Encryption, password management, and backups in Linux

An easy introduction to some of the most important tools and concepts

Be it malicious crackers, evil governments, or all-devouring US companies, we have to protect our data from their greedy grasps. But in the beginning it seems to be such a hard task. There are tons of tools and one does neither want to spend several weeks on reading documentation nor to use insecure ones. To alleviate this pain, I will give a short introduction by presenting four simple but essential tools: dm-crypt/LUKS for hard disk encryption, GnuPG for encrypting individual files, emails etc., borg to securely and efficiently backup your data, and pass to manage and store your passwords. »

ecmwf_retrieve

A package enabling you to download all public data from the ECMWF servers

The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) allows you to access its vast set of model data via a free account and a Python 3 package they provide as well. Unfortunately, a download limit of 30GB prevents the user to retrieve all public data. To circumvent this restriction, I wrote the package ecmwf_retrieve, which chops your request in small parts, sends all of them to the API of the ECMWF, and joins the retrieved data into one single file. »