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.

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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.

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First time driving and adding petrol on my own. That went well until I stall my car when I arrive home.

Took about half hour in total. I parked the opposite to the pump and thought it would be long enough, that was bad.

Was a bit nervous. Should improve after a few times driving on my own.

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