It’s been a few weeks since my last update. I’m bummed that I fell off the habit of writing every Sunday, but I had pretty good reasons for not getting it done the last few weeks, so I’m going to talk about what I’ve been up to.

Hacker Summer Camp

A few weeks ago, I spent a week in Vegas for Hacker Summer Camp. I gave my presentation, Free Your Mind, at BSides Las Vegas. Then I spent the majority of my Defcon working with my friends at the Hak5 booth, peddling pineapples, slinging screen crabs, dealing duckies, hustling hotplug attacks, etc.

I was also lucky enough to have my song, Oh Dade, appear on the official Defcon 32 soundtrack. You can buy the soundtrack on Bandcamp, pay what you want, and proceeds all go to the EFF. Or you can pick it up from the defcon media server free of charge.

Perhaps my favorite moment of all of Defcon, though, was getting to perform All The Things on stage with my dear friend Int Eighty, from Dual Core.

Hawaii

When we were done in Las Vegas, we flew directly to Honolulu, where we spent a week. We were working while we were in Hawaii so this wasn’t really a vacation, but it was a nice way to decompress after the hectic Las Vegas experience. We got to have our favorite breakfast place, Cinnamon’s in Kailua, twice while we were there. We also got to see the firework show from the Hilton Hawaiian village and went out on a sunset cruise off the coast of Waikiki.

In a fun coincidence, we happened to be there during the Pokemon World Championship, which seems like a super cool event. I didn’t know that they had one mega event for TCG, Video games, and Pokemon Go. Hilton Hawaiian village even had a little “Trainer Town” erected in the gardens, which was pretty cool. I haven’t really been into Pokemon since I was a kid, but I admire the people who got to go spend a long weekend in Hawaii to enjoy what they love with others who also love it.

Hack Week

We got back from Hawaii on a Monday, and that week was Hack Week at work. I was a team captain and my team ended up winning. The end of hack week also had a photo scavenger hunt component where we had to take photos on a polaroid camera all around San Francisco. This was a cool way to get others who weren’t local to see the city, and it ended up being a really fun time for my team, even though we were all local to the bay.

This was our first hack week event where the focus seemed more on solving immediate problems rather than moonshot future looking projects, and I have to say that it was by far my favorite hack week of the 5 or so that I’ve done at this company. We shipped multiple improvements during the week, and that felt great.

Looking forward

I’m going to try to get back into the weekly retro swing of things, and I have a few ideas I’m working on that I am looking forward to sharing. I want to write up some details on my home lab and home network configuration, write about how I’ve been using Obsidian, rebuild my kubernetes cluster using a network booted Talos Linux, and start exploring some ideas for future talk submissions.

Also I noticed that my cronjob for renewing certs is broken, I almost had an expired TLS cert on my site when I returned from Hawaii. I managed to renew it with about a day left, thankfully. But I have to look into that and figure out what I broke.

Interesting Links

• Gnossienne No 1 - This isn’t really “interesting”, but it’s one of my favorite Piano songs and I’ve been listening to it again a lot recently.
• Talos Linux - As mentioned in the section above, I think I’m going to run my home cluster off this going forward. I want an underlying OS that has nothing to worry about. No weekly ansible scripts etc. I’ll explain in more detail in a coming post after I’ve had time to work on it a bit more.
• HL15 15 Bay Storage Server - I’m late to the party here but I plan on building a new NAS soon and I am pretty sure this is going to be my new forever chassis for storage.
• Hextree.io - This is a new(ish) venture by LiveOverflow and Stacksmashing to teach courses. I’ve loved both of their videos over the years, so I was excited to sign up and support them. I’m looking forward to learning the Android Reverse Engineering course, as I have some experience there but frequently run up to the limits of my knowledge whenever trying to reverse engineer a real application.

Upcoming Projects

• PyBay 2024 Talk - Rejected - Unfortunately my PyBay 2024 talk submission, “Docker, Dependencies, and Determinism” was rejected. But it is a very small conference and they did receive a ton of submissions, so I don’t blame them.
• A conference that wishes to remain nameless currently has it’s CFP open. I am exploring a few ideas for talks to submit.