Antranig Vartanian

January 14, 2026

I can’t sleep. Let me rephrase that — I am so tired, that I can’t even sleep. I have spent the last two weeks upgrading and reconfiguring the infrastructure at ABI, while at the rest of my time, trying to answer the question “what do I need to be independent on the internet?”. I still don’t have a complete answer, but something is moving towards that direction. I applied for an ASN, and did the payments, now just waiting for my paperwork to go through. Let’s see how it goes.

The last couple of months have been really interesting. I start seeing changes that I both like and hate at the same time. And well, what should I do if I can’t sleep? blog about these changes.

These are not good always good changes, like I’ve said, some of them I do indeed hate, but most of them should be fine.

Last year I got a Valve Steam Deck. Actually, I kind of “won” a Steam Deck? One of our projects was over-budget, and my friend joked with the vendor saying “can we get a PS5? we’re redoing the office”. The reply was as expected — “no, that’s categorized in the Gaming Console section, I can give you anything you want in the computer section”. So I asked, as a joke, again, “can I get a Steam Deck if you have any?”, and to my surprise, the vendor say “actually yes, and I think it’s categorized in the PC section”. It was. I got it. Totally love it.

This change is nice, if you have it under control. Gaming for 12 hours a day? Not a good thing to do, unless its Sunday, and you have no plans. But gaming every day for 12 hours? Well, some people, I’m sure, have the luxury of doing that, but not me. Even if I had the luxury, my brain would crave for a challenge, on a Unix system — a bug to be fixed, a setup to be complete, a research to be read.

But I have to confess — going to bed every day, knowing that I will be using the Steam Deck to play a game, instead of scrolling on not-very-social-media, is one of the best changes in my life.

You’d think a computer like the Steam Deck — portable, tiny, with mid-size fans — would not be very powerful, but oh my how far have we become. I can play all of the games that I was never able to play on my top-of-the-line laptop from back in 2015, and I can even play some of the games I was able to play on my PlayStation 4 Pro from just less than 5 years ago.

I mean, sure, we’re a Unix household. The computers are a Mac, the TV is from Apple, the mobiles are iPhone, the routers are OpenBSD, the servers are FreeBSD, and I’m sure I have NetBSD and illumos somewhere, but seeing Linux do its thing as a gaming machine is absolutely fascinating.

Not only I can play my favorite MMORPG game — Star Wars: The Old Republic — in a pretty high quality, but I can even play Star Wars Battlefront II while I’m ~~on the toilet~~ in the taxi. And no, I don’t mean Battlefront 2 from 2005, I mean the one from 20… something.

You’d think that things are going well, but oh no, the bad changes can become terrible if you don’t get them under control, and I have not been able to get them under control for a while.

Not so long ago, I started using the GTD methodology as a way to organize my… life. It was all going very well, until it just didn’t I forgot to do my weekly reviews for weeks, and then I started forgetting to do my monthly reviews for months. I am still not sure what happened there, but I started feeling like I lost control of my life. Luckily, my brain started going into “auto-pilot” mode and just doing the actual daily things that I needed to do. Follow up with a customer, call a friend, boot up the game for 30 mins, reply to that SMS as soon as you got it. Nothing… major, nothing… new. Just an auto-pilot to keep things running.

Where does that get us to? Well, I stopped blogging, I stopped checking up with my projects, I stopped even to read books for a while. Actually, forget books, I even forgot to listen to the podcast that I care about. I forgot to upload pictures to my photo blogs, I stopped caring about my home servers.

It’s almost mid-night, and I haven’t had a proper sleep for the last week. Yes, I am proud of the new setup, yes, I will document everything I did (even tho I never do, and haven’t, for years now), but for now, all I need, is just a bit of sleep, a proper wake up, and a good morning coffee.

And if I can follow that with a morning, more of a happy blog post, then I can finally say “I’m back baby”.

Good night.

Antranig Vartanian

October 9, 2025

I started getting into retro computing again, but this time also for phones, so I’m blogging from a BlackBerry phone 🙂

Let’s see if it works!

Antranig Vartanian

September 21, 2025

There’s a lot of work that needs to be done on Jailer.

To start with, I have finally decided on the release model. The main development branch will be main, similar to FreeBSD, and then the releases will be tagged.

I’m not sure how I feel about branches, as I don’t want to have any kind of LTS versions, but I might need to understand if there’s anything missing in FreeBSD that I would need.

