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useless.exe
Back in the 1990s there was this Danish meme program called “useless” (aka. “useless.exe”) that was being circulated on floppy disks and on the internet. About a year ago I spent an unreasonable amount of time trying to dig it up and, through hundreds of now-forgotten web searches and endless scouring of ancient forum posts full of dead links and disappointment, I eventually succeeded, so I figured I’d make it available here for others in the same situation to find.
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XSS From Mixed Rendering
Most popular website frameworks — be they frontend or backend — have ways to safely handle user input in order to prevent injection attacks like SQLi or XSS. However, they (obviously) don’t have ways to handle it safely for other frameworks.
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Useful CLI Tools
This is just a collection of CLI tools that I find particularly useful. They’re usually not part of a standard Linux distribution (and certainly not POSIX), and even though I value and appreciate being able to log in to any machine and just start working, I also appreciate being able to use more specialized tools in some environments such as the laptop I spend about 7 hours a day working on.
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1987 IBM Model M partly defeats Indian Scammer
I had the pleasure of getting not just one or two, but three calls from the same Indian scammers today calling from “Microsoft Windows”. I’m pretty well familiar with the scam but didn’t really have time to play around with them, so I just sent the first two along with some snide remarks. The third however, I did have a little time to play with so I let him go on with his script.
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Getting Started with NodeMCU ESP32
I just got my shipment from Shenzhen, China: 2 NodeMCUs built around the ESP32. Until now I’ve only played a bit around with a couple of Arduinos (Uno Rev3 and Nano), the micro:bit and a ESP8266, and I was looking forward to seeing how doing Lua on an MCU would work. I mean, the Arduino IDE and C is pretty neat and powerful but it’s just not my cup of tea—and neither is JavaScript and MicroPython (as the micro:bit uses).
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Spinning up Hugo
Decided it was time to consider self-hosting again but I didn’t want to have to deal with all the stress of hosting something dynamic so instead I’ve opted to look into Hugo, a static site generator written in Golang. Coming from a traditional MVC past it takes some getting used to but I can definitely see the apeal—especially from a security POV.
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PCRE Branch Reset Operator
In Perl Compatible Regular Expressions (PCRE) and other dialects you sometimes end up with a flurry of capture groups, and if you want to use alternatives/OR/branching then you’ll end up with empty matches because of the enumeration of matches will match the capture groups regardless of branching.
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Brace Expansions in Bash (and Fish) For Renaming Files
I’ve been using Linux and Bash for upwards of 18 years and for some reason it’s never occured to me to use brace expansions when renaming files until I saw this answer on AskUbuntu on disabling NotifyOSD.