Spectator-mode Notepad
Today I had an idea. The idea was to write a book. A reference book of useful information for network and security engineers such as myself.
At times, I wish I had read more.
For many years I’ve been interested in the idea of AI assistants. The idea of having a person who I can write or say something to who can do the chore of googling for me has been something I’ve wanted. I don’t know why. I guess I just liked the idea. I even had some reasonable success in the pre-LLM era with Natural Language Processing libraries in Python, being able to determine the intent of my sentences and, in some occasions, google/search for an answer.
What happened?
In my apparently never ending quest to engage myself in wasting my own time, I was recently inspired to think about a new project. I wanted to make an access control system. But I didn’t want to make a convenient one. Or in fact a useful one at all. I wanted to make the worst, but still completely functional, access control system that I could think of.
It’s easy to get caught up in video game hype. It’s happened to me once or twice in the past couple of years. The Hogwarts game, Baldur’s Gate 3. Hell, I bought a new PC just to play Elden Ring.
Today I want to discuss one of the largest problems facing the world of security. Not an external threat, a malicious actor or some new, ground-breaking malware. Today I want to discuss an internal threat, a problem that comes from within:
I got bored and decided to have a quick browse of my web server’s access logs.
After the disappointment of the first day, I came to the table bright-eyed and bushy tailed for the second day which was much the same. Though it’s not a particularly bad thing that the group is filled with native speakers. This is their country, and it makes sense that natives would comprise the majority of the group. It’s just not what I was expecting.
I tend to prefer to study in English. This is because I work in IT, and English is a generally accepted language used worldwide for any work in this sector. Regardless of the country, company, or the area they serve, people speak English. Except when they’re German, for whatever reason.
I did it!
After breaking everything, I figured a simple way to force the git history back to the last known good commit.
So a reset proved more complicated than expected, as they always seem to with my favourite distro.
The instructions for running Jekyll in Github pages is somehow quite… bad. Following the instructions exactly gives you a barely functioning website, and attempting to change the theme through Githubs theme changer breaks functionality completely.
Ehh, didn’t work. The commits are too convoluted to know exactly where I messed up that made changing the theme impossible.
When I put my blog together, I attempted to screw around with the theme. I don’t know much about Ruby, or Jekyll, or themes. It did not go well. Not even slightly. But after some wrestling, I finally got it working.
Henry David Thoreau is credited with saying “I believe that water is the only drink for a wise man.”
VPNs have always been somewhat annoying for me to configure. Like a lot of people running a homelab, I use a forward facing node with a VPN attached to route traffic through to my internal servers. This requires me to do one of two things:
I’ve been gone.
Recently I replayed Starbound. For those who haven’t heard, there was some considerable controversy regarding Starbound between 2013 and 2017. And then further accusations for the company in 2019.
There’s a lot of controversy about videogames recently. We’ve all seen the issues, games being rated “10/10 100% game of the year” by professional reviewers and getting much lower reviews from the actual players. I want to focus on two instances of this.
I’m something of a recluse. And Covid has done nothing to improve the situation. My wife was away for a business trip over most of the last week.
One of my interests, that I’ve had to ignore over the last year and a half for obvious reasons, is Escape Rooms. They’re like a slice of a video game, transplanted into real life. And I’ve succeeded at most of them that I’ve attempted. I admit. Humbly.
Another underrated classic I enjoy is Moonstone, A Hard Day’s Knight. Not just because of the punny title.
I don’t have much of an alcohol tolerance. I drink rarely, and rarer still are the days that I drink heavily. I find it hard to judge how drunk I have become. So I looked into some sort of “drunkness scale” for reference and found:
For a while now I’ve been annoyed somewhat by Raspberry Pi power supplies.
Audiobooks are a growing genre of entertainment. For those of us who used to read a lot and now find ourselves far too busy to pick up something as lavish as an actual book, they’re simply the most efficient way to keep up a fiction adiction.
Cookies have bothered me for a long time. Okay perhaps not that long. For most of their existence, they sat quietly in the background and I gave them almost no thought.
Masters of Combat for the Sega Master System is a criminally underrated beat ‘em up.
In my old blog I had some mysterious and stupid post about who I was, clamouring about anonymity. It raises a good point, as I don’t think people really need to be tracked as much as they are (and as someone who worked in Digital Marketing for a while, it is way more than you think.)
Okay, solved that issue. Turns out I needed to include the baseurl in the part of the pages that generates the URLs, otherwise it fails.
Some teething issues still occurring. While the site is picking up the posts, the links it is creating to them is not working. I’ll try to figure out why.
One of my favourite things about Jekyll so far is the ability to post straight from my command line. No weird user-interface that posts to DBs. I understand why those exist. My wife has a blog, and she wouldn’t be able to use a CLI to make posts.
I am in process of migrating my blog.
It’s the world I’d like to live in, even if I know it’s impossible. I don’t wish to be tracked. But on occasion, I know I have to put my name next to things. It is unavoidable. The question I ask today is, do we need more than that?
I recently watched the Social Dilemma. I don’t have much to say on that. Not to say it was bad, quite the opposite. Not only was it good, but it was completely correct. Go watch it.
I don’t like Kubernetes. There. I said it. Controversial I know. Given that huge share of news it receives, you’d hardly know there are other container orchestration solutions out there. Personally I find myself wondering why. I don’t think the tool is good enough to warrant such attention. But eager to improve myself, I decided to look into the why. After all, perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps I simply didn’t understand the Kubernetes use-case.
There’s a trend in the world of technology. The magical becomes commonplace remarkably quickly. And each subsequent achievement suffers from diminishing returns. We already had a computer in our bag, why is it impressive to have one in our pocket? Then on our wrist? Who cares?
I understand this is going to be a somewhat divisive topic. Vim is something akin to Marmite. You either love it or you hate it. Only that’s not entirely true. It’s more like a one-sided relationship. Vim is something exciting and unapproachable. You start to work with it. Devote hours and hours of your time to learning its quirks and oddities, and in the end, how are you repaid?
The second thing I want to discuss (if you haven’t read the first blog post, go here) is the actual implementation of reverse proxies to support HTTPS in non HTTP systems. I am using OCM/Compendium as the example, but this applies everywhere that standard HTTP is provided.
Today I am writing a two part blog. I will probably write and publish both blogs today, but people have short attention spans when it comes to reading (but can binge Netflix like a beast) so I am splitting it in half.
I don’t care what the reviews said. I enjoyed Dark Souls 2. That being said, I understand what the reviews complained about. The difficulty peaked relatively early, and remained fairly static right through to the end. An abudance of summons for every single boss fight gave the option to trivialize difficult encounters, which I’m sure some players opted for. It’s not a perfect follow up to Dark Souls. But standing alone, it’s a good game.
Un-dated microblog format.