I made them for the cybersecurity section of the computer science club, because I wanted to present a new topic for that meeting.

Note: I did not create the theme, I used a “computer science” theme from slidesgo.

Updated with a new networking slideshow!

Updates and the like:

I have been very, very busy this year, hence the lack of posts. But I will summarize the main tech and computer science events and accomplishments here:

• Installed a new home button on my Iphone 6s plus
• Attended Harvard Women in Computer Science (WiCS) virtual WiCS Workshop
• Further DWM configs and Arch linux ricing on my thinkpad
• Nintendo 3ds homebrew
• Nintendo Switch tinkering and Yuzu setup
• Formed a cybersecurity and hackathon team
• Competed in PicoCTF 2023 - Team pwned by penguins, 118th place in the US
• Participated in a nearby high school’s hackathon
• Competed in Cyberstart 2022-2023 and invited to do scholarship application
• Winning a scholarship for the SANS foundations course
• Switched from DWM to Hyprland, editing and writing config files
• Invited to sign up for USCC Virtual Cyber Camp 2023
• Wrote a couple ctf writeups (I will post them later!)
• AP CSP exam and Hackerrank
• Yearly html/css website speedrun to brush up on front end development and web design skills
• Applied for a biology/chemistry Women In Stem mentorship at College of Dupage
• Participated in another hackathon hosted by the Girls Who Code club at my school - (see repo here)
• WON beginner’s prize for said hackathon, $80 per team, 3 teammates, so roughly $26.6 for me

Not really sure if this is an accomplishment but since the seniors running the computer science club are graduating, a couple club members and I are going to continue the club next year. Hopefully this summer we can get it registered as an official club this summer.

Upcoming things:

• Working through the SANS foundations course
• Attending the USCC Virtual Cyber Camp 2023
• Participating in the WiCys Cyber defense challenge
• Completing the Harvard CS50 course and getting the certification
• Taking the GFACT exam

Goals:

• Join the science olympiad team - participate in the Cell Biology event
• Join the Girls Who Code Club
• Get accepted for biology or chemistry mentorship at College of Dupage
• Apply for Lockheed Martin STEM Scholarship this fall
• Apply for Neubauer Phoenix STEM Summer Scholars next year

Well, I think that’s all for now, I might have missed something, but if I did, its probably not as important as the rest.

Cybersecurity and programming competitions

This was an exceptional year for CTFs and hackathons, and its only halfway into 2023. Because of my performance in Cyberstart, I now have a scholarship covering the SANS foundations course and an attempt at the GFACT exam. Additionally, I was invited to participate in the USCC Virtual Cyber Camp this summer, both of which I am definitely going to do over the summer.

Ricing arch linux

Thanks to all of the experience I got from ricing my arch linux setup, I am not longer afraid of config files.

My current setup: Hyprland on wayland (goodbye xorg), using keybinds inspired by the default dwm ones Status bar: Waybar with Catpuccin theme GTK theme: Catpuccin Mocha (I believe) Terminal: Kitty and XFCE terminall with pywal colors Wallpaper daemon: swww Launcher: rofi with custom theme 5

I also use:

• ffmpeg to make gif wallpapers
• musikcube as my music player, with the “80s baby” theme
• cava as a music visualizer
• vim with current terminal theme
• code-oss with lilac theme and catpuccin icons

Tinkering with devices

After installing linux on my chromebook, I became increasingly interested in tinkering with other devices. I started researching iphone 6, ipad mini 2, and kindle paperwhite linux installations, but these were either shady or outdated. However, I did still develop a passion for working with both hardware and software. I’ve worked on:

• HP x360 Chromebook
• Nintendo 3ds XL
• Someone else’s Nintendo 3ds XL
• Nintendo switch

In the future, I want to explore:

• My printer
• My kindle (if there is anything new in the kindle hardware community)
• Smart home devices (because of the whole NEST selling out thing going on) and google home stuff
• Maybe another (non-school affiliated) chromebook so I can make a video to go along with my post But overall I’ve run out of things that either belong to me or I am allowed to mess around with, so we’ll see.

