2017-06-27 06:39:00
Ten years ago, almost to the day, we bought a Playstation2 to play rhythm games like DDR and Guitar Hero. The console and its games have long since been relegated to storage, but one of the DualShock controllers is still with us in the living room. Our friend Baris once gifted us a LikSang SmartJoy Playstation2-to-USB converter, which I've been using in OpenEmu to play classic SNES games with my kid.
In this month's Steam Summer Sale I grabbed two great games, "Ori" and "Hollow Knight", which play better using a controller. Unfortunately they don't recognize the SmartJoy out of the box, so I had to do some research. "JoystickMapper" to the rescue! It'll work with just about any controller and can be used to map buttons to keyboard actions, which most Mac and PC games support. Now I won't have to shell out bucks for a new controller! /o/ Well worth the five euros for JoystickMapper.
kilala.nl tags: gaming,
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2017-06-22 19:48:00
The ecstacy of achieving the OSCP certification didn't last long for me. Sure, I'm very happy and proud that I passed, but not two days later I was already yearning to move on! I wanted to get back to the PWK Labs, to finish the other thirty-odd servers. I wanted to retake the exam a second time. I wanted more challenge! So I set to making a list!
As something inbetween, I've signed up for SecurityTube's SLAE course: they teach you basic x86 assembly programming, to build and analyze Linux shellcode. Sounds very educational! And at only $150 for the course and exam it's a steal! I'll be blogging more about this in the future :)
Signing up for the course went easily and I got all the details within a day. However, actually getting the course files proved to be a struggle! There are three ZIP files, totalling roughly 7GB. They're stored in Amazon S3 buckets, which usually implies great delivery speeds. However, it seems that in this case SecurityTube have opted not to have any edge locations or POPs outside their basic US-WEST location. This means that I was sucking 7GB down a 14kbps straw :( That just won't do! Downloads were horribly slow!
After doublechecking that the issue did not lie with our home network, I attempted to download the files using my private server in the US: speeds were great. However, downloading from my own server wasn't much faster. Darn. Maybe there's another hickup? Two of my colleagues suggested using a VPN like PIA; sure that's an option. But I've been meaning to look into Amazon's AWS service, which allows you to quickly spin up virtual machines across the globe, so I went with that.
I built a basic Ubuntu server in Frankfurt and downloaded the files from the US. Seeing how both the source and destination were on Amazon's network, that went perfectly fine. Grabbing the files from my Frankfurt system also went swimmingly. So after two days of bickering I finally have the course files on my laptop, ready to go :)
kilala.nl tags: work, sysadmin, slae,
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All content, with exception of "borrowed" blogpost images, or unless otherwise indicated, is copyright of Tess Sluijter. The character Kilala the cat-demon is copyright of Rumiko Takahashi and used here without permission.