Blog by Simon Frey

Yerba Mate isn’t one flavour. It’s a spectrum as wide as wine or whisky, shaped by country, cut, smoke, age, and the temperature of the water you pour. A shade-grown chimarrão from Paraná tastes nothing like a barbacuá from Corrientes. A wild-harvested Brazilian yerba that wants 85 °C water breaks every rule on the temperature slide. I am in love with yerba mate. The way it asks you to slow down. The way it turns a room of strangers into a circle. The gourd moving from hand to hand. The cebador…

DISCLAIMER: Swimming, tubing, and floating is officially FORBIDDEN in all Munich waterways — including the Schwabinger Bach described here. The city of Munich takes no accountability for anything that happens to you. And of course, neither do I! If you choose to do this, you do it entirely at your own risk. Don’t be stupid. Be aware of your surroundings, respect the water, and know your limits. The Schwabinger Bach is one of Munich’s best-kept summer secrets. While tourists crowd around the…

I’ve had to explain nuclear fusion a lot lately to people hearing about it for the first time. After a few tries that flopped, I think I found an analogy that works: loving couples, breakups, and what happens to their furniture. Stick with me. The short (but technical) answer: Fusion works by pushing two tiny atoms together until they merge into one. When they join, a small bit of mass turns into a huge burst of energy. This is the same reaction that powers the Sun. The hard part? Atoms push…

If you’ve used dig domain.com ANY lately to see all DNS records for a domain, you’ve probably noticed it doesn’t work anymore. Instead of A, MX, NS, TXT records, you get a single weird line mentioning “RFC8482”. Here’s why and what to do instead. TLDR; dig ANY is dead. RFC 8482 retired it to stop DDoS amplification. Loop over the numeric RR types in parallel instead. Command to do this with dig on linux at the end of the article dig ANY return nothing for most nameservers $ dig cloudflare.com…

If you’ve tried pivoting nmap through an SSH jump host, you’ve probably hit one of two outcomes: every port comes back as filtered, or every port comes back as open. Both are wrong and in this post I will show you how I got to a satisifying result. (Spoiler: Using ligolo-ng) Scenario: You’ve got an attack host, a pivot you can SSH into, and a target on an internal subnet that’s only reachable from the pivot: Attack Host (10.10.14.12) --> Pivot (10.129.229.129) --> Target (172.16.5.35) The…

I’ve been running Plausible for my website analytics for over four years. They do a great job as a managed service and I really like their team…but I have a Kubernetes cluster on Hetzner Cloud…Read more of Self-hosted Plausible Analytics on Kubernetes (with db operators and ArgoCD) →