Tools

Razor is a work session timer with one requirement before the clock starts: declare the specific task and which project it belongs to. Type API_Caller: WeatherApp and the 25 minutes begin. When time is up, it asks whether you finished. The completed list grows. That is it. I built it because I stood in my house one afternoon and counted ten unfinished projects in the same room. Not ten across the whole house. Ten in that room. A workbench with three tools out, a shelf half-painted, a cabinet with one door rehung and one still leaning against the wall. I kept starting the next thing before the last thing was done. The thing before that too. And the thing before that. ...

The first cybersecurity tool most people install is a SIEM. A SIEM without the fundamentals is a dashboard full of alerts you cannot interpret. The pattern repeats: someone decides to get into cybersecurity, reads a list of enterprise tools, installs a Splunk trial or a commercial EDR, stares at it for two weeks, and concludes that security work is too complex to break into. The tool was not the problem. The sequence was. ...

Nmap sends packets and listens for what comes back. What comes back tells you more about a network than most administrators know about their own infrastructure. Gordon Lyon released Nmap in 1997 in a Phrack magazine article. It has been in active development since then and has appeared in over a dozen films, including The Matrix Reloaded, Die Hard 4.0, and Bourne Ultimatum, because filmmakers use it when they need a terminal to look like actual hacking. It is one of the most widely used security tools in existence, and most people who run it do not fully understand what it is doing. ...