During the pandemic I started diving deeper and deeper into embedded devices. I mucked around a bit with getting core boot installed onto a lenovo laptop, which ultimately didn’t pan out for me and resulted in bricking of said laptop, but inevitably found my way into the world of building custom keyboards. My fascination with keyboards all started some time ago, when a friend introduced me to the ergodox boards. This, at the time, seemed way too steep of a learning curve for me, but it did get me excited enough about the concept of custom boards, that I put together my very first custom keyboard, a kbd65 dubbed “rascal” by my daughter.

Wanna learn about character encodings on Windows? Me neither! But unfortunately, I had to for a recent project. What follows is the generic journey I went through and how I learned a bit more than I expected about character encodings on Windows systems, and open sourced some new Chef cookbooks for managing AppLocker along the way.

A while back a good buddy of mine gave me a pretty sweet little arduino. It’s purpose was to reach out to the osquery github periodically and get the number of open pull requests and issues we had open, which was pretty relevant to me for some time.

Considering extensions on osquery are getting more and more support, I figured I’d throw up this guide for building osquery extensions on Windows in C++, as we’re still working on developing osquery python extensions for Windows. What follows are the build steps for developing Windows C++ extensions in osquery:

I pretty commonly get asked by folks for a generic Windows configuration for osquery, as the example configuration pack in the osquery repository favors posix systems a bit (Something we’re hoping to make better).