ramblings with little proofreadign

this is just like, my opinion, man. Please send comments in DM on fedi: @aetios@sns.minovsky.space

13-sep-2025 - why i like email (and you should consider it)
In the past time I have been shedding myself from messengers and platforms, especially the locked-in ones like whatsapp (I've been gone from whatsapp since May 1st and I don't regret it one second). This has come with a disadvantage: Outside of our normal techy circles, a quite large chunk of messaging happens via messengers like Facebook Messenger, Apple messaging, or Whatsapp. This is especially a problem when you want to participate in clubs. For instance I am part of an astronomy club and a plastic modeling club. I know someone who has Whatsapp because their caving club uses it. Etc. This sort of network effect is unfortunately real. What can we do against it? Well, if you're brand new to these clubs, sadly usually not much. But if you're a little more involved, maybe read on.

Thankfully more people are switching to Signal, which is the app I would preferably use. Still though, people are going to be using different messagers - not a particular surprise to those in hacker circles:) Also, everyone has faced the problem of 'I swear I sent this, but I can't find where'(furious scrolling). Another problem: most of these messengers are strongly bound to mobile phones, which have an inferior UI.

Enter: email.
Good old email. Crappy old email. Everyone has email. Even your gran has email and she probably even knows how to use it. It's old and creaky but it works. It's from a time where protocols were not made by corporations, so it's not proprietary. It's also (still, despite Google and Microsoft's efforts) decentralised. That means as a techy person you can have control. And your non-techy, 70 year old astronomy buddy can write an email from his 25 year old ISP e-mail that he will use until he dies. I think that's great. Another great thing about e-mail is that you can have a longer-form conversation. This is great. Writing long messages on your phone sucks, it's hard to read back, and forget about finding something after 3 months - might as well be gone (but it's not, because discord is training their AI on it, I guess)

Now email is not without its problems. As mentioned, it's old. From a time when security was non existent, and we've hacked all kinds of stuff on top of it to make it a bit more safe, more spam proof, et cetera. But still, it's almost impossible to have properly working private communications via email. So maybe don't use it for your possibly illegal or soon to be illegal activist group (see: palestine action in the UK). Also, google and microsoft are still working to get rid of email by constantly adding their own extensions on top of it. And there's the spam problem. It's the best (and only) we've got though and I don't think there's the incentive for companies to get people on board with something new, so let's work with what we have.

So - give e-mail a go. Set up a mailing list for your favourite club and try to get people on board. I don't know how that works yet so i'll figure it out and maybe write another post for it. If you have tips, let me know:)

2-sep-2025 - blog exists now | elections | job things | astro joy
I didn't think I'd add a blog page, but I suppose I can (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like daniel stenbergs), updated whenever I feel like it and wont ever be long I think but it exists now so who knows what will happen.

elections
Recently ive been thinking about elections because elections have been coming up here in NL. In the past few years I've been getting more interested in politics, and thinking about how to have an impact on this world and to help shape this country the way i want it to be. don't think that's ever really easy but you do what you can. This year i decided to volunteer for the elections as a poll station worker. I haven't heard anything of it yet after I told them, hey i want to help, but I guess i'll hear of it soon enough.

A few decades ago NL used to vote with a voting machine (actually one of my early memories is going out with dad to vote with one of those machines!), but since 2008 it's a completely manual process again - voting and counting at least. The voting machines used back in the day were proven pretty trivial to hack. There was an action group "Wij Vertrouwen Stemcomputers Niet" (We Do Not Trust Voting Computers) that started a case against the dutch state and I guess they won. Sadly the website is now down, but there are voices every now and again that call for the reintroduction of voting computers, usually with the arguments that it's easier, cheaper, faster, you name it.

I think that's moot. Voting computers are so hard to secure, and even more important: it's easy to cast doubt on them because no one really understands how they work. No amount of verification you tack onto it will remediate that. So anyway, I bought a domain: wijvertrouwenstemcomputersnogsteedsniet.nl (We Still Don't Trust Voting Computers). I intended to put a bunch of serious professional looking writeups on there but I think it's not a good idea - just gonna be a landing page and a bunch of links to relevant blogs, as well as a sticker shipping initiative. Watch that spot...

job things
we have been looking for a new opportunity at work for me, in a more Network management/ "Blue team" role, because I've been getting a bit burnt out on my security testing role, but the search has been really, really slow. Initially when I told my boss last year or early this year (Jan/feb) that I was due for a change of pace he was like, "We'll definitely have you on a new assignment in June or so". But it's already September and I still haven't as much as talked with any new clients yet. Outside work I applied twice so far, got rejected twice - once because they wanted to sign a different guy who ended up passing on that job too... Well I really hope we can find something but it might end up being me who has to leave. I don't really want to though, because I'm financially kind of tied up here with a lease car and some study loans. >.>"

astro joy
Last summer I had a lot of nice astronomy experiences. In Austria I was able to see a lot of new objects (see also my astro page and then at WHY2025 I brought my telescope and basically had to swat the people off me, so many came to see it. Sharing the joy of stargazing was really worth the effort though.
I am also active in my local astronomy club. It's a bit of an odd group of people but generally with the heart in the right place. I started making some stargazing tip guides (in dutch for now) that I'll upload to a different page here in the future.

Seeya next time:)