Whazzup, ladies and geeks? My work week - work YEAR - is over, it's Friday nite, so I'm back. And I got some fun stuff to talk about!
I got blessed with a $500 Amazon gift card! 🤯
At the Christmas party at work, they opened up the raffle to remote workers, so I threw a few bucks in. I still can't believe I actually WON! Now I'm doing my best to prevent it from burning a hole in my pocket. 😆 Frankly, I'll probably end up saving it - or at least most of it. But MAN is that gonna be hard!
- I've been on the fence about the whole Mac thing, and I can finally afford one... for at least half my winnings.
- I saw this super-cool (and not-cheap-but-far-less-expensive) Raspberry Pi thing that deserves its own post.
- The Pocket 386 is on Amazon
- There's a Raspberry Pi Game Boy case for the Zero 2W (and I have a Pi Zero 2W currently collecting dust) for like $40
- To say nothing of hockey gear, more armor to complete my collection, I could go on and on and on and on.
Meanwhile my mom's focus is on things like my brother's next birthday, the things I order regularly, and I'm thinking yeah, I could, and probably should, do that, but...... Obviously I'm gonna have to pray about how to use this money wisely... but I would LOVE to hear some ideas for fun stuff that's NOT gonna cost 2/3 of this unbelievable surprise.
I created an SSH server!
I love me some on-line text mode software. I used to be hooked on playing Legend of the Red Dragon on Lunduke's BBS. I have accounts on several MUDs, and I'm hoping to play some this week. I have an old mainframes emulator that I like to putz around on sometimes. I recently discovered Gopher, and had fun learning to use it (and I might end up putting a blog or something on Gopher some day - it's that cool). And I really like SSH Tron.
For idk how many years, I've been trying to essentially re-create the thing that makes SSH Tron possible. Telnet is fun, but SSH means games with passwords (and even things that are not games) can be put on-line and not broadcast everything in plain text. So I have spent a long time trying to figure out how SSH Tron exists and hasn't been obliterated by hackers and bots. Some of you have read my posts from those times. Like the time I tried to auto-run a program from .bashrc, got hacked, and deleted a Linode server. Or the time I messed with "websocketd" - which btw is a fantastic little WebSockets server - or ideas I've had about using custom shells, "chsh" and users with crap privileges (an idea that could have worked but I could never get chroot jails working right so I didn't go there).
Well, with help from AI, I finally cracked it. I asked how SSH Tron does it. It said something about Go, a language I neither know nor care to learn. I asked about where there was a similar way in C/C++, it pointed me to a library called "libssh". I did the whole gimme-some-code, I review the code as best I can, test, repeat loop. Then I remembered websocketd, and how simple it was - so much so that you can code a program in any old language and serve it because websocketd pipes stdin/stdout to the remote user. A few more rounds of generate, review, ask questions, test, fix, repeat and IT WORKS! And since the AI I used was co-pilot, I figured most of the code was probably MS's anyway, so I put it up on GitHub:
https://github.com/TheGeekOnSkates/ShellYeah
So if you feel like playing hacker and want to break it, or if you know libssh better than me and see some mistakes I didn't catch, I welcome your feedback. I'd love to see SSH used for more than just full-on OS shells. There are even SSH clients for DOS (and for games, it is possible to use my tool and inetd to serve games over both SSH and Telnet). Obviously, as a wanna-be author, I'm creating a game like LoRD. Well.. I'm coming up with story ideas, then realizing "oh, that belongs in my book" and starting over. :-D
And I could go on.
There's a lot more I want to talk to you guys about.
- More AI vs. not AI debates with myself (some of them deep rabbit-holes that would be too much for this little "I'm back" post)
- My writing is REALLY starting to take off - and there's a lot to talk about there for those interested (but it's not computer-y so not going there)
- Still loving the retro stuff, still never enough time but I'm always happy totalk retro stuff.
Oh, and CHRISTMAS BREAK! WOOOOOO! 🙃🥳🎄
lol
