And now I can shipost on this blog with zero impediments! 😁
Happy holidays, folks!
Migration complete!
Blog
Under Reconstruction!
Still here! Just been really busy with a bunch of stuff.
And I kind of made it less than easy to write quick, fun posts, since this is a static site… and I’m kind of monkeying around with Markdown files. 😅
Now that I’ve put some prior projects to bed, I’m in the middle of writing my own CMS specifically for this site. Not completely from scratch, but it should at least tick all the boxes I want.
See you soon! 🥃
Oh, Twitter’s dead, baby. Hit me up on Mastodon!
I have a big problem.
A Twitter bot problem, to be precise.
Not too long ago, I launched a trio of bots on Twitter. Two of them were those kinds of bots that post a random screenshot from a TV show or movie at some interval (usually every hour).
The first two honored two of my favorite things: The Critic, represented by @TheShermometer. And the world of Max Headroom represented by @20MinutesBot.
At the same time, I released the shoddy source code for the bots under the amazingly clever name of GenericTwitterImagePoster. (I could give it a proper name, I guess, but does it really matter?)
Anyway, earlier this week I launched two more!
- @FifthColumnV, celebrating both 1983’s V: The Original Miniseries, and it’s second half, 1984’s V: The Final Battle. An absolutely fantastic sci-fi series about resistance fighters versus Nazi space lizard invaders that absolutely holds up today. It was really ahead of it’s time. I’m a little obsessed with it. 😉
- And the other, the @JetsonsBot: a bot reposting scenes from the original 1960s and 1980s run of TV’s The Jetsons.
Both bots post every hour. You’re either into this kind of thing, or you’re not, so if it doesn’t sound like fun to you, take a hike, bub!
UPDATE: With the death of Twitter (as we knew it), so too have these bots passed on. RIP.
Goodbye, .xyz… hello Twitter bots!
It’s mostly done.
Almost all references to “Network47.xyz” have been replaced with “Network47.org”. Most things should forward appropriately, including email. I’ll have the domain for years to come, so it’ll never truly be gone…
As much as my beloved “.xyz” domain made me happy (I do love me some X’s and Z’s), it has an unfortunate stigma of being from the wrong side of the digital tracks. Prone to `*.xyz` being blacklisted, and so forth.
It was never a HUGE deal, but I might as well rip the bandage off sooner than later.
Meanwhile, I’ve also taken the time to make some revisions to site layout. Kind of surprised at how slow Bludit releases are, and the current 4.x that’s just going into beta didn’t seem to have features I’m interested in.
Maybe I’ll just fork it for personal use? 🤔
Also meanwhile, over the Thanksgiving week, I launched my first two Twitter bots: @20MinutesBot and @TheShermometer.
The former for the 1980s ABC TV series, Max Headroom, and the latter for The Critic. Both of which are instances of a Python script pumped out on Tuesday that uses the Twitter API to posts random images from a folder of images and metadata every 30 minutes.
It’s simple, but boy is it fun.
Like me!
Eeh, I’m not really that fun.
Gonna Skip Windows 11
Not going to lie: Windows 11 is giving off some major Windows Vista vibes. But I’ve been working hard on not being one of these “it’s different, so I hate it” guys. So I loaded up a copy of it in a VM and gave it a go.
I’ll skip the details, but: holy shit. What a mess. Lots of little issues. The Start menu has been bombed back to the stone age. There’s no organization. It’s simplistic. Too simplistic.
Frankly, I’m not sure where Windows is headed, but as an OS it feels like all they do is constantly layer new things on top of legacy things and never get around to cleaning up the old stuff. And when they do update something, it’s often missing functionality. (We see this behavior in stuff from Google, as well.)
I’ve described the whole sudden push to 11 as feeling like some higher-up guy at Microsoft got fired or quit, and his replacement is trying to make a name for himself, rushing a new product out the door that he can call his own.
I’m sure I could use Windows 11 and adapt to it… but I’m kind of tired of playing this game.
So I’ll keep my Windows partition on Windows 10. It’s good for a couple more years. Maybe Win11 will get it’s act together by then. Maybe in 2025 I’ll be able to organize my apps again instead of just lumping them into a list and being able to ‘favorite’ a couple things.
Meanwhile, I’ve decided to explore Linux again. A large part of what kept me away from full-timing Linux is that I’m a gamer. It’s a large part of my world. And, well, if you play games: you run Windows.
But the Steam Deck kind of changed everything. I’d learned about all the amazing work Valve did with Proton, and a plan started to formulate.
