Re: Why trust any third party?
Following myself up - the output from sha256sum is hex bytes, giving you a terrible 4 bits of entropy per output character, and encoding it in base64 doesn't help the situation.
Adding in "xxd" to turn the hex bytes back into binary gives much nicer results. I like Wood's idea quite a bit:
echo -n 'considerdollarbaseready fARSEbook' | sha256sum -|xxd -r -p|base64|head -1|cut -c 1-24
gTHDYfbTJYK0Sm5eI1W8mO+R