Alex Vranas @Alex@vran.as

Several years ago I owned the domain portscan.io, and I badly regretted letting it expire, as it was purchased immediately by someone else.

But it seems that the current owner has made proper use of it as a free self-scanning service, so honestly, I'm not mad.

The ability to be a no-code tech worker is pretty neat, but I know I would do better to actually learn how to code.

This is me right now:

So, full disclosure, I have worked in tech for over a decade, I'm skilled at network engineering and software engineering, I work as a support engineer at a software company, and my coding skills are absolute poop from lack-of-practice.

So I dropped like $300 on Codecademy and Mimo training materials, and I'm determined to get myself back into proper shape to program fluently again.

10 days in, and I can program a prime number generator and a fizzbuzz program without docs.

100-day router throughput check.

Of course, I type at like 90wpm, have a degree in journalism, and can do some programming, so it's not like I'm illiterate.

Weird fact about myself: I cannot write. My handwriting is illegible unless I slow down to about 15wpm (printing only), and even then it looks like a child's writing.

This is made even worse by the fact that my digital lifestyle allows me to literally never write. The most writing I ever do is signing a receipt, and that's mostly just a hand-gesture at this point.

And yet this has never held me back since my K-12 days, where I was told that perfect cursive was a requirement to be human.

Just fired up a DHT scraper and I'm sucking up data about the torrents people are downloading in real time.

10 minutes in and I've indexed over 150TiB of downloadable content.

I bought 10 shares of NOK during the initial GameStonk squeeze, hoping to get a tiny taste of the action, and while I have lost money, I also now have an invite to the Shareholder meeting and get to vote, which I plan to do because I've never done that before.

@steve @delve Inoreader does something similar, and lets me put channels into groups based on topic, or create search feeds.

@delve I've been using the hosted RSS at https://www.inoreader.com/ and it's the closest thing I can get to the classic Google Reader experience. I like it enough to pay for the full version.

Back on my Techno & House kick again.

I've gotten into a ton of different genres over the past couple of decades, but these two I keep coming back to.

What I'm vibing to right now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBsFCkB07Rs

Watching Bitcoin skyrocket to new highs, Ethereum NFTs set art auction records, and meme stocks jump thousands of percent during a pandemic and recession has me worried that the economy is deeply unhealthy in some novel and less-than-obvious ways, and that when the bubble pops, we're all going to feel it.

Several times now, I've stored a bunch of novel, rare Internet curios on USB hard drives, put them into storage boxes, and years later decide it's time to open the time capsule, only to discover that the drives rattle and click and won't read.

So I'm ensuring the future of my remaining and ongoing digital trinkets by buying a BluRay burner and a bunch of 100GB discs to store in a disc binder.

I can't wait until I can just keep a running cache of every kilobit of data that enters or exits my home network.

Spontaneously buying Revision Party tickets would normally be a bit of hassle, given the commute to Europe and whatnot, but while the world remains virtual I guess I don't have to worry about that.

Anyway, #Revision2021 tickets just went on sale.

https://2021.revision-party.net/tickets

Here's a look a bit closer.

Perseverence took this picture of it's heat shield a split second after it separated during entry.

Very proud of my web-scraping server for staying booted up for an entire year. I was still going to the office when I turned this thing on.

Glad my OVH VPS was in Gravelines, not Strasbourg.