Welcome to Arcana Labs
The best puzzles are those not intended to be solved. – Unknown
Providing Security Utilities, Tooling, and other Amusements, Arcana Labs is a small, independant technology exploration and development concern operating out of Atlantic Canada. Our past work has focused on security and disaster recovery, with present work focusing on monitoring tooling and developing puzzles and challenges intended for entrants into the “hackish” fields. Our ultimate goal is to improve our own overall understanding of computing to as deep a level of understanding as practical. We’ve organized our projects into a few categories: hardware, software, and a blog.
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Latest News
Automating PETI Font Changes
2024-02-06 05:00:00 -0600
Just last time, I talked about how I’ve been working on making some changes to how fonts are handled in PETI; specifically, switching to a more standard font “source” format that would allow more choice on the developer end, insofar as what tools would be usable for editing the fotns. We chiefly did this by creating a FontX2-format exporter for the older fontedit editor, since fontx2 is a relatively simple bitmap font format used by lots of other embedded devlopers, and usable for quite a few different font editors. The simplicity of the format gave me a pretty clear idea for how to get the fonts included directly into PETI’s source code, which itself gave me some ideas for working toward one of the loftier end-goals of the project.
FontX2 'Support' for PETI
2024-01-24 05:00:00 -0600
When it comes to PETI firmware updates, it’s a small secret that they rarely come out according to plan. The next firmware update, 0.4.0, is no exception - dedicated readers will remember that I had originally promised that release by Christmas, on the heels of a mid-autumn release of the current version, 0.3.0. The update was supposed to support the ability for the pet to sleep and for the implementation of the game’s native evolution system, so it should come as no small shock to anyone that in actual fact its being blocked by - font development. If that doesn’t seem to make sense to you, jump below the cut and we’ll have a look at what’s going on here.
Restructuring Lab Funding
2024-01-18 05:00:00 -0600
Those who keep a weather eye on the horizon that is the Lab Discord’s Announcements Channel will be less shocked by this news than others, but around Christmas time last year I got entirely too fed up with the use of my twitch profile to try and bankroll the lab, and I made a lot of grumbly noises about needing to change that pathway. Friends, let me bet the first to tell you that I’ve finally followed through on that mechanism.
End of an Era: Archiving Tapestry
2024-01-04 05:00:00 -0600
Tapestry is the oldest code project of mine that can be said to fall under the Arcana Labs umbrella - in fact, it’s so old that the project itself has persisted through two full rebrands and renamings of the lab - Kensho Security Labs, and Patch Savage Labs before that. While I’m sure I’m now its only continuous user, the fact remains it is, at least for me, a profoundly useful backup utility… when it works… and sadly, it no longer works.
Nailing Down a Years-Old Problem in Tapestry
2023-12-20 05:00:00 -0600
Tapestry is the oldest code project of mine that can be said to fall under the Arcana Labs umbrella - in fact, it’s so old that the project itself has persisted through two full rebrands and renamings of the lab - Kensho Security Labs, and Patch Savage Labs before that. While I’m sure I’m now its only continuous user, the fact remains it is, at least for me, a profoundly useful backup utility… when it works.