Another problem that I have right now is the fact that we don’t have a Port. I’m not happy with Jailer enough to make a Port for it, but maybe in the coming days.

Fix the Git stuff that I don’t care about but I should
Create a stable non-development version/tag
Create more lists like this, because, let’s be honest, no one can work without lists.

I do wonder if I can pull an all nighter and finish everything that I hope to finish. Lets see.

Antranig Vartanian

July 19, 2025

Sometimes all I need to do is

sudo tmutil listlocalsnapshots / \
  | grep TimeMachine \
  | cut -d . -f 4 \
  |  xargs -I% sudo tmutil deletelocalsnapshots %

And suddenly I have like 70GB of more storage on my Mac.

I wish macOS was less… black magic-y.

Antranig Vartanian

July 7, 2025

Sometimes, when I have a long running process on my computer, like scp, rsync or curl I need to know when it’s done, so I don’t check the terminal every minute. That’s when I realized that this is a perfect fit for Apple Script and pwait.

Basically, it looks something like this:

pwait `pgrep xargs` \
  && osascript -e \
    'display notification "Extraction Done" with title "large xargs"'

Now I can go back to work, and I don’t have to check if the job is done every minute. A notification will appear when it’s done.

For remote jobs, I have realized, that I can send a notification to myself, kind of like a self-hosted Pushover, using XMPP, I don’t want to go into the details, but that seems like to be a good solution as well. Maybe I should just use Pushover anyway.

Analyzing FreeBSD’s Package Mirror GeoDNS

One of the things that makes FreeBSD an amazing operating system is its package manager, pkg(8). Many people will keep arguing with me saying that apt or pacman is better, but pkg has some of the best features out there. Don’t even get me started on number of packages. A friend was telling me “but how can I use FreeBSD when you have 1/3rd number of packages that Debian has?”. Again, this is a lie. While Debian has 80K packages, each software is divided into -doc and -dev, while on FreeBSD a simple pkg install will install everything that a package needs.

But let’s not talk about how awesome FreeBSD’s pkg is, let’s talk about it’s issues.

Couple of years ago, I noticed that downloading from FreeBSD package mirror was veeeeeery slow. Turns out that based on GeoDNS Armenia was connecting to the South African package mirror pkg0.jinx.FreeBSD.org by default.

Lucky for me, there was a package to help you figure out which one is fastest for you, named fastest_pkg. I ran it and I learned that the Frankfurt package mirror was the fastest for me.

Initially, I changed the config in FreeBSD.conf as recommended by fastest_pkg, but I’m not a single server guy, I have dozens of hosts with hundreds of jails.

Solution? I asked the Cluster Admins to set Armenia’s GeoDNS to pkg0.fra.FreeBSD.org.

But servers come and go, and the Frankfurt server got decommissioned a while back. Luckily the project now has a server in… Sweden!

But my download speed is slow. Somehow Armenia defaulted back to South Africa.

Is this an issue for me, or is this an issue for everybody?

(Sidenote: turns out fastest_pkg has been broken for a while, ever since pkg moved to a new package format, so we also made a patch and submitted a PR)

During today’s FreeBSD “Ask the experts: AMA” we used RIPE Atlas to measure the speeds from all around the world, to all package mirror hosts.

All of the measurements can be found here.

So, here’s the goal

Measure from around the world to all of the package mirror hosts (done).
Measure from around the world to pkg.FreeBSD.org to get the default GeoDNS host for each area/country/network (in progress, recurring every 6 hours for the next 6 days)
Find mis-configurations between “fastest” and “default” (TODO).

While the big measurements is still running I tried to use my eyes to see if there’s anything GREEN (aka fast connection) in direct package mirror host measurements whilst being YELLOW/RED (aka bad connection) when connecting to pkg.FreeBSD.org.

Unsurprisingly, we found one! It was in Mombasa, Kenya.