So I grabbed a fresh 1TB SSD and took the plunge on Friday night.
Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.
…it’s Monday now. And other than some rough edges here and there, I’m missing… nothing? Or damned well close to it.
I installed Steam and enabled the Proton stuff. So far both Quake and Borderlands: Pre-Sequel all ran fluidly.
Quake is not the most convincing thing, I admit, considering there are native ports easily within reach, but the new update on Steam is only officially for Windows (maybe Mac?). But it ran without complaint.
I’ll try some more later, but if the Steam Deck compatibility rate is to be believed, very little will NOT run.
Crazy.
Even just plain Wine is doing great — Photoshop is working mostly without a hitch. There’s a couple trivial UI things but it otherwise started up out of the box without any tweaks. Literally wine Photoshop.exe on my mounted Windows drive.
That leaves almost nothing to be desired. Though I did have to reboot to play Far Cry 6, but even that’s just because it was running through the Ubisoft launcher — maybe there’s a way around it. And at this point, I believe it.
…
My prior attempts at running Linux as a daily driver have been met with frustration and sacrifice, but in 2021? I’m not feeling that anymore. I feel like the Linux desktop has finally arrived. For me, at least.
2023 Update: Best move I ever made. Long live Linux. Fuck Windows.
Zyxx Transmissions Decoded
A friend introduced me to Mission to Zyxx — an absolutely hysterical improvised sci-fi comedy podcast. It’s in it’s fifth season, currently, as we close in on the end of 2021. I’ve JUST hit the second season finale as I play catch up.
One of the many (many!) charms of Zyxx is how it weaves the show’s sponsors into the actual story, however lightly. I tend to find pretty much any advertising incredibly abrasive, even at the best of times. But hawking junk in-universe as various character’s “side hustles”… well, it had me in awe of just how brilliant that was.
One of the advertisers is a sponsor not uncommon to internet media: Squarespace. And to promote them, the folks behind the show created a website — therebellion.space — filled with various bits of propaganda related to The Rebellion — currently the good guys (…?) in a Star Wars “Rebel vs. The Empire”-style dichotomy. (The idea being to show how easy it was to setup a site through them, of course.)
On that site are a number of “intercepted transmissions“… I searched around a bit and was very surprised to see nobody really digging into them. That seems unlikely to me, but here we are.
So let’s go through all five of them (as of this writing) and see what we’ve got…
** BIG SPOILERS AHEAD! **
The First Message
A misdirect right out of the gate — below an inline audio clip lies a series of binary digits barely visible, but you can highlight them with your cursor… (“01010100 01101000…”, etc)
Tools to convert binary into ASCII are a dime a dozen, of course, and inside the ones and zeroes lies the message…
This isn't the encrypted message. Of course we know how to translate binary; we have more droids here than we know what to do with. Honestly, if you're looking for a good B-Class recon unit, we'll give a price well below gray book.
…well, fair enough.
The REAL message, STA#_34R5-Transmission-Log-CYCLE11040499080899-4420-Ra, is an audio clip containing a curious series of blips and bleeps.
You’d be forgiven for thinking you can JUST make out something. But that’s your brain jucking with you. Loading the audio up in Audacity and checking out the spectrogram view reveals…
…a secret message! The full text reads…
* * RACHEL: WATCH YOUR CARAPACE, THERE IS A TRAITOR AMONGST US! I FEEL IT IN MY CLAWS. THEIR POWER IS GROWING. TRUST NO ONE. - CHANDLER * *The Second Message
This one might be my favorite — it contains two different audio files.
Each one, by themselves, sounds like something screamed over a PA speaker in a robot’s version of Hell…
BUT! If you play them both at the same time…
…a voice!
“Your Excellency, it is I, Lieutenant Bordoff. I bow, humbly, before Your Wackness with what I hope is most pleasing news. Zwog Tambouie reports that your order is ready: yes, the device is complete! And he assures us that no one else among The Council has an inkling of it’s existence. Your servant, signing off. […mumbling…]“
The Third Message
This time around, they’ve intercepted an image transmission. Initially, it looks like a bunch of noise…
However, if you bisect the image in half at the red line (A) and place that half OVER the top half (B) with — I think it was a ‘difference’ filter — you end up with a inverted image (C):
On it’s “Print is the Future“-brand bonded stationary, it reads:
Beware! Red plus white equals destruction!
Ominous.
The Fourth Message
The next transmission looks simply like a star field. Maybe some poor jucker’s vacation photo from Hendron IV and they lost their camera?
