As you may have noticed, my posts have become less frequent and my lineage 2 posts have stopped. The reason to this is that I have had issues that took priority over gaming and the truth is … I have lost interest in playing right now. That doesn’t mean that I wont start playing again at some point. I still have a lot of material to publish. Material given to me by a great L2 player (my l2-mentor), which I simply MUST put it out there. But I guess it will have to wait a bit longer.
There was a series of events, coincidences or synchronicities that didn’t let me plan things as I wanted. The constant change of what was about to happen, kept me in a state of waiting and unable to plan what to do with my time. My plan was to continue learning Java and researching on the technology around producing youtube videos, which is something that interests me a lot. I did a series of Photoshop tutorials on my “Angelina’s Technology Channel” and few gaming videos on Bloons Monkey City. Of course they are far from perfect and I am sure many will wonder, why do I publish stuff that are not perfect? The reason to this is that I have discovered: you can never get good at something, unless you keep doing it. Not practicing it, not rehearsing for it, but actually doing it. Speaking in videos and tutorials was a great challenge at first, especially because I have very little experience in talking in English and my accent is funny but it did get better after a few videos, and I am sure it can improve a lot yet. Also, the experience that I am gathering with different recording and editing technology is very useful. I also did a video that is the Lord of the Rings Prologue, if the ring was “cyber security”.
During this whole time, being in a “void”, I have been contemplating a lot on my relationship with the Internet and the social media. I love the Internet and I love writing, but screen sucking can be a great waste of time. As I have been trying to learn new technologies and improve my English, I am discovering difficulties that did not exist before and I am certain that these have nothing to do with my “old” age. I am certain they have to do with social media overuse. They just kill our creativity and our ability to concentrate.
In the meantime, I have started giving yoga lessons again and somehow my passion with vedic astrology has started attracting a lot of people asking me to do readings. I am still uncertain about whether I should do that, it just sometimes happens that people give me their details and I start talking. Then they tell their friends and….
I think that the best thing for me right now would be to combine my passion with yoga and technology and create a Yoga Vlog. I would love to do that and if all goes as planned (which never does) I will start doing that in the summer.
The happy discovery of the last month was the movies of the Marvel superheroes. I have watched almost all of them. Thor rocks!
What else? My privacy and security obsession has started to slowly fade away again but the truth is, it is an impossible task. The sheer amount of time that I need to maintain the security and privacy of my accounts is scary. Because the material is huge, so I need to keep reviewing and deleting things all the time. I have still gmail accounts to clean up and spam has started to emerge in my protonmail account, which is something I really do not like. The dream here is structure. Organization. Not chaos and disorder. But dreams, more often than not, remain dreams.
I have formated 3 times in the last month. Learned to boot from usb-sticks, created some sticks with boot errors, which I don’t know why they are faulty, but I do know the commands to make them work… Got a new HD because I thought my HD was defective (which after scrutinized controls and scans it ends up it wasn’t) so I am stuck with 1TB of free space now, 2 HDs and missing one electricity cable.
And I do dream of linux again. Oh yes the troyans. Someone brought me a tablet that was infected so I backup up the data on a linux installation and don’t even remember now if I actually found a linux antivirus or not. Gonna have to look into that again.
This is generally a time that I am discovering a lot of new things, attempting to learn a lot of new things but lack orientation. Cannot decide where to concentrate and where to spend my energy. There are just so many interesting things out there.
But we were talking about linux. I dream of a world where all my personal accounts are accessed only by a linux installation. Then I would use windows only for photo/video editing, chess and gaming. How practical is that though? Eventually I would have to log onto an email and social media from windows.
There is another part of me that secretly (not to secretly now lol) wonders whether this whole security fuss is a myth. Not the privacy fuss, the security fuss. I haven’t gotten a virus in like over a decade. The only time I had real active malware on my system was in the dial up era. Unless I have had one without my knowledge. Possible, but a bit unlikely and in such a case, no amount of security would have prevented an APT. There are so many new security flaws discovered every day but how many of them are actually exploited? We don’t know and this uncertainty gives food to paranoia.
Granted, reading about security has made me aware of incredible things. For example, did you know that it is not safe to charge your phone from public usb ports? They can also be hacked (though I still have not seen evidence of that being exploited…. ). Reading about security has shown me the new threats (ransomware) and the value of backups. Where do I, as a normal user, go beyond the land of backups? Where do I go, beyond sensible surfing and a cautious behavior with sent files, attachments, word macros etc.
The truth is security is very simple and its principles in terms of user behavior have not changed for at least a decade. That is why I disable my antivirus most of the time.
I feel as if I have reached the end of security as a normal user. Now the only choice is to either back off or dive in the ocean of computer science, where the waters are very deep for the unskilled swimmer. But when did I back off from an adventurous exploration?