Newsletter # 22 - Changing the blog path in Middleman May 7 2020
Hello, and welcome to issue #22 of the Newsletter.
How is life? I hope everything is going well. I've been enjoying my time exploring FreeBSD Jails, and ZFS. FreeBSD is such an interesting Operating System. The sense of integration is quite refreshing.
In contrast to what I sometimes feel when working on Linux, many areas of the system feel disjointed. Everything works, but you have to know all the peculiarities on how each different distribution and each of the various groups responsible for different code bases work. Anyways, if you would like to explore FreeBSD, have a look at the FreeBSD Handbook (FreeBSD documentation is quite good).
This week I have a few recommendations for you. The first, keeping up with the BSD topic, is the BSD Now Podcast. I like their format, and they always share interesting articles.
Second is a book recommendation. This month, I finished reading Yurichev, D. (2019). Reverse Engineering for Beginners. It just took me a few months to finish it (Nov 2019 - to May 2020). I highly recommend it to you if you are into reverse engineering. You will get exposure to many aspects of Reverse Engineering for different architectures, and fundamental concepts that are a must for every Reverser out there. The book is 1069 pages long, but you can just read a few pages every day, and you'll complete it in a few months :).
I also wanted to let you know that I'll be moving stuff around on the website. I maintain an "engineering" journal, where I keep notes on pretty much everything I'm working on. I consult my notes very often, and I believe that some of them would be of help to others. So I'll be sharing more of those notes on the website, under the URL rderik.com/notes.
On the same vein, I published a note this week that shows how I changed the TIL Blog path to Notes. The note includes the changes I made to Middleman and also how I handled the redirect from the old URL to the new one. So If you are interested, here is the link:
https://rderik.com/notes/changing-blog-path-in-middleman/
Let me know what you think. I will probably add notes on different topics. If you have any suggestions, I'll be happy to hear them. The notes will cover various topics, from technical stuff, to book reviews (maybe I add a section in the website for that), or how I approach problem-solving, anything really. The distinction I want to make is that notes are more of a short "informal" writing, while the articles on the blog section are more long reads with more research behind. I'll be happy to hear your feedback.
Ok, that's it for this week.
Until next time, Derik
Tip of the week
Have you ever had an SSH session lose its connection and leave you hanging? The worst part is that you can't Ctrl+c to reclaim your shell.
Fear not, you can use the tilde dot (~.) command to close the ssh connection. This command probably comes from the times where serial consoles were a thing. You can use the ~. command in any ssh client based on OpenSSH. But don't use it just because you can, you should always try to exit cleanly, by typing exit or Ctrl+d to indicate the end of file for the shell. The ~. might be more akin to pulling your ethernet cable, than closing the session.
If you had to work with Serial Consoles you maybe have used the tip(1) command, the command to close the console was ~.. There you go, some SOL (Serial Over the Lan) history for you.