Life is just the intersection of fate and free will. We call that destiny.

The fate part can be hard to swallow depending on what it is, and free will can sometimes feel more of a burden than a joy. But we should recognise it for what it is and understand that we are the captains of our ship. We can’t change the weather but we can steer the ship. And there’s some comfort in knowing that we have a bit of control and aren’t simply fated to be tossed around by the waves of life. If you feel like you’re being dragged down under, maybe it’s time to shift your focus to the steering wheel. You could be missing safe harbour just off the horizon and all you’ve got to do is turn hard. Do something different with your life.

Have the courage to be a loner. Maybe things will work out for you better than you could ever have imagined.

If you want to play with your Xiaomi Mi Band{4,5,6,7} without using the official application (Zepp/MiFit) you can do that, but there are some steps before you can pair your band/watch to your favorite Linux distro.

New devices (and older devices with updated firmware) require server based pairing. This means, that you absolutely must use the original MiFit/Amazfit/Zepp app to make the initial pairing, retrieve the pairing key and then use this key.

Currently, Mi Band 4, Mi Band 5, Mi Band 6 and Mi Band 7 are known to be the first devices with this enabled from the beginning. You must not unpair the band/watch from the original application (Zepp, MiFit) because that will change the device’s Bluetooth MAC address and a new auth key will be required (auth keys are based on the device’s MAC). Every time you hard reset the band/watch, the Bluetooth MAC address will be changed and you must get a new key.

As prerequisites, you should have Zepp Life installed on your device, create an account and pair the band/watch with your Apple device.

Quick guide for people who want to have a quick way to generate a random password without unlocking their favorite password manager. The only requirement (if you want clipboard copy) is xclip which can be installed on your distro from its package manager.

$ < /dev/urandom tr -dc "A-Za-z0-9_+$?=/\@!%&#()-" | head -c 32

The above command takes output (redirects) from /dev/random, passes it through tr by filtering all characters except the ones explicitly defined and cuts the resulted string after 32 characters. If you want more/less than 32 characters, adjust that part.

A friend who read my how to turn a Ripe.net probe into a OpenWRT router article gave me a Globalping hardware probe to play with, two conditions attached: don’t expose any private information that might be hardcoded into the probe and return it with the same firmware. Because of his request, I’ll do this the “paranoid” way (no boot logs, no SD card manufacturer shown, no default firmware upload, etc) so this will basically be a short tutorial of how to connect one device to another via serial console and various hardware information about the probe.

What is a Globalping hardware probe, you might be asking yourself right now. Well, it’s pretty simple:

Globalping is a platform that allows anyone to run networking commands such as ping, traceroute, dig, curl and mtr on probes distributed all around the world. Our goal is to provide a free and simple service for everyone out there to make the internet faster. You can use it to optimize your anycast network, monitor your latency, debug routing issues and even check for censorship in different countries. source

I no longer believe that I will get to live in the future I dreamed of when I was growing up.

I grew up in a low-to-middle class suburban area, just few kilometers outside my country’s capital city. On a warm summer night, if I listened hard enough, I could hear the city buzzing - a siren from a police car, an occasional motorcycle screaming down the street, a helicopter sometimes, an airplane if we were lucky. But that’s the city.

I grew up in a two story house that my father and my grandfather built themselves. We had a nice backyard where mother used to plant flowers, a garage for the family car. The whole street was like that. I was a kid. There were so many kids, I couldn’t even count them all.

Everyone took care of everyone.

#18: Bet Yer Life, CaptainBlackbeard!

In this episode, we follow America’s number one game show host, Wink Payola. As we find out what America’s favorite son, does with the other twenty three hours of their day?

This episode is the most ambitious thing we have ever attempted. Bet Yer Life, CaptainBlackbeard is a hilarious, wild and darkly fascinating story that explores Media, Consumerism, Greed, Fame. And what it is to live on the dark side of the internet. The highs and lows that come from it. This story is also strongly about AI technology, how incredible it is and the consequences of how fast it’s progressing.

Bet Yer Life, CaptainBlackbeard was a whole lot of fun to make for ye! This story ties up a lot of different things in the CaptainBlackbeard Universe, and marks the beginning of a new era for CaptainBlackbeard Radio. It is challenge to create the right balance for ye, mates. When we come up with an idea for the show, it evolves into deeply rich universes that could span many hours to tell the full story of. However, we respect yer time and do not wish to Tommy and Pam ye. So we hope ye enjoy this wild and darkly hilarious story that we promise ye, everything works out in the end.

You can set-up a VPN killswitch, which is a simple way to ensure that if your VPN connection is dropped, regardless of the reason, the Internet connections are not allowed (and your real IP will not be exposed). And this can be done easily using ufw on any Debian-based distro.

Start by installing ufw if it’s not already installed on your system:

$ sudo apt install ufw

Configure ufw to deny all incoming and outgoing connections:

$ sudo ufw default deny incoming
$ sudo ufw default deny outgoing

• Moving back in with your parents in the town where you grew up after a career failure.
• Leaving your bicycle in an alleyway after an injury that left permanent damage.
• Selling your guitar and amps after getting kicked out of the band.
• Moving to the flyover states and living in a rural property with a propane tank on the front lawn after the startup you worked at went under.
• That last night at the job site sharing a drink with the guys after finding out that the construction firm is laying everyone off once the project is done.
• Hanging up the uniform and putting your framed medals in a box under your bed.