30 Day Yoga Journey; Day Six; Center

Hey Friend! Blogging from my mat again. It’s day 6.

This is not my first Yoga Journey. Every time the 6th day is a core practice. You bring all your energy and power to the center of your temple – your body.

I am in a lot of pain right now, that’s all I can say. It was tough.

Anyways, I am going to have another Yoga session today. Looking forward to the evening as well. Will tell you about my day more in the next blog.

Have a great Monday and an amazing start of the week!

See you in a few hours 🙂

30 Day Yoga Journey; Day five; Represent

Hey friend!

It’s the day 5, high five. I’m blogging from my mat again.

I assumed my weekend would be kind of calm and free, but it was much crazier than a usual day. Apparently I had planned too much stuff for 48 hours. So I skipped a day of yoga. But I came back. Planning to do two Yoga sessions tomorrow to be back on track.

I’m in the emotional hell right now. Every second is a struggle not to cry. My thoughts are a mess, I’m a mess. And these long four second inhales and six second exhales helped me to calm my mind for a few minutes at least.

My intention of starting this journey was only to find time for myself and concentrate on myself a bit. When I skipped a day and preferred to care about other stuff instead of doing yoga, I felt like I’m not following my intention. OK, forgiving myself. 🙂

See you in a few hours. I’m off to bed.

Take care.

30 Day Yoga Journey; day four; Movement

hey my friend! Blogging from my mat. Today we move.

For those who have a 9 to 5 job, moving is not a usual thing. My work starts at 2 PM and ends at 11PM. So I’m sited literally the whole day. This is one of the reasons, that after complaining about my neck and back pain I decided to do yoga every day. It’s only 4 days after the great pause of doing yoga and I feel the difference.

I used to be a walking person. I walked to work, I walked during my break, I walked after work. I knew every little corner of the streets of Yerevan due to my long walks in Yerevan. Now I kind of miss those days. I work from home. I work from my kitchen. I walk from my bed to my kitchen and back. Yoga was needed.

Moving is essential, at least not to have those back pains. In today’s Yoga I paid attention how my body moves when I breathe. Yep, exaggerated that part a bit, loooong deeep breaths, but I saw the wave of my body. It was cool.

Have a great day! See you tomorrow.

30 day Yoga Journey; day three; How

hey friend! Blogging from my mat again. Today we pay attention to how.

How you move, how you speak, how you think, how you start the day, how you ask or tell something. Every time you pay attention to how you do something, the improvement is there already.

How do you start the day; with the phone in your hands or a glass of hot water? Do you read the new right away or you read a page from that book you wanted to read the whole year?

How do you start your work; do you complain about everything or just get energized telling yourself that it’s a good day?

How do you think about yourself; are you proud of yourself? You should be proud of yourself.

Pay attention to those “how”s. (:

See you tomorrow.

30 Day Yoga Journey; Day Two; Notice

Hello friend,

Blogging from my mat again. Today we notice.

While doing the yoga, though it’s not always recommended I tried to notice what is happening around me. My boyfriend was setting up the coffee machine, my “robot” vacuum cleaner was cleaning my bedroom. Our heating system was broken in the morning, now it works again, and its noice made me happy. Well, yeah, I hate cold.

I got a gift from my friend, it’s a thing (have no idea how to call it), either an air purifier or something like that, I can add some water in it and the steam goes out like a flame, and if I add some scent, my house will smell like a heaven. Gonna try that after blogging.

So yeah, noticing small things in the world. Noticing what people do or say, or don’t do and don’t talk about. Noticing the smiles and the colors. Noticing the light and the warmth.

That’s today’s theme.

I think my coffee is ready. Gotta run.

Stay happy and healthy and notice every good detail in the world.

Starting my 30 day Yoga Journey, day One, Set

Hey friend! Blogging from my mat 🙂

New Year resolutions shouldn’t be forgotten on the 1st of January! They should be done, we should be committed. And don’t think of something as Crazy as Ross did with the leather pants, and nothing as impossible as Chandler not making jokes on his friends.

I decided to start from January with a Yoga Journey with Adriane.

Day one; Set. So I set up my mind to concentrate only on myself, be a bit selfish and be kind to myself. If you can’t say “I” you will never be able to say “I love you” or “I trust you”. So my kindness to the world is going to start from myself and from my yoga mat.

