Past entries of my now page

2024-07-08

Currently watching: All South Park episodes in order (now at the end of season 14)

Currently reading: Nothing at the moment, but I finished Patrick Süskind's Perfume: The Story of a Murderer and the other book I mentioned in my last Now page entry.

Currently playing: South Park: The Stick of Truth and Stardew Valley co-op and copious amounts of Team Fortress 2 now that the cheater bots are gone from official servers.

Current music phase: Tudósok's discography and some hidden gems from the 90's rave scene.

Now that my exam season is over (with pretty good grades), I can focus my attention fully on my bachelor's thesis. Implementing cryptographic attacks on RSA is fun (see my then page for more details).

Fishing on Orfű, a local alternative music festival tired me out to no end two weeks ago (our cabin was right in front of a stage that blasted music until 2 am), but I don't regret attending it. Almost all of my favourite Hungarian bands played and I even discovered some new artists that I've heard about, but didn't really give them a try before. Now's the best time to dive into their discography.

I started attending a psychologist to treat my (not crippling but still considered severe by me) social anxiety and anything else that comes up during the sessions. Being a young adult is stressful and I felt a need for some deeper self-knowledge compared to my high-school self to battle with the obstacles ahead of me on equal ground.

Also, I switched to OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, a semi-rolling-release distro with the XFCE desktop environment as a daily driver on my laptop. I love how snappy and old-school looking it is (not to mention its stability thanks to automatic BTRFS snapshots by default).

I like my computing to be as simple as possible (GNOME ate too much of my resources sadly) while also allowing me to customize it to my workflow and XFCE is perfect for that. I'll need to find a way to achieve auto-tiling like what Pop! provided though. I'll still follow the developments of Pop!_OS, especially now that their COSMIC desktop is almost at public alpha stage.

2024-06-05

Currently watching: All South Park episodes in order (now at season 13)

Currently reading: Vivek H. Murthy – Together: The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World

Currently playing: South Park: The Stick of Truth and Stardew Valley co-op

Tomorrow, I'm going to take an exam on the programming language C++ (template programming, STL containers etc.), I'm practicing for that, I hope it goes well.

Passed my Databases II. exam with a grade of 5 (best grade for students here), only two exams left before my well-deserved summer holiday.

I have a subject for my bachelor's thesis and I've already begun working on it. Its' title (not final) is going to be: Python Wrapper for Validating Cryptographic Keys and/or Solutions. Basically, I have to read into some mathematic attacks against cryptographic solutions such as RSA or elliptic-curve cryptography. One such method is using fermat's factorization to break badly generated RSA keys for example.

This weekend, I will be counting votes in my country's elections. It will mean a full day's work until late at night, but I'm looking forward to it. I did a great job on the one two years ago and I loved every second of it. I feel it's the least I can do to protect democracy here.

I am looking for opportunities to volunteer this summer. It bothers me that I rarely do good deeds explicitly. I'll try to convince some friends to join me.

2024-05-02

I am currently doing my internship in cybersecurity. Penetration testing, cryptography basics, Python scripting etc. It's incredibly exciting and I'm really glad I chose this field as my internship subject; I definitely wouldn't have enjoyed web or software development.

Learned a bunch about attacks like Bleichenbacher's one, buffer overflows and the like. Can't wait to immerse myself in this subject more.

I'm going to get a topic for my bachelor's thesis from my current company. I'd love to do some applied cryptography or anything that needs some esoteric modular math know-how. We'll see.

Sometimes I miss my Erasmus semester in Tampere, Finland. It was nice to live there for months. My courses were easier than here and the weekdays were more colourful, although I don't miss the snow and the minus temperatures anymore.

Biking to campus is nice and gives a boost to my mood every day I need to get there. I probably ride a bike around 4-5 hours every week, getting my stamina back slowly but surely.

I'm going to pass the penultimate exam season of my bachelor's degree in a couple of weeks, and then I'm going to dive head first into the first festival of my life at the end of June, where I managed to get a cabin ticket with my girlfriend. We got lucky we don't need to sleep in a tent for days, and are stoked.

Great to see that my latest blog post on the Pinephone Pro received some nice comments. It was a good idea to submit my personal site to SearchMySite.