What is Charles

A man-in-the-middle proxy that can be used to intercept network traffics between 2 devices.

I was worried about the rolling contract price hike by Virgin Media, so I went and checked “How to cancel your Virgin Media contract” prior, only to realise that I need to give a 30 days notice. So today is a good day, so I phoned them up.

My current contract is for VM’s M100 package (↓100mbps/↑10mbps) priced at £24.99/month for 18 months. If I don’t do anything, it will be automatically renewed by a rolling contract that costs £44/month, an increase of 76%. One of their competitor offers a similar package with speed ↓150mbps/↑22mbps priced at £32/month for 24 months, plus a £50 gift card - ≈ £29.92/month for 24 months after doing the maths - roughly about ↑20% increase compared to my current plan, or a whoop ↓32% decrease compared to the upcoming rolling contract.

Did not import old comments to the database yet. Comments imported for the Chinese version. English version did not enable comments in the first place…

Neither does the latest comments feature.

Currently comments are modded using direct access to db (via SSH).

Happy new year!

Didn’t do much throughout the year of 2021, been especially chill between Christmas and now.

The good part

• Met a few friends in game
• Reverse Engineering wise…
  • Learnt some basics about Android RE, though still not fully understand how to write one in my own;
  • Skill level did not increase much, might be due to lack of time to practice;
  • JS Obfuscation/Deobfuscation - It seems that deobfuscation now requires AST + rule matching now.
• Remaking the wheel, mainly as a lightweight alternative of an existing product, but with only the features I need.
• Wrote quite a lot of code in my own time, but to me, this feels empty.
  • Maybe that’s “open source”.
• Switched blog system again, now using static site generator (SSG).
  • But without commenting (Are there anyone commenting here?)
• Developing wise…
  • Ansible is so useful, though slow, still faster than me doing it manually.
  • VSCode still feels lag/restricted when compared to JetBrains’ IDE. I blame Electron.
  • Did some DIY soldering with the Key Dispenser project, though the soldering is horrible…
  • Moved a lot [Docker][docker containers] to GitHub’s ghcr.io Container Registry.

The bad part

• A lot of unfinished projects
  • New project as my focus & interest changes.
• Didn’t balance time well
  • Work/Play with Friends/My own time
• Still don’t like driving that much, though more comfortable
• Didn’t get in to relationship 😢, but I’ve meet some really cute friends 😄
• k8s - from the fundamental to abandon.
• Studying languages with a mobile APP, though not doing much…
• Too lazy to bother with making things, better to sleep the whole day…

Plans

• Get involved with local volunteer works
  • To meet some locals
• Reduce unnecessary spend
  • Impulse purchases are insane…
• Learn something new
  • Still would like to learn more about k8s, but it seems too expensive / tedious to use k8s for personal projects…
    • Though I did managed to find a PPT about self learning containers and k8s with over 2,000 slides, by Container Training.

Leisure

Watched some movies / drama and played games with friends. For titles, checkout the Chinese version of this page.