I just finished planning a vacation I’ll take with my parents through the southern parts of the UK. Here’s our itinerary in case anyone else finds it useful. I spent a day researching the worthwhile destinations close to London.

This itinerary is an opinionated one. I left out Stonehenge (forums said that unless I’m really into anthropology, it’ll just be a pile of big rocks to me), chose Cambridge instead of Oxford (they’re similar and Cambridge has the magnificent King’s College Chapel), and opted for the Seven Sisters over the White Cliffs of Dover (I found out the White Cliffs aren’t that white anymore).

The only undecided part of this itinerary is whether and where to get the rental car for the Jurassic Coast. Let me know if you have good ideas.

March 18 - London

• Tower of London
  • Wiki: “The Tower of London, officially Her Majesty’s Royal Palace and Fortress of the Tower of London, is a historic castle located on the north bank of the River Thames in central London.”
  • tickets: $33 book here
  • address: London EC3N 4AB, United Kingdom
• Greenwich
  • Wiki: “As well as the presence of the first example of Palladian architecture in England, and works by Christopher Wren and Inigo Jones, the area is significant for the Royal Observatory where the understanding of astronomy and navigation were developed.”
  • address: a neighborhood of London
  • free!

This guide will show you how to use Gmail to send and receive emails from a custom domain for free. Google Apps for custom domains used to be free back in the day for domains with less than 10 users. But sadly, now you have to pay $5 a month for that unless you were grandfathered in.

Some other web pages out there also say you can send email for free using Mailgun. But it’s a lot harder and slower to setup and caps the number of emails you can send per month.

Just follow the steps below to enjoy receiving and sending email from a custom domain for free!

1. You must already have a Gmail account, e.g. david@gmail.com.
2. Register a custom domain like example.com with any number of domain registrars like namecheap.com that offers free email forwarding.
3. Setup email forwarding in your domain registrar’s admin console to forward email from a custom email address like david@example.com to david@gmail.com.
4. Go to Gmail’s settings page and click on the “Accounts” section.
5. In the section labeled “Send email as:” click “Add another email address you own.”
6. A pop-up window will appear. Type in your name and custom email address david@example.com.
7. The next page will ask you which email or SMTP servers to use to send email. For this part, you need to have two-factor verification setup with your Gmail account. You need to generate a new app-specific password with two-factor.
8. Fill out the form like so: SMTP Server: smtp.gmail.com, Username: david@gmail.com, Password: [app-specific password].
9. Click “add acccount”.
10. The next page will say to enter the verification code in the email sent to david@example.com. Since we setup email forwarding to forward to your Gmail david@gmail.com, just wait a few minutes and you should get the email soon. Type in the code.
11. Tada. You should now be able to send email from david@gmail.com as david@example.com. Just compose a new email and click on the from field. You should see david@example.com as an option.

About a month ago, I saw a video that Amandla Stenberg, an actress known for playing Rue in the Hunger Games among other roles, made for her high school history class. In a video titled “Don’t Cash Crop My Cornrows,” Stenberg gives a summary of black hairstyles and hip-hop over the last two decades and how they’ve become popular in mainstream culture. Artists from Riff Raff to Katy Perry to Iggy Azalea have recently sported grills and picked up ebonics and hip hop musical styles in their music videos.

She seems very articulate and well-spoken in this video. So much so that it made me wonder, what the hell what I doing in high school. I was certainly not making viral videos like this that so insightfully dissects recent trends in pop culture.

It’s also too bad that history teachers often don’t make history more relevant and relatable. Dry facts about slavery and Jim Crow come alive when kids are taught that decisions our ancestors made reverberate all around us.

I remember dropping by my professors’ office hours during college. It was a casual thing and hugely helpful. I miss that. Why not bring it back?

So I’m announcing “office hours” for myself. If you’re interested in talking about technology, personal finance, current events, or just want to grab some drinks after work, I’m happy to oblige.

Anytime after 6:30pm on weekdays and anytime on weekends work. Email me at david@davidxia.com or send me a Facebook message here.

P.S. No recruiters!

I saw the trailer for a new movie that features traveling, fighting poverty, and Hugh Jackman. It reminded me of Nanette because those are some of her favorite things. It’s a movie about how one white guy saves the Africans. It’s in the vein of movies like The Last Samurai starring Tom Cruise, Dances with Wolves starring Kevin Costner, Avatar starring Sam Worthington, and The Help starring Emma Stone.

Today was mother’s day. Here’s an interview between a mother and her adorable seven-year-old daughter that becomes quite dark for a little bit.

