💭 Podcasts + Veilid

2023.09.11

🎧 Podcasts

Over this last week I finished two podcasts:

The Polybius Conspiracy

I was surprised that I had never heard of the game Polybius, until recently. It has all the things that I tend to navigate toward: an urban legend, 80s video games, and being from the PNW (Portland, OR). I found the ending a little disappointing, but I would still recommend this podcast.

Apparently the originally planned to do a documentary via Kickstarter, but it was not fully funded, so they pivoted to this podcast. It's a mix of investigation into the myth, and a fictional storyline attached to the research. I would have enjoyed an actual documentary, but this was still really informative as far as what people believe about this myth.

Blackwood

This one is only 6 episodes, and I finished it in a single day. I liked the story and the characters. It's about a group of teenagers looking in to the myth of the Bugman, and they find there is a lot more to this than a simple myth. It ends not necessarily on a cliffhanger, but on a promise for a second season to get more answers. I would have loved a second season, but it seems the company went under and that will not be happening.

I think if you go in knowing that a second season won't happen, it'll be less dissapointing at the end, but I still think this was a good story and would recommend it.

💻 Veilid

Since they were teasing it before Defcon, I've been curious about Veilid, a new framework from Cult of the Dead Cow. The idea behind it is that you can use this framework to build applications, and it encrypts and anonymizes the users data, along with distributing it via P2P so there is no central server that the data lives on. The point of this is to build a better internet where surveilence capitalism can't get it's hands on our data anymore.

I haven't watched it yet, but their talk is up on the Defcon youtube channel:
DEF CON 31 - The Internals of Veilid, a New Decentralized Application Framework - DilDog, Medus4

I started listening to the 2600 Off the Hook episode where they interview the creators, and that's been really good. It got me thinking about if I wanted to create something, and what I would make.

My idea that I may try to tackle sometime is a Knowledge Mangement System with comperable features to Obsidian. One of the issues with Obsidian is that you either need to pay them for sync services, or use a 3rd party file syncing system (Syncthing, Dropbox, etc). If a similar app was built using Veilid, you would no need to use any of this to sync, as it works without a central server. You can just set up a connection of your own data between devices and it would sync from within the app. It would also ensure that your data is encrypted, so nobody would be able to access it other than yourself on your own devices.

This would be a big undertaking for me, because I would need to learn how to make mobile/desktop apps (maybe using Flutter), and how to integrate Veilid properly. Still, I think this is something I would use, and I be other people would have the need for something like this as well.

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