In 2012, when I bought my first smartphone (the Google Nexus 4), I posed a very loaded question. “When is Apple going to make a real phone?” I wondered. The iPhone 4s was current at the time and had a pathetic 3.5" screen. It also lacked haptic feedback, and an NFC payment system, both of which the Nexus 4 had, as well as a 4.7" inch screen. ' The answer, almost as if Apple was listening, ended up being 2015.

From time to time, I like to partake in meaningless and ludicrous actions. For example, today, I remembered I have a Windows 2000 VM on my Macbook. What does a normal person do with a Windows 2000 VM? Probably delete it. What do I do with a Windows 2000 VM? Plug in a USB to Serial adapter, pass it through to the VM, install its ancient driver package, then proceed to control my Sun Fire V250 via its ALOM Serial Management.

When LogMeIn acquired LastPass, I jumped ship. Corporate mergers make me jumpy, and I’m not a big fan of cloud storage of sensitive information to begin with. It was at that time I found Pass, “the standard UNIX password manager.” Pass is ideal for my tastes, saving passwords as GPG-encrypted files in everyday normal folders. Pass supports bash completion, and can be backed up / synchronized with Git. It is, in short, exactly what it claims to be: the standard UNIX password manager.