Emacs Multimedia System (EMMS) My preferred media player in Emacs is EMMS. Think of EMMS as a stackable playlist media player. EMMS out of the box does not actually play music. It relies on a “external” player like MPV, VLC, or MPLAYER. This is where this journey takes an interesting turn. Under Linux my EMMS setup is pretty straightforward. Below is my config: (emms-all) (emms-standard) (emms-default-players) (setq emms-player-list '(emms-player-vlc) emms-info-functions '(emms-info-native) emms-show-format "Playing: %s") I call EMMS, state I want to use EMMS standard list of players and include VLC in the list of players installed on my system. Read more...

2024 TAGITM South Texas Regional Summit The Digital Force Awakens: Mastering Threat Hunting in the Cyber Galaxy I had the pleasure of attending the TAGITM Regional Summit on Threat Hunting and Digital Forensics. The Summit focused on enhancing the skills of Texas cybersecurity workforce. The last few years have been rough for many Texas companies and governmental agencies. The rise in ransomware and cyberattacks has increased the need for these type of events. Read more...

Tools make the job Having the right tools at hand can make any job a breeze. It is also helpful to have a good working knowledge of the tools you use. In this case running containers like Docker or Podman are easily deployable in my work environment. So I decided to leverage the fact that REMnux offers Docker containers. This makes running powerful tools for small jobs extremely easy. I have been using this approach recently with much success for analyzing malicious links. Read more...

Emacs + Orgmode + Cybersecurity = Winning I work as a Cybersecurity Analyst and I use Emacs as my primary note taking application. Naturally I have developed some techniques and writing practices around my work and the use of Emacs aids in the process. I think the power of Emacs and Orgmode are a winning combination for the type of work I do. So let me share with you a some of the templates I created that help me in getting work done! Read more...

The obvious approach I use Emacs + Org-mode for my note-taking workflow as a Cybersecurity Analyst. Emacs is my geeky cred at my job, plus it is genuinely useful. So one day when working on taking some repetitive notes on an incident I had a bright idea. Why don’t I just create a few templates that speed up my workflow? A demonstration of my workflow for capturing notes on an incident Incident --> Get Data --> Investigation --> Capture Templates --> Notes Expanding the approach Once I became comfortable with the approach of my capture templates, I expanded them to use the full power of Emacs and Org-mode! Read more...

This years BSIDES RGV was great! I had a lot of fun was able to meetup with a lot of old colleagues and meet some new interesting people. The talks were great and I had a real hard time deciding which talks to attend. I’m glad it was another great successful year for BSIDES and I hope for more BSIDES in the future! If you enjoyed or found any of the content on my site helpful, you can buy me a cup of coffee so I can continue to bring you amazing content for free! Read more...

I recently had the opportunity to add an ssl certificate in my homelab environment. It was really easy and only took one command in Linux. Once I created my ssl certificate all I had to do was upload it to NGINX Proxy Manager and have it serve it to my proxied sites. You can use any other proxy manager such as Caddy but I had NGINX Proxy Manager in my homelab environment. Read more...

Atreus Keyboard Figure 1: Atreus Keyboard from Keyboardio Ergonomics This keyboard is small and light. I found it to be an amazing size and shape. I don’t think it is too small or too close together I actually found it very comfortable. I did experience some fatigue in the beginning but that was from poor typing technique. I am a bit of a finger and touch typist. I tend to finger type with my left hand which made hitting keys like the C key really annoying because I’m used to lifting my left hand and pressing the C key with my left index finger. Read more...

I recently setup NGINX Proxy Manager to help manage all of my self-hosted services. How did I do this? I installed NGINX Proxy Manager in a LXC container in my Proxmox server. I then configured several of my services to route to their respective IP addresses and ports. In NGINX Proxy Manager you can assign local domain name to your services. I chose to go with something simple like example.home. Once I finished configuring NGINX Proxy Manager I moved over to configure my Pi-Hole server. Read more...

I recently decided to move away from Gitlab. There was a bit of news around Gitlab closing free accounts which I think is a fair business move by Gitlab. Businesses need to make money after all. Most of the internet decided that Gitlab as evil for doing this. But I didn’t in fact I think it’s for the best. Since I was barely even using my Gitlab account and most importantly I wasn’t paying for any services I felt that I was cheating Gitlab. Read more...