As you get better at OSINT you start to wonder what else you can do with these skills. Like maybe locating old friends.
I’m not talking about stalking here, to be clear. I’m talking about seeing if you can use OSINT to research an old friend to see what they are up to and if they are ok. Maybe you worked with someone day in and day out twenty years ago and you haven’t heard from them in decades. Are they ok, what are they up to these days? Not to say hi but just to know that they are ok and doing well.
I’ve worked with many people for many years and on occasion I often wonder what they are up to and if they are well. Using OSINT you may just obtain the answer. Hopefully a positive one.
OSINT, reconnecting people.
Cyberpunk
I loved cyberpunk.
I would religiously read William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, Bruce Sterling, and Rudy Rucker. But what happened? There’s been nothing really good since Neuromancer and Snow Crash in my opinion. Has the cyberpunk genre died?
Well there’s Richard Morgan’s Altered Carbon, which was made into two TV series. I highly recommend checking out series one and forgetting that there was a sequel. There’s the never-ending legacy that is Blade Runner. We had 2049 then Black Lotus with more on their way. PKD’s universe is here to stay with Spinners and Frank Lloyd Wright architecture blended with neon imprinted on our retinas.
But has there been any really good cyberpunk written since the aforementioned works? It’s as if the cyberpunk genre is no longer of interest as we live in a technological world. Or maybe consumers prefer to consume the genre in the form of video games, TV shows, and movies, rather than books. Paper is so.. retro.
Whatever the reason, I’m wearing out my copies of Neuromancer and Snow Crash as I re-read them each year in anticipation of some new author releasing a cyberpunk masterpiece.
Do you have any recommendations?
Emulators
I love emulators.
They allow me to take a nostalgic trip back in time running software and playing games from yesteryear without leaving the comfort of my current desktop. I can load up WinUAE for example and delve back into my Amiga days playing forgotten classics such as Cadaver, Dreamweb, or Alien Breed. Or fire up Directory Opus and play around with the Amiga OS.
In most cases I don’t even need to run an emulator on my OS as there are plenty of websites that will do that for you. Catering to the retro scene you can play just about any game on a myriad of bygone computer hardware or gaming consoles.
Maybe you are in the pub talking to your mates discussing the video games you played in your youth. You could pull up a YouTube video to show what it looked like, or you could fire up the game via emulation and actually play the game yourself in real time. The power of the internet!
I do love emulators!
Now for a quick game of Galaga..
Gig economy
I’ve started watching this YouTube channel called London Eats. Not sure why. Maybe because I find it relaxing?
This guy zooming around the capital in the dark making food and parcel deliveries on his electric bikes and scooters. It got me thinking about the gig economy. How these workers don’t have a traditional employment contract, but are paid a fee per job.
After four hours of work this guy earned less than minimum wage and called it a good night. How? Less than minimum wage? Is the gig economy a way for employers to hire cheap labour? The apps these workers use must take a cut of the profits although they do offer meagre bonus payments if you work harder, faster, completing more deliveries within certain time periods.
The London Eats guy augments his meagre earnings by filming his shifts and turning them into quality viewing. He also confesses to having a day job so his shifts only need to be a few hours. He also sells swag from his channel and has sponsorship from various companies. So he’s making ‘his gig’ work. But I’m curious how others are faring from this industry, being paid per delivery.
I guess it’s nothing new. In my youth I worked for a company that paid me 1p for every flyer I delivered. If I could deliver one a minute that’s 60p an hour! Sounded great as a kid needing to augment his pocket money, but even with inflation an adult wouldn’t do it. Explains why so many of us were school age delivering those flyers. Child labour.
The gig economy is here to stay. It makes sense for the employers as it’s cheap labour. And as there appears to be no shortage of willing workers it must be profitable enough for some. Or maybe they just like working when they want to, being by themselves travelling around the city listening to their tunes going door to door, having no in-person boss.
Waiting..
Have you ever considered how much of our lives we waste just waiting? Waiting for public transport, parcel deliveries, holidays, the weekend.
Waiting, waiting.
I needed a change of scenery so I decided to take the bus into town to hang out in my favourite coffee shops reading and writing. I’m at the bus stop actually willing the bus to arrive, constantly looking down the lane for it. Why? I don’t have an urgent appointment to get to. I’m not in a rush to be anywhere in particular. Yet here I am in waiting mode. Waiting for a bus, which isn’t late.
We spend so much of our lives in queues waiting. Wasting time willing actual time to pass, not being in the moment. This is probably part of why we are stressed so much. Everything is scheduled and automated these days and yet it’s still not fast enough. Microwaves get hotter and faster yet they seem slower. How? Are we so impatient?
It’s later now and I’m in my coffee shop with fresh brew in front of me staring out the window people watching. Watching people in a rush to get somewhere, queuing waiting for a shop to open, waiting by a bus stop looking impatient. Such busy impatient lives we lead.
Ferris comes to mind and his quote about stopping and looking around once in a while. If we don’t life will pass us by while we are waiting.
