Most of us use the default Google Authenticator to generate the 2FA code. You know, those 6 numbers that you need to fill in to login. But most of us don’t know that the Google Authenticator is tied to your mobile device. So what happens when you loose your phone, it gets stolen or it won’t power up again after you dropped it in the toilet bowl?
A world of pain will happen, that’s what!
You aren’t able to open the Authenticator app anymore and thus aren’t able to log into your accounts!
Maybe there are secondary options, or you can try to social engineer the support people. But even as likely you just lost access to your most important accounts.

So how to prevent this?

One option is to use the Authy app as an Google Authenticator alternative.

Authy is a free app and syncs to both your phone and the desktop app so you don’t have to look for your phone when you try to do your online banking on your computer. Authy also backups your logins to their secure cloud, so if a Russian rocket destroys your home with all your devices in it. You’re 2FA is safe and you can still login to your crypto exchange from the safety of the refugee camp.

Steps:

1. Download the Authy app on your phone and computer and setup your account
2. Open your Google Authenticator and check all the sites listed there
3. Login to each of the Google Authenticator listed sites and change the authenticator app.
   Usually you have to go to account -> security.
   From there you can either update your authenticator device or delete the old (Google) authenticator and setup a new 2FA with the Authy app.

Authy works on Mac, Windows, Android and iOS and setting everything up will take (depending on the amount of 2FA accounts you have) about 30 minutes.

Do it now! You never know what those damn Russians will do next!

_{Header image generated by Stable Diffusion with the DiffusionBee app.
Prompt: A blog hero image showing a hacker dressed in black trying to get into a bright fairytale door of a brick house typical for the Netherlands, Visual Novel, Art Nouveau, Warm Color Palette, Evil, Artstation}

I later named my personal holding company Ratsgate LTD, which later turned into Ratsgate BV.
10 years ago, I made a small portfolio website, which I am taking offline now as it has no real use and I want to focus on my new project Otira: Online Team Interaction & Reporting Assistant.

I drink Bulletproof Tea every morning as a breakfast, it fills me up and gives me plenty of energy to tackle the day. It is tweaked to sharpen my mind because your brain runs on fat and it also makes the caffeine in the tea do it’s work better. Awesome!

I’ll try to write a more detailed post on why I want to vlog later, but for now: check it out and let me know what you think of it.

P.S. if you are wondering why I started writing my name different: it’s because so all you English speaking folks would pronounce my name properly 🙂

Something had to change, but in my teens I had decided that I was not a morning person. So how to fix this?
Tim Ferris, in his podcast, always asks his guests about their morning routines. Mostly all of the succesful people he interviewed had some sort of routine and that mostly included mediation. This got me intrigued and I decided to look into morning routines. After discovering that the key to waking up earlier is to go to sleep earlier, things started to click into place and I now have a nice and productive morning routine which I am really happy with. And since I am a very digital minded person I present to you: My Morning Routine in Apps!

1. Waking up with Sleep Cycle
Sleep Cycle is an app that tracks your sleep patterns through how much you move during the night (of course my phone is in Airplane modus while I sleep). One cycle of going in and out of REM sleep takes about 1,5 hours. So in a normal night, I go through about 4-5 cycles. Before I go to sleep I put my iPhone into airplane mode and set the alarm at 6:30.
Sleep Cycle now wakes me up at that time, or 30 before, depending on where I am in my sleep cycle. Waking up during deep sleep, makes you really groggy, so Sleep Cycle makes sure to wake me up when I am out of REM and in a lighter sleep.

2. Tracking my weight with FitBit
First thing I do each morning after I relieved myself is stand on the scales. I have a Fitbit Aria scale at home that syncs my weight and fat percentage to their website. I can track and analyse it thought the Fitbit app on my iPhone.

3. Meditating with Headspace
All successful people seem to meditate nowadays, so I decided to also implement that in my routine. But I never meditated before, so where to start? Luckily the Headspace app helped me ease into it gradually, by doing the guided meditations I am now able to easily do 20 minute meditations and they are one of the highlights of my day. I make sure to do them in the morning, because if I don’t, life gets in the way and I tend not to do it anymore.

4. Exercising with Clock and RunKeeper
Exercising in the morning helps me pump up my body for an energetic day. I do either some body weight exercises which I time with the stopwatch in the default Clock app or I go for a run and track it withRunKeeper.

5. Reading with Blinkist
After exercising I make breakfast; either a protein shake or eggs and beans. And while I eat, I read. Reading is important because it expands the mind, I learn new things and it gives me inspiration and new ideas. In the morning I like to read business or self-improvement books, but most of those books are more fluff then insights. That’s why I read most of them through Blinkist. Blinkist distills the insights out of a business book and gives you a very well written summary. This way I “read” about 4 or 5 books a week. If I really like a book, or feel that the summary is not enough I buy it on Amazon and read the complete book on my Kindle.

