GPGtools, and me.

[Robert J. Hansen]

There is absolutely nothing in this email that's important, and maybe 
not much that's interesting. Take your chances by reading on. :)

First, business stuff. The general rule for this mailing list is that if 
it involves libre software and OpenPGP, it's going to be broadly 
tolerated for at least a little bit. So please let me tell you about a 
libre software business I've had a positive experience with.

GPGtools integrates GnuPG with Apple Mail. It does not do so perfectly: 
you'll still need to use other applications to do key management and 
whatnot. Although it includes some GUI applications to help make this 
easier, if I have to switch to another application anyway I might as 
well just use GnuPG directly. For that reason I've barely looked at the 
supporting software around GPGtools, just their Apple Mail extension.

And there, the news is pretty good. It does a reasonably good job of 
doing what you want it to do while not getting in your way about things. 
I have pretty high standards: I was for several years Enigmail's UX guy. 
They clearly care about UX, and although there's work left to be done I 
like the direction they're going.

Many of the GPGtools applications are libre, but the Mail.app extension 
is not. That's the only bad news. They're using the Mail.app extension 
as payware to fund further development, so it's an understandable 
tradeoff, but I hope they consider liberating the extension code in the 
near future.

The other thing you get for your approximately $30 (depending on 
currency fluctuations, etc.) is support. I recently had occasion to file 
a support request, and although it took a few days the response I 
received was polite, answered my question, pointed me to feature 
requests on the Apple site and suggested I chime in there, etc. I 
thought it was well-done.

Anyway. It's (mostly!) libre software done by people who care about 
doing it right, and for $30 you get lifetime support by real human 
beings. In an era where it seems everything is going through AI virtual 
agents first, a real human response is nice.

Highly recommended for MacOS users.

(Disclosures: No, they don't know I'm writing this. Yes, I paid full 
price for GPGtools. No, I have no business or personal connection to 
GPGtools.)

=====

And in other news: some of you have been wondering how I'm doing in my 
recovery.

When Warren Zevon was near death he appeared on the David Letterman 
late-night comedy show. He and Letterman were old old friends. Letterman 
asked him if being that close to death he had learned something about life.

Zevon thought about it for a moment, then smiled and told Letterman, 
"Enjoy every sandwich."

That's my advice to everyone on this list. Enjoy every sandwich.

I am at last being discharged from this rehab center on Saturday. Two 
months ago they were not expecting me to ever regain much use of, well, 
anything. As of today I'm able to hobble around with a walker for 100m 
at a time, and do the usual tasks of daily life. I'm still going to need 
help for a while, and my physical therapy will be ongoing, but I am 
massively exceeding expectations and I'm so happy to be able to say it.

If you want to know more details (including what almost killed me), all 
the public information is available at:

	https://sixdemonbag.org/?p=37

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