Perhaps ironically, I live in a nominally Communist country that went through decolonization quite a number of times. It doesn’t change much in my daily life (I’m not really political), although I arguably own some tiny slice of the means of production these days. So maybe in retirement I’ll provide public access to those for working class people. That would be really fun, I think. Who knows what we might create together? Certainly if the machines are sitting unused in my retirement, they are creating nothing, and I would feel sad for the machines.

I don’t do the whole 9-5 thing. That would stress me out! I work as long as I feel like, any day of the week I feel like. Generally, this is really nice for both managing stress (there’s always tomorrow!) and steamrolling over any competition.

I’m just a mercenary (and a bureaucrat) though. You pay my fee in filthy lucre, and the job gets done – legally, and reliably. If someone annoys me with politics at a client, I just try and replace them with a computer program. The result is that several of my best coworkers are machines these days. I foresee that trend increasing with time.

Yeah… I couldn’t cope with that unfortunately (I’m a bit jealous, it sounds nice). I need to work long hours and make things, it’s a compulsion. “Taking it easy” can stress me out to the point where I end up in a hospital.

So I sold all my worldly possessions and immigrated to the developing world on an investment visa (where things are made). My timing was a few years early, but I had no path to a decent life left except having my own company in a growth economy – my entire industry vanished twice overnight in my home country due to changes in legislation.

Nowadays, looking at the local economy, there is no path to home ownership except for people who own companies, and maybe senior executives or senior software engineers. An average university-educated couple would have to save 100% of their income for their entire adult life to afford a nice home – if they don’t have kids. I think this kind of cruel equation is slowly coming to the West too – although you guys have more land so I guess it takes longer.

One of the sad aspects of my job (in IT) is building tools to eliminate less stressful jobs, especially ones that pay well (usually management or accounting, in my case). Design has definitely been a specific target in recent years though – off the top of my head I could at least imagine two approaches to writing a tool that automates color and font selection with results comparable to human expertise.

This is one reason it’s a good idea to regularly study new things (IT or otherwise). I have to retool every few years as whatever I know becomes obsolete – this used to mainly be a frustration in IT, but is rapidly becoming a necessary process in other fields. It won’t be necessary to become an IT expert, but I would keep up-to-date on how to use the new tools technology provides… especially if I wanted to keep a job in say, graphics design or copywriting!

(Incidentally, my first job in this country was in marketing! It was high-stress and I did not earn 130k. I recall font and color choice processes vividly :D)

Haha, you got me there. So I guess you could more correctly say ‘a font with serif for titles only’.

Plain old static HTML is fine, and you can host it on a potato! Here are some design tips to keep it easy to read. None of them are objectively correct, and you are already doing some of them. They are just some suggestions as you move forward:

1. Don’t use dark-on-dark fonts. Use near-black on off-white or at least something high contrast.
2. Break up content using horizontal rules <hr> and various headers <h1 to h6> You can style both of them in css. This keeps things easy to find and read.
3. Generally, do not center-align text if it is more than one line. If you need to display blocks of text side-by-side, put each in a container then left-align the text within those containers.
4. Use a bigger font than you think is strictly necessary.
5. My preference is to use sans-serif fonts. Google makes some good free ones. Sometimes I’ll go back and make titles serif only.
6. Resize and compress your images. A bit higher resolution than you need but with lower quality is usually better than the reverse (for jpegs)

Yeah just jpeg. Always comes out perfectly legible.

Oh, it’s common in my country to use a smartphone to ‘scan’ documents by actually just taking a lousy photo of them. It’s so prevalent that when you tell someone to do a scan they usually do this instead.

I bought a cheap canon scanner for 50$ and it’s pretty perfect for legal documents. A little slow maybe. I use SANE, then do lossy compression too.

In rare situations I’d then post process the PDF to even worse quality using ghostscript, for example when a foreign visa application form requires a scan of a really long document, but doesn’t accept sizes over 2MB.

I use JPEGs in a PDF. They can be mediocre quality. Using an OK scanner makes a big difference. It’s good enough!

I’m required by law to keep physical paper copies for 35 years. So my parallel solution is a cursed filing cabinet, and several crates that describe the content of the filing cabinet. Its ugly, but saves me tons on data archiving, I guess?

Overall, I use “strange WiFi things” techniques for two useful things : audit security cameras, and foxhunting.

I use it to test wireless security cameras on my home network – to see if I can deauth them and/or force them to reconnect to spoofed access points. If it’s easy, then either the router or the cameras are being useless, and I upgrade/replace. Obviously WiFi security cameras can’t be made super secure, but if I know how good they are, I can conclude when they are ‘good enough’.

I only buy routers that support secure management frames, but I want to make sure that it actually works as it should. I test client networks too, with permission, and then plug security holes.

I also specifically disable secure management frames and deauth my cameras to see how they respond. If the system just ‘freezes’ without any warning being raised (and then resumes on reconnect), that is also a fail. Connection dropping must raise some form of alert.

Then for foxhunting, I build multiple antennas and listen to traffic. Then I use the RSSI to perform multilateralization on the signal to get a vector on their position. You can get 3-5m accuracy with some work. This is a neat but complicated way to build an indoor positioning system to track employees, corporate assets, and employees that you treat like corporate assets.

Also you can sometimes hack together WiFi ToF measurements but this is tricky and not widely supported.

voltage.vn

Closed registration while I fix some stuff, which might be a while. So I’ve only got 2 human users or so.

Last I checked mine is the only instance in Vietnam, but that might not be true anymore.