I recently deployed a Minecraft server in AWS for me and me son (and perhaps others!) to play multi-player Minecraft. Part of the reason I did this was so that he could join the server from his mother’s house. The other reason was so I could learn more about AWS. In particular, I wanted to see if I could use code to save money, explore IAM roles, and see how much artificial intelligence (AI) would be able to help me with all this. ...

It took me ages to figure this out, but I’m happy now it’s done, even if the solution isn’t the most elegant. I wanted to display an image for each blog post summary on my home page — like a thumbnail or featured image or something. I eventually came across page variables and file variables in the official Hugo documentation, and made changes to my site’s /layouts/_default/summary.html file. Here’s the part of that file that I changed: ...

I made some training videos, to help people who are new to ethical hacking and penetration testing learn some basics. The course makes use of VirtualBox, which is freely available, to create virtual machines, which run inside your existing PC or laptop. This is a great way to learn and practise hacking; because you can do it safely, and without causing harm to real computer systems! It’s also perfectly legal! ...

Here it is: tar --create --xz --file backup.tar.xz backuptest.md && passphrase=$(echo $RANDOM | sha256sum | head -c 64) && sudo gpg --symmetric --batch --yes --passphrase $passphrase backup.tar.xz && echo backup.tar.xz $passphrase >> /path/to/log/location/backup.log && rm backup.tar.xz && rsync -avz ./backup.tar.xz.gpg ./backup_location/ ...

NOTE: Date is probably wrong. Could remake this article and release in future. It is good practice to perform an integrity check on any file you download, to provide reassurance that the file was downloaded correctly and is free from tampering. The VirtualBox executable is digitally signed, making manual verification unnecessary. You can see this by right-clicking the file, choosing Properties from the context menu, and then selecting the Digital Signatures tab. ...

Disclaimer: I did very little research (if any) on this. You should consider the following, my opinion, and not a well-thought-out answer to the question. With frequent new releases of huge games like Cyberpunk 2077 now commonplace, and with the computer games industry raking in huge profits, something you may be wondering is, why isn’t the artificial intelligence — the AI — in computer games, well, better? After all, is this not the age of machine learning and self-driving cars? ...

I’ve spent most of the —no, all day, recreating this site, with the help of Hugo1 — not a person, but an open-source, static website builder. It’s taken me this long, because I’ve been learning how Hugo works, as I (Hu)go. I like Hugo now. Thanks Hugo. Every link on the site should now take you to a page, that actually has something on it. I’ve re-organised my content as follows: ...

The majority of the pages that make up this website are written in markdown (a lightweight markup language created by John Gruber) before being converted to hypertext markup language (HTML) using Hugo (https://gohugo.io). I used to use Pandoc, a command-line tool designed to convert almost any document type, from or to any other type. For example, HTML to Word (.docx), spreadsheets to portable document format (PDF), or in my case, markdown to HTML. ...

In this post, I will show you how the Raspberry Pi 4 (Model B) running Raspberry Pi OS (formerly Raspbian) can be configured as a router. This is something I’ve thought about doing for a while, but there is limited up-to-date information on the subject, so I decided to do some research, and provide my findings here in an easily digestible format. Background The primary role I want my Pi router to serve, is forwarding traffic from its Ethernet port, to its wireless interface. ...

Factorio is four parts real time strategy (RTS), four parts logistics problem-solving simulator, one part tower defence, and one part top-down shooter — or, as my friend Jimbo once put it — “Minecraft for adults”. Once a week on Wednesdays, I join Jimbo (the CEO) and Martin (the nest exterminator) for a not-so-casual multi-player game of Factorio. We often refer to this get-together as going to work. At work, we continue the construction of our empire, crack jokes and make logistical errors that take hours to reconcile. ...

If you’re interested in becoming an ethical hacker, a penetration tester, or security consultant — or you simply want to learn more about these roles, then read on. This article takes a look at hacking in a computer security context, and how to get started in this field. If you want learn some basics, check out my free training course. What is a Hacker? Hackers get a a lot of bad press. ...

If you want to learn how to hack, you’ll need some machines that you can legally hack and experiment with, without risk of doing harm. Rather than use physical machines, which most of us are unlikely to have lying around, you can use virtual machines. A virtual machine (VM) runs inside an existing operating system, such as Windows, and shares its resources. You could have a host OS of Windows 10, running several VMs, each using a chunk of the host OS’s physical memory, storage capacity and CPU time. ...

In this tutorial I will show you how to download and install the latest version of VirtualBox to your Windows 10 computer. 1. Download VirtualBox Point your web browser to https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads and then click the Windows hosts link, as shown in figure 1. Choose to save the .exe file, to the place where you normally save your downloads. The file’s name will be similar to VirtualBox-6.1.8-137981-Win.exe, and depends on the version number. ...

I want to explore approaches for base defense in Factorio (a realtime strategy/logistics/automation game) and how the four different types of turret (gun, laser, flamethrower and artillery) can be used together effectively. It is my view that a highly effective approach to base defense will make use of all of these units, but I’m going to test my hypothesis with some practical experimentation. Background After searching for a recent article on base defense in Factorio, that weighs up the four turret types, I was left lacking. ...

Note: Date is incorrect. I THINK I’ve already converted this into another document (taking notes during a pentest?). Check that. Discovering hosts on an internal network is one of the first things you’ll do as part of a penetration test, assuming all the initial formalities have been completed. I’m going to go through a few techniques for discovering hosts using Nmap, and crucially — how to organize the data that comes back from these scans. ...

This piece is all about taking detailed notes during a penetration test, and how to organize those notes. As well as the notes you write yourself, you’ll need to organize the vast amount of output generated by tools. One way of keeping everything organized, is to use some software for that exact purpose. But, I want to look at creating some custom bash scripts instead. Rather than store information in a database, I’m going to use good-old flat files organised into directories. ...