Here’s what it looks like while connecting directly:

{
  "fw": 5080,
  "mver": "2.6.2",
  "lts": 25,
  "dst_name": "pkg0.jinx.freebsd.org",
  "ttr": 10639.830509,
  "af": 4,
  "dst_addr": "196.10.53.168",
  "src_addr": "160.119.216.205",
  "proto": "ICMP",
  "ttl": 59,
  "size": 1000,
  "result": [
    {
      "rtt": 47.434297
    },
    {
      "rtt": 47.39957
    },
    {
      "rtt": 47.412379
    },
    {
      "rtt": 47.369089
    },
    {
      "rtt": 47.851894
    }
  ],
  "dup": 0,
  "rcvd": 5,
  "sent": 5,
  "min": 47.369089,
  "max": 47.851894,
  "avg": 47.493445799999996,
  "msm_id": 110487154,
  "prb_id": 22215,
  "timestamp": 1750269643,
  "msm_name": "Ping",
  "from": "160.119.216.205",
  "type": "ping",
  "group_id": 110487154,
  "step": null,
  "stored_timestamp": 1750269644
}

And here it is via GeoDNS’s defaults:

{
  "fw": 5080,
  "mver": "2.6.2",
  "lts": 10,
  "dst_name": "pkg.freebsd.org",
  "ttr": 10465.87807,
  "af": 4,
  "dst_addr": "173.228.147.98",
  "src_addr": "160.119.216.205",
  "proto": "ICMP",
  "ttl": 52,
  "size": 1000,
  "result": [
    {
      "rtt": 240.19025
    },
    {
      "rtt": 244.967071
    },
    {
      "rtt": 236.466414
    },
    {
      "rtt": 238.189775
    },
    {
      "rtt": 233.570938
    }
  ],
  "dup": 0,
  "rcvd": 5,
  "sent": 5,
  "min": 233.570938,
  "max": 244.967071,
  "avg": 238.6768896,
  "msm_id": 110489920,
  "prb_id": 22215,
  "timestamp": 1750270943,
  "msm_name": "Ping",
  "from": "160.119.216.205",
  "type": "ping",
  "group_id": 110489920,
  "step": null,
  "stored_timestamp": 1750270944
}

Clearly, it’s set to pkg0.chi.freebsd.org (173.228.147.98) by default. That’s Chicago. That’s halfway around the world. It took it 238ms on average. While it took the same probe 47ms on average when connecting to pkg0.jinx.freebsd.org directly.

Clearly, I’m not the only one.

Hopefully after collecting data for 6 days, we can start analyzing and improving the GeoDNS setup that we have.

A good suggestion from crest was to have a pkg plugin that does the work of fastest_pkg on the fly. We’ll try that one day.

If anyone is interested in helping me out, feel free to contact me over email, IRC or Discord.

That’s all folks…

Migrating to FreeBSD -CURRENT with pkgbase using Boot Environments

Couple of months ago I got my sister a MacBook Air with the new M4 chip, and she was happier than ever. However, I was the happiest, as she gave me her old MacBook Pro 2015.

As always, I installed FreeBSD on it, it was FreeBSD 14.2-RELEASE at the time, installed the required drivers, attached a Thunderbolt 3 to Ethernet adapter to it (thank you to whoever made it work via the bge drivers) and… nothing. It’s been sitting on the floor for months now.

Last week I decided I’m going to do my FreeBSD work again. I have a todo list with 20+ action items in them.

But first thing first, I need a -CURRENT machine so I can do my development.

So, here’s a simple guid on how to migrate to FreeBSD -CURRENT using PkgBase.

First we need to setup the pkgbase repo, so pkg can use it. I will be using pkg.FreeBSD.am, which is my regional pkg cache, but other than that, everything is pretty standard.

root@mbp15srv0:~ # mkdir -p /usr/local/etc/pkg/repos
root@mbp15srv0:~ # cat - > /usr/local/etc/pkg/repos/FreeBSD-base.conf
FreeBSD-base {
    url = "pkg+https://pkg.freebsd.am/FreeBSD:15:amd64/base_latest/";
    mirror_type = "srv";
    signature_type = "fingerprints";
    fingerprints = "/usr/share/keys/pkg";
    enabled = yes;
}

Next up, we create and mount a Boot Environment, that way, if we screw something up, we can always come back.

root@mbp15srv0:~ # bectl list
BE      Active Mountpoint Space Created
default NR     /          2.99G 2025-04-20 22:45
root@mbp15srv0:~ # bectl create 15.0-CURRENT-pkgbase
root@mbp15srv0:~ # bectl mount 15.0-CURRENT-pkgbase
/tmp/be_mount.6i35

But before we start, let’s make sure we’re on the latest version of pkg, since the devs keep adding cool features for PkgBase.

