Nosey Parker

It doesn't take much effort to search Google or GitHub for API keys and other secrets inadvertently shared with the world. This kind of information is often hidden within files or repositories and shared unwittingly along with whatever files or directories were intended. Those details can be very difficult to track unless you never share anything or keep those things you share separated from the rest of your system. Services such as GitHub can help, and GitHub in particular can scan your uploads automatically for shared keys and secrets, even checking them against known providers to check their validity, but it's far better if you can do this yourself locally. This is what Nosey Parker does.

Nosey Parker is a command-line tool that will look through files, directories, and even your Git history looking for anything it considers a secret. Its definitions for secrets are contained within 95 regular expressions, and these can be edited or expanded upon. The first step in performing an audit is to use the scan command with an argument for a local data store, to cache the results, and the destination to search. Nosey Parker can reportedly scan 100GB of kernel source code in less than two minutes on an old Mac. The process is fast, but even a scan of a modest project's Git history can take many seconds. But it takes a lot longer to digest the results, because in our experience, they're scary. Even choosing to scan the Git history of a small Git-based project (we won't say which) revealed "25 unique API keys," including three for an AWS API, and numerous passwords – tests or otherwise. The results are summarized in the output, but you can also use the report argument to dive into a specific result. This will typically include the Git blob, which lines contain the secrets, and the secrets themselves. The results can be terrifying, but used prudently as part of a robust testing system, it could save you or someone else from serious embarrassment.

Project Website

https://github.com/praetorian-inc/noseyparker

Fascinating and terrifying in equal parts, Nosey Parker will scan your data for the secrets it contains.

Music exploration

coltrane

John Coltrane will need little introduction. He was one of the great jazz composers and performers of the last century and helped transform our expectations of what music can and should be. He did this through both exploration and exposition, experimenting and performing with unique scales and music theory. And it's these last elements of musical study that coltrane helps to make accessible in a unique and intuitive way from the Linux command line, regardless of whether or not you enjoy avant-garde jazz. It works as both an interactive interpreter and as a command that takes arguments to generate output of musical insights, and it has several modes of operation (pun intended).

At its simplest, coltrane will take three or more note letters and tell you which chord they are. Entering C, E, and G, for example, will output CM for C Minor. Chords can optionally be shown on a variety of ASCII-generated representations of guitar, bass, ukulele, and piano finger positions. These representations are very useful if you're learning to play one of the instruments, but they're also excellent for documenting song structures. This is helped by coltrane's ability to also output scales built from the chords you input, as well as find common scales and chords in the scales themselves along with generated chord progressions. All of this can be output as simple text or as multiple ASCII visual representations, and it looks fantastic if you want to impress anyone with your command-line hacking. There are chord progressions for jazz, blues, and pop, and you can also generate your own custom progressions. If you're at all interested in music, all of this is weirdly compelling, especially from the command line, and can make a useful distraction while you're waiting for some other background process to finish.

Project Website

https://github.com/pedrozath/coltrane

Learn about music theory even when you're on the command line, with the excellently named coltrane.