The Rundown December 26, 2020
The full depth of the SolarWinds cyber-attack is yet to be disclosed, but one aspect of it includes U.S. Treasury Department emails being compromised because hackers got through encryption backdoors. This is a teachable moment for why government-mandated backdoors to communications is stupid: Sure, we can build a less secure entry point into our systems that to help the police. Sure we can naively trust the government’s promise to only use it legally (only under circumstances, and with due process). Guess what, the bad guys know about those backdoors as well, and they would have far less scruples about my privacy.
Two things I am winding up for the next year: Time blocking my day so I have slots for deep work like programming and writing, and going through intermittent fasting. Let’s see how this works.
Trying to transition out of Microsoft OneNote and into something better - right now I am on the fence between Notion and Obsidian. OneNote is easy to use and ubiquitous across all my platforms but I need to link my notes together in order to support the Zettelkasten Method (for my research projects) as well as building a second brain.
Bought a couple of games in Steam’s Holiday Sale: 1. Stardew Valley - because we’ve just about exhausted the Animal Crossing experience and we need something to work on something while waiting for another 6-8 months before the vaccine becomes available in the country. 2. Star Wars : Empire at War - I used to play this when it first came out more than a decade ago. I’m coming back to try out all the new mods.
Got myself an RSS Reader - Reeder 5 which has native clients for Mac and iOS. I have been out of the Facebook Newsfeed treadmill for quite some time, but I still need to keep tabs on content I like. RSS availability is a good filter. If you have stuff on RSS, it means the author is competent enough to get or maintain his own website. Posting it on a website also implies a higher degree of care than just the typical stream of consciousness take we have with social media.
