The Wick Blog

Public Service  Announcement This is something I wanted to write a post about as it seems to still be getting lots of hits and fooling lots of people. I will wright the TLDR here so you can get the message now and read further if you want to learn more. If ANY program EVER tells you to disable your Anti-Malware solution PROCEED WITH EXTREAM CAUTION.  If you are ever provided with a password protected archive again PROCEED WITH EXTREAM CAUTION. Now that the TLDR is out of the way let me explain. There have been many campaigns that have been involving something in common, using a password protected zip file hosted with a page that contains both the password AND instructions to disable your Anti-Malware solution. The ZIP file then contains infected files usually Redline or alike however if the person follows the instructions as provided they would have disabled their Anti-Malware solution which would now not detect the sample. This is a common tactic used to distribute malware on...

I have been a Visual Studio Code user for years now, it has been the IDE of choice for almost all my projects. But recently after some debating I have decided to give JetBrains a try. JetBrains if you don't know is the maker of IDE's such as PyCharm, IntelliJ, and more. For years I have looked at that pesky price tag and said to myself who would buy that. Now I am that person, after years of Visual Studio Code it has finally annoyed me enough to swallow that price tag. Let me explain. The reason I used Visual Studio Code was because of the flexibility, just install an extension for just about any feature you can think of and bam, its in VSCode. And it is still flexible with the thousands of community made extensions that can add almost any feature you want. Then you could just open any file and be ready developing in whatever language or even just to view the contents of a file with a nice style. However the more features that get added the more the bad part of VSCode starts to...

Microsoft has now included Windows PowerShell in every version of Windows 10 and up. PowerShell is a great tool for automation and for easily making Windows scripts, much of a improvement over the Batch language. However for the average user I have some concerns of it being installed and enabled automatically. If PowerShell is such a good tool then why would I want it to be disabled by default you may be asking, well because with all that power comes the ability for it to be abused to infect users with hard to detect malware. If you did not know its very easy to invoke PowerShell scripts through any application and bypass execution policy, you can put the command in a Batch script or built it into an EXE or even execute it using almost any programming language so invoking it is easier than you think especially as its included with all version of Windows so you always know its going to be in there. However just invoking is not the big issue as that would be the same with Batch, the issu...

So, Valve released their official Dock for their Steam Deck, and I got my hands on one to try out. So, let’s talk about it. First the good things, its small looks great and ironically fits in the dent with the strap on the Steam Decks case (can't be coincidence). It works great with the Steam Deck (right now we will talk about that) and even gets firmware updates from the Steam Deck to add more features as time goes on. I use it to dock my Steam Deck below my main monitor and connected it to it so it’s easy to switch inputs and play on the Deck while sitting back in my chair. However, for all the good parts I must talk about its issues. The first big thing I want to say is the $99 price tag, really. It’s a generic dock why is it $99. There where docks released BEFORE the official one for CHEAPER and with equivalent features and not like $80 or something but like $50, literally half the price. After the amazing work getting the Deck to $400 its insane that the dock would be priced s...

Recently I got the notification that my Steam Deck was ready and has shipped and for the past three days or so I have been testing it out and using it so I though I would write a post about my first impressions and maybe writing another post later going into more detail once I feel I have used it long enough for my opinions to form completely and for any problems to come out if there are any. So let me begin. The first thing I want to talk about is the look and feel of the device, probably the most important thing to nail for a hand held device. And to my surprises for the form factor it feels great! It looks like it would be clunky to hold being so much bigger than something like the Nintendo Switch, but at least for my hands it fits great and all of the controls also have good feedback without also being annoying or noisy. However at least for me the back paddles I personally have a hard time clicking them, not because they are difficult to click I think its just because of not expec...

Shortcuts, personally I never really use them. They link to a program slash file to run it or to make it easier to execute with arguments such as open minimized window. But I decided to give them a relook with the new Powershell program bundled in with all Windows installations and even released for Linux. Shortcuts if you did not know can pass arguments into the program or file it has been linked to. Usually you use this if for example you want to configure a program to launch silently using lets say a -silent flag. Well just add that into the shortcut and it will launch with that argument without having to open a shell. So what about Powershell? Well it has a interesting flag called " -Command ". The command flag allows you to pass a command or potentially even an entire script into the Powershell process that will be started. Interestingly this means an entire script can run in memory without being stored on disk at all, the most insane version of anti-malware avoidance. N...

 Hey everyone!  I decided maybe I should remake my brand as I have not really did anything with it in a very long time so you all may be seeing the new logo, new backgrounds, and the revamped discord. Along with that I have been adding custom redirect URLS for all my social platforms into my domain iwick.dev Also I have decided maybe I should make a main page or more accurately a blog where I can post more updates about me and what I am working on so using Blogger I have created this page. I will post stuff I find interesting and updates on myself. Here is a dump of all the new links you have probably already seen me posting everywhere lmao GitHub https://github.iwick.dev Discord https://discord.iwick.dev YouTube https://youtube.iwick.dev Steam https://steam.iwick.dev and now Blog https://blog.iwick.dev Thanks everyone, see you all in the next update.