My blog about computers
It's been a few years since I posted a blogpost. It's time to do so again, good ol' "screaming into the void" as they say. But something changed. This time, I scream not into the void, but into a churning mess of scraper bots, eager to slurp up human written content so that it may be digested in a long pipeline of training data intended for the newest hype-technology: generative AI.…
I recently got myself a Thinkpad Z13 Gen2 with an AMD 7840u CPU. It also comes with an integrated GPU (Radeon 780) which packs quite a punch for an iGPU. All in all, I am very happy with this system. I use it daily and have no complaints about the performance at all (there's still the post I want to write about the eGPU setup I am using... any day now!). What isn't so great, though, is…
CORS is one of those things that I think are needed, important, and annoying at the same time. I am happy it exists, because it protects against a certain class of attacks where a website can "pretend" to be you and request third-party resources in your name. But it's also a bit annoying, specially when things that should work, don't. This blog post is short, but if it helps a single…
I run quite a few services for friends and family. At some point, I will write a blog post about this, but today I want to write about a problem I have been having and how I solved it. Within the last few months, I had spontaneous hiccups within my infrastructure with regards to DNS lookups. Every now and then, at different points in time, DNS lookups for certain subdomains where different…
Well, this is kind of awkward. I wrote a blog post around a year ago where I claimed to have found the perfect Linux laptop. It turns out, dear reader, that I lied to you. I was never able to fix the glaring suspend/resume problem that I hinted at in the updates to the article. So, I did what no self-respecting Tinkerer would do after months of troubleshooting: I decided to give up and throw…
Ever since I moved my main computing environment over to a desktop at the start of the pandemic (which by now is already like 70 years ago, time flies man), I have regretted not being mobile anymore - even if that means sitting on the sofa instead of somewhere outside. So, a few weeks ago, I started looking for a laptop. I wanted something small-ish, max 14 inch. It shall have a 1080p display,…
Looking back, my blogposts mostly revolve aroud complaining about things I dislike. There are also many things to like out there, so this post is dedicated to that: software I use often, love, and want to recommend to others. Sway After some years of using GNOME as my primary desktop environment, I tried Sway . You know that feeling when you try something new, and it instantly hits that sweet spot…
I run a lot of services on my home server for friends and family. These services need to be authenticated, which is done via username/password mainly. Due to some poeple not knowing much about technology, I need to expose some of it to the internet (in contrast to being behind a Wireguard VPN). I do this via nginx, which I use as a reverse proxy in order to ease up certificate management. In…
Wew lads, it's been a while since my last post on here. I have been meaning to write more, and this post is a result of a new strategy - whenever I research a new topic, I'll try to document that and post the results here. So, I wish to dive into the world of home automation. I wish to avoid the buzzword "smart" as much as possible, so I will refer to it as "connected home" instead.…
In my last blog post, here , I figured that the Python bytecode could be obfuscated somewhat. Turns out it is, and this post will be a run down of my findings and the problems I encountered. It is a work in progress, so there could be updates at some point. I'll change the title in that case. This post concerns the obsolete 2.7 version of Python, since that's what the target application…
A while ago I wrote a blog post about patching Wargaming's World of Warships. Now, I was interested in attacking their Python subsystem, which might be interesting for various intents. This post attempts to document my research. WoWs uses Python within their engine to program their game logic. These Python scripts are obfusicated, so that programs like decompyle6 will not work out of the box.…
This post concerns the Windows win32 API, and is probably not very interesting if you have patched a binary before. For anybody who wishes to read about an easy patch, I hope you enjoy. I have been playing a video game called World of Tanks for quite some time now with my father. For a few weeks now, we have been going back and forth between World of Tanks, and Wargamings newer installment, World…
Ever since I published my first BEST2 VM , I have gotten questions about the instruction set now and then. Recently I published my vastly improved and fairly complete second version , which is fairly stable and written in C++. This post aims to explain what I know about the instruction set, some people perfer this format over reading code. The BEST2 instruction set was initially designed (as far…
While reading on /r/firefox today, I stumbled upon a discussion about how a browser extension was sold by a developer to a third party. This apparently stems from the original author not having the time for maintaining it anymore (why not just say so and step back then?). I do not want to discuss the handling of this issue here, what I am more interested in is the implication. The…
I designed this site quite a long time ago, and never really used it too much. Then, a few days ago, I decided to start this blog to see if I would enjoy this type of writing. As it turns out, so far I do. It also helps me practice touch typing, which I have recently started learning. Anyhow - since I plan to write at least a post a week, this blog needed to be built on a more solid approach other…
I am not a fan of buying new phones every year. I have been using a HTC 10 since around 2016, and it has served me well so far thanks to custom roms that prolonged its life. The main problem with old phones is security related though, as most manufacturers simply stop patching their firmware at some point (HTC released the last firmware update for this phone in 2018 [version 2.41.401.41]). I…
Ever since I made this website, I hosted it on a VPS for a few bucks a month running lighttpd. It was fast and worked well, but the server itself was for another project which I have since then frozen for the time being. I noticed that quite a few people had their personal websites on github and using their hosting feature for exposing it over https. I decided to try it. The first thing I had to…