Little Update - 11/02/2026#

So… It’s been a little over a month since I wrote anything for the site which isn’t initially what I had planned for the content here as I wanted it to be a bit more maintained than that but hey ho. To give a little update, I spent a lot of January doing not very much, I had a lot of social events going on with friends at the weekends. It honestly felt like I was doing the opposite of a dry January and trying to cram all my parties for the whole year into one month. This also coincided with another block of writing that I had to do for my uni dissertation and so I didn’t really have the mental strength to do even more writing after that. However now that I am a little ahead of schedule again, I wanted to take the time to write some more in relation to what I’m working on, thinking and cool things that I’ve been doing, it’ll be pretty short and sweet.

First off is the main consumer of my time which is my dissertation. I’ve just completed the drafts of my methodology which took a couple weeks and ended up at around 6500 words which I’m not sure is a good or bad amount. It’s focusing on the mix of qualitative and quantitative data that is extracted from the Learning management system usage metrics and surveying users after the study period. The more that I typed related to it really helped to set the image in my mind as to what the final product will look, all of the work that was done with this has put me a few weeks ahead of schedule and given me a bit of relief. Over the next week or so my plan is to finalise the last touches on the Learning management system itself and push it live for the study to commence. Once that is done, I can tidy up the less important bits of the dissertation, like the introduction and the appendices to get me in an even better spot. So, all things considered it is going pretty well, and my supervisor believes in this also.

Next up I’ll touch on a couple bits of scripting that I have been doing at work. From my time in the identity and access management I skilled up a reasonable amount into PowerShell scripting and in doing so I’ve done my best to make improvements to workflows within my cybersecurity role. The first script that we made use of was a neat script that was adapted from a script that I found online (I’ll find the author and link it soon) to audit chrome extensions installed across the organisation. This was done as part of a discovery to get a better idea of what allow list can be built from this, allowing for app control principles to extend to extensions and browser. Now this isn’t a new technology, from what I’ve read these came in around 2014, but was only controlled in our Edge clients prior leaving a little gap in our armour that we are working to close. The second bit of work that was interesting that I wanted to write a little bit about was the work that was done to improve our investigation process for information audits. One part of the process that had always felt a little too manual for me was the collection of certain information around history cache and cookies details from machines. This one I created from scratch and spent the better part of a day to make something that worked for what we needed. To avoid writing a mass about just this I might save it for my first showcase post and will do a very short write-up for it.

And finally, I just want to do a little update on the plans for the weeks/months going forward. So, I get burnt out quick when I’m writing and even to get this post together took a couple days and a few rewrites to get to a point that I wanted to do anything with it due to the working on my dissertation. Because of this I will probably be a bit quiet on this front for the next couple months while I finish off the rest of that work but once I have completed my studies and move more towards my individual study phase of the year I will no doubt be writing enough to annoy anyone who reads these. To tick it off with my weird interest as of recent is artists that create small models of robots out of everyday objects and a YouTube channel I would recommend to anyone that has any slight interest in what I just wrote is (Roborovski.

I hope this wasn’t too rambled and is just a nice short, sweet update. Hope your year started well and I will hopefully write more for you soon.