Hey friends! Quasi-vacation week over here, so today's episode is lighter and more personal: just a story about how I turned my phone into a "brick" (kind of) and what that's done for my mental health over the past week.

The product is called Brick (getbrick.com). Not sponsored, no discount code — just something I've genuinely been enjoying. It's a $50 NFC dongle + app that lets you "brick" your time-waster apps until you physically tap the brick again. Here's what stood out:

• The physical separation is the magic. Other digital-wellbeing apps just need a code to unlock — Brick makes you walk to wherever the dongle lives (mine's on the fridge) and tap your phone to it. That extra step is enough to break the habit mid-flight. I caught myself doing three or four Pavlovian pocket checks an hour, on autopilot, with zero notifications waiting.
• "Junk food for the eyes" realization. First day I bricked socials until end of day → felt great. Then I unbricked, sat down, and spent 25 minutes catching up on everything I "missed" → felt noticeably worse afterward.
• Scheduling is a sleeper hit. You can set the phone to auto-brick on a schedule — no physical tap needed. Mine kicks in from 9pm to 8am. Result: calm wake-up with my wife and son, no email triage in the school drop-off line, and my "work brain" doesn't fire until 8am.
• One-to-many is a real win. A single Brick works across household members, each with their own app profile. My oldest son Cam (deep in paramedic-school crunch) tried it for a study session and reported the same thing — reaching for his phone between turning book pages, for no reason at all. He even left for evening class with his phone still bricked and decided not to burn an emergency unbrick.
• Emergency unbricks are scarce by design. You get five total and that's it!
• The stats are anti-shaming. Instead of the dreaded Sunday-morning "your screen time is up 10%" notification, you get to see number of hours you spent in brick mode. Love that!

Want to see screenshots and hear more about Brick? Hop over to 7MinSec.club — this week's Tuesday TOOLSday was all about Brick.

Got a digital-wellbeing tool you swear by? Let us know!

Hello friends! Picking up the AI-automation series from a couple weeks back — here's another batch of scripts and integrations that have been giving me precious minutes (and sanity) back. Yes, I had to upgrade to Claude Max. No, I'm not trying to automate myself out of a job — just freeing up bandwidth for the more interesting parts of work/life.

• QuickBooks invoice automation: Got tired of the eight-factor login plus click-fest just to send a few invoices. Now I run a PowerShell menu — type the client name, pick the project, enter the amount, hit Enter — done in ~30 seconds. The QuickBooks dev onboarding (security questionnaire, IP allowlist) was actually a bigger time sink than the script itself.
• Password Pusher API integration: A menu-driven PowerShell script that prompts for a label, pops an Explorer window to grab the files, optionally adds a password, then auto-drafts the client email with the secure link filled in. A few minutes saved each time, a couple times a day — adds up to some nice time saved!
• Basecamp + Claude: Linked Basecamp into a Claude project so I can ask plain-English questions like "what personal project tasks are due this month?" or just voice-note a new task while I'm in the car. Honestly the biggest win is anxiety reduction — once it's in Claude, it's out of my always-simmering pressure cooker of a brain.
• Blumira agent auto-installer for the GOAD lab: I revert the GOAD lab to vanilla a couple times a week, which means re-installing Blumira agents constantly to show clients the attack/defense telemetry side. Wrote a Kali-side script that uses NetExec over WinRM to check each box for the Blumira service and push the installer if it's missing. (Tried SMB exec first, but escaping got wonky on the PowerShell one-liner.) Bonus: Blumira's dashboard auto-removes agents that haven't phoned home in 24 hours, which is a perfect fit for a lab that's constantly getting nuked.
• Auphonic + API for podcast production: This one's a little meta. Old workflow: record → drag into Hindenburg/GarageBand → manually line up intro and outro → noise reduction → export. New workflow: one terminal script that previews the first and last few seconds so I can trim silence, ships the audio to Auphonic via API, and returns a cleaned-up, levels-corrected MP3 plus a full transcript and auto-generated chapter markers. (If your podcast app supports chapters (like Downcast) pop open this episode or #720 and you'll see them.) Next step: pipe the transcript straight into Claude for a show notes first draft.

One quick personal note before I run: my oldest son just landed an EMT job with a great Minnesota medical network, and is wrapping up paramedic school in a few months. I cried some happy dad tears today.

Hey friends! Today's another Tales of Pentest Pwnage!

Quick tangent first on a couple side projects: I've got a music thing at quack.house (like the duck noise, not the drug) and a podcast with my dancer son Atticus at DadOfADancer.com. Speaking of Atticus — he just landed a spot in Master Ballet Academy's summer program in Phoenix, and I am a very proud dance dad over here.

OK, on to the pentest:

• A weird runas quirk: If your AD test account password ends in a percent sign, runas seems to misbehave (Claude thinks Windows is interpreting the % as a variable delimiter). Workaround: runascs.exe, which wraps your tool launch with creds inline. Worked like a champ — notes over on the 7MinSec.wiki.
• Standard first pass: PingCastle for the AD overview, then Snaffler for share crawling, with Chimas as a nicer web UI for searching the Snaffler JSON.
• The "Snaffler missed something" moment: Snaffler is great but it primarily uses pattern matching, so manual review of interesting directories still matters. I found a PowerShell script with a funky obfuscation routine, fed it to Claude for context, tracked down the function definition, and ended up decrypting a local admin password.
• Going loud: SMB-sprayed that cred across the subnets → handful of machines popped → ran a deeper, targeted Snaffler against just those boxes → enumerated sessions and spotted a domain admin interactively logged in.
• Plan A fizzled: Wanted to pull off a favorite trick — sneak in via WinRM and queue a scheduled task as the logged-in DA (no password needed). WinRM was disabled. Oh fart.
• Plan B — the "trap" file: Dropped a malicious .library-ms file directly into the DA's desktop folder. No clicks required — just the desktop being open is enough to trigger an HTTP coercion to my evil box. (Caveat: I think you need a DNS record or computer object that the victim box trusts as "intranet zone.")
• The escalation: Had ntlmrelayx standing by, ready to relay to LDAP on a DC. The coerced auth fired the moment the "trap" file landed on disk. An interactive LDAP shell fired in the DA's context, and I used it to add my low-priv account to the Domain Admins group.
• Defense angles: Rather than chase each technique individually (LDAP signing, web client GPOs, library-ms neutralization, etc.), I like to back up to the systemic fixes that break the chain earlier. Big ones here: deploy LAPS so a single decrypted local admin password isn't a master key everywhere, and a thorough sweep for sensitive data and custom obfuscation routines hanging out on shares.

Got thoughts on any of this? Shoot 'em over — I always love hearing how you'd have tackled things differently.