The banner shows a typical caravan-shaped, 1950s diner, in a dirty, poor neighborhood, with people sitting on stools outside and looking in.

I grew up on the outskirts of Auckland, New Zealand in the 1980s. I tutor English, History, and Computer Literacy, the latter especially as regards Security and Cryptocurrency. I have a Master's Degree in Philosophy from the University of Wales. My specialist topic was Existentialist Ethics. I trained as a Computer Technician, and worked in the I.T. industry for seven years, despite not actually liking modern technology, surely a drawback, as is obvious to me now.

It's a place where I can publish ideas and software to help society during this 'fourth turning', especially focused on Hard Money, Regionalism, Virtue Ethics, and Anti-Technocracy.

My definition of 'Hard Money' is money which resists devaluation. Money can devalue in several ways, but the most common is to create more of it quickly. Hence, the 'hardest' form of money cannot be minted or handed out rapidly. I am interested in Hard Money because Soft Money is the easiest way to corrupt the leaders of a society.

Regionalism is a 'middle way' between Localism and Globalism. It brings back face-to-face politics like Localism, but expands the scope to include other neighboring towns, and plugs into the ancient regional identities. A good example of Regionalism in practice is the Basque Country in Spain. I am interested in Regionalism because, amongst other reasons, I have always had a keen interest in traditional languages and cultures.

Virtue Ethics is the system of morality that answers moral questions based on an understanding of how virtuous people act. It bypasses overly intellectual, rules-based solutions, and instead focusses on training people to be brave, honest, freedom-loving, and whatever other virtues are deemed most important by one's society. I am interested in Virtue Ethics because I've seen firsthand the terrible consequences of stripping virtue from our education.

Anti-Technocracy is a set of beliefs and practices aimed to stop the progress of Technocracy. Technocracy is a political state characterized by power in the hands of an elite group of scientific engineers who think that politics can be reduced to Science and centralized planning. They believe that human beings should be organized like lego blocks. Technocracy is also the material means to make such a system a reality, especially surveillance tech. Anti-Technocracy focuses on counter-tech, decentralization, and the priority of 'squishy' human things like compassion and nostalgia. I am interested in Anti-Technocracy because I remember fondly a time before the Internet.

No. I'm in favor of much simpler websites, the way they used to be. There's a growing community. Things have gotten out of hand. Autoplaying videos are the worst. I try to make things easy-to-read, accessible, and low-key. Given time, I hope to make a version of this website for the Gemini Protocol.

No. Not in itself. The same libertarian (but admittedly technocratic) tradition of the 80s and 90s that brought us the Web, brought us cryptocurrency. Crypto is a way of transacting with strangers on the Internet without a bank in between. Crypto can be steered to a dark place, but it can also be an amazing force for good. All the same, we need physical money too.

First, take some safety precautions in advance. Download a free copy of a chapter from my book here. (MD5= 2d04f6b528107753dadbf68f80693b76 What's MD5? ) It's basic stuff like using a good VPN. Next, learn three basic rules. (1) Never accept free crypto. (2) Never backup sensitive information online. (3) When dealing with strangers, always ask yourself "who contacted whom?"

Download a 'wallet' app, such as Trust Wallet or Edge. Toggle on litecoin (LTC) as one of the 'wallets'. Litecoin is the best cryptocurrency to start with because it's the easiest to use and is accepted in lots of places. Choose 'Buy' and pay with your debit card, Paypal, Apple Pay, or a number of other options. Even better, meet other crypto users in your area, or use a Peer-to-Peer online marketplace, like Localcoinswap. Or, contact me, and I have great resource with step-by-step instructions.

You should definitely buy silver coin or 'rounds'. Gold too, if you can afford it. Gold and silver are still the best forms of hard money in my opinion. If you can find local vendors willing to accept silver rounds, consider yourself blessed.

I won't share your data with any third party. I ask for a minimum needed for purpose. I store all data on servers with privacy-respecting companies; in the case of e-mail, it's encrypted so even the e-mail hosts can't see it. For products on sale, I offer a tickbox saying 'please delete my data after the order has been delivered'. For contacting me, I offer cutting-edge privacy options like SimpleX and Matrix. In summary, I take the issue of privacy more seriously than 99% of people out there. If there are ways I can improve, while still keeping this website's honoring of old-fashioned simplicity, let me know.

As of yet, no. My life is better without the daily game of Silly Tribal Wars.

No social media. To keep up with me, click on the RSS link in the footer. (What's RSS?) Or, e-mail me for further ways...

MD5 a way to test that a piece of computer software has not been tampered with. The proper jargon is a 'checksum'. An MD5 checksum looks something like: 4ae9892b80bc6baa6e68b83063f324cf. I typed in 'And she's buying a Stairway To Heaven', and the MD5 generator spat out that 32-character sequence of letters and numbers. If I change anything, even if I just type 'stairway' without a capital letter, I will get a completely different 32-character number. Go to md5generator.com to get your MD5 checksum from some text, or go to md5file.com to upload a file and derive an MD5 checksum therefrom. For an extra step of tamper-proofing, you can notarize. Read about it here

OpenAlias is a way to make cryptocurrency work more like e-mail. Cryptocurrency addresses are long sequences of gobbledeegook. They're a nightmare. OpenAlias simply maps them to e-mail like addresses, e.g. molino@prolecafe.cash. (That's my one). OpenAlias addresses are easy to remember and hard to screw up. OpenAlias is a specification designed by influential people in the monero (XMR) community. It leverages the worldwide, universal acceptance of DNS. It's not perfect, but it avoids a Format War, and it's free to use.