Photos of stuff I did:

Coming soon.

I was pretty busy with school, so I couldn’t really write much, but a lot has happened since I last posted. I did all of the things mentioned in the title, as well as learning a ton of new things about linux that are extremely useful all the time.

I GOT A THINKPAD

A month after I installed linux on my chromebook because chromeos was annoying me, I got a thinkpad! My chromebook had served me well, but by this time I had used it everday for almost four years, and it was on its last legs. Using a Lenovo Thinkpad T14 Gen 3 has changed my life honestly, because it allows me to do much, much more than my chromebook ever did (thanks to the difference in sheer computing power).

Discovering Luke Smith’s cooking site and learning pull requests!

I often look to youtube for linux tutorials and news, and I eventually stumbled upon Luke Smith’s youtube channel. From there, I found his video showcasing his website titled Based cooking, and I thought hey, maybe I should add a recipe so I can learn to make a commit to a public repository. So I followed the instructions on the readme, and voila, I added a strawberry compote recipe. View it here

Computer science Club & Cybersecurity team

I joined the Computer Science club at my high school, and I formed a Competitive Cybersecurity team! Computer science club is once a week, and I host two weekly online meetings for the team on discord, where we talk about linux, competitions, and I demo CTF challenges. I arranged for the team to participate in cyberstart as training, organizing a leaderboard and all, as training for PicoCTF. Then, in March, we’ll compete as a team in PicoCTF.

Ubuntu 22.04 update breaking grub & fixing it || An arduous process of learning from mistakes

Sometime during the summer, a failed system update to my dual booted ubuntu setup on my pc resulted in 3 months of chaos. I don’t remember exactly how this issue began, but I was running ubuntu 20.04 at the time and tried to update the system, and I probably restarted my computer after something froze (big mistake), and when I booted back into ubuntu I was brought to the grub rescue screen each time.

After hours of research, I went on to try the advanced options for booting into ubuntu, and after trying one recovery mode after another, I eventually got to one that would bring me to a command line and the recovery menu, and after trying options like dpkg, clean, fsck, and grub (admittedly at random), clicking resume to normal boot would work, and it would boot to ubuntu 22.04. However, the strange thing was I couldn’t launch a lot of programs, and there was an icon showing the system was unmounted. Nothing would happen if I clicked and tried to mount it. Additionally, trying to laucn firefox would immediately crash ubuntu. I started had also tried a multitude of different grub rescue commands, and trying to find mount points for grub. None of these methods worked, so I backed up any important files, and tried reinstalling ubuntu. However, the issue here was I had no idea how exactly I would accomplish that. So I boot to Windows, open up the partition manager, and delete all the partitions on the ubuntu ssd (I had two separate ssds) which makes the problem even worse. But back then, I had no idea (woops), and just reinstalled ubuntu (again). This time, I ran the boot repair tool following this tutorial. Then, after everything, I pulled the plug and decided to install popOS, and voila. Miraculously popOS fixed the whole issue, and its been the same ever since. So when all goes wrong, install popOS.

And that, is a beginner’s first sysadmin trainwreck.

My experience with distro hopping

I was a pretty conservative ubuntu user up until the chaos with the new update ensued. I was researching other linux distrubutions but I didn’t really have any motive to switch. As I mentioned earlier, I switched to Pop OS by System 76 on my main computer. Because it’s based on ubuntu, it was pretty easy to switch. Then, this fall I installed Kali linux on my chromebook after jailbreaking it, which is covered in this post. After that, I started realizing that kali linux isn’t really that good of a daily driver, despite its uses for cybersecurity CTFs. So, I started researching good linux distros that are relatively lightweight. And from there, I found it. My current daily driver and favorite linux distro: Arch Linux. Yes, I use arch btw. Configuring and making arch usable was a relatively large learning curve for me, but it was definitely worth it. Thanks to installing arch linux, I managed to significantly improve my linux and command line skills, and bash scripting even.

Exploring Desktop environments and DWM Configs on arch!

