I have a hard time unplugging my brain on vacation, and in fact have come up with some pretty wild ideas with my wife when we have time together to “unwind.” (Date Night Appetite, anyone?)
A 5 hour drive to the beach is apparently a very conducive environment for hairball ideas to percolate. Somewhere around hour three, as the family enjoyed their devices and Ween played on the radio, I started stewing on how every single YouTube video these days opens with the same two words.
“Hey guys.”
It’s everywhere. Every creator, every tutorial, every teenager reviewing a energy drink, all of them leading with “hey guys” like it’s a legal requirement, and it had been quietly driving me up a wall for years.
So I decided I’d make some videos that are nothing but that. Just me, in some random setting, looking at the camera and saying “hey guys” like I’m about to launch into something, and then not saying anything else at all. That’s the whole joke. There is no punchline, because the missing punchline is the punchline.
I figured maybe my kids would find it funny and a few people would see them. Instead, the it quickly started taking off. A few of shorts went mildly “viral” on YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels, and I spent a good chunk of the week watching the view counts climb, all based on a bit I came up with while stuck in traffic on I-26. You can see the ridiculousness over on my YouTube shorts if you want to understand my sense of humor.
Aside from that whole distraction, the week definitely felt like a vacation. we took five straight days of 2 hour tennis clinics in the mornings, Rachael and I enjoyed some lovely chats on the balcony over a cocktail, we soaked up the sun and surf at the beach in the afternoons, where we continued to sweat and play Pro Kadima. Riding our longboards to-and-from the tennis clinics was a fun time as well, and it made me feel like we were the cool family that knew how to ride skateboards (and one scooter) together.
It was very relaxing. I want to make that known before I tell you about what else I did.
Bogey
As someone who likes to know what I’m sharing a wifi network with when traveling, I started I realized I missed having a UI for network scanning. NMAP and ARP scans are great, but sometimes it’s nice to visualize things (I think I’ve been spoiled by wiz.io).
So I built Bogey. It’s a little macOS app that shows you a live radar of your own network, figures out what each device probably is, and tells you the second something new and unfamiliar shows up. It runs entirely on your local machine. There is no root access necessary (though some root-based features are planned), there’s nothing to log into, and nothing leaves your laptop, because I cannot think of a single good reason my network map should live on somebody else’s server.
It’s real and it’s up at getbogey.app if you want to poke at it. And that’s what I call a productive, relaxing vacation.