2023-03-02

Digital Signatures

When I used Windows, I tended to use Adobe Acrobat Reader. This allows you to import a self-signed certificate and insert a digital signature into a pdf. To me, this is much more professional than a wiggly line drawn with a mouse which looks like a five-year old’s attempt at forgery.

Note that this can be read fine in the pdf reader in Firefox, but seems to give some problems to Google Chrome and Brave.

There are a lot of pdf viewers on fedora, including Zathura, evince (the default) and Sumatra. I always used Sumatra on Windows, because it’s so incredibly lightweight, but Okular definitely wins in terms of supporting more formats and offering the capability of annotation and digital signatures. I haven’t explored all its options, but it seems tightly coupled to the operating system (it uses the OS’s certificate store, you add certs externally, on the command line). Depending on your starting point, you may think this is more or less of a good thing.

Coldwar Steve

I am a great fan of Coldwar Steve. Satire, whether on the TV or in print or on the internet is very powerful in shifting the Overton Window/zeitgeist etc.

I don’t align myself with Steve politically, but I enjoy nearly all his artworks. I strongly urge you to follow him on Twitter. (Yes, I know that Twitter is in its death-throes, and is being run into the ground by a narcissistic psychopath, but it’s still working at the moment.)