The easiest way is to use Cake Wallet app or Coin Wallet app. It'll just work! But maybe you have a favorite wallet app and it doesn't work with OpenAlias. You can use my OpenAlias Resolver here. You need the recipient's OpenAlias address (e.g. paul@thebeatles.com). (Just like with e-mail). Enter it, choose the relevant cryptocurrency in which the recipient wants you to pay, and you'll get a proper cryptocurrency address to copy and paste in your app, and a QR code for you to scan.

If you want to recieve crypto with OpenAlias, it's pretty easy. It should take about 30 minutes of your time. Instructions here. I also have a tool which takes away the chance of typos.

P2P V4V stands for 'Peer-to Peer, Value For Value'. Someone offers a good or service, and the customer decides how much he or she wants to pay. Sounds like donationware, but it's more specific. It avoids some pitfalls, for example the 'P2P' part means that people donate as individuals, never on behalf of an organization. Read more in my blog post here. Get my full list of donation options here.

When you use Visa, your credit card deets are checked on a database somewhere. That database is run by a few supercomputers. It's highly centralized. What if the database was shared by volunteers all over the world? A blockchain is a transaction log and anyone anywhere can download a copy and make it available over the Internet. At the most basic level, a blockchain stores two pieces of data : the transaction, and the time it happened. The big problem is making sure all these volunteers don't muck up the transaction log, either by laziness or mischief. Satoshi Nakamoto solved the problem of ordering this scattered, democratic system in a clever way. Download a chapter from my book 'How To Be A Hard Money Hawk' to find out how he did it.

When you put a file through an MD5 generator, you are looking for a match. You're looking for a matching number to the one the author has given. Sometimes, that's not enough. The checksum proves that the file you have is the same as advertized, but what if the advertisement itself has been changed? What if the whole website has been faked? The next step is Blockchain Notarization. It means that the checksum has been stored on a blockchain. Blockchains make sure that numbers in the past can't be changed. It's like when a lawyer notarizes something, but better, because a lawyer is just one person, but a blockchain is verified by tens of thousands of people. I notarized the zip file of the Litecoin Paper Wallet Generator on the Ravencoin blockchain. You can go here and search for 'ltcpaperwalletzip'. It is in block 3950434, confirmed first at 21:22 GMT on the 27th of July, 2025.

If you're forcing me to make recommendations, I'll choose iVPN, and Express VPN . Both have a strict no-logs policy, which thwarts inside-jobs. Each has a different rationale. They're at opposite ends of the spectrum. iVPN is a small German company that lives and breathes privacy. Express VPN is a huge corporate monster. The advantage to Express VPN that you get additional cover in the crowd; your traffic blends in with literally millions of other users. Make sure you change server locations every few hours of browsing. I don't recommend free VPNs, but if you really must, use Sky VPN. Sky VPN's user privacy is good.

'RSS' stands for 'Really Simple Syndication'. It's a way of letting you know when a website has been updated; for example, if I publish a new blog. RSS is old-fashioned nowadays, and that's not entirely an accident of history- Big Tech can't use algorithms to monetize your attention with RSS. Behind the scenes, RSS is very simple; more or less just another web page. To use RSS, you need either an extension for your web browser, or an app like Feedly, or Inoreader.

I'm going to say 80s, simply in revolt against the Boomers, because, when I was growing up, the 60s were sacrosanct, and nobody was allowed to say any music was better than The Beatles, The Band, Jimi Hendrix, etc.

Karl Popper's theory of science I call Falsification Theory. It's pretty simple. It means that one can never prove a theory definitely true, but one can prove it definitely false. It stems from an asymmetry. New facts can always come along to wreck your theory. But once it's wrecked, new facts can't salvage it. This only works in a controlled environment. In the real world, with complex systems at play, allegedly 'wrong' theories get salvaged much more easily. I like the Falsification Theory from a practical point of view. It helps deal with confirmation bias.

Get me into a debate and come back at me with points already dealt with. Be an Imperialist. Jump queues.

I think the best decade was the 1950s. The birth of Rock Music, the heyday of Radio drama, Beatnik liberation, fashion that aged well, but all tied together nicely with a revived moral compass due to the horrors of World War 2. Plus, I associate it with Raymond Chandler, one of my favorite authors.

PGP stands for 'Pretty Good Privacy'. It's a simple way of encrypting e-mail, so that only you and the recipient can read it. First, you need the recipient's (public) key. It will be a file with the extension 'asc', e.g. fullchoad@hotmaildotcom.asc. A good place to search for someone's PGP key is openpgp.org. My key is there. Otherwise, you'll need to ask for it; or some e-mail providers like Proton Mail find PGP keys automatically. I said 'simple' above, but I meant simple in theory. In practice, no two e-mail apps do it the same way and it's pretty fiddly. It's easier to copy and paste your messages into an online PGP encrypter/decrypter at onlinepgp.com. You'll still need your recipient's (public) key.

Rewilding is the theory and practice of taking human-developed land and returning it, in an orderly manner, to an undeveloped state . For example, one might take a thousand hectares of wheat fields, and pull out the wheat, plant native trees, and add native animals which once existed there. Rewilding is sometimes summarized as Cores, Corridors, and Carnivores. 'Cores' means that the rewilded area is not some game-park; it must be truly isolated. 'Corridors' means that wild animals must have natural migration paths. 'Carnivores' means that carnivores are key to the ecosystem functioning well. Search for the keyword 'nature' and you'll find some blog posts of mine on rewilding.