at home on just other things,
and stay in the office later, which was unfortunate, but I'm no longer at that company, and I hope to
continue working at this company. So really, you have a choice in choosing your employer, and your
employer also has a choice in choosing you in terms of what's compatible and what's not. Some
employers are enlightened enough to allow people to work without carrying laptops and devices around
with them at all times. Also, I don't carry around a company mobile phone, or even a mobile phone,
because I don't like to have a mobile phone on me at all times. It is a necessary radiation.
We're getting enough radiation anyway, and it's also a necessary invasion of my privacy,
and we all know that our privacy is really one of the few things that we even have left,
and it's becoming smaller and smaller every day, so why should we feel the need to give in
to privacy invasions for no reason? So I've covered the idea of not traveling and not caring,
and basically reducing your footprint, your travel footprint. So here's some other tips that I've
learned for security and privacy. First of all, don't read your private emails from your work
network. You shouldn't be logging on to any of your private accounts from your work, because the
system administrators will be able to key log or capture your passwords from the work network
and theory, and also read your emails in theory. So basically, you don't want to be logging into
anything private from your work accounts. So what I do is I create my own work-related accounts on
different various servers, and I use them only from work, and that prevents unnecessary invasion of
my privacy again, and it also enables me at the end. I can turn over the passwords to the administrators
or whatever one I leave the company, they could audit them, and I don't care, because all of that
is only work-related. If I have to send a message to my wife or my family, I can do that from my
work-related email accounts, but only those messages that I send from work are then readable,
and I have no fear of people getting at my main accounts. So let's continue with some more ideas
on privacy and not exposing yourself too much. You don't necessarily need to, for example,
carry your private SSH keys around, you can create secondary SSH keys, and for example,
email them to you, or just you can make a disposable SSH key, and email that to your disposable
email, and then you can use that only on the places where you need to have SSH into, and then you
can remove those accounts later if you don't need them. So again, temporary passwords, of course,
emailing them around makes them vulnerable, but in the case that they're compromised, at least you
can identify easily what SSH key needs to be disabled, and you can track when it's being used,
so I think that is at least a better idea than carrying around your main SSH key, and then having
that compromised. Of course, you could go into these huge issues of, oh well, I encrypt my hard drive,
et cetera, but it's better not to have the data on your hard drives, and not to carry the hard drive
around and to carry it around encrypted. So yeah, well, I lived in Frankfurt for a long time,
and I lived right next to the train station, so basically I would be able to walk out the door,
and go down the street, and within two minutes I was at the main travel hub, the train,
the Frankfurt train station, which I could reach all destinations from, and all destinations
stopped at, so I was really in a luxurious state of being able to travel anywhere in Europe,
and also then take the train to the airport. Can you imagine that in Germany, you can take the
train to the airport, and you can get on to the train from a whole slew of local buses, local
trams, et cetera, that will then take you to the train station, and then from the train station,
you can take a high-speed train to the airport, and then get from the airport, you can go anywhere
in the world, so basically I was completely mobile. Now I'm living in Lawrence, Kansas, there is no
train to the airport, there is an expensive shuttle bus, and the airport is relatively far away.
I lived in Topeka, where the bus was almost unusable, at least where we were living, and the bus
would not be northbound, southbound, but only, let's say, southbound, and if you wanted to go to
the shop, and then come back home, you would have to go to the shop, and then go downtown, and then
take the bus all the way back to your house, so it was very, very bad to even do that. In addition,
the bus has only ran until 5pm, so even if you wanted to go shopping after work, you could not,
and even worse than that, you could not even walk to the shop, because there were no sidewalks
on the side of the street, there was only a narrow road on the 29th street, for example, we need
to go, and there is no way to actually even walk or bicycle. For some reason, and I can go into
these reasons, I might as well, because if you're listening to this then, I mean, you could stop
at any time, and I'll just keep on going, so basically the sidewalks are the responsibility of the
homeowners, and the homeowners decided not to implement a sidewalk, so they have huge sections of
the town which have no sidewalks, and then you'll have sidewalks on one house, and then they'll stop
on the next house, even worse than that, this is my pet peeve, the sidewalks are just connected
for many shops, so you can't get from the street to the sidewalk, you can't get from the sidewalk
to the shop, they just put it in the sidewalk, maybe to say they have a sidewalker to fill some
regulations, I mean, there might be some regulations saying you need to have a sidewalk in some places,
but the sidewalk is completely useless for people using wheelchairs or people on bicycles,
now on this topic, you're not allowed to ride your bicycle on the sidewalk in many places,
but I have been studying the police data, for example in Lawrence, and it seems that many,
many more accidents happen on the road and on intersections than on the sidewalk, so you're
much safer to be on the sidewalk away from the cars than to be on the road, by especially here in
Kansas where they have no vulnerable road users' laws, and if someone runs you over then the
punishment is not that great, so they kind of treat it like having a car accident, just running
people over, so and it happens all the time here in Kansas and no one seems to care, in general,
I want to make this point about Kansas that they are very car dependent and many sections of the
town are dependent on having cars available to you at all times, as I said, there's no sidewalks,
there's no bike lanes, the bus system is horrible, there's no other way to get around, if you want
to take the taxi, you have to wait for half an hour for a gelapidated, this is not to peak up,
you have to wait for a gelapidated taxi which has exhaust coming into it, and it's horrible,
