Books
This week I read:
Volume 14 of Overlord by Kugane Maruyama
This newest edition has a new translator. I’ll admit, I was worried. The older volumes, while not exactly the pinnacle of English literature, were easy to read and had a certain style. Would that style change? Almost inevitable, unless the new translator took incredible care. Would it change for the worse?
No.
Wow, this reads so much better! Thank you, new translator! Looking back at when I read volume 13, I had a few issues with the translation: big tonal or topical shifts part-way through a paragraph and inconsistent character naming being the two major issues, but throughout the series there’s also been a less significant issue, where the writing just felt… juvenile at times. Things like dramatically-translated sound-effects or characters yelling “Whaaaaaaaaat!?”, and suchlike. I’d kind of chalked that up to being just something you get with light novels. But not so! This latest volume feels much more like a book that actually could have been originally written in English. It’s not all the way there, but something about the writing style just feels much more mature and normal; the translator even uses the word “druthers” at one point, which the previous one would never have done.
Oh yeah, the story was enjoyable too. But my main take-away is how much the style of the translator matters.
Miscellaneous
I felt like fiddling with my NixOS configuration this week, and so I finally got around to implementing proper secrets management, using sops-nix. No longer do I symlink a git repository of plaintext secrets to /etc/nixos/secrets: secrets are now in my config repo directly, encrypted, and only made available to the things which need them.
I was initially worried about key management, as this sort of thing can just be a case of kicking the can down the road: “ok, the secrets are encrypted… but now I have a secret decryption key to distribute instead”. But sops-nix solves that nicely by making it trivial to use your SSH host key as the public key, and so your SSH private key (which is already on the machine) becomes the decryption key.
No need to distribute a separate key, very handy!
It does mean that I’ve introduced a bit of state to my config repo where there wasn’t any before—if I need to change a machine’s SSH host key for whatever reason I need to re-encrypt its secrets—but that’s an acceptable trade-off to not needing a separate mechanism to configuration-as-code the decryption key.
As part of this, I also switched to a flake-based configuration, which was almost trivially easy and not something I should have put off for as long as I did.