The Net
Do you remember the Sandra Bullock movie The Net? I loved that movie when it first came out. Not for the storyline or because Ms Bullock was in it. I loved it because it showed me a possible career path that I didn’t know existed. One that I thought looked perfect to me.
You see Sandra’s character tested computer software for a living, all from the comfort of her own home. She didn’t have to deal with long commutes or co-workers. She worked freelance when she wanted for whomever she wanted. Free from office politics and office parties. Bliss!
I vaguely remember the rest of the movie. It was probably so-so. Not as good as Speed or Demolition Man (remember the seashells?). But I do remember it igniting the idea of becoming a freelance tester, a troubleshooter of software, and an ethical hacker.
It’s interesting where ideas can come from. A book, an overheard conversation, or a conspiracy movie from the 1990s.
Thanks for the career inspiration Ms Bullock!
Graphics adventure nostalgia
I grew up in the 80s and 90s, the era of the point-and-click graphics adventure games. Games like The Curse of Monkey Island, Broken Sword, Universe, and Dreamweb.
I have a large tome on my shelf dedicated to the graphics and storylines of these games. Simon the Sorcerer, Beneath a Steel Sky, and The Legend of Kyrandia to name but a few. I spent many hours of my youth immersed in the worlds conjured up by these games. Sailing the seven seas, exploring foreign lands, looking for treasure, saving fair maidens from dragons, or just hanging out in bars talking to the drunken natives in the hope of eliciting a clue in order to make further progress in my adventure.
People say that when they dream they can’t recall if it was in colour or black-and-white. When I dream I can recall not only the colour but the resolution! I recall many a happy hour spent exploring the world of Valhalla and the Lord of Infinity to many calls of “It’s a skull!”, or “It’s just a book”.
I’ve explored many a low-resolution pixelated world in my day. Minecraft players don’t know what they are missing!
So long and thanks for all the 8 and 16-bit memories!
DuckDuckGo
I’ve switched to using the Duckduckgo web browser on my laptop and phone as it promises to reduce tracking and increase privacy.
Early thoughts are that I am indeed seeing a lot less adverts, pop-ups, and opt-in modals. The video player is great as most YouTube videos play on it no trouble with zero adverts. It’s only the occasional one that insists that it is played through YouTube.
There are a few bugs in it though. One annoying one is where you have two instances of the browser open on your computer with each displayed on a different screen. If you select a bookmark in one it sometimes opens in the other replacing what was already in that window. This is especially annoying if it was a YouTube video and you have to then go back to it and find out exactly where you were up to.
Overall though it works much better than Chrome’s incognito mode. You can still be tracked by each site you visit but you automatically reject the third-party tracking cookies and content.
I still keep Chrome around as there are a handful of sites that only seem to work properly with it. I also use Google search on occasion as DuckDuckGo search filters-out a lot of stuff that you may actually want.
Still, early days..
Aimlessly surfing
There’s a kind of procrastination art to aimlessly surfing; surfing with no goal in mind, just following links and recommendations, seeing what interests you.
You may come across useful nuggets of wisdom, products you never knew existed, entertaining websites, or cats doing something unremarkable. I’m not sold on the cats thing.
Nostalgia trips await, as does losing hours watching fail videos or people are amazing videos. I personally prefer the latter as I like to look for the good in humanity rather than consuming entertainment at the expense of others, but that’s just me.
Maybe you are into ASMR or ambience videos? Study with Merve or walk through the streets of New York or Tokyo at night in the rain or even a thunderstorm. Maybe even walk through the slums of the Philippines with Larry PH, or drift BMWs through Berlin.
The internet is a vast place.You can get lost just aimlessly surfing. Lost in content and time.
What will you find today?
Musings on working in London
I’ve worked in IT for the best part of three decades and somehow during all that time I’ve managed to avoid working for a company based in London. I’ve been there for several interviews and many meetings but I’ve never had to work there.
It wasn’t on purpose, it just didn’t happen. And I’m ok with that, now.
Don’t get me wrong I do like to visit London. Piccadilly Circus, the Trocadero, the underground. Over time I’ve come to appreciate living and working in the countryside. As I’ve gotten older I’ve learned to enjoy the gentle ebb and flow of life outside the cities and major towns of England. It’s nice on occasion to go into London for a meeting or event but that’s it. I find it too.. peoply.
I like people and the intenseness and craziness of cities, but in moderation. I don’t think I could live and breathe that amount of people and activity every day.
It helps that I live so far from the nearest city and that the trains are so expensive as both combine to supply me with the perfect excuse as to why I can’t work there. The maths just don’t add up. The cost of train tickets and travel time make such a commute too expensive. You end up giving a huge part of your income and time to just getting to your desk each day.
During the pandemic I got used to life in my village. After the pandemic I joked that I had become village agoraphobic, in that I rarely left the confines of the village. It is a pleasant existence. It also saves on fuel costs and car insurance!
So despite the younger me anticipating a busy life in the city, the older me has come to appreciate the calmness and slowness of life in the countryside.