SM5 assembler [sig]
git clone https://www.altsci.com/repo/sm5asm.git
I present the SM5 assembler. Derived from the SM5 emulator, it works well in creating new programs for the SM5 architecture. It was necessary as part of a challenge called Game Copy Protection ROM in OpenCTF 2019. It also contains a small patch to sm5emu that improves the stability and benefits the user.
Why would someone want an assembler for an architecture that is not commercially available? If an FPGA version of this architecture were created, an assembler would be handy. But until such a time, I used the assembler to create a challenge which tested the ability for users to adapt to new architectures, SM5 being an architecture that only a handful of people in the world have experience with.
Read more »
Dec 7, 2014
Unproprietary 0.4: Nov 25, 2015
Unproprietary 0.5: Sept 11, 2016
unproprietary-0.5 [sig]
unproprietary-0.4 [sig]
unproprietary-0.3 [sig]
unproprietary-0.2.1 [sig]
Git repository: git clone https://www.altsci.com/repo/unproprietary.git
Lume is a simple point and click Flash game available from Steam and Humble Bundle. I got it as part of of the Humble Weekly Sale: Amanita & Friends bundle and played it because I was interested in playing a short puzzle game one night. Since it's only 30 MB, it's pretty much guaranteed that it's a short game. It took an hour or so to complete and had some excellent puzzles. One of the main features of the game is the graphics which were made by a good artist with good style. Today, I was able to reverse engineer the game in a short amount of time using some custom tools I wrote, so I'm going to release them and ask for pull requests. Reverse engineering file formats is not a difficult process, but it is time consuming and it is more difficult to automate, so tools that do the work for us are valuable. That is why I'm releasing this simple set of tools I wrote.
If you'd like to follow along, you can buy Lume on Humble Store for $5.99. It supports Linux, Mac, and Windows. Lume has a Metacritic score of 69 and a high score of 83 by GameShark. A sequel was released recently called Lumino City (5 days ago) and it has gotten good reviews. It looks brilliant but it isn't released for Linux yet.
Read more »
Let's Encrypt Nosudo Scripts 0.1 [sig]
Let's Encrypt is a free SSL certificate authority that is designed to let users encrypt their website correctly. This has let me save around $81 creating certificates for all my domains (9 domains with Let's Encrypt, one without). Let's Encrypt was designed for the overly-trusting user who is willing to run code they download off github as root. Experience and paranoia teaches us not to run untrusted code as root or even as a user that isn't fully sandboxed. How do we deal with this? This technical document is for the admin who can read code and find vulnerabilities in Bash, Python, and protocols, not for the faint of heart.
Let's Encrypt Nosudo was designed for that. It takes a few hours to sign 10 certificates, so maybe 30 minutes per cert. But Let's Encrypt only issues certs with duration of 3 months which means that every 2-3 months you have to spend 30 minutes per cert. If you have 9 certs, that's a huge time investment. So like me you want to automate Let's Encrypt so that you don't have to spend 5 hours every 2-3 months. This is what these scripts are for.
Read more »
Aug 14, 2015
I solved my first SAT problem and in doing so, I had to write a valuable improvement to satispy, a simple and powerful Python frontend to minisat and lingeling. I'm making a pull request to netom, the author of satispy and I am publishing my code on Github since the original was published on Github. Allow me to show you the problem I was working on and the possibly elegant solution.
Read more »
