Now, let me just preface this with a disclaimer: 
 
 
 
 … and get used to this puppo, as you may see this a few more times in this post :’). 
 In light of continuing my bumbling foray into the hardware hacking landscape, I bought a bottom-of-the-line $10 
 TP-Link TL-841N(EU) router off a random fellow on Facebook Marketplace, in a thrilling , high-stakes deal…

 recently i’ve been diving into the rather intimidating but endlessly fascinating world of hardware hacking, and after a few aliexpress orders and bad financial decisions, I now have some of the tools required to start to poke around under the physical and digital hoods of electronic devices. 
 and why not start with my battle-tested, age-old Telstra Gen 2 “Smart Modem”?…

 this all started when my friend gave me a surprise care package at 8:11pm on a Thursday evening while i was practicing soldering in their garage, after I’d had an exceedingly bad mental health day. 
 
 “here’s a lil usb module. you should make it into a rubber ducky” 
 
 
 
 A Digispark USB/microcontroller Module 
 
 now, i didn’t…

 for those who occupy a cherished space alongside me in this wibbly wobbly plane we exist in. 
 
 vira (the mystical) who knew that someone who you met, face down on a table in a first year elective class would come to mean so much? 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 email smooth (the pepsi man) how many instruments can one man play? 
 
…

 it all began with a brilliant video released by the venerable 
 Dammit Jeff - 
 How to ACTUALLY quit spotify ! A fairly engaging introduction into the weird and wonderfully rewarding world of reclaiming ownership over our digital media, but much of what i already knew… until 
 the last 6 minutes . 
 Discoverability. the golden bullet to the self-hosting revolution. the…

 a while ago, i installed custom firmware (CFW) to my 3DS to play modded & emulated games & ROMs, following a number of 
 excellent guides on YouTube and the incredible project that is the 
 3DS.hacks wiki . 
 now, aside from the fact i’ve spent more time doing all of this than actually playing anything (which is much moreso a problem with me and NOT the process - it can be…

 My most recent endeavour: transforming my cute lil second-hand Panasonic LetsNote CF-SX2 into a retro, Windows-XP -era (because my childhood absolutely demands it) Linux media ripping and burning machine! 
 
 
 OS of choice: 
 FreeXP (Q4OS, debian-based distro) Ensure to grab the - 
 FreeXP live CD image for the retro windows goodness! 
 
 Flash to USB drive with…

 i am what some might consider a “camera person” . 
 
 5/5/26 film photo dump from last few months 
 
 
 
 23/11/2025 captured - on film, this time — by the ever-lovely vira ! 
 
 
 21/12/2024 (rediscovered 7/2/2026) a bit of a blast from the past, as i’ve just rediscovered these, but wanted to pop them at the top of the feed to reflect…
After spinning up a new unprivileged Proxmox LXC with an installed (but not yet configured) Tailscale node, using something like a PVE helper script, you may want to turn it into a 
 subnet router to access your internal LAN devices remotely. Now… how did I do this again? 
 Full disclaimer: this is nothing spectacularly new, but rather just a conglomerate of the collected…
Recently, I ran into issues getting certain Steam games running when installed to an NTFS internal SSD that I’d formatted to share across my dual boot Arch Linux and Windows 11 machine. They would hang on boot after pressing Play , and occasionally produce the following Steam log (stored in my home directory, ~ ). 
 
 TIP: To generate live Steam logs to assist with troublehooting,…
ahhh, ly . how you betrayed me. 
 The TLDR; + quickfix After a (mostly silent) change in how ly interacts with systemd and its associated services, the 
 following commit was added to the readme to clarify a new tweak when enabling interactions between ly and any other services (for me, that was getty ) attempting to use the default tty service spawned at login. This was ( importantly )…
Side note: yes, I know that very capable and feature-rich tools like 
 snapper and 
 timeshift exist that can achieve similar outcomes. However, this is a small, homebrew alternative solution that i’ve chosen to go with out of user preference, and so your mileage and needs may vary :3 ~ 
 Using the following script, you can create and manage periodic btrfs snapshots of the /home…

 Inspired by the following article (applies to OpenBSD) : 
 Be your own privacy respecting (meta)search engine with SearXNG! 
 
