The Magic of Recluse is a 1991 Epic Fantasy novel by L.E. Modesitt Jr. It was recently for sale as a Humble Bundle. I picked up the bundle because I recognized the author’s name, but I hadn’t read any of his works.

The Magic of Recluse centers around the story of Lerris from the land of Recluse who is often bored with the demanding perfectionism of his land. Every craft and trade must live up to the level of “perfection”. Lerris is sent to live with his uncle, a woodworker because he considers his mother’s pottery trade to also be boring. Within a few months, his skills grow and he learns to be proficient with woodworking as an apprentice, but he doesn’t care about perfection in woodworking because it too is boring.

Yesterday, I was watching some old episodes of The Computer Chronicles. I noticed that the earlier seasons had a lot more levity during the roundtable discussions, with a stronger focus on business and industry topics. This contrasts with the later seasons, which shifted almost entirely to personal computing.

My guess is that sometime in the late ’80s, the producers realized that viewers were more interested in what they could actually buy and use themselves, rather than what was happening in boardrooms and high-tech labs.

I also watched the special episode dedicated to Gary Kildall. It was exceptionally well done, and Gary came across as a genuinely awesome person. RIP Gary.

As one of my favorite philosophers like to say, let’s begin by defining our terms?

What is Seamonkey?

From Wikipedia:

SeaMonkey is a free and open-source Internet suite. It is the continuation of the former Mozilla Application Suite, based on the same source code,[6] which itself grew out of Netscape Communicator and formed the base of Netscape 6 and Netscape 7.

SeaMonkey was created in 2005 after the Mozilla Foundation decided to focus on the standalone projects Firefox and Thunderbird. The development of SeaMonkey is community-driven, in contrast to the Mozilla Application Suite, which until its last released version (1.7.13) was governed by the Mozilla Foundation. The new project-leading group is called the SeaMonkey Council

Geoguessr is an online geography game. That may sound like the most boring thing you’ve ever hear but it’s actually very interesting if you’re a newbie in OSINT. A big part of OSINT is GEOSINT, that is, being able to look at a photo a understanding where it was taken using different techniques.

Geoguesser drops you into a Google street view session but without any of Google’s normal map aids such as links, bookmarks, etc and you have a time limit to find yourself on their map. If you can do it within a certain number of meters/feet, then you get more points.

Hmmm, it’s been a while. I started a new job. It’s DevOps, not OSINT, but I am in a better place in my life.

I want to do more learning and more writing. I know a lot about things that OSINT courses never touch upon. Too many times they only focus on the mainstream because it’s easiest. I think I can help people learn about the parts of the internet that are not well known or understood.

The past year has been difficult. About a year ago, I was so burned out on my job that I started looking for a way out. I couldn’t just leave without an exit strategy and I knew that it would take more than a year to complete. I’m an American citizen who has spent the last several years living in Europe. We made the decision to get a green card for my wife and then move back to the US.

I love the old days of the Internet and Usenet in particular. Life on Usenet was considerably different than it is today. Moderated groups were rare and the huge majority of them were unmoderated and yet they worked for the most part. Moderation was something that people did and not moderators. If you didn’t want to see something, then you added that person or a keyword to your “killfile” and they wouldn’t show up again. It was a simple and mostly affective block.

One thing I’ve been doing as a part of my research into #OSINT as a future occupation is to scope out who is hiring, look up the company’s website and their employees LinkedIn pages to see what experience they have.

I don’t use a sock-puppet account for this, though I do have one. I actually want people to see me looking because when I start applying for jobs, I want my name to stick out. Also, I’m learning a lot about the OSINT job market by what these companies do on a day to day basis, and eventually I hope to make more contacts that can help with that.

I’m wary of remakes and sequals that are made years or decades after the original. Too many times, they are lazy. Only a handful of the original actors ever come back, if they come back at all. The plots generally try to remake the original film beat for beat and by the middle, you know exactly how the ending will go because you’ve seen this movie before and it was better the first time.

I decided to change this website yet again to a simple Hugo generated site for a few reasons.

1. It is more secure. There’s no login and password like with Wordpress that can be hacked. The only way into the site is with my SSH key.
2. It is simple. I hate cookies warnings and I hate it when web developers include cookies when they are not needed. Consider this to me by privacy statement. This website doesn’t have any cookies therefore there is nothing for me to use or sell.
3. I like the idea of being able to edit my site with a CLI text editor. I am writing this with Vim.

However, Hugo is a pain in the butt to work with at times. I would genuinely have more flexibity to make pages using plain html, but that would also be a to write and it would be ugly.