Making Text Files Colorful – With a Hex Editor

Hello, friends. In this tutorial I will be sharing a neat hack that you can use to add colors and other styles to a plain text file. This means that when you view the file with cat, the text will be color-coded. We accomplish this using ANSI escape sequences, a text editor, and a hex …

Unix vs. Windows: How to Check and Convert Between the Two File Formats

Different operating systems use different formats for line breaks, and this can cause confusion and difficulty for a lot of newbies. In this article I will explain the difference between the Unix file format used by Linux and MacOS and the DOS format used by Windows, and I will also show you how to check …

Extracting Text Files from an Archive – With a Hex Editor

I started taking a cyber-security course on Coursera, and one of the projects assigned involves working on a virtual machine, which is to be imported from a .ova archive file downloaded from the course website. Since I have plans to distribute my own homebrewed VMs as .ova files in the future, I wanted to figure …

Hacking Image Files – With a Hex Editor

So recently I've been doing some SEO research for my site. This research basically consists of searching for my own pages on Google to see what's been indexed and how the pages rank. One problem that I want to solve is Google's penalizing of duplicate or old content. In the case of images, if I …