Backstory For the better part of my Computer Science career I’ve had a project in the works that I am finally happy to say is "1.0".
I was just finishing up my last year of high school when COVID hit. During that time, the school board in my area had the bright idea to fix the grades. As a student, this was pretty awesome, as this meant that I had to do absolutely nothing for the rest of the year, and I would come out with crazy high marks.
A little while back a friend and I were looking for some ways to get into embedded programming and reverse engineering. My primary motivation was learning Ghidra, the NSA-built decompiler used for malware analysis and reverse engineering.
The original plan was to spend a weekend ripping apart and tinkering with some device from the second hand store. Something like a router or network switch. That is, until we found a VTech Kidi Star Dance toy.
Hong Kong from Mt. Johnston During my 4th year of University, I got the pleasure of going abroad to Hong Kong for one semester to study. I could talk forever about how amazing this experience was, however I want to focus on one topic for this post; the transit, and why I think it’s the best in the world.
MTR (港鐵) MTR (Mass Transit Railway) is Hong Kong’s primarily government-owned transit company, having a monopoly over the subway, streetcars, and buses for the entire country.
This is a bit of a less technical post, but one that I think is important.
During my 3rd year I took a group project course called “Object-Oriented Design and Analysis” in which some classmates and I were required to create a project using correct object-oriented design. I was getting an itch to do some more hardware-based projects, and luckily my idea for Wizard Chess got approved.
This was not at all original, as many people have created this idea before, but it seemed both really cool and feasible.
A while ago this Michael Reeves video came out demoing a creative project in which he shot himself based on what was happening in the Fortnite game he was playing. This gave a barrage of new ideas for the hacker house.
Lucky for us, we had the perfect skill set to recreate a funny video that we had seen online. Essentially, a real life flashbang that didn’t just blind you in your game of CS:GO, but outside as well.