Writing

An outline of how you can extract icons from Windows binaries and dump them into a local folder.

I discovered that you can get anyone’s true email address (Google Account) if they are hosting their email on Google Workspaces from their alias, even if the alias is not on the same domain.

The other day one of my friend shared an interesting letter they received, that I thought I’d cover on this blog. It all started with them peeking at their USPS Informed Delivery digest to see that there was a letter headed to them postmarked with an automated Canada Post label.

A short overview of how modern app stores can lead you or your relatives to install authenticator apps that are not really authenticator apps.

I have nothing against the concept of aliases at its core, but I have a lot to say about it being treated as some kind of security barrier against the bad guys and gals busting into your private accounts. Email aliases are a privacy and not a security measure.

This is a collection from a recent trip to Hawai’i (Big Island). Hands down, one of my favorite places in the world.

I’ve talked before about Microsoft Authentication Library (MSAL) for .NET on this blog, but I feel like I should bring attention to another product that our team ships that is massively adopted in the community - MSAL Python.

It finally happened - after a bit more than a year of playing Halo Infinite, I’ve finally reached the end of the line. The pinnacle of experience-based rank, if you will - Hero.

A collection of photos from the event.

I finally reached the Hero rank in Halo Infinite, and as the primary dogfood-er of the OpenSpartan Workshop project I ran into issues where the Hero rank was not correctly rendered in the app. With this release, it’s now correctly shown.

A few people were reporting problems with the Windows App SDK, so I released a new version of OpenSpartan Workshop that fixes the issue.

Diving into the Halo Infinite lesser-known post-match film data.

The latest dataset for Fleetcom is now available on GitHub.

As I was building OpenSpartan Workshop for Windows I needed the ability to convert a hexadecimal HTML color code to a SolidColorBrush object. Unlike with previous UI frameworks, WinUI 3 (which is what I use) doesn’t have a built-in construct for this kind of conversion. Naturally, I had to improvise.

Let’s talk a bit more about the Exchange. I’ve discussed its API implementation on my blog when it first came out in retail builds of Halo Infinite, but now that I am growing the content on the OpenSpartan website, I decided to start documenting my API explorations here. After all, it’s all at home with the rest of the Halo-related tinkering that I am doing.