mrdee.in

I built a mandala tool.

Hi, I’m Dinesh. # I work in cybersecurity — the part where you spend years building defences, and then watch someone click a phishing link anyway.

The first thing I noticed was how hard it was to answer a simple question: which of these ransomware victims are actually in India?

I had a small web radio player sitting in a scratch folder — an amber-on-black thing styled like an old hi-fi tuner.

I’ve wanted to contribute to the Linux kernel for a while.

Not everyone who talks loudly about “hacking” or collects certifications is worth listening to.

I’ve been pasting long blog post URLs into my Mastodon bio, notes, and slide decks for months.

I wanted a check-in tool that matched how I actually think about a mindfulness practice: three specific questions, asked at specific times of day.

Coverage-guided fuzzing is one of those topics where the gap between “I’ve heard of AFL” and “I understand what AFL actually does” is larger than it appears.

I have a tab problem.

Every time you click a link in a newsletter, three things happen before you’ve read a single word: the link redirector logs that you clicked, the UTM parameters tell the destination who sent you, and the tracking pixel in the email confirms you opened it.

My Lenovo Tab M10 FHD (TB-X605LC, 2019) was sitting at status low on memory before any apps were open.

Some people pass through your life, do their work, and move on.

VNC is excellent at showing you your Linux desktop on a Windows machine.

Austin Kleon takes a newspaper page and a black marker, and turns the news into poetry by erasing most of it.

A /uses page.

A /now page, in the sense Derek Sivers meant.

Things I want to build, explore, or think through.

How this site is made.

The itch # Notepad++ has a hidden easter egg most people never find.

Kaveri Trail Marathon, 2013.

OWASP Juice Shop is the gold standard for learning web application security — a deliberately vulnerable Node.js app where you practice exploiting real vulnerabilities in a safe environment.

The itch # Every SOC I’ve ever worked with has the same gap.

I ran securityheaders.com against mrdee.in recently.

The machine was taking over two and a half minutes to reach a usable desktop.

I read a lot.

There’s a specific failure mode for CISOs that I’ve been thinking about for a while.

P.G.

The Clear Writing Community WhatsApp group has been running for over four years.

Building a personal AI reader for The Wealth of Nations # Project #12 of the 100 Vibe Coding Projects challenge I’ve been meaning to read Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations for years.

I’ve been listening to Everything is Everything — Amit Varma and Ajay Shah’s podcast — for a while now.

What the Heck Do I Do with My Life?

I’ve been doing APK security analysis manually for years — pulling the file, running jadx, grepping through decompiled source, eyeballing the manifest.

Verbal Judo: The Gentle Art of Persuasion by George J.

The Upanishads translated by Eknath Easwaran (2nd Edition) We spend our days in the familiar world of our five senses, but what lies beyond that — if anything — we have no idea.

The Little Blue Reasoning Book: 50 Powerful Principles for Clear and Effective Thinking by Brandon Royal On perception and mindset # Selective perception is the tendency to see the world the way we would like it to be rather than how it really is.

Search Inside Yourself by Chade-Meng Tan With forewords by Daniel Goleman and Jon Kabat-Zinn Emotional intelligence enables three things: stellar work performance, outstanding leadership, and the conditions for happiness.

How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens On bias and systems # If one were to attempt to identify a single problematic aspect of human reasoning that deserves attention above all others, the confirmation bias would have to be among the candidates for consi…

Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown The commitment to doing only the things that were truly important — and eliminating everything else — restores the quality of your work.

Clear Thinking: Turning Ordinary Moments into Extraordinary Results by Shane Parrish STOP!

What’s Mankutimmana Kagga # Mankutimmana Kagga — often called the Kannada Gita — is a collection of 945 philosophical verses by D.V.

I asked an AI to help me build a home radio server.

Building a bot to post Mankutimmana Kagga verses to Mastodon # D.V.

Live: slashsec.mrdinesh.workers.dev I wanted a single place to read cybersecurity news from the sources I already trust — SANS ISC, Bruce Schneier’s blog, Brian Krebs, Bleeping Computer, and Zack Whittaker’s This Week in Security.

Curl source explorer: learn a 30-year-old codebase without getting lost # Curl has been running on virtually every computer on the planet since 1998.

Prompt used # Build an interview simulator, for an upcoming job interview for a senior cybersecurity role.

One usable idea from every episode # Project #3 of the 100 Vibe Coding Projects challenge Think Fast, Talk Smart is Matt Abrahams’ podcast on communication — 270+ episodes, each guest offering their best advice on how to speak, listen, and connect more ef…

VIZMIX — a Winamp-inspired 3D audio visualizer for the browser # Project #2 of the 100 Vibe Coding Projects challenge The prompt was simple: build something that visualises music the way Winamp used to — but in a browser tab, using X, Y and Z axes instead…

Two big ideas here # Idea#1: Use an LLM, to create something, anything Idea#2: Do it for a 100 days A third, meta idea, is to write about what I’ve done (aside: why is this a meta-idea, will write about it later) Today’s vibe-coding idea: create a browser…

Took a first concrete step today — rather than just reading, I ran a static code analysis on the curl repository.