Cicada 3301

Chances are if you frequent the more nerdy side of the internet you might have heard of Cicada 3301. In short, back in 2012 an image was left on 4chan with a message hidden inside of it. It was the first of several puzzles and today people still are trying to solve the last one.

Rather than do a poor job at relaying the story, you can watch a 4 part series that does a really good job on catching you up on the whole story to where we are now. You can find the videos here.

Part of the fun is learning about cryptography and problem solving, and I cam across a tool called outguess. It can be used to hide information within an image and is great fun to play with. Unfortunately it’s no longer developed and the package was no longer maintained in the AUR of Arch which I used to play with it. I installed it using a AUR helper but it errored. So, I removed it, downloaded the source code and compiled it myself and it ran great.

I’ve put the source in a public git repo which you can find here

Clone the repo and run the following to compile and build it:

$ ./configure && make

Enjoy.

Distrotube update.

I have to admit my complete surprise when Distrotube watched, commented on my youtube response to his video and subscribed to my channel. It’s not very often in Linux youtube land people respond to criticism in a mature fashion, if they even do at all. This has totally raised my respect levels for him.

Before people get hasty, this isn’t a backflip. I stand completely by what I said, and even though I accurately surmised what he would proffer as his reason for the video and don’t quite believe it, I’m sure he stands by his video too.

This, this is exactly what I have spoken about many times. Who cares if we disagree? Who cares if I put out an opinion and somebody challenges me on it? Discussion that isn’t inhibited by people with delicate feelings and snowflake dispositions can only help nigh on anything.

So, hats off to Distrotube for responding to me. We may disagree again in the future but respect for each others opinion on these such things should hopefully yield positive outcomes.

u wot m8?

I don’t want to link to the video I’m about to discuss, but for context, I will.

Oh, let me counteth the way thoust has offended thee.

First of all, like with any shitty “journalism” or hack job, it’s dead easy to paint somebody in a negative light with a montage of handpicked footage. This isn’t clever, or even offer any sort of insight. Anyone who has looked into Linus or Stallman would have seen this stuff a dozens times over. It’s relevance on their contribution to Free and Open Source Software and where FOSS and Linux is today? Fucking zero.

Also, where in the pantheon of Linux proponents does Distrotube fall? Who the hell is he to be even casting aspersions like this? Should he speak for us? Not a chance.

One handsome dude and Richard Stallman.

I’ve met Stallman. I travelled 700kms to watch him speak in person and have exchanged many emails with him debating a great many subjects. There’s plenty he says that I strongly object to, but does that diminish his accomplishments in regards to Free Software and the movement it spawned? Not in the slightest.

Let’s remember, Distrotube is a guy who was sacked from his job quit his job after being accused of allegedly harassing a black lady in his store. By his own account, that wasn’t his intention and meant no offense, and I believe him. Why then, should we as viewers and subscribers, allow him to “throw shade” at absolute key players in the FOSS and GNU/Linux world when we could just as easily cast shadows over that same person?

Word to the wise champ. Show a bit of fucking class and respect for the people who make the very existence of your little youtube channel possible. Lots of solid comments left on the video if you care to read, I hope the common sense starts to sink in.

curses..

My stubbornness is the stuff of legend and much maligned by some people that know me. I very, very rarely quit or give up on something. Even more so when it is something that is simple that just doesn’t do what it’s supposed to.

Enter this little shitbag, the HP ProBook 4340s.

I hate you

Rather a nice little 13″ laptop. Aluminum construction, decent i5 with 4gb of RAM and a 120gb SSD. Sounds like a great little Gentoo machine, right?

Well, despite my best efforts, I cannot get this little bastard to boot into legacy mode. Before you ask, I’ve been a sysadmin for 10+ years, and know how to set all the BIOS options. I managed to track down some BIOS updates even though HPs website lists none for the serial number based search I did for my particular machine.

Some of you may say, “Just use UEFI?”

No, I will not, and do not want to use UEFI. Same with my aversion to Pulseaudio and systemd. I don’t like them, and will avoid using them when I can. The laptop running Gentoo isn’t a necessity, I have a Macbook Pro already. It was more to play with, do a little more learning about Gentoo and possibly as a package testing machine. I still plan to move my desktop rig to Gentoo when time allows. It’s the household Plex server currently so I basically need to plan outages.

I think I will sell the Probook, and maybe pick up a favourite of mine, the Thinkpad X220. We will see.

urgh

Messed with my blog, and hosed it. Should have backed it up before I did that, but with only a couple of posts I didn’t end up bothering. Luckily I had a backup of the previous iteration, so I just restored it and pulled my posts out of the database for the newer one and added to the old one.

So here we are.

Have created an bootable Gentoo USB to try on a troublesome HP ProBook I have at home that seems to be in a committed relationship with UEFI.

finished

Well the VM on my workstation is done. Not a great achievement or anything, I’ve installed gentoo dozens of times, but in watching some recent videos including the series mentioned in a previous post, I could definitely refine my gentoo usage a bit. In recent years I’ve been lazy and relied upon genkernel, and using auto-unmask and dispatch-conf instead of properly defining a package.use when required.

So, I plan to re-watch those mammoth long videos again taking notes on various things I do or don’t do now. Then, I will do a new install, adhering to these new methods when needed and see what the difference is. I do wish I could use gentoo as my daily driver but currently at home this isn’t a possibility for now at least. Will see what happens.

I have plans. Grand plans…….

compiling

So with my new found Gentoo vigor, I’m running up a VM at work. I always end up wanting to use it after a break from it. At home it can be troublesome to find the time required for system maintenance and patching. I have always been interested in getting more involved with the Gentoo project, and a package tester seems to be the best way to get stuck in, so I may pursue that.

Anyhow, compiling….

Mr Sandman bring me a dream……

Another night where I can’t get to sleep properly. Might as well write another post.

gentoo

Still my favourite Linux distro and every few months I search youtube for any recent videos that have been uploaded covering it. Recently I found a good video series on it’s installation. I’ve installed it a bunch of times but I enjoy seeing other people’s methodology and can always pick up little tips and tricks.

The series is on the channel of Zebedee Boss and currently has 3 parts. They are long, but worth it. See Part 1 below.

arch

One of the other golden children when it comes to Linux for me. I’m currently running it on my Linode VPS and as you would expect, it runs great.

There has been some gap in time since I’ve used it, enough of a gap you find that the AUR helper yaourt is no longer being developed. A quick google found yay to be highly recommended as yaourts replacement.

Being a minimal VPS I did have to install a couple of extra packages first.

# pacman -S binutils
# pacman -S base-devel
$ git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/yay.git
$ cd yay
$ makepkg -si

Then you can search and install away just like the old days.

$ yay -Ss <package to search for>
$ yay -S <package to install>

And then to update all the packages

$ yay

Pretty nifty stuff, but that’s Linux through and through.

reboot

Another blog reboot.

I’ve done this countless times. I’m not even kidding. Platform changes, hosting changes, the list goes on. It’s a rather successful formula coupled with a smattering of posts initially followed by months of inactivity and then eventual deletion.

Will it be different this time? I’d like to think it will be. Maybe it’s hard to maintain content creation for an effectively non-existent audience. The key I think is to write for myself and not others. Surely it’s not too difficult to bang out a few paragraphs every few days?