eXpl0it3r – development

Windows Server on WD Sentinel DS6100

Recently I have acquired a WD Sentinel DS6100 server and over the 2018 Christmas holidays I’ve been playing around with it and want to share my experiences over multiple blog posts.

Looking at online reviews for the WD Sentinel DS6100, it seems like this has been a lucky model, as it has lasted for over five years already, while others have reported failures of multiple devices in a short period of time.

Now it’s time to give it some software upgrade and re-purpose it as Hyper-V host and data storage device.

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January 3, 2019By eXpl0it3r WD Sentinel DS6100 RAID, Western Digital, windows serverLeave a Comment

Your Windows is a Hypervisor

For the longest time I’ve either picked VirtualBox or less often VMware whenever I needed a virtual machine. Only a few months ago I learned at work that Windows 10 comes with its own Hypervisor called Hyper-V. Usually you have to enable Hyper-V, but then it’s really easy to use.

As a bonus note, if you have Docker installed, you may see it running a Linux VM in Hyper-V.

August 17, 2018By eXpl0it3r Tools Hyper-V, microblog, virtualization, VMLeave a Comment

Fetch GitHub Pull Requests Locally

It’s by no means a secret thing and Google will be the first to tell you, but by the off chance that someone hasn’t thought about it, here’s just the command how to do it.

git fetch origin pull/<id>/head:<branch>

<id> refers to the pull request id on GitHub
<branch> refers to a custom branch name of your choosing
Note: You can’t push back changes, but you can push them to your repository and create a new pull request.

Since we’re merging pull requests manually at SFML, it’s a command I’m using very frequently.

August 14, 2018By eXpl0it3r Tools Git, GitHub, microblog, pull requestLeave a Comment

Visual Studio Tip: Save Layouts

When working a lot with Visual Studio, you’ll run into the issue of managing your windows properly. You may spend quite some time figuring out the perfect layout, only to have Visual Studio randomly move a window around again, when you have to restart Visual Studio. Or you keep rearranging your windows depending on what you’re currently working on. Either way, you spend too much time fighting the IDE, instead of getting work done.

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August 6, 2018By eXpl0it3r Tools layout, productivity, Visual StudioLeave a Comment

Kirby CMS & Plugins

For many years I’ve been playing around with various PHP-based content management systems (CMS). From self-made to well-known ones like Drupal, I’ve seen quite a range and yet they all never really could provide enough flexibility for the developer and easy of use for the website maintainer at the same time. I don’t want to go into much details here, but the goal should simply be, that as a developer you want to create a site and as a website maintainer you want to edit all parts of the websites without developer involvement. Getting to that goal while not having to invest huge amounts of time into learning all ins and outs of a CMS is hard to reach.

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July 26, 2018By eXpl0it3r Other Dev, Web Dev cms, customize, kirby, webdev, websiteLeave a Comment

Top 5 Podcast I Listen To

It’s interesting how things develop. I remember quite well how my brother used to download and listen to interesting podcasts 10 or so years ago, yet it felt like podcasts lost on popularity over the past years and only now is again gaining some major uplift. There are many YouTubers out there who noticed the medium and given its potential with ad placements, it has turn out to be more profitable that just creating YouTube videos.

It’s no surprise then that mainly two YouTubers brought me to discover and listen to podcasts myself.

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June 3, 2018By eXpl0it3r Thoughts audio, Cortex, CppCast, Hello Internet, No Dumb Questions, podcasts, Writing Excuses, YouTubersLeave a Comment

Generate a DEF file from a DLL

Last night I spend multiple hours trying to get a non-broken CSFML build ready, which requires to have import libraries for MSVC and GCC that both depend on the same DLL. This works because the import library only points to the symbols that are in the DLL, thus acts as sort of instruction how to use the DLL.

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June 2, 2018By eXpl0it3r Tools, Tutorial DEF, DLL, DLLTOOL, EXPDEF, GENDEF, import library, LIB2A, MinGW, REIMP2 Comments

When fitness tracking reveal bases

The other day I stumbled up on a thread in my Twitter feed, where people have located army bases based on fitness tracking heat maps released by Strava. Here’s an example of what the data looks like: Drone base in Djibouti

Soldiers running around the perimeter or just a simple patrol?

Nice drones!

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January 29, 2018By eXpl0it3r General, Thoughts data leak, Google maps, North Korea, secret army base, trackingLeave a Comment

Rule of Thumb – Linking Order

Those newer to programming in C++ often fail to understand that compilers like GCC or Clang require a specific link order for the libraries in use or they don’t know what order to pick. Working on SFML and helping out in its community, I’ve had the pleasure to help people fix their linker errors many times and every now and then I’d explain a short rule of thumb one can keep in mind when specifying libraries to be linked. As such I wanted to share it here with you too.

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January 10, 2018By eXpl0it3r Tools, Tutorial C++, linking, SFMLLeave a Comment

Blocking Ads in Skype and Viber

I’m not a fan of advertisement, be it on a website or in some application. For websites, we have quite a few options by now – I currently use uBlock Origin. But when companies include ads in an application itself, the options to block it, get a bit more complicated.

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January 5, 2018By eXpl0it3r Computer Science, Tutorial adblocker, ads, block, skype, viberLeave a Comment