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  Captain's Log, Entry: February 26, 2026

  It’s been a busy month on the blog! So what’s goin’ on… I’ve added a bunch of new pages to the site, and have been publishing a variety of notes and posts. I’ve mused on how to get myself academically/professionally motivated once more and also appended a new thoughtstream section to the bottom of this here journal—a place for me to do mini-writeups/commentary on things that I don’t want in an isolated note/post/etc… Le’s go!

  Site News

  • I’ve made some big tweaks to my blogroll. It now features a lot more blogs/sites I really enjoy. I’ve added a .opml but not sure the best way to keep it reliably up to date as I add more sites to the list. I am also considering adding some descriptions for each entry.
  • I recently went through my archive of Scrolls, clicking through each link to find long-lost interesting blogs to add to my blogroll. In doing so, I discovered that there were a lot of dead links sprinkled throughout. There were fedi posts that had disappeared, blogs that had moved, and who knows what else. Just the nature of the web I guess!
  • My experimental GtS fedi instance is dead. Long live malici.ous.computer! Like a dumb-dumb I didn’t grab my archive in time before K&T Host went dark, so here I am. Not sure if I will attempt to revive it elsewhere. Time will tell. Until then, I’ve removed the redirect on @afterdark@shellsharks.social and will be using that account once more. 🌙
  • Inspired by Marijke, I now have a mentions page which lists all of the instances (atleast that I’ve found) of people mentioning me or my site on their own blog! I think I’ll limit this to just mentions on blogs, and not those on social media.
  • I’ve published a bunch of new slash pages—/ai, /blank, /hello, /nope, /self-hosted, /top4 and /verify.
  • I got the idea from Burgeon Lab to publish an Indieweb.org profile page.
  • Reorganized my hamburger menu items. 🍔
  • I’ve (finally) made some significant styling tweaks to the site. I’ve moved from colored links to underlined links for both the light and dark themes (keeping the ‘classic’ theme the same for the most part). Hopefully this improves legibility/accessibility and gives it a slightly more pro look.
  • Upon request, I’ve made visited links in Scrolls have specialized styling. So folks can keep track of what links they’ve already visited. I’ve kept it to just Scrolls for now to reduce visual clutter elsewhere on the site.
  • I’ve changed up my welcome message at the top of the home page. For posterity, it now says…

  Greetings web traveler! My name is Mike. I am a security researcher and Internet homesteader (among many other things). Welcome to my digital garden — a florilegium of personal works across all things infosec, technology and life. This site also serves as the canonical identity (a veritable root system) for myself on the web. There’s a lot to discover here, so sit a spell, take some time to really dig around and explore. Wanna contact me? Don’t be shy now either! C’mon and say hi anytime.

  TV

  • Finished the Stranger Things binge. I had heard a sprinkling of folks saying they didn’t like how it ended, but I thought the final season was great and the ending was a perfect way to wrap things up.
  • Knight of the Seven Kingdoms has been thoroughly enjoyable. Didn’t see the Egg thing coming…
  • The Lakers need to stay healthy, but otherwise have been pretty exciting to watch. Being a DC-area native, the Wizards have really never been exciting to watch. Even in the Wall/Beal days they weren’t that compelling. But with the way the East looks + them adding AD & Trae Young, who knows… maybe I could get into watching Wizards ball too?
  • I’ve been rewatching a bunch of the X-Men movies on Disney+. Just for fun. They’re all OK.
  • I’ve also started watching Paradise (season 2) and Task.

  Self-Hosting

  I have a lot of things I want to self-host. Right now my Masto instance is run by MastoHost and that’s fine, but I want to get malici.ous.computer (my GtS instance) back up and running, I need a new bookmarks manager (since Pocket died), I want to self-host my RSS (and get off Feedly), and I’d like to put some Discord replacement up (who knows, something like Discourse or maybe even Matrix). There’s probably other stuff I want to self-host too. I’m taking a look at Hetzner and Yunohost. I’ve started documening this journey, and will add things to my /self-hosted slash page as they materialize.

  Career

  From ~2016-2022 I was incredibly prolific with respect to learning, doing infosec trainings and getting certifications. In the time since, that’s really fallen off a cliff. I haven’t gotten a cert in forever (for whatever that’s worth), I’ve tried and failed to get much traction on doing any kind of training (just go peruse my journal for all the times I’ve mentioned working on OSWE, eg. 8/21, 12/21, 4/22, 6/22, 12/22, 1/23, 2/23, 1/25), and I can’t say I’ve really added anything particularly significant to my knowledge base in that span either. Sure, I’ve been busy with kids, and the house, and w/e else, but I have to call it like it is—I’ve been stuck.

  

  So how do I get momentum again? I don’t know what will actually work. I don’t know if writing this up and publishing it here will serve as any spark. But I’m going to do a bit of ideation/brainstorming on how I can kickstart my learning and advancement right here (in no particular order).

