Hey friends! This is a tough one to write. My dad passed away on Friday, and instead of the hacker-y tech episode I had planned, I pivoted to something more personal — another installment of our "Securing Your Family During and After a Disaster" series. I talk pretty raw and transparently today about loss, grief, and the practical stuff that makes a hard situation just a little less hard. Fair warning: it's about death and dying, so if that's not where your head is today, it's totally okay to duck out – we'll catch you next week.

Here's what I cover:

• My dad's last day — He spent Thursday doing all his favorite things: chainsaws, ATVs, trap-shooting, mowing, and weed-whipping. Then Chinese food with the family and marveling at modern video games for the first time since the Atari 5200. It was, by all accounts, a perfect day for him.
• How we found out — My son Cameron, who's finishing up paramedic school, was visiting and sprung into EMT mode when my dad was found unresponsive Friday morning. He did CPR for 10 straight minutes — on his grandpa, who was his favorite person in the world. That's the stuff that's going to stay with Cam (and me) for a long time.
• Getting some closure — Cameron had the presence of mind to ask the paramedics to leave my dad in place so I could have a few minutes with him when we arrived. That was both devastating and, in its own way, healing.
• Why pre-planning your funeral is a gift to your family — My parents had nearly everything already picked out: the pastor, Bible verses, music, the military honors ceremony, photos for the display board, and even a time limit on service length (45 minutes and no more!). My dad had pre-written his own obituary. When we sat down with the funeral home, the heavy lifting was already done — and that was a genuine gift to all of us in an incredibly hard moment.
• Storyworth — seriously, do this — Years ago we signed my dad up for Storyworth, a service that sends your loved one a weekly question via email (things like "What's your earliest childhood memory?" or "Do you have any regrets?") and compiles their answers into a hardcover book. It runs about $100. Reading that book the last few nights has been incredibly comforting — including finding out my dad started smoking at age 8 using used cigarette butts rolled in toilet paper. Gross!
• Get your end-of-life wishes in writing — My wife's mom had verbally told us she wanted to be cremated, but it wasn't documented, and other family members made a different call. My dad put "cremation" right in his paperwork, no ambiguity. My recommendation: have this conversation with your loved ones, write their wishes down and make them official.
• Funeral home "upsell" moment — I had no idea there were apparently 627 ways to incorporate your loved one's remains into keepsakes — pendants, rings, necklaces with fingerprints, biodegradable urns for water scattering, etc. Some family members were very into this. I was not quite ready to turn my dad into an Atari cartridge, but your mileage may vary.
• On grief itself — Everybody handles it differently, at different speeds and intensities. My approach is to head straight into it rather than put on a happy face and deal with unprocessed grief years later. I encourage everyone — especially the kids — to not hold back. Ask the questions. Tell the stories. Cry if you need to. Give each other grace.
• Coming up next week — Back to pentesting content! I'll share details on a new lab from the folks who brought us Game of Active Directory, and I'm getting back on the CARTP (Certified Azure Red Team Professional) horse. I'm also tentatively eyeing the third Thursday of July for an unedited livestream of owning Ninja Hacker Academy from start to finish — Kali setup, tools, Mythic C2, BallisKit obfuscation, the whole thing. More details to come.

If you're the thoughts, prayers, and/or good vibes type, I'd really appreciate you sending some my family's way over the next few weeks.

Hello friends! It's been over a year since we did a dedicated mental health episode, so today I'm doing a big catch-up and running through my 7-point plan for being a more mentally secure me. None of this is professional medical advice (I am most definitely not a doctor or therapist — well, actually, I am in therapy, but that's tip #5), so take what's useful and leave what isn't. Terms and conditions apply.

Here's my current mental health toolkit:

