Ylixir's Sharing secrets: keeping work and personal cyberlife separately together

So my daughter is into Roblox lately, and she’s always wanting to use my machine so she can “stream”.

Meanwhile, recently my employer allowed me to trade in this god awful 90 pound laptop for a Macbook that is actually reasonably nice to work with.

In general I like to keep my work and personal life separated, but this Mac makes it really easy to create encrypted volumes, and I’d already broke down a bit and created a separate Firefox profile. Meanwhile, I’ve been eyeing nix and thinking about revamping my dotfiles…

So in order to do this, I wanted to make sure that since my work computer doesn’t belong to me, that if I put something on it that does belong to me, that I have a reasonable guarantee that it is inaccessible to anyone but me. I approached this basically how I would if I was stashing all my secrets on a strangers computer. I want to make sure I’m the only one who can get to them.

I use Padlock for my personal secret manager. I install that right off, since I can’t get into hardly anything without it. Padlock has it’s own encryption so I don’t sweat storing it’s secrets on someone elses machine.

Step two using Disk Utility to create a case-sensitive and encrypted volume. Since I’ve got Padlock, I just use it to store the password that is used to encrypt/decrypt the volume. Now I’ve got a place to stash all my personal things, I can go about stashing things there.

It’s very hard to get around without a we browser. Unfortunately, I had already configured my machine to have work and personal firefox profiles. This turned out to be no problem. It was very easy to move my personal profile to the encrypted drive.

Once I had Firefox rolling, then I could set up git and github to seamlessly work with both my personal and work accounts. This mainly consisted of making a new key (stored on the encrypted volume of course) and [following a nice guide that the googles found] (https://wyeworks.com/blog/2018/1/15/automatically-managing-personal-and-work-git-configurations).

Now I’m on to reboot my dotfiles with nix. Stay tuned to see how things work out…