A Year of Blogging (2024)

As 2018 ended - I had successfully blogged every week for the entire year as a new years resolution. Of course now 2024 has ended, but my 2018 resolution has not - welcome to my favorite posts from 2024.

As the year started I knew I wanted to take a better focus on the Cicada 3301 puzzle. What I noticed is commonly all folks re-use the same bit of information from a public wiki - down to the exact watermarked snippets/images. I wanted to re-solve every single public solve thus far, but my own way with my own scripts and discoveries. Sure I knew the passwords from the beginning, but I forced myself to discover said passwords in a way that resembled how the original researchers solved a puzzle.

Of course in this journey I ended up publishing unredacted solves that ended their way back into the wiki since I was solving things from scratch. This ended up being followed every few months by Part 3 and Part 4.

I had to blog about something that upset me - which was this new crypto service that led hundreds of people to open spam pull requests on many open source projects on GitHub. It just continued to leave a sour taste in my mouth on crypto again.

One day I noticed the Insignia project launched support for Halo 2 - which was a replacement for the original Xbox Live. Jumping back into the game that defined my work/life was such a fun nostalgic trip to the past, so I had to blog about it.

Like clockwork at this point (or via a request from a Twitter user) I realized I hadn't done my yearly blog about Pi-hole. This had become quite a standardized blog at this point where I recap versions, review block-lists and provide insight on the top blocked/allowed domains. Knowing I made changes with that setup after this post - the 7 years later post will have some details.

What I didn't expect was to spot the most insanely detailed and professional attempt at a global backdoor. This ended up discovering a small little army of puppet accounts orchestrating a multi-year long plan that failed when a little performance hit was discovered in SSH. This discovery went pretty global in the world with folks everywhere bringing their own opinion into this backdoor.

After learning a bit about Superfund sites last year I was curious how the EPA determined which materials were harmful for the environment. This led to me learning about how the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) was created and how it trusted companies to relay chemicals they knew were toxic to our world. Of course as predicted companies did not truthfully reflect what chemicals were harmful leading to a never ending battle of the EPA requiring research to disprove a chemical and thus regulate it.

Another post that has developed a pattern to occur yearly was the Tour de France this time covering the 2024 edition for men and women. This was a great race with Tadej the favorite winning the yellow and a major shakeup for the green jersey going to Biniam Girmay of Eritrea. Of course I can't forget mentioning Mark Cavendish retiring after winning his 35th stage and setting a world record.

Of course I couldn't avoid blogging about the hurricane season we had here in Tampa with hurricanes nearly back to back that caused immense destruction. While Hurricane Helene did a number on the coastal homes - Milton flooded so much inland due to the failure of our diesel pumps on basin neighborhoods. As shown above I woke after the hurricane to a flooded neighborhood which led to day after day watching it slowly recede as pumps were added.

With the excitement of playing Halo 2 again on Insignia it sure was a large contributing factor to bringing an old school Halo 2 LAN tournament back. Towards the end of the year I got to watch online a major nostalgic throwback to people playing Halo 2 competitively. This was incredibly fun to watch so I donated some money to the prize pool and blogged about it.

Finally I ended the year with a mini obsession with the Baltic Sea as large ships were caught intentionally breaking undersea cables whether it was power, gas or internet. This has only accelerated since this post with recent breaks with a newer EAGLE S ship. This joins the ships YI PENG 3 & NEW NEW POLAR BEAR who have been caught destroying cables. I just got so obsessed following the daily developments in the sea that every morning I like checking what new ship is under suspicion.

This year the blog post release date did not fall on December 31 so this time we will have a few days before 2025 hits by the time this post is released. Thanks for reading and onward to 2025.