Sven Krasser's Blog

To wrap up my project from last week, only keycaps were missing. Those got dropped onto my doorsteps tonight, so here is the final result of the media numpad project.

After building a small media keyboard in 2019, I always wanted to go a little bit bigger with respect to custom mechanical keyboards. But instead of going straight from the 3 switches plus the 1 rotary encoder of the 2019 keyboard to a full 104-key project, I opted for a smaller starting point: a numpad with media keys, which will nicely complement my 75% Vortex Race 3 keyboard.

Five years after the Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich mission launched, its twin satellite Sentinel-6B launched as well. In contrast to Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich, Sentinel-6B was a night launch. I packed my Nikon Z 6II and my Tokina SZX 400mm f/8, the longest lens I currently have, and took a few pictures from a NASA viewing area set up at Lompoc City Airport.

After announcing our joint work between Meta and CrowdStrike at LlamaCon in April, we finally released our new LLM benchmark for cybersecurity applications, CyberSOCEval, this month at Fal.Con. You can read our paper here.

Better late than never. Here is a preprint of the chapter on malware detection using machine learning that I mentioned previously. You can get the final paper with a number of revisions and additions on the publisher’s website.

Now that all electronic issues are resolved, it’s time to update the PCB for my expansion board that adds a W65C22S Versatile Interface Adapter (VIA) to my Commodore 64. Besides fixing the clock issue uncovered in the last post, there are a couple of other changes I made.

In my last post, I discussed wiring up a modern Versatile Interface Adapter to the expansion port of the Commodore 64. Unfortunately, I ran into timing issues and the design did not work. In this post, we’ll get it to work with the help of two extra chips, a breadboard, and a bunch of ribbon cable.

It has been a while that I embarked on an electronics project (our soldering iron has not seen use since Shannon built her Arduino-powered space pants). For my next project, I decided to hook up a VIA to the expansion port of the Commodore 64 that I put together during the pandemic. What’s a VIA? Well, it’s the Versatile Interface Adapter, an integrated circuit that provides such niceties as timers and GPIO pins to 6502-based systems. I’ve used one in my homebrew 6502 breadboard computer, so this sounded like an easy target. Spoiler alert: there’s still a lot to get wrong, so we won’t see it working in this post just yet. But there’s a lot to learn along the way, so keep on reading if you want to follow along on this journey.

Some quick updates on new and upcoming publications I co-authored: today the Journal of Cyber Policy published an article on data localization risks, i.e. the risks to cybersecurity if pertinent data cannot be shared globally due to regulatory constraints. The article is titled “Risks to Cybersecurity From Data Localization, Organized by Techniques, Tactics, and Procedures” and is freely available through the Taylor & Francis open access program.

Last Sunday I flew out eastwards to meet Shannon in Nashville to view the eclipse. I just managed to get a brief glimpse of the city, visiting Broadway the night of my arrival (see picture below). The next morning, we drove towards Paducah, Kentucky, which is close to the eastern border of the zone of totality. After getting breakfast, we actually ended up making camp just north of the Ohio river at Fort Massac State Park in Metropolis, Illinois. Yes, that’s a thing—and I am happy to report that Superman also wore protective eyewear (see also below).