After installing arch linux, I started watching more of Mental Outlaw’s youtube videos, specifically all the arch linux tutorials he has. This lead me to stumble upon his dwm videos, which got me interested in using other desktop environments, besides the beloved xfce. XFCE4 is great and all, but I wanted to try something new, specifically a tiling window manager. It was yet another steep learning curve, but thanks to Mental Outlaw’s and Bugswriter’s videos, I learned to configure DWM to how I like it, and this was my introduction into linux ricing.

Participating in Advent of Code

I was introduced to Advent of Code this winter, and I solved up to day 8. My solutions are probably a bit janky, but I got a lot of good practice out of this competition. Solutions are in this repo: https://github.com/M-watermelon/Competition-programs.

What I’ve already done:

I changed the dark theme colors to a warmer tint.

If you look at the source code to this website on github, you’ll notice I made a couple commits with pretty similar edit messages - “changing dark mode colors” , “color changes again”. That’s because I forgot which file determines the final outcome of the website appearance-wise. I was testing changes to CSS files to find out which one will make the permanent color-theme change. There definitely were smarter alternatives I considered, but I was tired.

For future note: use _sass/yat/_dark.scss and _sass/yat/_layout.scss to implement theme changes. _sass/yat/_base.scss can be used to change the colors of things like links and also add more elaborate styling.

I attempted to change the url of the homepage of the website, to be shorter.

Note, it hasn’t worked yet, and I’ll continue trying to fix it. I’ll add the fix to that here later, but so far I’ve tried changing it in the github pages settings and changing it in _config.yml. Neither worked, so I’ll probably just google it or look into republishing the website.

EDIT: I finally understand why I cannot remove the /WatermelonBlog/ in the url. This is due to the fact that I have not configured a custom domain for my website (and I probabkly won’t in the future.) The reason it is https://m-watermelon.github.io/WatermelonBlog/`WatermelonBlog/` and not https://m-watermelon.github.io/WatermelonBlog/`home` is because ‘WatermelonBlog’ is the name of the github repository from which I created a github pages environment.

This is a goofy mistake, but better to find out late than never. I found this out only after launching a second github pages website, that had the url https://m-watermelon.github.io/`Uranium-cat/`. I had considered the (rather obvious) possibility that the urls are made from my github account username, .io, and the repository name, but I never decided to look into it.

The more you know!!

Update: That’s pretty much all. I’ll keep working on this from time to time, but my main focus is school (which has started again) and BASH scripting.

Uranium Cat¹ is a new github repository² and project made by me.

It is a chat website made to bypass the URL filters on school wifi. My school has a very strict phone policy this year, and has disabled even Slack due to students using it in class to talk to friends. So, I decided to use this as an oppurtunity for a coding project and make a chat site.

It is still a work in progress. So far I have used HTML and CSS to build it, but I plan on using PHP, Javascript, and Bootstrap as I learn/experiment.

Progress so far:

I’ve:

• Launched github pages for it
• Created basic html foramt and css styles
• Furnished with a title, body, and footer with the link to the github repository.
• Given it a modern looking makeover
• Built the base for the “chat” box
• Researched best languages/methods for creating chat sites (PHP, Javascript, looked into whether or not python is an option).

What I need to do next:

Make the chat website into an actual chat website:

• Figure out whether I am going to use PHP or Javascript, and continue researching python alternatives.
• Creating host/client connections, disconnecting
• Write/send messages
• Send button
• Users can choose/enter names
• ‘Exit’ button
• CSS styling for things like names of different users.

Long term ideas:

• Keywords for custom ascii symbols (☏, ♫, ♥, ☺ , ☹ , ❇ , ★) (I love these)
• Users can enter a hexadecimal value to choose what color they want their name to be
• Implement security features to prevent unwanted people from joining chats (ie internet trolls, people looking to collect information)
• Support for sending files and images.

