It’s hard to break the habits of a lifetime – or at least, those rooted decades deep.

Ever since I can remember, I always wanted to be a goodfeather. Sorry, wrong reference. As far back as I can recall, I have been wary of making changes to vi (later vim) settings out of a fear that I would become reliant on them, and thence unproductive when I had to work on a freshly installed machine.

There are several good arguments against this position.

Pseudovalidation is a major goal of marketing and advertising. Actually validating a claim is expensive and often boring. Why not just make people feel like they’re important in some way?

But once you recognize it, pseudovalidation feels disrespectful: these people are lying to me and don’t even care if I know it:

Let us suppose, dear reader, that you are worried about small drone aircraft – copters, quad and hex and so forth - espying on your private activities. This is not as completely unreasonable a fear now as it was a few years ago. A realtime first-person-view drone can be as small as your hand and still manage 10 minutes of hovering and scooting about.

Let us also suppose that you are not the sort of maniac who is willing to shoot a deadly projectile at a rapidly moving small target in a populated area. If you are that sort of maniac, please move to an unpopulated area immediately, and put up big signs at your property border. “I am an armed idiot” might be suitable phrasing.

Unless you have a good reason not to do so, the services you run on your server should be encrypted. For the last few years, and probably the next few, that means you need a security certificate, commonly called an SSL cert, even though we just stopped using SSL in favor of TLS, which is exactly the same but slightly more advanced.

(You don’t run a server? OK, the services that you access should be encrypted. It’s the moral equivalent of sending letters in sealed envelopes instead of postcards: you do it even when it doesn’t matter much, because that way you don’t accidentally forget and send a hundred dollars to your friend by taping it to a postcard. The rest of this post is for people running servers – mostly, people who run one or two servers as a hobby or small business. I expect the professionals to already know all this.)

(But some don’t.)

“Premature optimization is the root of all evil.” – Donald Knuth, in “Structured Programming With Go To Statements”, 1974.

That was more than 40 years ago.

You think we’d have learned that lesson by now.

I’ve had an LG G2 for about two years now. There are lots of new flagship Android phones coming out now. Is it time to change?