New blog, old terminal, no content calendar.
Hello, World! This is the start of a personal blog. The plan is straightforward — a place to publish my thoughts on technical matters, write-ups of research or vulnerabilities I find interesting, half-finished tools and scripts that deserve somewhere durable to live instead of rotting in a private repo, and the occasional opinion piece on a news item or paper that I could not reasonably fit into a LinkedIn post without smoothing all the interesting edges off. No content calendar, no posting schedule, no SEO strategy. If the work is good, eventually somebody who needs it will find it.
If you land on 0x42sec.io you will be dropped straight into a 1990s terminal emulator, fully functional, and you can navigate the site and read the blog from there if you share the same nostalgia and general tech geekiness. Fear not, dear reader, if you are a UI/UX person and want the usual modern web experience, just type exit and hit enter ;-)
The terminal is nostalgia, plainly, for the old retro times. I dislike most modern things — smartwatches, smart fridges, the entire category of devices that exist to tell me something I did not ask about — and I would happily go back to a world with fewer screens and more knobs. Slightly paraphrasing Donald Norman’s line from The Invisible Computer in 1998, I feel like an analog human being trapped in a digital world. The original is sharper: “We are analog beings trapped in a digital world, and the worst part is, we did it to ourselves.” Norman wrote it a quarter of a century ago about the trajectory of consumer computing, and I think it has only got truer since — every layer of abstraction we have added has made the systems more usable for most people and more opaque for the ones meant to understand them. The terminal is not a fix for any of that, it is just a small personal protest with a green tint.
On the technical side, the site is static content built on Astro, the terminal layer is custom and mostly vibe-coded, the whole thing is self-hosted out of a GitHub repo, and it is very much still a work in progress — so expect glitches, broken links, and the occasional CSS regression while I keep iterating on it.
If you came expecting polished content marketing you are in the wrong terminal. If the next thing you want to read is why most “cyber transformation” programmes are a Gartner quadrant laundered into a purchase order, and why the red team tacked on at the end is being paid to reenact a 2019 ransomware playbook because that is the only adversary the shiny new detections were ever tuned for, then we are probably going to get along.