Thu, 12 Nov 2026 {5:44 am}
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I've been working on a "pixelated" display app. I had seen advertisements for the Ledable display, and was like "I have a couple really old Raspberry Pis that aren't doing anything. I bet I could write something in Python using pygame that could make a much cheaper regular display look like a low resolution LED matrix display." So I did.

Right now I just have a clock app for it. And I don't have any assets (images, fonts, etc) in my GitHub repo. But it runs on my Raspberry Pi 2B+. I would have started with the older original Pi I have, but the mounting bracket on the back of the display I bought didn't support the PCB holes on that one.

Any way, I'll post some screen shots or photos up here at some point. I'd like to add a simple weather app next. And probably some sort of user input handling to switch which app is in the foreground.

Thu, 05 Aug 2021 {7:18 pm}
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I got a digital badge for doing a BlackHat training this year. That's neat, I guess. I watched several of the BlackHat briefings yesterday and today, but it's all over now. Now I get to go to Potato Creek State Park and do some camping.

Sun, 25 Jul 2021 {12:03 am}
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Well. I saw that everything had broken. Apparently my web host had upgraded PHP versions. And I was still using PHP4 mysql API that was deprecated in PHP5.5 and completely removed in PHP7.0. (I built this website in college 15 years or so ago). Fortunately it was pretty straight-forward to update the back-end code to the newer API and now it's working again. Well. At least it displays. I guess I didn't test everything....

Tue, 03 Oct 2017 {3:48 pm}
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Does this thing still work? :)
So, we moved... closer to work... into a condo. It still needs some work. But it's nice having a 10 minute commute (and that's from desk to front door) that isn't very affected by time of day based traffic.

Sat, 28 Mar 2015 {11:18 pm}
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Level 14

This one has you download a file that sets up several tables in a database. I scanned through much of the file until I came upon a table named "flag?" which contains a username and maybe a hashed password. I wasn't real sure what to do with it, so I decided to keep looking at the file. In the next table, named "friends" there's an entry that looks like a string of hexidecimal unicode bytes.

They all appeared to be in the printable range, so I figured I'd decode this before moving on to anything else. I used python to remove all of the "\u00" strings and then converted the remaining bytes to ascii. Oh, look, it was the flag after all: infosec_flagis_whatsorceryisthis

Sat, 28 Mar 2015 {10:32 pm}
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Level 12

Yoda again. Appears to be the same image as level 1. I already did a strings scan on the image, but lets try it again. Yeah, still nothing. :) Probably related to the source again, so let's look. Hmm, css/design.css looks like a source file I haven't seen on other pages. It contains:

.thisloveis{
color: #696e666f7365635f666c616769735f686579696d6e6f7461636f6c6f72;
}

Now, that I'm sure isn't a color, and it looks like hexadecimal in the printable range, so let's decode it: infosec_flagis_heyimnotacolor

Sat, 28 Mar 2015 {10:07 pm}
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Level 11

So, this one has a large PHP logo that looks kind of funky. I opened it up in Hex Workshop and immediately saw the string:
infosec_flagis_aHR0cDovL3d3dy5yb2xsZXJza2kuY28udWsvaW1hZ2VzYi9wb3dlcnNsaWRlX2xvZ29fbGFyZ2UuZ2lm

I assume the final portion is encoded and isn't the actual solution. It appears to be base64 encoded, so decoding it yields: http://www.rollerski.co.uk/imagesb/powerslide_logo_large.gif. When when loaded is a logo that says "powerslide". I'm not sure if this is the answer or if it is a red herring.

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