I’m Pepe Vila, although on the internets other conscious entities might know me as “cgvwzq” (or btoa('pepe').toLowerCase().slice(0,-2), yup, that’s why).

It is interesting how our brains end up assigning meaning to any random sequence of characters, no matter how alien and unpronounceable it seems at the begining. In fact natural language is just that, a bunch of random sequences of chars (and sounds) that we agree on and that have evolved (and continues doing so) to contain high levels of redundancy. Anyway, that was a bit of a digression, but since we are here let me clarify that I employ the above fact to justify all my language’s misuses. I will improvise my own conventions: make mistakes, invent words, and use them however I like. I’m sure they will contain enough context and redundancy to be understood by any civilized person that is not so self-pity as to feel offended by them. Language is just a tool, and bindings of words and meaning are just the accidental result of evolution, there’s no point in fighting these forces. If you ban a word, the associated meaning will just reemerge in another shape. If you want to wipe an idea, good luck. Let words and languages die and born freely. Enjoy their aesthetic and dislike their bitterness. Stop trying to impose orwellian changes.

Ok, that surely was another detour… Let me focus.

My interests are broad and my attention span narrow. The future of this blog is certainly uncertain, but my intention is to capture here whatever I feel worth sharing: technical or not technical, about computers, security, space, or whatever, things that I know about and things I do not.

More concretely, these words are typed from my brand new Macbook Air, with an Arm M1 processor :). So it is likely that I end up collecting some notes about it in here. Likewise, my main laptop is a T480 running Gentoo, which frequently gives me problems, so you can expect some writeups about that as well. These days I rarely play CTFs, but from time to time I might include some interesting solutions. Most likely, I will end up dumping random thoughts, describing the latest thing I did, or commenting some book I read.

I also plan to automatically share new entries via Twitter, as I still have some audience there, but I intent to keep using it just as a broadcast channel. The best way to approach me is via email. I recently disconnected from Twitter, the only “social network” I used, and while sometimes I still feel sorrow and fear of missing too much, truth is that not that many super interesting things occur often. Surely some people do terrific things every now and then, but in most cases I will forget about it in a few weeks anyway. Missing “really big” events is more difficult even when you are out of that information dopamine wheel, and honestly, being a bit late is not that bad.

So, all that said, see you in the multiverse.

Pepe.