6. Keeping in contact with Contactually
The last addition to my morning routine is Contactually, Contactually helps me stay in touch with people. During your life, you meet a lot of interesting people, but most times you loose contact, because life happens and you just forget about them. Contactually helps me remember to contact those people when I haven’t been in contact in a while. I have different settings, some people I want to contact every week, while for others every three months is fine. Every morning I login to Contactually and see a list of people I have “neglected” for too long and I write a couple personal e-mails to them. This has already helped me stay in contact with a couple people that dropped of my rader and enlivened our relationship again. Awesomeness!
I love my morning routine, it feels great to have all these things done before I actually start working on my business. It helps me become a better, healthier and more rounded person. And I notice that when I do it, I also get more and better work done on my business. It’s a win-win!

Do you use apps to improve yourself?

It’s the little things

When I am out of town I like to stay at a friend’s house, usually this is for just a day or so but sometimes longer. I firmly believe that guests are like fish, after 3 days they begin to stink so I never try to overstay my welcome and put too much stress on my hosts. But always when I stay with friends I am struck by the little observations I make about their daily lives. Sometimes I just sit in a quite corner of the house and keep quite while my hosts are going about. It’s the differences in the little things that make these observations fun. Some of the things I am interested in is food and cooking, so I always make sure to pay special attention when it’s time for dinner; what time do they eat? do they cook? do they use fresh ingredients? how do they cook? do they use special techniques? are they stressed about cooking? do they like it? I always try to ask some questions about their favourite dishes and I also offer to help. After cooking the food has to be eaten. But where is this done? Will we be eating in front of the tv or are we putting out the plates? All these things can be different and while it is already fun to notice these differences, it can also be very interesting to discover why your hosts do the things they do, so be sure to ask lots of questions (but don’t make them uncomfortable in doing so)!

Interactions in the family

Another thing I like to observe is how my hosts interact with each other. When it is just me and a friend, there is nothing to observe. But if there is a partner, some children or even a dog or cat, things start to become interesting. I love to observe that small moment when a love partner comes home and how they are greeted. Do they get a kiss? Is there any inquiry about how their day went? Any other signs of affection and interest? Or maybe they just get a short “hi” and are ignored afterwards.
With children this goes even further, because your hosts will be responsible for them. So how do they react on questions from the child? What happens when it is time to eat or sleep? How do the parents react when the child misbehaves?
Of course, you are there as an observer and your hosts will know that and adapt there behaviour a bit to meet certain social standards. But if you watch closely, you can see the underlying patterns.

Learnings

When you start to observe people you can imagine yourself to be a palaeontologist researching a newly discovered society. You can learn a lot when doing this when you are open to it. By realising everyone is different and does things differently you become more open to it. It becomes easier to accept differences and you might even start to realise that the way you do things is not the only way and might even not be the best way. So always try to reflect upon how you would react in a similar situation you are observing. Do you like the way your hosts react, or do you believe you would do it differently? Either way, make a mental note of it. You get bonus points of you also decide on why you like it or not.
Not only are you observing a different culture, you are also observing people. This is the field of the psychologist. Try to discover why people do or react the things they do and what those interactions do with their mood. For example, I love to see when my friends girlfriend get’s home from work, he takes the time to give her a kiss and a hug and asks her how her day went. I could immediately see the change on her face, when she came in she was cold and stressed out. But after the hug and the attention she was much more at ease. Funny how that works and a great tip to also implement in my life.

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Picture above: My living room, where anyone is free to visit and observe me.

What I love about Christmas and how it killed me!

Christmas is really about 3 things that I really love:

1. I love my family and I like visiting and spending time with them.
2. I love traditions, I think it is very important and brings people together.
3. I love good food, I love to eat it and I love to cook it.

Combining the 3 things I love sounds like a perfect plan, but apparently there is something like too much of a good thing!
After a hectic week traveling to my fathers’ for Christmas Eve, spending the night there and having breakfast, then on to my mother in law, where more family would show up and I had to take care of the christmis dinner to make sure we weren’t going to “gourmetten”. After dinner we exchanged gifts and it was well past midnight before I could turn to bed.
And the next day: Christmas at my moms place.
Of course I enjoyed the company, love and the food and I don’t want to sound ungrateful, but after 3 days I was exhausted!

Everything was too much, the food was delicious, but with every bite I took I already knew that more and more food would follow. Making me feel a bit disgusted about my own gluttony.
Also things around Christmas become a bit tense in the social space. Everything should be perfect and everybody should have fun. This makes family visits feel a bit less natural. Which adds to the stress of trying to give every family the same amount of quality time so nobody feels left out.
If it was only one day, I would be fine. It probably wouldn’t be the most comfortable day of the year, but it would be manageble. 3 days on the though, are just too much.

So, how to fix Christmas?

