Polymaths.social

ROP-Chains (Return oriented programming chains)
Are utterly fascinating, I got into a research hole after playing around with my 3DS yesterday, and thinking about the attack vectors and priviledge escalations across CPUs and stuff and ended up reading about them, sounds like painful work though finding functions with endings that does what you want and then manipulating stacks and jumping into the middle of a function to let it do the things you want from executable memory, and write an exploit with that which isn't easy in the first place, hat off to the people doing those things :)

Another day of thankfully some of our processes and reports have sources that I can look into. Being able to mentally thread variables through a couple of queries and some code just makes it so much easier to figure out where to change out some data to fix an issue someone is having, so much easier than the other way, which is randomly change data around to see what finally gets it working.

Wrote up a little blog post about my adventures with tinkering with my 3DS, and how I solved the problem of a segfaulting game caused by the newer seed encrypted games.

https://sotolf.polymaths.page/posts/3ds-tinkering-seeded-crypto/

Yey, I did manage to fix the 3ds game, or more fulfill the requirements to run it, it was a fun tinkering session, marred by my mistakes, but now it's running, and I have more than enough games on my 3DS for a while.

Now I think I have 4 reinstalls of SMTIV:A (Shin megami tensei IV: Apocalypse)

Had to download it, once it didn't run I had to check the hash of the file, and it matched, so the download was not borked.

With each restart, it just dumped memory and closed the console.

I figured out it was a newer game that is encrypted and needs a seed to run. So I found a seeddb.bin file, that of course I couldn't directly use, so I had to use a program to split it into singular files for the seeds.

Then when I had my seeds I could transfer these over to the sd:/fbi/seed folder, go into fbi again to titles, and import the seed for the games. That got them into running correctly, and I felt happy, now that was most of my off-time yesterday, so I didn't get much time to play.

I didn't really play any octopath II yesterday, I was being out taking a walk, and then playing around tinkering with my 3DS a bit, the FTP and installing .cia files through FBI is really fun, but it takes a long time, transferring a 2 Gb file takes 40 min, then installing said file takes another 30 min :p

So I went on an adventure, I wanted to prepare Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse, so that I can play it when it gets to it, but when I had it installed the second time (~2 hours of transferring and installing) it still just bails when I started it up, I did some searching and figured out it needs a seed for some crypto stuff that was implemented for some of the newer games, so I have aquired the seed, and will have to try and get that over to see if that gets the thing to run, but that will probably have to wait until the weekend again, still felt kind of fun tinkering with the simpler older systems though, and it kind of brought back the wonder of Custom Firmware for the older handhelds which always was so much fun to tinker with.

Some anxiousness pleaguing me agian, and really missing the older small handheld systems, making me want to play on them again, the small systems that you can actually bring along without worrying, and have fun with.

https://sotolf.polymaths.page/posts/this-week-2026-27/

I finished up partitio's quest line today in octopath 2 still not a fan didn't even get to suplex the train.. maybe going for Castti's next.

Also was looking at my 3ds again, downloaded a couple of games and ftpd them over, which still feels kind of magical, so I have dragon quest 7 and SMT IV on there now :)

There is only one god

As much as I have enjoyed the switch I kind of miss the really pocketable handhelds, the old ones are great, as I can emulate them on the miyoo, but it would be nice with a more dedicated handheld again, something like the 3ds in size, it was just such a joy to just clap it together and stuff it in a pocket to have something to fiddle around with.

Did get some Octopath 2 done yesterday, I struggled a bit fighting the seamonster in the water vortex, I had to boot Agnea from the Team and replace her with Hikari, both he and ochette can deal some real punishment with attacks that does around 15 000 damage, which is really helpful with bosses. Third time was the charm.

Exploring the eastern seas I found a labyrinth and managed to get the arcanist job there, I think there is only one job left for me to find now, at least from what it looks like with the job selection wheel.

Probably it's getting time to start concluding some of the character stories now, or at least that's what feels like it's coming with the lvl 45 recommended story quests.

Fighting some fires right as I arrived at work today, but I think we managed to solve that, then I weirded out my boss by showing him https://grugbrain.dev/ And now I think he thinks that is a description of me, but at least it's friday, and there is a weekend :p

Ser ut te at jæ får te å komma meg på besøk i gamlelandet oppatovreatt, sist gang var det midtvinters, blir også forhåpentligvis godt å komma seg litt unna varmen her nede i sentraleuropa også, satser på at det ordner seg.

A discussion reminded me of this poem that is really good, and probably even really quite important

A poem by Arnulf Øverland, Du må ikke sove

With a pretty good English translation here

https://lyricstranslate.com/en/arnulf-overland-du-ma-ikke-sove-english

#poem #fascism

Databases can be really confusing some times, I had to do some new stuff in a query that I was sure would make the thing grind to a halt, but it seems like it tickled an index or massaged a plan in a very good way, and it ended up being quicker than my original version. And I'm sitting here feeling like :|

Yesterday in my Octopath 2 adventures, I won over a beast on a nameless island and learned how to decipher ancient languages, which I don't yet know what is good for, but might be important. I also spent 2 fruitless hours with a lone ochette trying to beat some kind of samurai in a place I could only go in alone, but I couldn't figure out how to bring out power quick enough to best them, so I guess that's something I will have to come back to later.

I just spent a couple of hours writing an sql for a report, and debugging, I'm pretty proud of it, but I don't think anyone would understand what it does without being quite steeped in the databases and processes that it's querying. But I'm really quite proud of it, and how well it works. It's nothing huge being just a 41 line thing, but my brain now feels pretty tired, so I need some defrag time :p

"I just want the correct time difference"

oracle sql: give me the right incantation

me: sigh

(to_date(to_char(from_tz(to_timestamp(bk.sabk_frei_d4, 'yyyymmddhh24miss'),'UTC') AT TIME ZONE 'Europe/Vienna', 'yyyymmddhh24miss'),'yyyymmddhh24miss') - current_date)*24

If I'm ever out of things to boost, I'm quite confident I can just go visit @paul s profile and just blindly boost everything on there, since usually when I visit half of their boosts I have already boosted :p

It's kind of funny how fast the US went from a big soft power to this imperium reaching free fall speeds, and being little else than a laughing stock.

Every day there is another "What did those clowns do this time?"

Finished off the 8th book of the black ocean, and really quite enjoyed it. I still have the little novella at the end of the collection, but since it's only 20 or so pages I don't count it as a book, I will read it and then start at Chromatic Aberration the next one in the sector files universe :)