July 4 fireworks and reviews

I finally got to use the whole stash from last year, freeing up a bunch of space under the bed. Here's a review:

Nightmare Fountain - As always, amazing display and great value for $25:

1000 roll of BC firecrackers - gee whiz, this is too long. 500 is better, especially when left in rolled up form for maximum effect.

Bug Eyed 200 gram fan cake - nice, but I'm realizing fan cakes really aren't suitable for lighting in a neighborhood street without distance to appreciate the effect.

Motormouth - Misfired and something like 70 shots went off simultaneously. Otherwise, nice, but I still prefer Fireworks Fiesta.

Brothers 'Box of Bombs' - Got this instead of a second case of the 'Brothers Anniversary Combo' because they didn't have enough - Except for 'Cobalt Bomb', I wasn't impressed. The colors are similar across all cakes and the breaks aren't all that high.

'Brothers Anniversary Combo' - Firefly was amazing, with heart-thumping breaks and launches. Ditto for Baby Boomers with its amazing willows thrown in. Saturday Night Special was fun because of the special effects but just a bit underwhelming.

Proud 500 gram fan - not impressed. Too short. 

BP Firecrackers - very good, but commercial 500gram cake breaks are even louder.

Rockets - sugar rockets all were too powerful or failed spectacularly. Firecracker launched on D12-7 was just fine. The thrust was plenty enough to compensate for the seven-second delay.

My Artillery shells - Last two remaining. Two were launched, on a D12-0 plus E9-4 combo, each. Stabilization wasn't perfect, as each rose at an angle. Each broke a good thousand feet up and the effect lasted for almost a minute as the wind carried the firefly stars slowly back towards us. Video will be posted later. Here's an example, which turned out vertical on Youtube. I'll fix it later.

Wax-based Smoke Bombs - 100 gram size makes too little smoke for taste, and for 3 straight minutes. The 300-gram size is much more effective, both in the burn and the actual smoke.

R-candy equivalent smoke bomb - Actually flew up 30 feet and burned up in just a few heart-pounding seconds. Perhaps adding a wide-throated nozzle was a bad idea.

All In cake - great as usual. New this year was Evil, with amazingly wide breaks for such a small, cheap ($4.50) cake.

Life updates and new things learned

After Toorcamp I went to company training, held in Orlando. There were 1800 people here, all associates, senior associates, and managers. I met many cool people, went on my first rollercoaster at Seaworld (and then six times more the next day on different rollercoasters at a different theme park), discovered that Moshiach has come in the form of kosher food, and did a bunch of networking. All in all, a useful exercise. Oh, there were also daily courses that had a nice bit of useful information.

New things learned: May 1, MSFT released a tool called LAPS which mitigates the effect of Pass-the-Hash attacks against Active Directory - based networks. Read about it here. However, there's an interesting attack I need to read about for privilege escalation on Windows boxen, which could help as an alternate attack.

Note-taking tools: Google Keep and Toodledo. Keep sounds nice, and Toodledo is useful too.

Updates on Toorcamp slides and Kali Linux Persistence

I didn't work on the slides today, on account of a lovely long bike ride. I'll work on them this week after each day's training (in Orlando) is over.

Just now I set up persistence on a live kali USB for the first time. It's the Kali Rolling distribution of Kali Light, which by default installs virtually nothing. The USB key is 32GB capacity, which can be had for 10 bucks or so on Amazon. You can get the top 10 tools, which cover the majority of good stuff, with kali-linux-top10, which is 1.5 GB when installed. Then I spent way too much time messing with pulseaudio and alsa to get the sound working. Turns out that for some reason the sound on this specific release of Kali comes muted. Here are the steps I followed:

1. Install alsa-mixer with: apt-get install alsa-mixer -y
2. Run the following and create it as a launcher (for now): amixer sset Master unmute
3. Open the Pulseaudio Volume Control. In my case there are two options in the Playback tab for the playback - "Built-in Audio Digital Stereo (HMDI)" which does not work, and "Built-In Audio Analog Stereo" which does work. I selected the second option and finally things worked.
4 (optional). Right-click on the panel, wherever it's placed, and add a "PulseAudio Plugin" plugin to control the audio.

Voila. And now it works after restarting. Eventually I'll figure out how to maybe just unmute on login or boot.

The bike ride was a new one, which I'd planned out using Google Maps. However, I neglected to allot enough time for the ride in light of it being new, and also did not notice that the route included one underpass and four overpasses. And of course I got lost, going well past the road that turns west and on to a rather seedy area with no bike path whatsoever. The road that I took as an alternative, going west, had several uncovered sewer drains which meant that occasionally the bike lane included holes at least nine feet deep. The ride took till 45 minutes after sunset, with a total of about 36 miles.

Toorcamp - Friday through Monday

The rest of Toorcamp was extremely busy. By mid-day Thursday I was loosing track of the people I'd met. Fortunately, the impressions are still fresh, and I went to several talks on Saturday, the last official full day. I've been asked to create a slide deck for a special Toorcamp presentation at the local Hadoop and Apache Spark meetup, so will work on that through Sunday and post it here via Slideshare or Prezi hopefully on Sunday.

Toorcamp - Third day - Thursday - Part 1

After the last post, I walked over to the volleyball court to the wood-gas generation project, which connected two trashcans with air ducting to extract wood gas from burning wood chips to power a generator to power a heater. Again, interesting implementation with a somewhat pointless end result. After that, I walked over to the Pop-up cafe to get some club mate, which is concentrated sweetened mate syrup mixed with seltzer water. It's pretty good, and I got another before the introduction to the talks occurred. I sat next to a group from Las Vegas, the Psychoholics, who run a hacker/makerspace called Syn Shop. Great people, and I spoke for a while during the keynote presentation with a quilter and model house maker about gardening. She is in the middle of building a 1:12 scale model of a house, complete with working plumbing, bricks, and wooden jousts all the way down to the details. It's fiddly work.

After that, I walked over to the Lower Camp and met someone from RCCGroup which is sponsoring toorcamp and also supplying free beer. We talked about hacking webcams and other embedded devices. I also got a "stamp" on the information passport all the attendees have been given from 98.3 "the lol", which I'll have to check out with an actual radio, or when they start streaming online. Afterwards I was encouraged to find a kosher solution to cooking at Milliways, which is the cafe/restaurant at the end of the universe (from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a hacker manifesto among others).

Afterwards  I hung out with J, who showed me his large hacking box with various Arduino equipment and moisture and temperature sensors, as a side project to possibly integrate that into gardening applications. Shortly after the hard-drive launcher was put into action, and the quadcopter that came with my bag was also used to see if it could be destroyed by a flying hard-drive platter.