root@mbp15srv0:~ # pkg install pkg
Updating FreeBSD.am repository catalogue...
Fetching meta.conf:   0%
FreeBSD.am repository is up to date.
Updating FreeBSD-base repository catalogue...
Fetching meta.conf:   0%
FreeBSD-base repository is up to date.
All repositories are up to date.
New version of pkg detected; it needs to be installed first.
The following 1 package(s) will be affected (of 0 checked):

Installed packages to be UPGRADED:
        pkg: 2.1.2 -> 2.1.4 [FreeBSD.am]

Number of packages to be upgraded: 1

12 MiB to be downloaded.

Proceed with this action? [y/N]: y
[1/1] Fetching pkg-2.1.4.pkg: 100%   12 MiB  12.5MB/s    00:01    
Checking integrity... done (0 conflicting)
[1/1] Upgrading pkg from 2.1.2 to 2.1.4...
[1/1] Extracting pkg-2.1.4: 100%
Updating FreeBSD.am repository catalogue...
Fetching meta.conf:   0%
FreeBSD.am repository is up to date.
Updating FreeBSD-base repository catalogue...
Fetching meta.conf:   0%
FreeBSD-base repository is up to date.
All repositories are up to date.
Checking integrity... done (0 conflicting)
The most recent versions of packages are already installed

We need to do pkg update so we get the repo metadata. We’ll also set the ABI to 15, since we’ll be installing that.

root@mbp15srv0:~ # env ABI="FreeBSD:15:amd64" pkg update -f -r FreeBSD-base
pkg: Setting ABI requires setting OSVERSION, guessing the OSVERSION as: 1500000
pkg: Warning: Major OS version upgrade detected.  Running "pkg bootstrap -f" recommended
Updating FreeBSD-base repository catalogue...
pkg: Repository FreeBSD-base has a wrong packagesite, need to re-create database
Fetching meta.conf: 100%    179 B   0.2kB/s    00:01    
Fetching data.pkg: 100%   52 KiB  53.2kB/s    00:01    
Processing entries:   0%
Newer FreeBSD version for package FreeBSD-zoneinfo:
To ignore this error set IGNORE_OSVERSION=yes
- package: 1500043
- running userland: 1500000
Ignore the mismatch and continue? [y/N]: y
Processing entries: 100%
FreeBSD-base repository update completed. 554 packages processed.
FreeBSD-base is up to date.

Now we can do the installation using -r, which will set the root directory. I’m also using -Fy which will fetch-only, and assume yes for everything.

root@mbp15srv0:~ # env ABI="FreeBSD:15:amd64" pkg -r /tmp/be_mount.6i35/ install -Fy -r FreeBSD-base -g 'FreeBSD-*'                                                    
pkg: Setting ABI requires setting OSVERSION, guessing the OSVERSION as: 1500000                                                                                        
pkg: Warning: Major OS version upgrade detected.  Running "pkg bootstrap -f" recommended                                                                               
Updating FreeBSD-base repository catalogue...                                                                                                                          
Fetching meta.conf:   0%                                                                                                                                               
FreeBSD-base repository is up to date.                                                                                                                                 
FreeBSD-base is up to date.                                                                                                                                            
The following 554 package(s) will be affected (of 0 checked):                                                                                                          
                                                                                                                                                                       
New packages to be INSTALLED:                                                                                                                                          
        FreeBSD-acct: 15.snap20250612001522 [FreeBSD-base]                                                                                                             
        FreeBSD-acct-dbg: 15.snap20250612001522 [FreeBSD-base]                                                                                                         
        FreeBSD-acct-man: 15.snap20241026125659 [FreeBSD-base]                                                                                                         
        FreeBSD-acpi: 15.snap20250612160001 [FreeBSD-base]                                                                                                             
        FreeBSD-acpi-dbg: 15.snap20250612160001 [FreeBSD-base]                                                                                                         
[...]

        FreeBSD-zfs-dev-lib32: 15.snap20250612160001 [FreeBSD-base]
        FreeBSD-zfs-lib32: 15.snap20250612160001 [FreeBSD-base]
        FreeBSD-zfs-man: 15.snap20250531144220 [FreeBSD-base]
        FreeBSD-zoneinfo: 15.snap20250521200023 [FreeBSD-base]

Number of packages to be installed: 554

The process will require 6 GiB more space.
1 GiB to be downloaded.
[1/507] Fetching FreeBSD-kernel-minimal-15.snap20250613001933.pkg: 100%   39 MiB 861.9kB/s    00:47    

[...]

