“Universal literacy was supposed to educate the common man to control his environment. Once he could read and write he would have a mind fit to rule. So ran the democratic doctrine. But instead of a mind, universal literacy has given him rubber stamps, rubber stamps inked with advertising slogans, with editorials, with published scientific data, with the trivialities of the tabloids and the platitudes of history, but quite innocent of original thought. Each man's rubber stamps are the duplicates of millions of others, so that when those millions are exposed to the same stimuli, all receive identical imprints. It may seem an exaggeration to say that the American public gets most of its ideas in this wholesale fashion. The mechanism by which ideas are disseminated on a large scale is propaganda, in the broad sense of an organized effort to spread a particular belief or doctrine.” -Edward Bernays, Propaganda (1928)" It’s amazing how much better people get along when they are on the same page. ...

We’ve all seen that scene in Mission Impossible where a secret agent picks up a device, it relays a message, and then it utters the unforgettable line, “This message will now self destruct”. I love these scenes, and I’ve always wondered why normal civilians can’t have devices with cool spycraft features like that. Well, on Android, there totally are features like that and I wanted to explain some of them here in case you weren’t familiar. ...

I used to work for a wonderful company called X-Force Red. It’s a cybersecurity firm that has some of the world’s most talented hackers, and I count myself as supremely lucky to have had the privilege to work there. I spent a lot of time with the Vulnerability Management consultants, and their toys were really top notch. Advanced APIs, daemons, and cron jobs, and data science stuff that I couldn’t begin to tell you about. ...

This’ll be a short one, but I recently moved to a new city and it’s always difficult to meet new people if you aren’t part of some large organization or religion. One way to get familiar with new people is to use https://meetup.com. The issue I was facing is that the city I’m a part of is huge and there are a ton of groups. Trying to login to each group individually would take like 20 minutes if I just wanted to see what they were up to. So here’s a little script that I made with chatGPT and some unix philosophy magic that will give us all of the group urls, event names, and times so that I can see if any of them interest me this week. ...

I’ve found the perfect tech video. Seriously, it changed my entire outlook on things. I’ve spent over 10 years spending most of my free time watching technical videos on various computing topics. That is an unfathomable amount of hours of content. In that time, there have been a number of videos that helped to shape my perspective on computers and how they can be used. One of them stands above the rest though, and it can be located here: ...

Ok, this one is nerdy and short, but it’s made my life immeasurably better. There is a utility called fuzzy finder on most unix-based systems. It’s purpose is simple… it fuzzy finds. Okay… but what does that mean? Usually when you search for something, you typically do “string matching”. You search for “photo” and if it’s got the word photo in the name, it’ll show up. Easy enough. But what if the file you want has “Photo” in the name? That capital P is going to throw it off. ...

Over my 20’s, I’ve spent a ton of time researching privacy and security measures utilized by hackers, spies, and criminals. Anyone who spends any amount of time on the subject will hear about an Operating system called Tails. If you haven’t, Tails OS is a linux desktop on a usb stick that is meant to forget everything you do. It’s in the name: T.A.I.L.S. is an acronym for The Amnesiac, Incognito, Live System. https://tails.net/about/index.en.html ...

Productivity log: I’m not going to make this a running thing, but I do need to test out netlify’s automated build pipeline and it would be nice to have something in the blogpost other than “TEST” or something remarkably boring like that. I intended to launch the blog on January first, but I wanted to do so from a fresh Ubuntu machine. I had been meaning to switch for a while from my battered and beaten kali instance. In my view, the following are the only distros I would use: ...

Introduction: Hello World. Well, it’s about time I started a technical blog to start sharing tips and tricks for how to navigate the increasingly complex digital landscape that we find ourselves in. I’ve talked myself out of writing this thing for a couple years. Fortunately for me … and depending on how you view my content… unfortunately for the web, LinkedIn refuses to accept my email address without a document signed in the presence of a notary public. So like it or not, I need to advertise my expertise, and I’m going to have to do it the way our forefathers did it: With text and a fandangled website. ...