This is a macOS-heavy edition (though one section is platform-agnostic) if non-macOS folk want to save some time and skip it. Before darting away, perhaps take a look at the macOS-centric sections and suggest some solid Windows or Linux alternatives in the comments?

Boop

I'm regularly amazed at how IT folk, developers, and cybersecurity professionals will casually paste copied text into text boxes on random websites to do things like convert from one base to another, defang (make them as harmless as possible) addresses/domains, and other operations. I use RStudio, VS Code, or Sublime Text for such tasks since I really don't want to give sites my telemetry or my data, but a while back I also added a new tool to said arsenal.

Ivan Mathy (@OKatBest) seems to feel the same way, since he created Boop [GH], which is a small, extensible macOS application that lets you paste plain text and transform it "if need be". The tagline for the tool is "Stop Pasting Company Secrets Into Random Websites", a sentiment I will gladly echo.

It comes with many built-in transformers, like this defanger:

plus, there are solid docs on how to write your own converters.

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Jupyter Notebook Viewer

Cute names are fun and all, but I will admit to being fond of apps/services that say what they do right on the tin's label.

Tino Wagner's Jupyter Notebook Viewer is a macOS app and QuickLook plugin for rendering Jupyter notebooks. It wraps Ondrej Kokes' nbviewer.js into a macOS app container and can be installed from GH or via homebrew.

The last release was in April, so it's kind of actively maintained, but definitely hit up the issues page to see if any problems you run into have already been logged.

This is potentially a great way to share rendered notebooks with colleagues who aren't full-on notebookers and being able to hit spacebar in Finder to see a notebook preview can be a real time-saver.

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PCAP visualization tool

Network packet captures (PCAPs) are both simple and complex. They're simple in the sense that the structure of the PCAP files is well-defined, making individual packets easy to digest. They're complex in the sense that they're layered (as in an 🧅) records which have contextual meaning across entire sequences of records.

You can get a sense for what's going on with PCAPs with Wireshark (and many, many other longstanding tools), but a new tool on the block — PCAP visualization tool (PVT) — by Elad (@elad_pt) — uses graph notation to let you did into the layered/tree structures of PCAPs.

PVT is not the only PCAP graphing tool out there, but it's new and has a very clean UX.

Give it a go on your next packet inspection safari!

FIN

I'll try to lean a bit heavier on cross-platform tools next issue. ☮