I don’t have New Year resolutions every year, but this year I figured what the heck. Looking back, while I didn’t call it a resolution, I did force a switch to Camera RAW for photography on January 2nd, 2006 and that was great. I have a few technology and Internet related resolutions that I thought I would share this year. Hopefully I’m as happy with these changes in a couple of years.

Digitally Signed Email

The time has come for this to be standard. This feels a lot like the Camera RAW resolution above. Not many people use digital certificates with their email because it's generally a pain and complicated. But, without it email is like writing on a bathroom wall, in a really big bathroom. It's so wide open it is somewhat shocking. Digital certificates solve this problem.

I have now enabled my OS X Mail with a digital certificate from Thawte and if you get email from me it will be signed. This isn’t universal since the iPhone at this point doesn’t sign messages, and I do occasionally have to resort to webmail. But if it’s from Mail.app it will be signed.

Go get your own certificate as well and we can even encrypt the message. There is a somewhat dated, but good explanation on doing this for OS X at Joar Wingfor’s website.

Less Google

Yes, less Google. Google knows too much about me. I've decided this trend needs to reverse. I've stopped using GMail and am using Tuffmail for my mailbox. I've ditched Google Calendar. I'm even thinking about moving from Google Reader, a frightening thing to even consider. But I think 2008 needs to end with less Google than it started with. It isn't that I think they are evil, it's just that I don't think one company should really have that many angles on my personal data. After moving my email to Tuffmail, I had this sense that I was no longer being monitored. Real or not, I had that feeling.

More Wikipedia

This resolution was made by another guy at the office and I liked it so much I'm adopting it myself. It seems that many times when I search on Google I end up at [Wikipedia](http://www.wikipedia.org/). So I'm going to try to cut down on the middle man. Even better, how about doing Wikipedia searches from inside OS X's Dictionary.

Cleaner URL’s

I have a tendency to put an unnecessary trailing slash on URL’s. I’m going to try to stop doing this.