While reading The Sound and the Fury, I searched up the definition of “Southern Gothic,” the genre in which Faulkner’s book belongs.

I wrote part one of a guide on how to fix a gas range here. Today I follow up with the much-awaited conclusion.

1. Call the tenant to check if the oven is clean. She says yes.
2. Call your parents who actually live near the property and aren’t several states away like you. Ask them to drive over and check on the oven themselves.
3. Eventually learn that some new ovens use some type of material that gives off noxious fumes when you use them.
4. Lesson learned: Do not buy the Holiday Freestanding 2.4-cu ft piece of crap gas range.

I’ve been reading and thinking a lot about digital privacy in the past two weeks. It’s disconcerting that so many AMericans are resigned about the current state of digital surveillance. Before the Snowden leaks, one could plausibly deny the vast extent of mass digital surveillance, but in this post-Snowden era, this is increasingly hard to do without appearing like you live under a rock.

I recently watched two videos which explain the disturbing extent to which intelligence agencies like the NSA have gone to subvert encryption algorithms and to sabotage critical Internet infrastructure. In this video, Jacob Appelbaum and Laura Poitras talk about how reading through documents leaked by Snowden has led them to believe the spooks have compromised everything including PPTP, IPSec, and even SSH. Everything except for PGP (implementations include GnuPG), OTR (implementions include Pidgin and Adium), and ZRTP (implementations include the Signal and RedPhone mobile apps).

The second video I watched was a talk by Poul-Henning Kamp in which he pretends to be an NSA officer giving a status report to NATO. Kamp talks about the various technical and psychological operations the NSA and its associated intelligence agencies use to collect all digital communications. I’m not sure how much of what Kamp says is true as some parts are deliberately tongue in cheek, but none of them seem impossible. Here are just a few:

• The NSA spots a startup that’s developing a product that strengthens privacy and thus makes the NSA’s job harder. They send someone who poses as a venture capitalist. He invests money in the startup and gets insider knowledge on what they’re making. NSA looks through their Rolodex of friendly companies for someone with a patent that’s related to the startup’s product. They convince the company to let loose some patent lawyer trolls on the startup. The startup folds or needs to work on something else under legal duress. The founders call the fake VC back saying how sorry they were to waste the VC’s money. The NSA bites its tongue trying not to laugh and busts out the champange bottles.
• Skype’s encrypted VoIP product was a threat to the NSA being able to listen in on all telephone calls. Skype didn’t use standard protocols, was closed-source, was outside the jurisdiction of the FTC, and the NSA couldn’t bribe the founders of Skype to stop. So the NSA pressured eBay to acquire the company which eBay did. But eBay’s lawyers bungled the deal and didn’t get access to the source code or control the infrastructure. So the NSA made eBay sell it back to the founders at a loss. eBay wasn’t too happy about this. And then the NSA had to spend a lot more money making Microsoft acquire Skype. But it was worth it because this time Microsoft got all of Skype and made the traffic go through Microsoft servers where it could be decrypted.
• How the NSA regularly derails and slows down open source work by appealing to people’s fear, uncertainty, and doubt; playing the GPL vs BSD card; spawning bikeshed discussions; and soaking up mental bandwidth with bogus crypto proposals.

I wrote about PGP a while ago and showed how to generate a key. Since then I’ve managed to do what you should never, ever do: forget your key’s passphrase. And I didn’t generate a revocation cert to boot. So I was screwed and had to generate a new one. Forunately not many, and by “not many” I mean zero, people were using that public key which I had uploaded to public keyservers.

I generated a new one and spent a lot of time reading about PGP best practices. Here’s what I learned.

Before Nanette left for her five-month Kiva fellowship in Nairobi, she told me she was memorizing some verses from the Quran.

“Why?” I asked.

“I heard that Al-Shabaab asks their hostages to recite passages from the Quran,” she said. “If you can, they let you go. If you can’t, they tell you to close your eyes.”

I laughed ruefully and took what she said with a grain of salt. After she was accepted into the Fellowship program for Kiva, a nonprofit microfinance organization, the group asked Nanette to list ten countries where she’d like to be stationed in order of preference. Her first four or five were southeast Asian countries like Vietnam, Thailand, and Cambodia. Kenya, the only African country, was somewhere in the middle of her list. When she first heard that Kiva had assigned her there, she wasn’t sure what to make of it. Her excitement in visiting Africa for the first time soon gave away to worry when she found out the U.S. State Department had issued a travel warning against Kenya.

When I first heard of the term “travel warning,” I thought this was a lightly applied label that probably meant the occasional robberies and diseases. This isn’t the case. A travel warning according to the State Department means “Do not go there. At all.”