bwiggs

I once asked an appliance repairman which refrigerator brand to buy, to which he responded:

"If I had a choice between a Samsung and an LG, I'd pick a Yeti cooler!"

You would still expect some amount of file structure, ex byte headers or something at the beginning/end of file. no?

DEFCON30, Mayhem CTF.

We were given a file full of random bytes. The flag was in there somewhere. It was too random to be encrypted, there wasn't any structure. `file` didn't return anything, truly just a bag of bytes.

I had decided to install `hexyl` as an alternative option to some of the other hex editors installed o my linux machine. All the bytes were colored grey.

I scrolled the file and noticed a blip of yellow. A random golden `{` amongst all the noise. Weird.

The next colored byte was a `C`, then `T`, `F`.

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At that time, I was mostly using HexFiend to look at raw files, which didn't have byte coloring. For DEFCON I had decided to drive my linux machine. I had ghex installed, but i had also decided to install and try `hexyl` via cli. So seeing bytes in color was purely by chance that I had installed it. I eventually posted an issue to ghex to add color support. https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/ghex/-/issues/60

I need to see if I can find the file and post it on that blog post. https://bwiggs.com/posts/2023-08-31-hacking-in-color/

Longwood Gardens (https://longwoodgardens.org/) is one of the most incredible public gardens in the US, and maybe the world. If you are in the Philadelphia/West Chester/Kennet Square area, do not miss the opportunity to check them out!

The Conservatory (and the new West Conservatory) is stunning. Checkout their summer concert and fireworks series for something family friendly. The Chimes Tower District reminds me of something you'd walk around and discover in Myst. https://longwoodgardens.org/gardens/chimes-tower-district

This place is huge! And there's a bunch of trails and places to walk if you wanna get away from the crowd.

Here's a 1hr video from QuietPlaces featuring the Conservatory, Lilly garden, Chimes District. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ooR-f3vx_RY

Deep Link to the Bonsai area: https://youtu.be/ooR-f3vx_RY?t=1364

I really like what https://datagolf.com/ has done to visualize and explore professional golf statistics.

A few interesting pages to check out:

- Scottie Scheffler's (Current Top Golder in the World) Player's Profile: https://datagolf.com/player-profiles?dg_id=18417

- Approach Skill Analysis: https://datagolf.com/approach-skill

Port Scanner/nmap clone - This project is much simpler than the others, but is more approachable. It's a great project to implement when picking up a new language. If it's your first time writing one, it forces you to learn a bit about networking and concurrency if you want it to scan quickly.