…. And so on…

Why I keep making html websites from scratch + history of these types of projects:

From time to time I review HTML/CSS by making a basic website from scratch, but with a different focus every time. The first time, it was Watermelon Blog 2.0, a remake of this website from scratch, later repurposed for an unfinished browser game project. I considered repurposing the code for Watermelon Blog 2.0 for Uranium Cat, but I felt that the code had been repurposed and mutilated enough.

My aim in every programming project / repository of mine is to be able to explain what the significance and function of each line is.

It is deeply frustrating when there is a line of code that is absolutely essential to my project (ie everything breaks without that one line, especially certain css structure stylings), but I cannot explain what exactly it does. Ultimately, I want to prevent that. After all, if I’m in a job interview, what am I to do when I present a project and the recruiter asks a question about the code I can’t answer?

Additionally, I don’t feel that a project is truly my own work, unless I truly made it myself, not some copy paste soup or a step by step reproduction of a tutorial.

Conflict with tutorials and why Uranium Cat is so important:

Speaking of tutorials, I generally have a hard time with them. Its not because I can’t follow them step by step, I can, but when I do, I don’t feel like I learned anything. Tutorials make the process exponentially easier, but it becomes too easy. I’ve learned to teach myself using many different resources on the internet, and piecing things together rather than relying on a single source, no matter how good, to provide everything I need. this, along with wanting to feel like I own my work, are the main issues I have with tutorials. But perhaps there is a better way, a proper method to learning from tutorials. That is what I aim to find discover for myself with Uranium Cat.

Progress images:

First launch:

Featured a pastel orange heading and footer, with a light navy background. Unfortunately, I no longer have a record of what it looked like. It looked like an old website.

Sleek and modern redesign:

Chat boxes added and UI design (stage one):

June:

I didn’t do much, but I did some research related to Networking and Linux.

July:

I switched my main desktop from Windows to Ubuntu.

I wanted to do this for a long time because most of the programming and cybersecurity tools I use are on linux. The only thing that was holding me back were audio issues and gaming (Windows-only games).

• For the gaming part, I eventually figured everything out using WINE and Steam Proton.

• Audio was even easier to fix than on Windows.

Simply by making this switch, I feel like I’ve learned a lot of useful things, including how to use the terminal better.

What I’m working on now

August:

Since I’m not on Windows, I can do a lot more customization to make things the way I like it, which gave me a couple of project ideas.

• I’ve been experimenting with BASH scripting, mainly using it to automate things (like typing terminal commands that have long and annoying file paths, useful for starting up games)

I’m also keeping a computer science journal that has lots of useful notes and reminders for Linux tools.

What I want to do next

Website improvements:

• Improve the way the website loads (there is a flash of purple when loading the banner on the home screen)
• Making a blog post template document (Ubuntu has a folder for document templates, I want to try using it)
• Finally fixing the home url of this website
• Removing the extra home page link on the top bar
• Add better grouping methods for posts on this website on the home page

More linux stuff:

• Continue working with BASH scripting, going beyond using terminal commands and instead learning to use variables, loops, functions, and more.
• Figure out the issues I’ve been experiencing with modding Windows based games.
• Learn more about git, lua, and onion routing (and networking in general).

Conclusion

I kind of fell out of touch with Watermelon Blog 2.0, the remake of this website I wanted to create a browser game on. I might pick it up again in the future, but even if I don’t, I learned a lot from my attempt to make a website line by line, from scratch.

I also want to contribute to other’s projects, or make a collaborative project of my own.

I’m very interested in BASH at this moment, so whatever I choose to do, it’ll probably have shellcode in it.

It’s good to be back!

I decided to switch from Javascript to Python, because I’m a little more experienced with it, and I always wanted to try using pygame and tkinter to make a game. I’m still making a snake game though.

Key takeaways

I was having issues with import tkinter as *, I was recieving an error that said the program couldn’t find a module named ‘tkinter’, but after doing some more research, I found out that I didn’t have tkinter properly installed. The method of installing that worked for me was sudo apt-get install python3-tk. After that, I managed to get a little pop up to open that also had the quit button. I’m currently using the ttk (Themed tkinter) widget of tkinter, and learning to use it at the same time.