It’s easy to forget about commitments. It’s not easy to open your mat every morning, especially when you are broken, anxious, especially when you find it hard to get up. I know what I’ve committed and I am going to do it, stick with it.

We’ve moved to a new house. It was kinda symbolic to start the new year in a new house. We’re trying to make it home with my boyfriend’s legos and my books. It starts to look homie.

Have a great day! Stick to the list, the bucket list of your life, start from now.

Solving Bandit 11 → 14 levels

Hey,

I’ve decided to solve all the bandit levels until the end of the year and to blog about it. It feels like that I have a lot of time but I’m also a bit worried, because I’m pretty sure that the further I go the harder it becomes and the more time I’ll need for a problem. Let’s give it a start.

Bandit Level 10 → 11

It says that our password is base64 encoded. The attached article of Wiki helped me to understand remotely what base64 stands for and the man page helped me to find out, that we need -d to decode. So I just did:

cat data.txt | base64 -d

Mission accomplished. There is the password for the next level.

Bandit Level 11 → 12

I guess we’re learning some encoding-decoding methods in this phase. This time all lowercase (a-z) and uppercase (A-Z) letters have been rotated by 13 positions. The attached article is talking about Rot13. This is fun (I remembered how we used to “decode” our letters at school adding “b” or “g” to every syllable). I found this rot13 decoder online and I’m gonna use it now. And there is the decoded text with the password of the next level. Yey!

Bandit Level 12 → 13

At the first sight this one seems to be a harder one. What is hex dump? The article says that in a hex dump, each byte is represented as a two-digit hexadecimal number. And what is the difference between hexadecimal and decimal numeral systems? Unlike the standard system representing numbers using 10 symbols, hexadecimal uses 16 distinct symbols, most often the symbols “0”–”9″ to represent values 0 to 9, and “A”–”F” (or alternatively “a”–”f”) to represent values from 10 to 15. Oh, that’s why it’s also called base-16. OK, got it. The article also says that one of the common names for this program function is xxd. Let’s read the man page.

xxd - make a hexdump or do the reverse.

That’s exactly what we want to do here. The hardest part is that the file has been compressed repeatedly. The key word is repeatedly. I really thought twice or thrice but the reality was way different. On the man page of xxd I found this:

-r | -revert
    Reverse  operation:  convert (or patch) hexdump into binary.

I decided to follow the advice and made a new directory in /tmp:

mkdir /tmp/coffee123

Now let’s try to move the decoded file to a new file named “data”. `Now let’s try to move the decoded file to a new file named “data”.

xxd -r data.txt /tmp/coffee123/data

`The rest of decoding is being done in our new temporary directory. We check the type of the file just made:

$ file data

The new file turns out to be a gzip compressed. We have to rename it:

$ mv data data.gz

and now we can decompress it:

$ gzip -d data.gz

After checking the type of the file, we see it’s bzip2 compressed. Now it feels like this has no end. So I found out a much easier way to decompress the file with line. Check this out:

cat data.txt  | xxd -r - | zcat - | bzcat - | zcat - | tar -x -f - -O | tar -x -f - -O | bzcat - | tar -x -f - -O | zcat -

And there is the password for the next level. I’m going to explain this line in details on my next blog, so stay tuned.

Bandit Level 13 → 14

Wow! Nice! For this level we have an SSH key. First of let’s go through the material and if needed, watch some videos to understand the concept thoroughly. What I learnt from all of these reading, I just need to use -i for using the private key to connect. So I just type:

$ ssh bandit14@localhost -p 2220 -i sshkey.private

No password, not even needed, because I’m already on the next level. Anyway, we can find the password in /etc/bandit_pass.

I thought it’s supposed to be easier…

and we keep scrolling

hey,

aliyev has started a new war in Artsakh, killing peaceful citizens, ruining cities, taking captive those who has not managed to run away. And I want to ask why?

I’m 28 years old and I have seen three wars already. And I want to ask why?

Antranig was trying to explain me that yes, sure, war sucks, he has seen more wars in his life and has lost more people than I have. And I want to ask why?

So I opened my laptop today and this is what I saw.

And I want to ask “why”?

And then I just scroll the feed, swallow news, swallow reality, swallow tears, and the only thing that I want to understand is “why?”.

There is nothing much to do right now, all my friends keep asking: what can we do, should we protest, should we fight, should we go and scream at their faces for not doing anything and I ask them “why?”.