Not quite. ZOOM, ENHANCE:
There are several ways to draw out these hidden pixels, but just cranking the gamma is is enough. The hidden text reads:
Your Excellency: There are many in the rebellion who eagerly await your rise to power. I shall gladly come to your aid if ever the need arises. Yours, Grand Plutt Sunblighter.
The Fifth Message
The final message (as of October 2021 at least) has multiple steps.
First, an 8×22 monochrome image — too small for Rebellion codebreakers to crack! But no match for our tools — ZOOM BUT DON’T ENHANCE:
It’s worth noting that these black and white pixels are 8 across — a big clue that this is binary. (Hey wait a minute, weren’t they just boasting about their binary cracking skills? 😏)
When we break it down into 22 binary groups:
01101000
01110100
01110100
01110000
01110011
00111010
00101111
00101111
01100010
01101001
01110100
00101110
01101100
01111001
00101111
00110010
01111000
01101110
00110011
01100001
01010111
01100101…and then feed that into your favorite tool we get a bit.ly-shortened URL leading to a Dropbox account sharing an MP3 audio file…
The clip contains a voice that’s clearly speaking in reverse, so let’s load it into Audacity and spin that sucker around, and…
OH… OH CRAP:
Hey Bordoff!
Got the business cards and I got to say: I am pretty excited to see “Emperor” on them. Me! Little ol’ me! Wow-ee! I can’t wait to start handing ’em out.
Uh, oh, circling back onto kind of our master plan… I cannot wait to kill the rest of the Council of Seven and impose my will upon the entire galactic entity.
Anywho…i just want to say I’m so glad about your participation in this. I will not kill you unless you prove unuseful to me. And then, well, by golly, I probably will.
Oop! Okay, Linda is callin’. I have to get to dinner.
But uh, hey: great chattin’ with ya, and uh, yeah, let’s just touch base later. See how it all turns out.
Alrighty, bye bye.
As I sit here at the end of Season 2, not all of this clicks yet. So it doesn’t feel like too huge a spoiler.
Besides, as they say, it’s just a show. You should really just relax. 😉
One Blog Too Many
Decided I needed to have a place for random, dumb junk. And I’ll keep BytesTemplar.com specific to projects and coding.
I’ve taken this opportunity to explore other flat-file CMS..es…CMSes… (🤔)
Sluggish Gravy
I migrated BT.com from WordPress to Grav at the start of the year. It’s not bad, and at the time I was quite pleased with it… until I uploaded it to my shared Dreamhost account. Despite not using MySQL, and despite being a simple ‘drop in and go’ system, it still had these absolutely weird moments of slowness. Pages would take 3-5 seconds to load. Same for the admin.
This didn’t happen on my development VM. It was a bit of a surprise.
I spent hours trying to debug the issue, but eventually I had to just concede that it was some mysterious Dreamhost magic getting in the way, and let it be.
Woof
So, this week I took a look at some others, and this time I’d install it on Dreamhost first to see how it performs. And, long story shorter: Bludit did the job. Fast, uses a clean WYSIWYG editor, but you can also flip over to Markdown. Feels mostly solid, and has a decent backup plugin.
The downsides are that there isn’t really an easy to use plugin/theme system. And one of the plugins is broken so badly that it ate a lengthy post I’d written because I saved without a post title… Thankfully it’s a completely unnecessary one that I quickly jettisoned once I realized it was a bug in the plugin, not the CMS.
Onward
So, got all this setup in an evening. Manually moved over some goofier posts from BT.com.
I feel like I’m spreading my interests thin — BT for generic development? This for random junk? Another blog (elsewhere) for infosec?
I don’t know what the hell I’m thinking. I need to clean this up and unify.
The Worm Is Back!
NASA says the worm is back!
The original NASA insignia is one of the most powerful symbols in the world. A bold, patriotic red chevron wing piercing a blue sphere, representing a planet, with white stars, and an orbiting spacecraft. Today, we know it as “the meatball”. However, with 1970’s technology, it was a difficult icon to reproduce, print, and many people considered it a complicated metaphor in what was considered, then, a modern aerospace era.
Enter a cleaner, sleeker design born of the Federal Design Improvement Program and officially introduced in 1975. It featured a simple, red unique type style of the word NASA. The world knew it as “the worm”. Created by the firm of Danne & Blackburn, the logo was honored in 1984 by President Reagan for its simplistic, yet innovative design.
NASA was able to thrive with multiple graphic designs. There was a place for both the meatball and the worm. However, in 1992, the 1970s brand was retired – except on clothing and other souvenir items – in favor of the original late 1950s graphic.