As I promissed myself last year, this year I’ll be traveling during the holidays. But it’s not just vacation time, we’ll be visiting my brother-in-law in the USA. I’m looking forward to the trip, but I notice that I am dreading Christmas day itself, I’m probably still a bit traumatized from last years Christmas extravaganza.

The changes

Christmas is a yearly event and I know that I can’t run from it forever. I have to face my deamons and find a way to make Christmas enjoyable for me again. So here are some of the strategies I will follow to make sure future Christmasses become more fun:

1. Limit it to one or two days max.
   By keeping visits a bit shorter we could easily visit both my mom and dad and my mother in law at the same day. This probably doesn’t take care of the too much food problem, but at least it will be just 1 day of too much delicious food.
2. Inviting people to visit us
   I love it when people visit us, I can cook a nice dinner, light up the fireplace and make sure everybody is enjoying her- or himself. I really like being a host and I find it gives me energy to care for others.
   Only problem is that I can’t invite everyone over at the same time because my mom and dad don’t really get along anymore …
3. Go on holidays
   That is the strategy I am following this year. Being in another country makes it easier to say no to Christmas altogether without really hurting someones feelings by not visiting them.
4. Pre-Christmas
   The idea is to spread Christmas out over a longer time period. So instead of visiting the 25th or 26th of december. I could go over a week earlier. This way the whole event isn’t that fatigueing.
5. Just eat less
   Too much of anything is never good, and too much food will make me feel terrible. Difficult things is: food is delicious!
   I guess I just have to be strong and try not to eat as much. To help myself with this I came up with a tactic: Only eat the one thing I like best and only eat 1. Most of the time, several things are served at once. So I just have to pick the thing I like the most in a moderate portion and I’ll be fine.

No humbug for me

While writing this post I realise that I still have quite strong negative feelings around Christmas and I’m a bit sad about that. I really used to enjoy Christmas a lot, but last year apparently was too much. I guess I just have to ease into Christmas again by taking it slow. This year I am covered, so hopefully that heals all the negativity and next year I’ll be able to fully enjoy Christmas again.

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Picture above: Christmas tree and presents at my dad’s place a couple of years ago

I believe it is important to know what makes you happy and what you love to do, because then you can seek those things out and structure your day around them. This is the core of what lifestyle design is about.

When most people think of lifestyle design, they just picture some smuck on a beach drinking cocktails or going on some bizar adventure. Lifestyle design is also only doable by very wealthy people because they don’t have to work. But lifestyle design is so much more, and available for everybody.
Lifestyle design is also not something complicated or difficult, although, it can be difficult depending on your situation and mindset.

For me lifestyle design is about organising your life in such a way that makes you happy on as many fronts as possible; socially, the environment you live in and your daily activities.
You can have big dreams for all or any of these three fronts, but it can start small. You just have to discover: What do you love?
When you discovered that, you can take action and try to structure your life around that.

So, what do you love?

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Picture above: Good food is definitely very important for me and part of my lifestyle design. This is our lunch in a Korean restaurant in Ho Chi Min City, Vietnam.

So why do I want to start blogging again?

One way to make sure that I keep on posting here is to have clear why this is important for me. So here goes:

Helping others by sharing knowledge
I don’t have the illusion that I know everything, but I do know that I love helping others. By sharing my ideas, knowledge and experience on this blog, I hope to inspire others and make them aware of the things I can maybe help them with.

Writing helps me clear my head and helps me make decisions.
I noticed that the last couple of months while writing e-mails to others to ask for help on a subject. By the time I wrote the e-mail and expressed my thoughts it already became clear what I should do.

Creating a log of my life
I love my life, but it’s going so fast! I’m 32 now and I can barely remember how it was 5 years ago. What was I thinking? What was I working on? How did I grow in the person I am now.
Luckily I have some rare insight in those things because of the blogpost on this blog. So I just have to create more posts so that I can look back to the past in the future.

And what is going to be different this time?

Writing in English
Well, one of the most important changes I make to blogging is that I’m going to write in English. This was a hard decision to make, but since I’m putting my focus more and more to an international lifestyle it only makes sense.

Making time for it
Writing a good blogpost takes time, I just have to make time for it. There is a lot of “missed” time during a week, for example when I am on a train or just on a lazy evening. These times would be ideal to write a blogpost, I just have to make it top of mind and not mindlessly go on 9gag.

Ideas Journal
One of the most difficult things about blogging is deciding what you write about and getting inspired. So to counter this, I am already creating an Ideas Journal, a list with cool ideas for future blogpost. So each time I have some time to write something, I just have to look at the list and start writing.

I will try to put up a couple posts a month, but I don’t think I can commit on a certain schedule yet. I just have to see how this will go.

All in all I have to make writing as frictionless as possible, so if you have some tips for this, please let me know!

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Picture above is me trying to figure out which way to go on a gps map on our last hiking trip in the Eiffel in Germany.

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Picture above: Lieve Pietersz Verschuier, the Arrival of King Charles II of England in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, on May 24, 1660. (1665)