Tomas Vik

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Hashtag: Vanlife

Last Summer, after years of watching YouTube videos about tiny homes and van conversions, I made the decision. I’m going to buy myself a van. Convert it to a camper van and potentially even move into it. Purchase My requirements were quite simple. It needed to be L2H2 (classification of length and height). It had to be around 8K USD so that I’m not too afraid to drill and cut holes in it.

Iteration

Today I’m going to be writing about one concept that is as common in software development as it is counterintuitive. With the added benefit that it translates well into every day life. Imagine you are about to: pick up painting as a new hobby change career from salesperson to a carpenter start going to the gym If you are anything like me, you would do actions like: buy yourself expensive art equipment and text books quit your job and get a workshop sign up for the gym and get new gym gear If these seem like a reasonable steps, you are in for a treat.

Signal - the secure messenger

After writing about privacy and security in general, this is the first time I’m going to be talking about a specific solution. Full disclosure: I’m not a security professional, more of an enthusiast, so please take the advice with a grain of salt. I’ve been disconcerted with the messaging situation for a few years now. I’ve been super excited about using WhatsApp back in the days when it was still an independent company.

Meditation, introduction

This post is an introduction to meditation. If you are meditating regularly, you can skip right over it. What I mean by meditation? When I refer to meditation, I mean mindfulness meditation. That means paying close attention to what is happening in your own mind and consciously trying not to change or force anything. The main goal (at least for me) is to understand better what my own mind is and how it operates.

Security is like ogres

I’ve just seen security report in the news about a critical Bluetooth Vulnerability on Android devices. The report says that the attacker was able to run arbitrary code on Android 8 and 9 devices. Just by being within the Bluetooth range. That got me thinking. How safe can I be from breaches of my privacy/security. Ever. No matter how much effort I would spend on keeping my devices and accounts secured.

Privacy

Two years ago I read George Orwell’s novel 1984 that describes a dystopian future where authoritarian regime got complete control over people’s lives. The book is amazingly written and it is as relevant today as it ever was. Reading it sent me on down a rabbit hole of research about how much privacy do I have in my current life. Let me put on my tinfoil hat and tell you some of what I found.

Free and Open-Source Software

This article is mainly a personal research to clear my thoughts about what FOSS is and isn’t. Before we start, let’s quickly mention some famous examples: Firefox, Linux, Git, Gimp, Eclipse, GitLab, most programming languages and thousands more. F is for Free Usually when you publish a piece of software, you publish it “under a license”. Which means you attach a contract to your code that says how it can and can’t be used and shared.

Slow endorphins

Watching YouTube or reading a book? Scrolling through Instagram or calling a friend? Eating a pizza or working out? Playing computer games or going out for a walk? If you are anything like me, you’d much more prefer to do the former. It’s so easy that you could almost say those things are doing you and not the other way around. I think this is happening because these things reward you immediately.

How I stopped drinking for a year

As all Buddhas refrained from alcohol until the end of their lives, so I too will refrain from alcohol until the end of my life. The five precepts, the most important system of morality for Buddhist lay people 1 I’m writing this article on Saturday morning after a Friday night out with my Friends. We’ve hit the pub and everybody was merry. Beer was flowing and shots were had, just not by me.

Split brain phenomena

What do you do when epileptic seizures take a control of your brain and large storms of random neural activity starts to spread through your brain? You cut your brain in half to limit the blast radius. The human brain is split into two hemispheres right above the brain stem. The reason for that is not clear but I’m pretty sure it’s the same why we split CPU’s into cores. Connecting the layers of neurons is expensive and probably not necessary.