CategoryTutorials
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5-Min Tutorial: Building PyPI Packages
Turning a throwaway image-generation script (Imagenation, built on Google's Imagen API) into a real pip-installable PyPI package — restructuring into a module, wiring up pyproject.toml, and the build/twine upload dance.
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5-Min Tutorial: Lifting Firmware with the Bus Pirate
Opening a TP-Link WR841N router, wiring its W25Q32.V EEPROM to a Bus Pirate over SPI, dumping the firmware with flashrom, and extracting the embedded Linux filesystem with binwalk.
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5-Min Tutorial: Prototyping Web-Apps with Flask
Building a small leaderboard web-app with a Flask back-end and a jQuery/AJAX front-end — a brutally simple micro-framework server exposing GET/POST/DELETE API routes, plus the JavaScript that fetches and live-updates the page.
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Break Free! - Bypassing Captive Portals
Bypassing hotel/airport/cafe captive portals by tunneling traffic over DNS with Iodine — the escape strategy, server + domain setup, and the iodine/proxychains client side.
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5-Min Tutorial: K-Means Clustering In Python
A five-minute tutorial on K-Means clustering in Python — with a live, animated visualizer that shows exactly how the clusters get selected: random centers, assign-to-nearest, recenter, repeat to convergence.
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Coding Chrome Extensions Quickly
A fast, practical walkthrough of building a Chrome extension — manifest, background script, pop-up, options, testing and publishing — using the author's Hidden: Auto-Incognito filter as the worked example.
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Capture The Keys - Chapter 2: Pylogger
My Python reimplementation of the earlier C++ keylogger, walking through building an efficient Windows keylogger with PyHook — keystroke capture, window-aware logging, log rotation, and typed-keyword triggers (status, dump, pause, kill) — as an educational security exercise.
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11 oddly specific (yet useful) security tips
Eleven weird-but-genuinely-useful security tips for the curious non-expert, from killing WPS to keylogging your own machine — now with a 2026 retraction on the RFID-credit-card advice.
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Magstripe tinkering
My hobbyist dive into magnetic stripe card technology: how magstripes encode data, and how I hacked a Square reader by bypassing its encryption chip to read raw card data, with some reflections on real-world magstripe security.
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Capture the Keys - Chapter 1: Clogger
A post-mortem of my first keylogger — a ~280-line C++ prototype I built for Windows back in college to monitor my own machine — covering its key-state polling, shift/caps filtering, window tracking, and stealth tricks, plus why I eventually abandoned it for Python.
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PenTesting 101: Setting up your lab
A 10-minute walkthrough for building your own hacking lab — VirtualBox, a Kali attacker VM, a Kioptrix victim VM, and an internal network — read as a git-graph: each step collapses as you scroll past it.
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5-Min Tutorial: Git
A five-minute, bare-bones intro to git and Github — init, status, add, commit, log, diff, push — now with a fake in-browser terminal you can actually type the commands into.
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5-Min Tutorial: Caesar Cipher in Scala
A five-minute tutorial: implementing the oldest trick in cryptography in a handful of lines of Scala — with a live shift visualizer and an interactive cipher generator.
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Android Tutorial
A quick, 4-hour Android tutorial written for UCSB's CS56 class — hosted on GitHub in markdown, paired with a 'legacy' SMS-driven Android service for students to keep building on.
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Bayes' Theorem and Stochastic Processes
A short discrete-maths paper on deterministic vs. stochastic systems, conditional probability, and Bayes' theorem — with a live base-rate visualizer that shows why a 99%-accurate test for a rare condition is mostly wrong.
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