[371/484] Fetching FreeBSD-smbutils-dev-lib32-15.snap20250612160001.pkg: 100%   86 KiB  87.8kB/s    00:01    
[372/484] Fetching FreeBSD-libsqlite3-dbg-lib32-15.snap20250612160001.pkg: 100%    1 MiB   1.2MB/s    00:01    
Checking integrity... done (0 conflicting)

And finally, I can do the actual installation. Again, not forgetting about ABI, and BACKUP_LIBRARIES with BACKUP_LIBRARY_PATH.


root@mbp15srv0:~ # env ABI="FreeBSD:15:amd64" BACKUP_LIBRARIES=true BACKUP_LIBRARY_PATH=/tmp/be_mount.6i35/usr/local/lib/compat/pkg pkg -r /tmp/be_mount.6i35/ install
-Uy -r FreeBSD-base -g 'FreeBSD-*'                                                                
pkg: Setting ABI requires setting OSVERSION, guessing the OSVERSION as: 1500000                                                                                        
pkg: Warning: Major OS version upgrade detected.  Running "pkg bootstrap -f" recommended                                                                               
Checking integrity... done (0 conflicting)                                                                                                                             
The following 554 package(s) will be affected (of 0 checked):                                                                                                          
                                                                                                                                                                       
New packages to be INSTALLED:                                                                                                                                          
        FreeBSD-acct: 15.snap20250612001522 [FreeBSD-base]                                                                                                             
        FreeBSD-acct-dbg: 15.snap20250612001522 [FreeBSD-base]                                                                                                         
        FreeBSD-acct-man: 15.snap20241026125659 [FreeBSD-base]                                                                                                         
[...]

Number of packages to be installed: 554                                            
                                                                                   
The process will require 6 GiB more space.                                
[1/554] Installing FreeBSD-acct-15.snap20250612001522...                
[1/554] Extracting FreeBSD-acct-15.snap20250612001522: 100%               
[2/554] Installing FreeBSD-acct-dbg-15.snap20250612001522...            
[2/554] Extracting FreeBSD-acct-dbg-15.snap20250612001522: 100%         
[3/554] Installing FreeBSD-acct-man-15.snap20241026125659...       
[3/554] Extracting FreeBSD-acct-man-15.snap20241026125659: 100%          
[4/554] Installing FreeBSD-acpi-15.snap20250612160001...                
[4/554] Extracting FreeBSD-acpi-15.snap20250612160001: 100%              
[5/554] Installing FreeBSD-acpi-dbg-15.snap20250612160001...            

[...]

[553/554] Installing FreeBSD-zfs-man-15.snap20250531144220...
[553/554] Extracting FreeBSD-zfs-man-15.snap20250531144220: 100%
[554/554] Installing FreeBSD-zoneinfo-15.snap20250521200023...
[554/554] Extracting FreeBSD-zoneinfo-15.snap20250521200023: 100%

Done!

Now we can chroot in and do some changes.

chroot /tmp/be_mount.6i35/ /bin/sh

We will see a lot of files ending with .pkgsave, these are the old files. Some things are required for us, such as sshd_config, master.passwd, sysctl.conf. Now, this is a pretty fresh installation, so I don’t need to do other changes, but you might!

root@mbp15srv0:/ # cp /etc/ssh/sshd_config.pkgsave /etc/ssh/sshd_config
root@mbp15srv0:/ # cp /etc/master.passwd.pkgsave /etc/master.passwd
root@mbp15srv0:/ # cp /etc/group.pkgsave /etc/group
root@mbp15srv0:/ # pwd_mkdb -p /etc/master.passwd
root@mbp15srv0:/ # cp /etc/sysctl.conf.pkgsave /etc/sysctl.conf

I think this is a good time to delete the other .pkgsave files. The FreeBSD Wiki says that I also need to delete /boot/kernel/linker.hints

# find / -name '*.pkgsave' -delete
# rm /boot/kernel/linker.hints

Back on the host, outside the chroot, I can finally activate the BE, at least temporarily, so only for the next boot.

