Jacen's Blog

My thoughts that I think other people deserve to read

JumpStart/Reader Rabbit Disk Bypass

October 31, 2022

The company I work for has a program where we take old computers and load them with Windows XP and various educational games to send to schools in other countries. They aren't top-of-the-line workstations, but it's enough for basic computer literacy, as well as any lessons taught by the educational software.

Low-budget education endeavors tend to lead to sketchy and unorthodox solutions, so I felt it would be a good idea to document the various problems we rant into and the solutions we used to get around them. Maybe one day someone else will find them useful.

TryHackMe - Chill Hack

May 3, 2022

Chill Hack is an easy-ranked box. Unfortunately, it wasn't the most fun box to do, with a handful of unrealistic and unintuitive stops along the killchain.

Hosting Pi-hole on Android Using QEMU

March 1, 2022

Advertisements suck. Beyond being generally obnoxious, they can cause performance issues and even sometimes be downright malicious. There are plenty of ad-block solutions for your browser, but not as many to help with ads not hosted on websites, especially in apps on your phone. One of the most notable solutions to that problem is Pi-hole, a DNS-level ad-blocker that can run on something as simple as a Raspberry Pi. That's great for when you're at home, but the official solution for using Pi-hole on the go is a bit obnoxious.

Fortunately, there's always an alternative solution.

It's not a good or viable solution, but beggars can't be choosers, right?

Running QEMU on an Android Host

December 28, 2021

For a few years, modern flagship phones have had comparable specs to mid-tier computers, which gave me a thought: why can't you just run a full-fledged virtual machine on your phone?

The short answer is "because virtual machines don't quite work like that". The long answer is a bit too complicated for my small brain to properly explain, but the point is that running a virtual machine from your phone isn't really feasible for the average user.

Fortunately, there's another solution: emulation.

TryHackMe - HackPark Writeup

November 2, 2021

HackPark is a Medium difficulty room, although it guides you along fairly well for the initial foothold, and it's pretty easy to root if you do proper basic enumeration.

TryHackMe - JPGChat Writeup

August 17, 2021

JPGChat was a very quick and easy box, but it does have a simple OSINT step that was a bit of fun to follow.

TryHackMe - Overpass Writeup

August 16, 2021

By now, everyone has done a writeup of the Overpass room on TryHackMe, but I've decided I want to try my hand at it anyway. Hopefully someone will find it helpful.

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