takes forever, and it's not that cheap either, so really if you don't have your own car then your
your life pleasure is reduced, now I never had a driver's license and I'm not even planning on
getting one at this, I could easily get one, but it really goes against my idea of sustainable
living, so basically this is where I want to get to, that my philosophy is that we should
choose our places of living and choose our work and choose where we live so that we do not need
to have cars, that's why I chose to live at Lawrence and we're so happy that we found a house
that is near a shopping center and we can walk to shops, we can bicycle downtown on sidewalks
or on bike lanes, I choose personally to ride on the sidewalk like many other people do, technically
it is illegal but not enforced and I also ride on side streets where there is little or no traffic,
that main traffic is on the couple streets and those are the streets with the most accidents,
if you stay off of those streets then your chances of having an accident are reduced,
basically the number of cars driving around and many of these people are not paying attention,
they have children and they're screaming at the children while fumbling with their mobile devices
and they are not used to looking out for pedestrians or for bicyclists because first of all it
doesn't seem to matter if you run them over and second of all only people, well at least in
Topeka only people who are poor actually walk or ride bicycles, in Lawrence you have a lot of
international students and many of those international students are walking or taking the bus riding bicycles,
so basically if we imagine that the cost of fuel is going to go up and up, if we look at
some of the post oil peaked theories then we should really focus on organizing our lives around
not using fuel and not having to travel great distances in order to get things, that's why I like
living in Lawrence, there's a vibrant farmer's market here, even though the farmers are basically
fuel dependent many of them and they need to use fuel to get to town or even get to the market,
there are a large amount of them around here and if the price of fuel were to go up I'm sure
there would be great impacts on the people at least for the short term would be protected, for
the long term of course we can't really predict what's going to happen, at least I would say that
if the situation in our country would change dramatically that at least I would have a short
buffer period where I don't need to have a car, let's say the price of oil would go up to $6
a gallon or $7 a gallon then I would not be directly affected like many other people would,
so I'm kind of directly affected through the cost of other goods that I need and of course
the only way to protect yourself against that would be through different off-the-grid living type
situations which we all know about, I can tell you about my experiences in Kosovo where the people
there are already living off the grid for the most part they don't have running water in the mornings
and the power gets turned off for many hours a day so I could tell you about that, they have big
tubs of water in the bathroom and they fill that up when the water is running and when the water
is turned off they can use that in the morning to wash themselves and a lot of them have generators
or battery backups and you know gas cookers work very nicely and you can really live without
power for a couple of hours, small refrigerators help instead of having huge refrigerators
using many of them have to keep food not even in the refrigerator they put it in the oven,
so when they cook the food they'll put the food that's finished in the oven to keep it away from
the flies and they'll just eat whatever's in the oven after that when somebody comes home they'll
look in the oven for something to eat and I'll eat that and they have pantries with food in it
that's not so perishable et cetera many of the things are dried sausages the cheese also doesn't
need to be refrigerated it can go into a brine solution if you use salt and oil and sugar
anything can be preserved so we'll learn that many people are worried about the changes in our
economy but you have to remember that human survived for thousands of years before we had
electricity it's only been a hundred and some years since we have widespread electricity and of
course we all are now used to it independent on it but many parts of the world live without all
these wonderful things and it is possible we did it before and I'm sure we could go back to doing
again so yeah and in terms of a maker or movement we used to call that tinkering and inventing
my grandfather's all or tinkers my father as well and many people I know are now rediscovering the
maker movement I won't go too much into that but basically I think that if you come out here to
Kansas you'll find many people who could still repair tractors and take apart motvers and fix
their own things they don't call themselves makers and they just call themselves farmers and
many of them are pretty self-sufficient once you go away from the main towns then you have to
become more and more self-sufficient and plan your life so properly so I hope you enjoyed listen
to me this was my first recording for the Hector Public Radio it was a long rambling chat
and yeah I would appreciate your feedback to some projects that I'm working on well basically
by guarding a project to create a Linux install Fest and that's going to be on the 20th of
October you can check it out install Fest Lawrence minus EORG dot eventbrite dot com that's
install Fest Lawrence minus EORG dot eventbrite dot com that's the project that I'm working on I've
got other things linked from there and you can send me an email to James Mike Depont at gmail.com
that's my main email if I'm at home I'll read it otherwise I've got a much of other emails but
you can just wait until I get home I've got a Twitter which is Hacker Mike H4CK3RM1K3 on Twitter and
that Hacker Mike name is used all over the place so I'd appreciate any feedback at all I'm planning
on organizing a yearly conference here in Lawrence I would like to organize a free
Libra open source open knowledge open hardware conference ideally at the university if we can get
that done otherwise in some other place but I would like to establish that as a yearly festival like
the Linux Fest in Ohio and there are very many interesting people here in Kansas and the area
who I would like to invite as long as well as the international and national speakers I'm sure
that Lawrence is a great place to visit it's got a wonderful downtown that you'll walk around and
it's also very safe in comparison to Topeka and Kansas City so well so I want to say I want to say
thank you to the people from the Hacker Public Radio for setting this up I really enjoy listening
to your talks and I hope you enjoy listening to mine thank you over and out Mike
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