• Drink a ton of water — I try to chug a full Yeti thermos before my morning mint hot cocoa, then keep it going throughout the day. I taper off around dinnertime to minimize, uh, nighttime tinkle stops. Science agrees this does good things for your brain.
• Brick your phone — I've been using a little Bluetooth device called Brick that hooks into your phone's screen time features so you can block distracting apps on demand or on a schedule. I've got a "Brian Needs Sleepy" timer set for 9 p.m. every night — pretty much everything except the clock app goes dark. Outlook, Gmail, all the socials — gone. It's not revolutionary advice, but it turns out doing what people have been telling you to do for years actually works.
• Get enough sleep — Directly related to the Brick. Phone goes dark at 9 p.m., I yap with Mrs. 7 or we watch a show, and by 10:30 p.m. my peepers are drooping. I feel more refreshed and less anxiety-ridden during the day.
• Supplements — I'm not here to hawk some magic elixir with 47 mystery ingredients. What I'm currently trying is Nello Supercalm — a powder you mix into water. It's got magnesium glycinate, L-theanine, vitamin D3, and ashwagandha. I thought it was placebo at first, but kept it up for a week and noticed a legit mood/pep boost. Your mileage may vary, but it's doing something for me.
• Therapy — I've been in therapy since 2019 when my house burned down (link to those episodes here if you want to get thoroughly bummed out). If I could go back, I'd have started way earlier. The biggest benefit for me isn't some parade of uplifting affirmations — it's having a neutral third party with no stake in my life help me see situations from different angles and cut myself some slack.
• Take care of the TMJ — A few years back I started getting tinnitus bad. ENTs were basically like "yep, try not to think about it" — super helpful, guys. Eventually a jaw specialist found an irregularity on the left side of my jaw and fitted me with a heavy-duty custom mouth guard. That alone made a monumental difference in the ear ringing. But I also picked up a TMJ Pen on a chiropractor's recommendation — it's a 3D-printed vibrating/heated massager specifically designed for jaw muscles. Looks exactly like a vape (fun times at the airport), but it's been worth every penny of its ~$200 price tag. Between the mouth guard and the TMJ Pen, I wake up feeling way less like I survived a Saving Private Ryan scene.
• Forced fun — After a full work day plus all the dad/house stuff, my go-to is to be a blob on the couch. Nothing wrong with that sometimes. But I've found that the things that actually recharge me — like singing and playing guitar — require a little push to get started. So tip #7 is basically a note to future tired Brian: go downstairs, plug in the guitar, and start playing. You'll be glad you did.

Got mental health tips that work for you? I'd genuinely love to hear them — this is the kind of conversation I want to be two-way. Find me and all things 7MS at 7MinSec.com, our Substack at 7MinSec.club, and our constantly growing pentesting wiki at 7MinSec.wiki.

Hello friends! I've been on a bit of an AI agent journey lately, and today I'm sharing my experience ditching OpenClaw and going all-in on Hermes — a self-hosted AI agent built by Nous Research. A Network Chuck video sold me on it, I wiped my Mac Mini (again), and baby's first Hermes adventure began!

Here's what we get into today:

• Why I left OpenClaw — After getting the Mac Mini set up, OpenClaw left me feeling pretty meh: burning through API requests, random mid-conversation shutdowns, and a marketplace where the top listings were flagged as "potentially malicious." Hard pass.
• Network Chuck's five reasons Hermes rocks — His video summarized why Hermes stands out: (1) Nous Research has serious open source model cred predating OpenClaw, (2) more flexible persistent memory via markdown files + optional Honcho integration for building a profile of you over time, (3) a mission around humanistic and democratic AI, (4) a self-improvement loop where it writes its own skills after figuring things out, and (5) it just doesn't break — it feels like a product, not a project.
• The install — I used Claude to build a Mac Mini install guide from the Network Chuck transcript, and had Hermes up and running in about 15 minutes (one small Ollama hiccup aside). The install wizard lets you choose cloud models like Claude or ChatGPT, or go fully local with something like Gemma — I'm planning a hybrid setup with two Telegram bots.
• First real-world use: sitting in a truck running errands — With Hermes running on the Mac Mini and connected via Telegram, I asked it what it could do. It suggested Uptime Kuma for LAN monitoring — weirdly well-timed since I'd just been thinking about flaky IoT devices. I said "go install it," and it did — narrating its own troubleshooting out loud the whole time like a little robot intern.
• Remote access and Home Assistant — Had it install Home Assistant for smarthome control too, with plans to wire up TwinGate for remote access (it had a TailScale skill ready to fire in about two seconds, but I'm trying to keep VPN services consolidated).
• Daily digest via email — Hooked Hermes into a dedicated Gmail account and set up a 6 a.m. cron job that sends me a personalized morning digest: weather for my watched locations, recent breach/CVE news from select sites, and a summary of my favorite pentesting-focused Mastodon accounts. Needs tuning, but the first digest landed this morning and it's really good!
• The privacy angle — The real long-term win I see here is a hybrid model: feed raw, unsanitized pentest data to a local private model, let it analyze and sanitize, then hand off the clean version to a cloud model for deeper insight. Best of both worlds without the data exposure anxiety.

Check out the Network Chuck video that started it all, and as always, if you're doing cool AI + security stuff, I'd love to hear about it. Find our pentesting services and training at 7MinSec.com, pentesting tips and scripts at 7MinSec.wiki, and if you want to support the show, head over to 7MinSec.club.