I’m working on the opening screen currently, I probably should just start with making an outline of the game, but I want to experiment and try out the features of tkinter and tkk first.

My plan:

1. Set up the basic html formatting and css styles [DONE]
2. Make the basic canvas and shapes using python
3. Add animations and movement using keys
4. Add border/collisions to canvas
5. Polish and add extra features like items/fruits, scores, health

Details

I didn’t qualify for the scholarship because I’m not a high school senior or student in college. I got an email yesterday from the National Cyber Scholarship Foundation announcing the competition results, and that I’m a finalist for the competition. This means that if I was a few years further into school, I could’ve gotten the scholarship.

Competition results are viewable here <- I’m listed on there!

How the rankings work

Scholar: The top 1152 highest scoring students who met the eligibility criteria for a Scholarship (including being in 11th-12th grade or enrolled in an accredited U.S. college), who have each been awarded free access to this summer’s Cyber Foundations Academy and a digital Scholar badge.

Finalist: The highest scoring 2325 students who completed the NCSF Scholarship Application, who will each be awarded a digital Finalist badge.

Semifinalist: The 4521 students who scored at least 20,000 points in CyberStart via CyberStart America or Cyber FastTrack, 1000 points in picoCTF, or Platinum level in CyberPatriot.

What is the scholarship?

The NCSF award would pay for a SANS cybersecurity course and an attempt at the GFACT exam, worth $3,000. The SANS course would prepare you for the GFACT exam, and then the GFACT exan would give you a certification for basic cybersecurity, which could help get you internships.

“The GFACT certification validates a practitioner’s knowledge of essential foundational cybersecurity concepts. GFACT-certified professionals are familiar with practical skills in computers, technology, and security fundamentals that are needed to kickstart a career in cybersecurity.”

GFACT Details:

• One proctored exam
• 2 hour long test
• 75 questions
• 71% score to pass

What I’ll be doing in the future:

Qualifying for the scholarship would be a great opportunity for me, and getting a chance to take the SANS course would be incredible. I’m going to do what I can to get the scholarship in the future, and I will study as hard as I can to pass the GFACT test. The scholarship and the GFACT test would be a great headstart on my cybersecurity career. So far I have been teaching myself cybersecurity, so a course would be a good boost for me. I’m especially interested in the GFACT exam, because I could be certified in cybersecurity (at least for the foundations) by that exam, and that would be helpful for me in many ways.

In the meantime:

Additionally, although I didn’t get the scholarship, SANS has a free online course called Cyber Aces that I’m going to be studying this summer. Its a beginner course, and it has content on networking, which has been something I’ve been meaning to learn.

This is only the beginning. I’ve begun eyeing competitive programming, and I’m going to start using websites like Leetcode and Hacker Rank. I’m also going to do more programming projects, so that I can have knowledge in both cybersecurity and programming. The school year just ended, so I will have plenty of time for everything over the summer without burning out.

Furthermore, I’m going to compete in both PicoCTF and Cyberstart every year for the next few years, at least throughout high school. This way, I can continue testing my growth over the years, and have some cool activities to add to my college applications.

• Language: Javascript [For the game] with HTML/CSS [For the website]
• Type of game: Snake game
• Originality: completely original, made from scratch, no tutorials used – just occasional research of specific terms This is going to be a short project I’m going to do. Instead of leaving the code for the second version of my blog site unfinished, I decided to repurpose it for this browser game. I chose to do this project so I can do something simple first, and then move on to the more complex programming projects.

My plan:

1. Set up the basic html formatting and css styles
2. Make the basic canvas and shapes using javascript
3. Add animations and movement using keys
4. Add border/collisions to canvas
5. Polish and add extra features like items/fruits, scores, health

My current score is 50,400 points!

Updates

I finally reached 50,000 points today, the last day of Cyberstart. I was burning out lately, but I managed to make one final push, and I focused mainly on the moon base, the python programming challenges. I still added some notes to my cybersecurity guide, and I will be adding more in the future. I mainly learned about python sockets and url requests today.