  • I have a pro subscription to PentesterLab. This platform came highly recommended from some coworkers and has a lot of practical exercises targeting real-world CVEs and other commonly found web vulnerabilities. I just need to make time to work through the challenges and write up the solutions (responsibly of course).
  • I’ve been toying with the idea of producing a ~weekly “what-have-I-learned/read” stream or post that would contain links and mini-writeups related to all the things I learned and did in that period. Maybe said stream could live in this here journal, or maybe I’ll create a new content type, or perhaps it can go in Scrolls—tbd! (Maybe I could do something with the /TIL slash page idea?)
  • I’ve said it before, and now I’m saying it again—maybe I’ll try for one of those OffSec certs 😅. I’m particularly interested in OSWE (sound familiar?) or the upcoming OSAI training.
  • Learning topics of emphasis for me this year (vague but w/e) include AI (securing/pwning these systems to be clear), Cloud, Cryptography, Code Review and Web App Pentesting.
  • Generally I’d like to do more reading! I save a lot of articles, and have a lot of books on my shelf. I’d like to read more of this stuff and write about it where possible.
  • Finally, I need to do more writing about what I’m doing at work. This can help juice the work, cement knowledge in my mind and put more lovely content on the site!

  Life

  • Trying to make time for and build a long streak of going to the gym is always tough. But I do feel like I’m making slow and steady progress. Biggest issue right now is this nagging right shoulder soreness.
  • I’ll be heading to San Francisco in March! Always good to make my way out there and make my usual pilgrimage to Mama’s.
  • I’ve been thinking about trying to get out of my house to work a little more often. That change of scenery seems like it would help my focus.
  • I’m thinking this snowcrete will be here until May. Insane.
  • I took some time away from this site but now that I’m back I really want to put more effort into journaling. I went back and read through the archive of captains logs and really enjoyed time traveling through things I was thinking about and doing in months and years past.
  • I’ve started planning out my garden for 2026.

  Thoughtstream

  Just a stream of random thoughts…

  Resonant Computing

  I recently came across this “Resonant Computing Manifesto”, cosigned by famed Bluesky apologist and Techdirt founder Mike Masnick. Before I talk about “Resonant Computing” in isolation, let me start with Mike’s take on how ATproto enables Resonant Computing. In this piece, he waxes poetic about how ATproto (and thus Bluesky) fulfills/enables the 5 core principles of Resonant Computing. He also goes on in the comments of the post claiming that ActivityPub/the Fediverse enable at best, only the Plural tenant of Resonant Computing.

  …but I don’t think ActivityPub meets the criteria I’m talking about in the post. The only thing AP currently does is allow you to move and keep your social graph. The other features I discuss aren’t really possible with AP right now. That may change, and I hope it does. But, like already with ActivityPub I have an account on Mastodon, but I couldn’t use that same account or data from it on Lemmy. I had to create a separate account.

  Yeah ok, Mike…

  I’ll go principle by principle here and be quite frank about how this don’t smell right…

  1. Private: ATproto is very famously not private in terms of what is visible to everyone. Mike explains however that he was against this specific term being used as the Resonant Computing Manifesto’s understanding of “Private” means that users own their data and determine how it is used. Well yes we know theoretically ATproto’s PDS concept enables this level of data ownership, and that’s great! So I’ll give ATproto a point here, but have to agree with Mike that it’s not the right word from the manifesto itself.

  2. Dedicated: “…You have to trust that there are no hidden agendas or conflicting interests.” omg really? With ATproto? The protocol behind Bluesky? The same organization with Muskian roots? The one that took VC cash from some blockchain firm? The same one that allows open Fascists to run rampant? Yeah sure… lots of trust there.

  3. Plural: No single entity should control digital spaces. Bluesky is pretty monolithic. Maybe the tide has started to turn a bit, and I know we’re trying to logically separate ATproto and Bluesky. But until there’s any significant amount of users off the main Bsky node, I don’t think ATproto can claim any success here.

  4. Adaptable: Software should be open ended. Well I think they’re just trying to claim that ATproto is open source. OK. Cool? So is like, all of the Fediverse pretty much…

  5. Prosocial: Technology should help us become better neighbors, collaborators, and stewards of shared spaces. Well in Blueskys’ case, they certainly are collaborators (derogatory) aren’t they?

  But don’t take it from me, I’m not the only one who this Resonsant Computing doesn’t make much sense.

  18 lessons from 18 years of blogging

  Some commentary on Ben’s 18 lessons from 18 years of blogging. I thought this was a great article and most of the points I think are really spot on. There were a few though that I disagreed with…

  2. Write about what you’re passionate about: Yes of course. But y’know, why limit yourself? I think you should just write about everything. I mean, start with your passions, but I think it’s fun, and a good way to expose yourself to other things, to write about other things, not just your “passions”.

  6. Hand writing drafts on paper can help the creative process: I’ve never done this, so maybe I shouldn’t comment on it. Don’t knock it ‘til you’ve tried it, and all that. But physically hand writing a lot of text is pretty exhausting in my opinion.

  11. Resist the urge to go back and edit old posts: This is the one I feel the strongest about. This is bad advice (in my humble opinion). This is your site. Your voice. Your site is a place for you. If you want to edit a post to be more accurate, or to add more context, or because you’ve learned something new, or changed your mind. You absolutely should. It’s your site, do what you want with it.

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