I'm yawnbox, welcome to my blog. I'm an autistic privacy and security engineer from the Pacific Northwest living in the Netherlands. If you ever see me around at CCC, DEF CON, or any other hacker con, please feel free to say hello!

Focus Determines Reality

Focus Determines Reality has been around since April 2004 when I bought yawnbox.com for sharing my thoughts about philosophy to my friends and family online. Over the years I've transitioned to discussing aspects of privacy, security, and open source software with the goal of lowering the bar for people with useful education. It makes me very happy to be a student then to teach these topics for free. Instead of trying to publish many articles, I keep a smaller amount up-to-date as technology and knowledge changes. In 2024, I moved yawnbox.com to yawnbox.is and now the blog is physically located in Iceland. yawnbox.is is coded using Zola, a Rust static site generator, and VSCodium is my choice editor.

I reject surveillance capitalism. I don't know how many people read my content. However, due to how much direct engagement I have about various articles on social media, I know that "How to Use an iPad as a Secure Calling and Messaging Device" is probably the most popular article. It's not without controversy.

Sailing Zapdos

I’m also novice sailor. I took my first sailing class with the Seattle Mountaineers in April 2023. Zapdos is my sailboat. I bought Zapdos in May 2023 near Vancouver Island, British Columbia (BC), Canada and started refitting it in July 2023 near Powell River BC. Zapdos is a 1985(?) Bruce Robert’s design steel-hull sailboat. No one knows exactly when or where it was made or what model it is. Zapdos didn’t even have an HIN! I named it Zapdos because I am converting it from diesel to electric. Since its primary propulsion is wind and its secondary propulsion is electricity, I felt I must use a childhood icon to name it.