It's been a while. I've been spending the past year either working from
home or being at home in my spare time, except some shorter travels
within Norway. Nothing but covid really happened, and I didn't find
anything particular to write about. Until I spend last weekend at a
small festival at our local makerspace group.
The makerspace is situated in the basement of one of the university
buildings. There are 3D printers of various kinds, a laser cutter, a
CNC and so on. This year they bought a lot of sewing equipment,
including an embroidery machine. Lots of cool stuff, if you have some
spare time and some creative ideas about what you want to create.
Every year there is a small festival going on there, and as last year, I
was one of the participants. There were talks about geeky stuff, like
rocket building, smart homes with home assistant, but also Docker,
NixOS, etc. One of my favorites was CTF, or Capture the flag, which is a
digital hunt for "flags" which requires solving various tasks, usually
withing web exploitation, cryptography, reverse engineering, etc. This
CTF was a little different though, as it also contained questions about
the talks.
One of the CTF tasks was to decompile and reverse engineer a C program
to find out what input it accepts. Attached to the task, there was a
Linux binary, and I had only brought my FreeBSD machine (and the wifi
was too bad for installing the linux libraries and binaries). So in the
end, I solved the task by just reading the assembly code. I haven't
touched assembly since my 20s, so that was fun!