21 June 2025: Roundup: Speeding up linux disk decryption, share topics, reflections, games
Playing with Manjaro
Working (again) on making an older Thinkpad T420 (2011) useful for home surfing and light development. Trying out Manjaro for now because with hardware this old I've run into issue with immutable systems like Fedora Atomic.
Tweaking full-disk encryption
Full-disk encryption defaults can be unbearably slow for unlocking (over 1 minute) on this machine. Unlocking happens early during the boot process before the system has access to crypto hardware. I tweaked this using the following to set the number of iterations to a lower value. Dropping from 1,500,000 to 10,000 combined with a high-entropy passphrase is hopefully good enough for the need:
sudo cryptsetup luksChangeKey --pbkdf-force-iterations 10000 --key-slot 0 /dev/sda1
# check key creation
sudo cryptsetup luksDump /dev/sda1
# remove old key
sudo cryptsetup luksKillKey /dev/sda1 0As always, double-check device ids and RTFM before making changes.
Tools Show and Share
Working on a show-and-share featuring the following:
- Zed Editor: Fast editor written in rust.
- aichat: Command line LLM client. Good for working through tricky bash and git options.
Challenges of the Week
- Adapting a legacy web component to read a new data spec as part of our plaid integration. So far it's mostly understanding the old data structure and renaming fields so that everything (hopefully) works.
- Translation tags for a feature I've been working on.
Games
- Started a playthrough of The Alters. This is similar to the 1996 movie Multiplicity where a stressed-out husband clones himself multiple times. The Alters is a base-building survival game centered around Jan, a construction expert. Fortunately, he has weird science to clone himself multiple times, giving each clone fake memories of the training and skills he lacks. Unfortunately, each clone has survived a different set of challenges and traumas. As is frequently the case in survival scifi, your biggest challenge is yourself.
- Backed Defy the Gods, a mesopotamian-themed TTRPG.
- Picked up Homeworld: Revelations, because I've never been quite able to get the CRPG to run.