 Recently, I stumbled across the above article detailing how to set up and configure the Metasearch Engine 
 SearXNG , a choice & 
 privacy-focused alternative to singular, centralised major search engines like Google or Bing. 
 SearXNG does…

 i do life. sometimes, at least. allegedly . . . 
 
 05/05/2025 film dump from last few months! 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 03/05/2025 film dump from last few months! 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 05/10/2025 captured on digicam by the ever-lovely vira on her Canon PowerShot A20: 
…
now, i’d like to preface this all by saying: this is, by all measures, absolute madness. 
 the biggest thing that i’ve learnt throughout this entire process (aside from how to speedrun de-bloating & installing windows and, to some extent, also installing linux systems) is that the “perfect” system is one that you ACTUALLY USE." 
 and I regret to say that, after…

 as noted in my 
 caramel slice entry 109 , i have recently discovered the tool 
 OpenCamera , which is an alternative camera app that i’ve been using to take purposefully-downscaled & compressed .jpeg photos. 
 i’ve been finding it a beautiful lens through which to view snippets of everyday life, and thought I’d share a growing collection of my favourites below.…
I encountered some issues downloading complete albums due to some songs being age-restricted because they, GOD FORBID , may have had the f-word (and other OBSCENITIES) in their titles… so here’s my workaround for an automated solution that simplifies this: 
 spotdl download URLHERE --format opus --cookie-file ~/Documents/SpotifyRips/cookies.txt --bitrate disable --audio…
Please note: this is a downloading service that uses public spotify playlist information to download songs from YOUTUBE MUSIC, which is a service that I PAY FOR with a YOUTUBE PREMIUM SUBSCRIPTION. Please understand the intentions behind using this tool, and adjust your use accordingly. Above all, ensure that you support the original artists that bring media you value to your life. 
 
…
For a number of reasons (notably… well, fuck streaming services and how they treat artists & their customers alike), I have begun to collect & self host my music library, in an attempt to Ditch Spotify Completely and switch to spending the equivalent amount of money that I’d line their pockets with a year for actually supporting artists through buying merch, concert tickets, as well…
Here’s a small tutorial to satisfy your Peak Paranoia Needs: installing the kiwix server to “self host the internet (well, manuals & documentation &… wikipedia) before it’s TOO LATE!11!1!!!” with a custom TrueNAS app via YAML ( TrueNAS SCALE Fangtooth 25.04.01 ). 
 Inspo vids: 
 
 Wikipedia Offline - IT’S SO EASY! 
 
 self-host the INTERNET!…
Installing the super cool 
 glance homepage within a custom TrueNAS app ( TrueNAS SCALE Fangtooth 25.04.01 ) via YAML . 
 
 Steps: 
 
 Within the TrueNAS GUI , create a dataset glance , with child datasets (or folders via the CLI, just make sure permissions are set so apps user can access it) of config and assets . 
 
 
 Using the TrueNAS CLI to be safe, cd into the…
Ahhh, nvidia . Don’t we just love to hate you. 
 Here’s a small little entry on a new little miniseries I’m going to call “Arch tidbits”, where I post small snippet-posts of things that I’ve learnt from a combination of 
 Arch Wiki -surfing , troubleshooting and tears (aka anything where there isn’t a “complete” guide available…
Just a smol lil guide for myself (that will be periodically updated over time as i return to the self-imposed joys of small-scale mc server admin :3) to set up a minecraft server from scratch, as I cannot count the number of times I’ve had to re-learn this when I migrate from server to server . 
 I’ve opted for services that should (for the most part) be supported long-term and are…
A while ago, my friend had played around with installing 
 Arch linux , and I warned her against choosing it as an OS for dual-booting due to how notoriously difficult…. Windows can be when playing with other OS’s rudely occupying its boot drive… let alone one that’s as DIY as Arch (comparatively) for the install, and a rolling release model lending to it being…
Below lays out my adventures setting up syslog-ng as a pfSense package to get pfSense (&/or Suricata - the same process can be applied, see 
 the very helpful guide here ) logs into a Splunk (Cloud) instance! 
 