root@mbp15srv0:~ # bectl list
BE                   Active Mountpoint         Space Created
15.0-CURRENT-pkgbase -      /tmp/be_mount.6i35 4.62G 2025-06-13 13:05
default              NR     /                  3.07G 2025-04-20 22:45
root@mbp15srv0:~ # bectl unmount 15.0-CURRENT-pkgbase
root@mbp15srv0:~ # bectl activate -t 15.0-CURRENT-pkgbase
Successfully activated boot environment 15.0-CURRENT-pkgbase
for next boot
root@mbp15srv0:~ # bectl list
BE                   Active Mountpoint Space Created
15.0-CURRENT-pkgbase T      -          4.62G 2025-06-13 13:05
default              NR     /          3.07G 2025-04-20 22:45

A reboot… with fingers crossed!

shutdown -r now

The machine is up and running!

root@mbp15srv0:~ # uname -a
FreeBSD mbp15srv0.evn0.loc.illuriasecurity.com 15.0-CURRENT FreeBSD 15.0-CURRENT main-n277903-a14573de29de GENERIC amd64

Let’s make this BE the default now.

root@mbp15srv0:~ # bectl list
BE                   Active Mountpoint Space Created
15.0-CURRENT-pkgbase N      /          4.62G 2025-06-13 13:05
default              R      -          3.08G 2025-04-20 22:45
root@mbp15srv0:~ # bectl activate 15.0-CURRENT-pkgbase
Successfully activated boot environment 15.0-CURRENT-pkgbase
root@mbp15srv0:~ # bectl list
BE                   Active Mountpoint Space Created
15.0-CURRENT-pkgbase NR     /          7.54G 2025-06-13 13:05
default              -      -          666M  2025-04-20 22:45

Finally, I will re-install pkg (not sure if that’s needed) and update my packages.

pkg bootstrap -f
pkg upgrade

All good! Now I can get to work 🙂

Special thanks to everyone who wrote the Wiki article and to ivy on the FreeBSD IRC channel for answering my questions.

That’s all folks…

Antranig Vartanian

June 12, 2025

A while back I needed to get the input voltage from one of our UPSes, so I used bsnmpwalk(1) to get the information needed and ran it in a script with a loop and sleep. Running it in tmux(1), of course.

#!/bin/sh

lastoff="maybe"

while true;
do
  inpvol=$(bsnmpwalk -o quiet -s [email protected] 1.3.6.1.2.1.33.1.3.3.1.3)

  [ $? != 0 ] && \
    curl -s -X POST \
    https://api.telegram.org/botXXX:YYY/sendMessage \
    -d chat_id=-ZZZ \
    -d text="Something is wrong with the SNMP server"

  [ "${inpvol}" -lt 200 ] && \
    curl -s -X POST \
    https://api.telegram.org/botXXX:YYY/sendMessage \
    -d chat_id=-ZZZ \
    -d text="Power seems to be off. I see Input Voltage as ${inpvol}" && \
    lastoff="true"

  [ "${inpvol}" -ge 200 ] && [ "${lastoff}" == "true" ] && \
    curl -s -X POST \
    https://api.telegram.org/botXXX:YYY/sendMessage \
    -d chat_id=-ZZZ \
    -d text="Power back on. I see Input Voltage as ${inpvol}" && \
    lastoff="false"

  printf "%s  ---  %s\n" "$(date)" "${inpvol}"
  sleep 60
done

This got the job done, but I guess there’s place for improvement (leave a reply).

Anyways, I kept forgetting that I need to run the script in tmux after reboots, so I decided to use daemon(8).

touch /etc/rc.local
chmod +x /etc/rc.local
cat - >> /etc/rc.local
#!/bin/sh

daemon -u nobody -r -R 5 -f -t ups-notifier -o /var/log/ups_notifier.log /usr/local/bin/ups_notifier.sh

Again, there’s a place for improvement, specifically I can use a proper rc.d(8) script, yet again, this gets the job done.

Gotta say, I love the simplicity of FreeBSD.

Antranig Vartanian

February 27, 2025

For years I’ve been a night owl, staying up late until 5AM, hacking on code, chatting with friends and even drinking coffee at that late hour. I’ve been told that it’s a genetic thing, that people don’t choose what kind of a person they are, morning or evening. And yet, when I tried to find my “natural sleep cycle”, looks like I’ve been functioning at my best when I sleep around 10PM and wake up at 5AM. This has been a very weird experience, but what else do I not know about myself? I am not sure. The unknown unknown is a very weird place, unlike the known unknown.

