My musings on tech and life

New Blog, who dis?


So, there was a bit of a shock last month when I got my usual digitalocean bill – it had jumped to nearly $500. While I’ve got a nice job, I don’t want to spend large sums of money every month that basically do nothing but sit idle; it’s time to kill off my bloghost instance. Moving this blog off to cloudflare is the last step in that journey. My thoughts on Ghost If you’re wanting a medium like experience, ghost is probably the best bang for the buck.…
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My thoughts on the St. Rita's incident...


Reading about what happened at St. Rita’s School for the Deaf in Cincinnati is heartbreaking. My little guy went there until he passed, and he even had the teacher who allegedly threw the child down the hallway. I volunteered at the school, setting up a technology program from business donations and program donations from Apple and Google, and have funded a scholarship in my little guy’s honor ever since. I have paused my contributions to St.…
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Long COVID sucks


I’ve had COVID three times now – 2020, 2021, and 2022. Each one was a little bit different than the last, but, my CTF from this year’s “Hacker Summer Camp” was COVID, and while I did get to spend five days recovering and quarantining without worrying about my job, it took me another two weeks to get my sense of smell back. I’ve been living with the after effects from this round of COVID more noticeably than my previous run-ins.…
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Red Teaming with tools from hak5


First of all, all of the tools that I’ve purchased from hak5 are items that I’ve purchased with my own money for use in my roles as an information security engineer. Generally speaking, my day-to-day is a mixture of threat detection, incident response, and providing guidelines and guidance to keep our infrastructure secure. I did some red teaming in my previous roles, but, it wasn’t anything formal: running things like wp-scan automatically against our wordpress instances to make sure that the developers hasn’t inadvertently kept in a plugin that should have been updated due to a security issues.…
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OpenStreetMap, Nominatim, and OSRM


I’ve been on a fairly big GIS kick recently. Part of it is me feeling like there’s a lack of market tools for things like studying things like resource deserts, but, the other half is me wondering, “How many oil change places are within a 15 minute drive,” looking for things like resource saturation within a specific industry and possible geopolitical research (for example: OpenStreetMap + Census Data + Political data could be a tool to allow campaigns to better target their advertising dollars to allow for a more focused spend).…
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