 Pre-requisites: 
 Change the logging format on pfSense from the default BSD log message format to the syslog (RFC5424) format . Enables extra info like hostname, etc. to…
The constitutes as the first of (perhaps a few) posts within which I plan to document the highlights/learnings of my foray into the mythical, wonderous world of Powershell (7) , alongside the troubles and toils that I will (inevitably) encounter on the way there. 
 I’ll try and keep the depiction of said inevitable toils as brief and to myself as possible; however, containing such a…
Finished Setup - a Sneak Peak: 
 Appealing? Disgusting? Well, you can completely change it, and customise to your heart’s content - so let’s dive into the basics, from scratch ! 
 
 One of these days, I’ll tame the ferociously verbose beast and learn how to properly use Powershell , the long-feared and disgusted language by many a *nix user… but, unfortunately,…
Running within proxmox LXC (so can be notified even if TrueNAS fails): 
 
 On your Proxmox LXC , install docker-compose and create a new directory with a docker-compose.yml : 
 
 services :
 gotify :
 image : gotify/server 
 ports :
 - 8081 : 80 
 environment :
 GOTIFY_DEFAULTUSER_PASS : 'theGOAT3fy' 
 volumes :
 - './gotify_data:/app/data' 
 #…

 
 partying is something that i rarely do, but when i do, it is typically with a number of cool folk and beverages . . . 
 behold: some ephemeral moments. 
 12/07/2025 captured on film by a brilliant soul by the name of sage . 
 find more of their work (photos, essays, thoughts) @ their website 
 here . 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
…
Recently, I’ve been playing with 
 Wazuh , the “Unified Open Source XDR and SIEM .”* My thoughts on the actual platform are still in a state of active formulation as I deploy and test the various capabilities… but all things considered, it’s a pretty cool product and concept in general. 
 In any case - after running the various install commands, I thought it…
.dotfiles or… (.)²files? 
 - Using Git + Github, & tracking dotfiles with an alias. 
 … as mentioned on the 
 ever-wise Arch Wiki . 
 
 # 1. Create a bare Git repo to track dotfiles 
 git init --bare ~/.dotfiles
 
 # 2. Create an alias to simplify dotfiles management. 
 # Tells (/usr/bin/git) to link the git alias directory you just created to your…
Smol Objective: Revisiting branch ing, checkout ’s, and stash ing! 
 Via: creating a new local branch to save recent experimental changes on, publishing the branch to a remote Github repository, and then switching back to the functional, remote main branch locally. Oh, and stashing changes as I switch between the two to compare. 
 - Branching & Checkouts # Check the current status…

 Here lies the ramblings of a madwoman; bumbling her way around in the darkness in an attempt to understand the wide world of websec… 
 
 … in the absolute broadest of strokes: 
 Token-based ( JWT ): 
 
 Authentication state is stored on the client (local/session storage) in the form of a token . 
 
