about | RSS Playground | Technical Projects and How Tos
Welcome to IGAZINE
Of all the websites in all the world you stumbled upon mine.
— Eric McWilliams 2025/05/08 18:48
I'm not sure what brought you here, be it random or some search engine, but welcome. I just wanted a place to put down random things in my head, day-to-day cool things I find, and anything I'd like to share with others.
The Blogs Starts here
This is just me thinking out loud.
Fedi-love, my love of Mastodon and the people of the Fediverse
DRAFT… THIS POST IS A WORK IN PROGRESS DRAFT
You ever type the title of a post and then think it should be something else like “Fediverse and the people I don't know but love” or “Mastodon made me like the internet again”? Really the list could go on-and-on for how much I appreciate the Fediverse, the ActivityPub, and the shear ability tech nerds to host 1000s of nodes around the world to build a social network not controlled by the major tech companies. At this point I am sure you can find a million blog articles both pro and cons on the network. People complaining that it is not Twitter or other micro-blogging platforms. Personally I like that it turns some people off and its not a platform I will find my 80 year old mother posting stories forwarded to her from some political party or friend from church about human trafficking on the I40 being the worst in the country.
Don't get me wrong there are plenty of people expressing political opinions but you can really pick and chose which of those people you want to hear from. I think everyone has an opinion these days and on the commercial platforms you are nailed with a wall of text and image trash that may have been algorithmically generated with the soul purpose to keep you doom scrolling the platform just sending you ad after ad.
I believe that is one of the main problems with people that try Mastodon or other Fediverse clients and end up going back to Twitter, Facebook, or IG. Those people are so used to the ads mixed in with click bait content they don't know what its like to seek the information you want and participate in a group or community free of that. Those little dopamine factories in their brains are hooked on the easy scroll and just accepting the content shoved on them.
Getting back to it
I have owned igazine.com for a long, long time. I bought it back in the days when every great idea started with “whats the domain name?” the iPod was just coming out I had been using a Compaq (HP) iPaq Windows 
based phone. Apple came into the world with the iPod and kind of took over all things with the “i” branding. I have always been a bit of a magazine junkie. These days there aren't as many Linux/OpenSource magazines but I still frequent the bookstores to pick up mags whenever I get a chance. I know I could get a better price on them and could have them delivered directly to my house. But there is something great about walking in picking up your magazine off of the news stand, thumbing through it, and heading home with your new quick read.
I have been dealing with gaming too much and not feeling like I am productive. I watched this YouTube Video and the 90 challenge of crating and not consuming. I felt like going down a rabbit whole of starting up a game today and I started writing this instead. Hopefully when I get through this I am not grinding away 4-8 hours at a time on games in a day.
The game of Monopoly vs The game of Life
If you think about it at the world scale do you think its possible we are playing things out like a game of monopoly? you keep playing this game going around the board over and over again and eventually someone has so much they win it all…
Another night in Franklin
I am in Franklin, TN this week and its nice, some times too nice, finding a good Mexican food place in Tennessee is one of the hardest quest you can put in front of a traveler. Besides jumping up in the middle of the night due to alerts from my EDR product alerting on a powershell false positive I feel like this trip has some potential to set some new direction for things at work. We have decided to move off of VMWare to Proxmox and improve our storage engineering by using ZFS. If I can get things started this will be a pretty interesting year or two ahead of me.
I may be putting my developer hat back on and hopefully putting some of this cybersecurity stuff behind me. I would love to build my own ERP system for a company but that is going to take a ton of debate and the breaking down of silos inside our company. If it doesn't happen I will just stick my head back in the cybersecurity space, enforce policy, and slap peoples hands while working my way to Bali.
Anonymous on American
I tired watching a documentary about Anonymous on my flight. I knew anything that was touching on Anonymous was going to touch on 4chan. I wasn't aware how much 4chan but even a little bit of /b content is way too much to have on a tablet screen in the middle of a commercial flight. I ended up pausing it and will pick back up when I get to the hotel tonight. I am not really sure if there is much they can put in an Anonymous documentary I don't already know but it was a pretty amazing time in the internet and I was glad to be whiteness to it all.