I had some fun this weekend creating a capital guessing game. Try it out at https://www.capitalguesser.com
In this project I wanted to try learn how to spy on monitors using leaked electromagnetic signals.
I’ve been playing Wordle for the past week. I got curious and decided to dig into the source code. My goal was to find out how guesses are validated - and it turns out to be designed in a strange way.
As part of the Research Project 2 course at the Security and Network Engineering Masters @ University of Amsterdam, Philipp Mieden and I worked on comparing various ML techniques for network intrusion detection.
I recently setup a new desktop with an encrypted Arch disk. This is a slightly modified version of my Arch/Windows dual-boot guide with additional steps to encrypt the root partition. I removed the fluff and kept the key parts of the installation. If you run into any problems please be sure to read through the Arch Installation guide and the dm-crypt guide
When running a dual boot Arch + Windows setup, Windows updates can sometimes mess with your boot partition. Rather than booting directly into grub, Windows will override your /boot partition and you will be left without a grub.cfg. Due to this, you will boot directly into windows. Luckily there is a simple fix for this.
As part of my research project at the Security and Network Engineering Masters @ University of Amsterdam, I worked on building a library for that offers various flavours of typo correction. Since 2016, safe typo correction has been shown to be possible to but there is a clear lack of adoption. With the goal of democratising typo tolerance, I released tipsy!
As part of the Cyber Crime & Forensics course at the Security and Network Engineering Masters @ University of Amsterdam, Davide Pucci and I worked on building a neural network designed to embed a hidden audio message into a cover message in a way that is indistinguishable to the human ear.
In Go, it well known that errors are values. When I first started programming in Go I was dissatisfied at the number of times I was writing error handling blocks like:
if err != nil {
// do something with error
log.Println(err.Error())
}
I recently bought a WD MyPassword 2TB external hard drive to backup my laptop. When I first plugged it in and attempted to mount it, the drive was read-only:
# get the external drive device name
fdisk -l
[...]
Disk /dev/sda: 1.82 TiB, 2000365289472 bytes, 3906963456 sectors
Disk model: My Passport 2626
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: gpt
Disk identifier: $REMOVED_DISK_IDENTIFIER
Device Start End Sectors Size Type
/dev/sda1 2048 3906961407 3906959360 1.8T Microsoft basic data
# mount the drive
mkdir /mnt/wd-passport
mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/wd-passport
touch /mnt/wd-passport/file
touch: cannot touch 'file': Read-only file system
I had a recurring issue with my laptop: when it would enter sleep mode I would attempt to wake it by pressing on the power button. I would wait 1 or 2 seconds and after seeing that the display wasn’t lighting up, I would press the power button again. At this point my laptop would come out of hibernation and immediately shut down potentially losing unsaved work.
So you’ve spent a couple of hours installing arch and you finally have access to a shell. What more could you want? Probably a desktop environment like gnome or cinnamon. If you want to try something new and exciting why not go for a window manager? It’s much more efficient in terms of system resources, and once you’ve spent some time wasted days customising your configuration files you’ll have a desktop worthy of unixporn. What are you waiting for? Go have a look at i3 for a bit more info about and come back when you’re convinced this is the right thing for you do to.
There are already dozens of tutorials to setup an Arch and Windows dual boot - welcome to a dozen + 1. Like most others this is a step by step guide. Unlike most others the steps are ordered in a way that makes sense (starting with the download first - duh!) so you won’t have to restart your computer a gazillion times.