Until today.
The worm is back. And just in time to mark the return of human spaceflight on American rockets from American soil.
This excites me to no end!
Now, okay, I’ll admit, I’m probably biased towards the ‘worm’ design because it’s the one I grew up with. And I know “the meatball” — the older style logo — has just as many fans. Enough to bring it back in the 90s.
I never understood that roll back.
NASA! Space! The Future!!
The “worm”, to me, embodies that spirit. It’s a simple, yet futuristic logo. It used to fill my mind with amazing visions back then.
When I see the “meatball”, I think… backwards. Old. A lack of progress. Quaint sci-fi rocket ships. Black and white footage. Pre-moon landing era.
But! I know the “meatball” means a great deal to other people, too. So I thought, why not merge them? Put the “worm” on top of the “meatball”? Best of both worlds!
And, as usual, that means it’s already been done.😉
Check out the “New Heritage” design:
Wow!
I don’t know who the creator is that did the edit (hit me on Twitter if you know and I’ll update this), but it’s exactly what I’d imagined. This fusion would be perfection to me. It pays tribute to the past, while integrating the future.
But, in the meantime, I’m going to giggle excitedly to myself now that they’re moving… back to the future. 😉
Reincarnation
I don’t have a link to it, but I remember reading about how some people essentially “reinvent” themselves multiple times over the course of their lives. They are constantly learning new things and switch careers to some other focus every decade or so, in an attempt to live a rich, varied life free of stagnation.
An interesting idea, if you can pull it off. After all, typically, people are married and have a family to take care of. And if not for a family, one’s own finances need to be secure.
Now, I’m not planning on quitting my job any time soon, mind you (I love it quite a bit), but I think the basic idea could at least be applied to one’s hobbies…
Since I was in high school in the 90s, I’ve always had a thick interest in game development. Skipping past the boring self-analysis, I came close to doing it professionally a couple times in the last decade, but otherwise it’s mostly stayed a hobby. But it was one I actively participated in during my off hours… I could cite various reasons, but suffice it to say that despite my dreams of ‘going pro’, it never took off.
Other, recent events have soured the milk on game development even further. It was probably for the best, though. All it ever did was remind me of unfinished projects, and planning for a future that wasn’t going to exist. Never mind the increasing number of horror stories from inside the industry, as people begin to feel safe about opening up about corporate abuse and general misery.
So, over the last couple months I’ve decided to pack up my game development hobby and put it into a little box in the closet. Sure, I’ll still keep tabs on industry news and people’s fun indie projects and stuff, but it’s no longer a primary interest.
What will fill the void?
Well, over the last couple years I’ve been, off and on, attending the B-Sides information security conferences along the east coast. I always had fun, but felt a bit weird going to them. It wasn’t my field. I felt like an outsider, even though it was stuff I could potentially apply to my day job. But as time went on, the wheels of further interest started turning…
Network security has always been a major weak point in my computer education. Compiler internals, hardware, software development? Sure, I love that stuff. But network administration? Server security? Subnet masks? OSI layers? I’ve had, more or less, only a scattered, surface level understanding. (No worries — I had a good handle on what to do, and what not to do, when it comes to security when working on software projects, so no worries there at least …mostly. I mean, as far as I know. Oh god, now I’m paranoid.)
So, I’ve been taking courses. I’m going all-in on educating myself about all of it. Taking part in CTF challenges. Pentesting my own internal network. Breaking into vulnerable virtual machines. (Already taught me a ton about WordPress security. Cough.) And I’ve been taking extensive notes as I go.
And you know what? I’m addicted. This is seriously fulfilling stuff. And my interest has only increased the further in I get. It’s like an infinite box of puzzles that keeps my brain active.
So now I have a primary hobby that is not only good for me, good for helping others, but also helps my day job.
I don’t want to say it’s goodbye forever to game development, but it’s going to be a long time, if ever, before that flame is reignited. And hey, maybe I’ll write up some more educational stuff here and there to help others, like me, along the way. I’d be down for that. 😎
This, of course, applies to almost everything divisive…
Surely there’s a balance between the suffocation of extreme political correctness and being a crude, self-important jerk who lacks compassion.
Finding that balance requires a nimble nuance few seem willing to engage the issues with. It’s either all or nothing, whichever way you happen to swing.
And the sheer aggressive, pigheadedness of the majority of the opposing side (whichever it is), and the strong desire to throw a wrench in their mechanisms, all but forever guarantees a wide gulf between ideologies.
