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No Post This Week
I’m feeling a bit overworked, stressed, and under the weather. The consequences of not taking care of myself first before my studies, work, and organizations is finally taking a toll on me. As such, there will be no post this week. Happy trails.
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Python Workshops Successfully Concluded!
Tonight, we finished our final Python workshop for the semester. This was the concluding workshop in a series of three spread over the span of three weeks, made possible through partnership with Engineering Service Learning at UC Merced. The following are some photos taken of the series. I had a...
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Hack the Power!
I’m really excited to announce that the Solar Energy Association at the University of California, Merced, is about to begin work on a big project in collaboration with the Association of Computing Machinery and HackMerced! We will be teaching students how to hack a solar panel array at HackMerced’s Local...
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About Work Ethic
I’ve always believed that in anything I do, I must give my full, honest, 100% effort. Sometimes my 100% on one day isn’t the same as my 100% on another day, and that’s okay! What matters is that I truly try my best. Anything less is simply unacceptable. The code...
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Check Out WhiteHoodHacker's Blog Post!
I usually don’t make blog posts like this, but I felt particularly compelled to today after reading something. One of my teammates at IrisSec, WhiteHoodHacker, recently wrote an awesome blog post about how he hacked his school district and rickrolled everyone, titled, “IoT Hacking and Rickrolling My High School District.”...
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All of Those Yesterdays Coming Down
The set of what I’d consider the most salient memories of my life thus far largely takes place under the cool blanket of the night. It exists along the breezy horizons and fluorescent street lights, along barren or packed roads, sometimes alone or otherwise at least feeling alone – it...
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Reflecting on My Experiences Teaching at Brown Youth Academy
Just this passing summer, I had the great pleasure of working and teaching at Brown Youth Academy, an educational program hosted by the University of California, Merced, for middle school students in the California Central Valley. We served five groups over the span of five weeks in late June and...
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What Motivates Me Is Not What Drives Me
I suppose this is a follow-up to a point I made in my post, “Natural Talent is Baloney,” in regards to a question asked of me that I had never thought to have asked myself: why do I take on such a large workload when it very clearly causes me...
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Summer Lost
Although I originally had a lot planned this summer, I unfortunately couldn’t go through with the vast majority of it. I was really looking forward to building a mobile projection interception system and creating an analytics tool for nginx servers – particularly because my own website runs using nginx –...
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Natural Talent is Baloney
I do a lot… like, a LOT. I’m balancing a full academic workload of major upper division classes, plus my jobs at UC Merced Extension and UC Merced IT Network, plus my extracurricular positions as the administrator of IrisSec, logistical organizer at HackMerced, and vice president of the Solar Energy...
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August's Summer Leaves
Well, it’s official: the autumn semester has begun and instruction has started again. I’ve been fortunate enough to (almost) have an extra week of summer vacation since all but one of my classes cancelled this week. The first week is totally remote to give students more last-minute time to move...
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Deciphering an Unknown File and Navigating MS-DOS to Retrieve a Flag
This writeup is also readable on my GitHub repository and team website. This is a writeup for a great forensics challenge that I did at UIUCTF 2021 where I found yet another reason to despise Microsoft – something I openly welcome! This challenge involves an unknown file format, navigating MS-DOS,...
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Diffing Images and Using Columnar LSB to Retrieve a Message
This writeup is also readable on my GitHub repository and team website. This is a writeup for another “forensics” challenge that I completed at UIUCTF 2021 where I took a rather unconventional and possibly even unintended approach to the challenge in order to arrive at a solution. I put “forensics”...
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Performing Digital Forensics on an Apple Tablet to Recover Evidence
This writeup is also readable on my GitHub repository and team website. Last weekend, I had the pleasure of competing at UIUCTF 2021 hosted by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. This was my team’s second time competing at UIUCTF and we scored 3rd out of 658 teams this year....
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UC Merced's Student Housing Crisis
Hey there. My name is Shawn Duong, and this is my blog. I’m a rising third-year Computer Science and Engineering undergraduate student at the University of California, Merced, and I’m on track to becoming homeless by the end of August. This isn’t clickbait, and I’m not special. There are others...
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Arch Linux UEFI+Encrypted+i3 Minimal Installation
So I finally got around to installing Arch Linux on my Node 202 SFF PC build. There’s still no GPU yet since prices are still pretty high as of writing this, but I figured I might as well install Arch on it while I wait for GPU prices to drop....