-- When you're not using a network manager, WiFi without (!)
encryption can be a little tricky. Some kinds of tools (namely
dhcpcd) tend to run wpa_supplicant automatically -- which will
block the connection to an unencrypted network. Hence, you must
make sure that it does not get started. Resort to a simple "iw wl
connect foo". Took me quite a while to figure that out.
-- HTTPS (and encryption in general) is much more important than I
thought. At the very least, every web site which requires
authentication *must* provide some kind of encryption. This is
crystal clear to me now, but I honestly did not think about it
that way before. Usually, I only use my internet connection at
home. As a result, I have forgotten that a lot of people
can/could read my data. When you're in a hotel with unencrypted
WiFi (where everybody can even sniff your data streams to the
access point), you suddenly realize: "Whoops. I'm not alone on
the wire."
-- I didn't want to take my large notebook with me (on this
particular trip). Instead, I used my older netbook. The great
thing about Linux is that you can remove a hard drive and simply
put it in another computer -- and it'll work. That's awesome. So,
I used my older netbook but with my current SSD.
-- While changing the SSDs, I was in a hurry and I accidentally cut
off the power to my laptop. It took me a moment to notice that
I've lost some data. Luckily, it was in a Git repository, so it
was easy to repair the damage: I reset "master" to some commits
back, fetched the recent history again and then merged. Done.
"git fsck" was clean again.