After I told one of my friends that I am unable to work today because of the war he was like: “its hard to believe how many wars are there in the world, given the fact that most people don’t want war. I will never understand that…” Yep, me neither, so I am asking “why”?

I am talking to one of my colleagues living in India, I’m showing him what’s happening here, how we lost a whole country in less than 24 hours and he tells me about his country, how the same political sh*t is happening there and how he wants to leave the country to live in peace. And I am asking “why?”

I hear people screaming outside of my house, inviting everyone to join and protest. I don’t think they have a better alternative so I am just looking at them thinking “why?”.

The kids go to school, not even being properly dressed or fed because of the blockade. They want to study, they want to be a better citizens for the future of their country, they want to be the change they want to see. And they hear bombing in the middle of the lesson, can’t even go back to their parents. Why?

I am not saying Armenians are special, I’m not saying this is happening only with us. We are just one of those who are not protected. Who don’t have enough oil or gold or gas to close some eyes, and deafen some ears. We are not preferable. We do not deserve. Why?

The war sucks, the world sucks, my news feed sucks, all governments suck, and politics sucks.

And I am not leaving. I am staying. And do you know why? Just because that’s what you want for us. Staying in spite of you.

I thought it’s supposed to be easier…

AI – a new way to hack the reality

Hey!

I haven’t been writing for a very long time (hanging my head in shame). Today I am going to talk about a very new but a very exciting topic.

In recent years, the field of artificial intelligence (AI) has made incredible strides, revolutionizing many aspects of our lives. One area where AI is increasingly being used is in the creation of digital art, including photos. Using sophisticated algorithms and machine learning techniques, AI can generate new images, enhance existing ones, and even manipulate photos in ways that were once impossible. As someone who is interested in both AI and photography, I decided to explore this fascinating intersection and try my hand at creating photos with AI. In this blog, I will share my experiences, insights, and tips for anyone who wants to delve into the world of AI-generated photos.

I was literally amazed seeing what a great community is there already on … Twitter. Kris is a New York based AI educator, she has also a YouTube channel, where she shows some tips and tricks how to create photos using AI. I have researched on Twitter for an hour, and she seems to be the spirit of AI photography community.

I tried to create my perfect spot right now and got this:

Photo is created with BingAI

For the first time, I think this is not that bad, huh? At least my imagination could do yoga on the beach! 😀

I also tried to use the same prompt for three different AI tools: Bing AI, Midjourney and NightCafe. The game is following: find 5 similarities:

Created with NightCafe

Prompt: Christmass mood, six little pinky and golden glass jars with ribbons visible unique numbers, from 1 to 24 near the window, Christmass tree, flowers

Created with Bing AI:
Prompt: Christmass mood, six little pinky and golden glass jars with ribbons visible unique numbers, from 1 to 24 near the window, Christmass tree, flowers

Created with Midjourney
Prompt: hristmass mood, six little pinky and golden glass jars with ribbons visible unique numbers, from 1 to 24 near the window, Christmass tree, flowers

It is really tricky to teach the AI to use different numbers, right now I am working on calendars, and have no idea how to make the AI to use unique numbers. And the most fun part is when you /imagine a Christmass mood, and Midjourney returns you this creepy old room.

Anyways, this is only a little quick start. I am gonna explore this world and hope to create the realities I really want to live in both online and offline!

I thought it’s supposed to be easier…

about motivation and how to find it

Hey,

Well, today we had a little discussion on mastodon about getting motivated for work. I had no idea what motivates me until I was asked and eventually had to think about it 😀 And the things that came to my mind were:

1. “understanding what you are doing and why you are doing especially that”. Sometimes we get lost under the pile of tasks and can’t help getting disappointed. It takes a second to remember the reason why we chose that profession. OK, I’m fighting against scammers, I’m helping the people who might be victims one day, who might lose money or worse; private information. 

2. “discussing cases with colleagues”. 
Working from home has thousands of advantages. I feel much more comfy and I work much more efficiently when I’m alone in the room. But knowing that there are people who can help me or I can be helpful, we can just discuss this or that case, reminds me that I’m not alone and that’s relevant for me. 

3. “listening to podcasts/watching videos of the people having the same profession”. This not only motivates you but educates you as well. You can learn about new tools, new methods, listen to their stories and feel yourself as a part of the community. And it’s awesome.