In either case, I will keep a detailed log of my sleep for the coming months and see how if I actually function better, or is it just an illusion.

What’s your sleep cycle? when do you hack on code? or do you stay up late watching YouTube videos and doom-scroll on social media?

Syrian-Armenian Stories: My first hack, Arcades, Syrian Parties and Mortal Kombat

Couple of days ago my fiancée was watching an Armenian internet show named “Tany Layva” which roughly translates to “Live at home” that aired during COVID-19. The interesting part for me was not the show itself (frankly speaking I could not care less about Armenia’s pop culture) but the intro music triggered something in me… You can listen to it here.

Oh my god! It’s the theme song of Mortal Kombat! I think it was in the 1995 movie too, which is probably the first time I heard it.

However the trigger was not the song itself, but something that the song represents for me.

You see, until that moment I thought that the earliest hack that I remember was the PlayStation Swap Trick, which my father showed me in the year 2002. Growing up we did not have a lot of money, so we waited for the release of the PlayStation 2 in Syria, allowing us to buy the Original PlayStation at a discounted price. But games were expensive, and they are getting more expensive (that’s a topic for another day), however, the Syrian gaming community was very active in making bootleg/imported game CDs, selling them at a cheaper price. So how do you play these games?

Well, you insert an original disc (in my case, I kept using the Crash Team Racing disc), you wait for the PlayStation logo to appear, and you swap the disc with the one that you want to play.

This was my earliest memory of a “hack”, where you “bypass” a system check.

But why Mortal Kombat? Why was that important for my brain? Well, it reminded me of an event.

It was probably the year 2000 or 2001, we were at a family party. A wedding party maybe, an engagement party, or just a party overall? Not sure, but I remember two things: It was near a swimming pool and I was bored as hell.

Our family friends had a daughter, Natalie, she was roughly my age, and both of us were not just bored during that event, we were actively looking for something to do. Literally anything.

We were at the “Al Galaa Family Club Swimming Pool and Restaurant”, a place that still exists today. It was a pretty large area with multiple floors and a swimming pool, where people were dancing next to it.

At the basement we found our salvation. An Arcade. Multiple games. Oh my god, there’s even a multiplayer game.

We run to our dads, and we ask them to boot the multiplayer game. My father and Uncle Vartan connect the arcade to the socket, the game boots up. A very violent game. But we’re not Americanized are we? we don’t care about game age ratings, we care about having fun! We start playing the game. Very, very addictive. I play against my dad, my dad and uncle Vartan play against each other, and at the final round, I play against Natalie. It was indeed a Mortal Kombat.

You see, when Syrians party, they tend to stay up late, by late I mean until 6 in the morning. And just when I thought that this arcade is exactly what I need for the next 7 hours, the game asks for a coin.

I mean, sure, 10 Syrian Liras were not much back then, but for 7 hours? That would be very expensive.

And then my dad asked the question that would rewire my brain forever… “why didn’t it ask for money the first time?”

Ah yes. The free trial 🙂 First game was free, next game is not.

It’s the middle of the night, everyone’s at the pool, they are dancing and drinking, no one is watching us. What could possibly go wrong?

My dad disconnects and reconnects the game’s electricity socket, the boot menu shows up again and says “Press Start To Play”… FREE GAMES ALL NIGHT!

And just like that, we spend the next 6-7 hours, until the dawn of light, playing arcade games, from Mortal Kombat, Sonic The Hedgehog, to some random racing games that I don’t even remember their names.

And yes, Natalie did have fun as well!

I told my mom and dad this story couple of days ago, they remembered the event, but their reaction was “how can you possibly remember this? You were not even 6 years old”. Well, what can I say, how can someone forget their first hack? I mean, sure, I did, but I remembered it too, right?

I’d like to think that, where-ever Natalie is, she’s also doing hacks every once in a while, and I’d like to believe that, while I am mostly spending my days crafting emails to customers, writing code to solve problems, documenting my experience, I will, until the end of my life, be hacking on computers and teaching my children how to do hacks.

Unlocking a memory from a game music that was re-implemented by an Armenian TV show was not on my bingo card, but I’m happy that it happened.

Keep hacking y’all.

That’s all folks…