Category Archives: Asides

Concerned Online Citizens vs Executive Secretary et al.

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Last July 29, 2020, Concerned Online Citizens – social media personalities, bloggers, artists, professionals even students who use the internet and social media to speak on issues of public concern in filed a petition to strike down as unconstitutional the Anti-Terror Law.

  • Let’s fight for our rights both online and offline
  • The Bill of Rights should apply everywhere, including the internet
  • Free expression should be protected across frontiers and the media we use
  • There should be no threats and no terrorist-tagging of citizens expressing themselves online and offline
  • 73 million online Filipinos should be protected
  • The people should not be afraid of government. The government should be afraid of its people.
  • Cybercrime Law noon, terror law ngayon
  • Kung walang ginagawang mali, bakit takot ang gobyerno sa placards at Facebook posts

I am humbled and privileged to join some of the biggest names on social media today:
@macoydubs1

@SexbombGurl

@robcham

@victoryliner

@thysz

@markgeronimo_

@ka_bino

@PinoyAkoBlog

@darnitJC

@mongster

@leanporquia

@Punongbayan_

@albertraqueno

@blogie

@TheRainBro

@giasison

& Aling Marie

Below is a fully copy of our petition.

We wish we could have added more, however time & the restrictions of the on-going community quarantine have prevented us from doing so.

Follow & interact with all of each of us, we are eager to hear from you as well especially if you have experienced harassment or being attacked online for speaking up. Together, we will defend and fight for our rights be online or offline.

Thirty-five

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I am now in my mid thirties. Life has been tough, especially in the last couple of years. And I never thought that I would be alive in the age of a pandemic. On the other hand, it’s been fun, challenging and worth the pains, struggles, setbacks and even defeats. It’s great to be alive!

The past couple of months, in particular, have been amazing – I’ve launched a science podcast, a newsletter, and recently, an advocacy group that had already made great strides towards its goals. Other side projects are steadily moving forward even if it’s in small baby steps.

In the coming days, I’d be joining other brave bloggers and netizens in a great and noble endeavor. Just to be in their company is both humbling and a great privilege.

On the home front, I am mightily proud of being able to sharpen my cooking skills. Salads and more vegetables have become part of my diet. Something my mom would definitely be proud of. Perhaps I’d talk more about it in the upcoming posts.

Much more needs to be done. My growing pile of books to read for starters. Sticking to regularly updating this blog and adding a few chapters to a writing project that’s really close to heart.

Adding a few pounds wouldn’t hurt. Improving my skills and staying healthy – getting through this year in the age of coronavirus would remain my primary pre-occupation. To all my friends, colleagues, readers and followers, thank you to each and one of you!

LIFE Hacks with Atty Chel Diokno

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It’s been a tiring, busy yet very fulfilling week as together with good friends and colleagues, we’ve launched the first installment of our ‘LIFE Hacks‘ series of webinars last June 27, 2020.

Our keynote speaker is none other than the venerable human rights defender, nationalist and founding Dean of De La Salle University’s College of Law, Atty Chel Dionko in which he talked about the Anti-Terrorism Bill and the recent cyber-libel conviction against veteran journalist Maria Ressa.

The webinar series is the inaugural project for our little volunteer group Lasallian Initiative for Empowerment or LIFE. Our mission is to help our fellow Filipinos, especially the youth, to better understand current issues and take part in the national conversation.

Despite the speed bumps and misses, we were surprised that the event exceeded most of our expectations given that we only had almost a week to put it all together. It was also my first foray into moderating or hosting a webinar and the experience has been a humbling and inspiring learning experience for me.

Apart from managing the logistics of the webinar and hosting it, I also handled the technical production – learning how to use and setup OBS Studio to jazz up our zoom webinar the night before and live streaming the event on our Facebook page. All those years of tinkering with computers, sound mixers and DIY-community theater really helped a lot.

We’re now working on our next event which would be a lot smoother and better thanks to all the valuable lessons we learned from the pilot episode. I’ll be talking more about this soon in the coming days.

If you’re one of those who joined our first ‘LIFE Hacks’ thank you from the bottom of our hearts. We look forward to seeing you in the next installment soon!

A more stable home network with the TP-Link Archer C50

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A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about tips on how to boost your WiFi signal at home one of which is to get a new WiFi router especially if your existing one is of an old model. A new device would give many benefits like a more stable home network, power efficiency, security, easier network management, and even more refined parental controls if needed.

That’s exactly what I did yesterday when my new TP-Link Archer C50 AC1200 Wireless Dual Band Router finally came. It’s not the bleeding edge model but it’s more than perfect to upgrade our home WiFi network.

Main features of the Archer C50 are as follows:

  • Supports 802.11ac standard
  • Simultaneous 2.4GHz 300 Mbps and 5GHz 867 Mbps connections for 1200 Mbps of total available bandwidth
  • 4 external antennas provide stable wireless connections and optimal coverage
  • Easy network management at your fingertips with TP-Link Tether
  • Supports IGMP Proxy/Snooping, Bridge and Tag VLAN to optimize IPTV streaming
  • Supports Access Point mode to create a new Wi-Fi access point

It took less than 30 minutes from unboxing to putting up a new home WiFi network complete with a Guest Network and parental controls for the kids.

After all of our devices: smart TV, two PCs, 4 smart phones and a tablet have been moved to the new WiFi network, I took down the old one by disabling the WiFi on the three-year-old router that came from our ISP.

Now the entire house gets full WiFi coverage and my Bluetooth Awei headphones have been working flawlessly with my Lenovo notebook because it’s on the less congested 5GHz network while the rest of our devices are on the 2.4GHz network.

Best of all, I can control the Archer C50 with my smartphone via the easy-to-use and intuitive Tether App which is available for Android and iOS devices. WiFi bliss without breaking the bank and maximum convenience.

The joy of customizing Ubuntu

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One of the best things about Linux is the freedom to do almost anything you want with it. So when I started using Ubuntu Linux, one of the first things I did after a fresh install is customizing it to look and behave like Apple’s OS X. It’s a hack to get the best of both worlds: a taste of the OS X experience because it is a great operating system and still be able to use free and open-source software that is Linux. Both OS traces its roots to Unix so that should take care of any philosophical hang-ups and make customization easy.

There are a lot of good tutorials out there, just make sure that it’s up to date and it matches your Linux distro or flavor of Ubuntu. As for me, I’ve stopped customizing my Ubuntu installation to look & behave like OS X mainly for two reasons: appreciation for the GNOME desktop environment and my minimalist attitude towards software, eye-candy like fancy animations or icon sets should be as light on system resources as possible. It’s also the reason I loved Google Nexus phones because it ran on stock or pure Android.

More than a month since going back to using Ubuntu as my main OS and it’s only been a couple of days since I changed the default wallpaper and the biggest customization so far is the installation of GNOME Tweaks tool to refine small bits of the OS: showing what day of the week it is, the battery percentage, managing Workspaces and replacing the default dock with Dash to Dock.

The last piece of customization is installing “Albert” an app launcher similar to macOS Spotlight. Everything was wrapped up by adding shortcuts to my most-used websites and apps. With that, my personal Ubuntu setup is now complete.

My customized Ubuntu 20.04 with GNOME Tweaks and Albert app launcher

If you’re also using Ubuntu and have made your own customization, feel free to share about it in the comments below or slide into my inbox with some screenshots. I’d love to see what you came up with.