 
 Session-based: 
 
 Authentication…
just a lil guide for my future self when i inevitably forget this again (and it’s probably still wrong oops-) 
 - Steps: - Find the commit you want to revert to & copy its hash: 
 - Return to your open project: for me, i was working with a locally-cloned copy in VScode, connected to the remote repo’s main branch, and was up to date with all of the changes made.
and now - to the story of how this blog was born! 
 (it’s nothing special, but I thought I’d document it for myself when i inevitably forget how i did it in the future, as well as any other wandering lost souls out there!) 
 
 i’ve been meaning to re-jig my tech blog for a while now. for the last year and a bit, I experimented with the static site generator (SSG)…

 debian 12 container install inside proxmox 
 `sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y 
 network settings: If your router supports subnets/VLANs, connect this to the isolated VLAN. within proxmox, assign static IP not in use and point to your router’s gateway.![[Screenshot 2024-07-08 at 8.40.32 PM.png]] 
 install nginx on debian - sudo apt install nginx -y 
 create a file…
burn it all down… or? Ahh, a tale born from the first time that I dipped my toes into the weird, wide and wonderful world of distro-hopping. Because sometimes, instead of building it all from scratch again (like so many of us are fond of doing), bringing your old config, notes of a previous home, with you is desirable. Because don’t lie - we won’t get those hours spent tweaking…
- so, how did we get here? :see_no_evil: 
 git stores all historical changes to a repo in a PACK file inside the hidden .git folder. This allows restoration of previous repo states in the future. 
 However, if you upload files like binaries, photos or videos, this file gets VERY large, even if you delete them in a future commit. 
 - enter: git-filter-repo Luckily a tool exists called…

 DECEMBER, 2023: a (large) trip with a dear group of uni friends, an amalgamation of utter chaos and love: 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 


 NOVEMBER, 2023: some of the most blissful and simultaneously heartwrenching moments in my recent memory: 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Hi all! After a long and troublesome battle against the gods of networking and the intricacies of pfSense, I have
finally developed a process (that I understand, at least) for initialising an ETHX port to pass VLAN traffic that is
tagged externally by a switching device (in my case, a 
 USW-PRO 48PoE UniFi managed
switch ). 
 In the hope that this can be of use to others out…

 … & pulling files from an external SSD &/or an internal HDD. Yes, this was… interesting. 
 
 - So… why did I write this? My primary objective was to setup a home lab, which could do the following things: 
 
 
 run LXCs of various linux distros (Kali via external install, and CentOS via Proxmox template) [done] 
 
 
 run a Plex Media…

 ~ Using 
 TP-Link TL-WN722N ~ 
 
 The GUI way of adding a USB device to a Proxmox VM didn’t work for me when using a USB network adapter (the device id was not showing up when trying to add to the VM via the GUI), so here is a simple manual workaround. 
 - Steps: 
 
 Plug in your desired USB device into the physical machine you’re running Proxmox on. 
…

 Here is a little guide from a nightmare I encountered whilst trying to perform a maintenance update on a pfSense router… I hope my pain and suffering can help someone else :’). 
 
 DO NOT MAKE MY MISTAKE - CREATE A BACKUP FOR YOUR PFSENSE SETTINGS AND STORE IT LOCALLY BEFORE UPDATING!!!! . 
 
 
 pfSense DOES create a backup of settings before updating, but…

 Here’s a quick little rabbit-hole of upgrading ESXi clients, and a crash course on TPMs and their equivalents! 💛 
 
 - TPM/fTPM/Intel PTT Rundown 
 Trusted Platform Module - a secure crypto-processor that generates, stores, and limits the use of cryptographic keys required to access system files!!!!! 
 (reference) . 
 
 The traditional TPM is a physical…
- Pre-requisites: 
 
 Have a working Splunk instance (Splunk Enterprise, in my case) to connect to. There are plenty of tuts for this online. 
 
 
 Have installed a universal forwarder on the endpoint that you want to monitor (see here, an excellent post which will get you most of the way through setting up Splunk to analyse Suricata & pfSense logs) 
 
 
 
…
much like Atlas; struggling under the weight of an imposter syndrome that will (allegedly) never cease. 
 > current status: drowning in a lake of what some might call 'existentialism' and .exe ` s
 > you can (hopefully) find me… 
 
 (…but then again, why would you want to?)