The Good
- I managed to continue to walk 10k steps every single day in April. It is hard going given the lockdown and most days I do them entirely indoors. It is like the last feature of my exceedingly healthy start to 2020 that I am maintaining.
- I got a security related blog post out the door: https://cornerpirate.com/2020/04/14/uploading-file-when-all-else-fails/
- I needed to use RDPUpload in April and took an evening to patch it for Python3 and introduce some new functions. An equivalent tool to exfil through locked down remote environments was also made but not public facing yet. It felt great to get a bit of on message content out again 😀
- My work runs a regular Hackathon event where we share skills and do some collaborative research. It went great and let me help out with a bunch of potential CVEs that could take sometime to get disclosed. I do love this stuff as it is things I never really did elsewhere.
- Music has been the saving grace of my lockdown. It lifts the spirit like nothing else.
- Keyboard – I bought one before Christmas 2019 and struggled to get time on it until the lockdown. I was able to practice chord shapes and play a bunch of songs out of a chord song book in early April. Even getting as far as coordinating left and right hands together to sort of double up the chords for a richer sound. To be clear; I have no idea what I am doing but it is fun to try!
- Guitar – I taught myself to play around 20 years ago but finding time to keep up has been a struggle since having kids. In 2018-2019 I started to get into home recording and I have seen myself practising those skills in the lockdown.
- MPD218 & Ableton – This cheeky wee bit of kit lets you assign sounds to buttons and manipulate them. I had given Ableton software a brief go in 2019 but it didn’t make a whole lot of sense. With the arrival of the MPD I sat through a bunch of Ableton tutorials and made a simple dancy track. My intention is to figure out how to make drum tracks on this setup which I have never done before.
- My friend was making a video to demonstrate CVE-2020-7055 (an RCE in the WordPress Elementor plugin). It was a bit stark at 3 minutes of silence so I battered out something that felt appropriate over lunch. In the end I gave it to someone else in my team to make something more professional sounding which went on the final video. But I have been listening to what I made on loop for a bit and it isn’t as shit as I initially thought!
- Glasgow Defcon (DC44141) went online for the first time via Twitch. With talks from @ZephyrFish (an intro to Red Teaming) and @InfoSec_Paul_M (on blue team phishing detection techniques). While on the stream someone said “toss a coin to sysadmin” so that inspired this 😀
- The DC44141 meetup had the pub vibe via an open Discord chat room after the talks. Featuring lots of lovely people.
- Brooklyn 99 season 6 on Netflix arrived and was consumed to much joy.
- A feature length Red Dwarf episode arrived and was absolutely a joy to behold. I truly appreciate having spent so long of my life in the company of those characters.
- I played counter strike: GO more often with great people and had a good time. I feel like I suck a lot less than last month. The game is free on Steam if you want to get hold of it. I have a dedicated server and share the details if you DM on Twitter to @cornerpirate.
- I started Half Life 2 Updated which I think is free on Steam. I loved HL2 obviously. This updated version seems to have different or more immersive music and I was in absolute tears of joy about how amazing the feat of engineering that is. They introduced GRAVITY for the first real time into games and had an absolute blast making puzzles. It is inconceivable now that games were not like this before. Truly brilliant and if you haven’t played it in over a decade like me, if not now when?
This month’s audiobooks
- How to talk so little kids will listen by Joanna Faber & Julie King. I had not completely finished this in March and eventually got through this by mid April. It was a great book with tonnes of advice for communicating with kids clearly. Sadly the lockdown has regressed most peoples behaviour because we are trapped in pretty tight quarters. Still several of the techniques have reduced the impact of that.
- Amazon Web Service by Paul B Richie. I am looking to learn more about AWS and Azure to have more rounded knowledge in those fields. I know bits and pieces but am seeking a few more jigsaw pieces. I am going to be honest. I haven’t gotten far into this and the initial chapter was like listening to someone reading a dictionary rather than inspiring the listener. Ok ok.. I also selected this book in particular because the author is almost my name sake. It might not be fit for the purpose I had in mind.
The Bad
The amount of crud I am eating is essentially putting on the weight I lost at the start of the year. Now that I am getting towards adjusted to the new lockdown reality I have been able to start reigning that in.
Highlight of the month
This has put a smile on my face. I needed to go and collect medicine. When I wrote in to say I was going AFK. An amazing colleague said “A QUEST!” just before I went out the door I recorded a few bits of the walk.
When I got home I strung them together and threw some music on it. There is now a channel in youtube “Fun with cornerpirate” which maintains a list of two quests so far:
The audio of me speaking is particularly bad because of the wind. When I filtered it out in Audacity using noise reduction it left my voice sounding shrill.. Lesson learned even if it is spur of the moment take out the better microphone which has the fuzzy stuff on it.
I now have the right mic but the wrong app was the lesson from episode two.
cornerpirate.com 