Mixed Bag #2

Updates on some topics mentioned in the last post

Hydroponic Vegetables

Growing plants in a hydroponic setup has been surprisingly easy, so far no major problems have occurred. I have expanded my plant selects from growing exclusively hot peppers to now also include tomatoes and a cucumber plant. Most of the peppers have started producing flowers / fruit by now, same for the tomatoes and the cucumber, I even harvested some of the cucumbers already.

The only area that caused my some issues was the container selection: I started growing the peppers using an empty yogurt container to hold the water and roots, sadly the containers did not block all the light which caused algae to grow in the water. From what I read, algae is not a threat to the plant or the setup, but it consumes some of the nutrients, reducing the overall yield. Since then, I have tried two other containers:

• Soda Cans (250ml): The soda cans block all the light and the top almost perfectly fits the net cups I purchased, resulting in a fast and easy setup. The cans are quite small, so I have to refill the water quite often. The cans are very good for young pants, but as they grow older the plant will have to be moved to a bigger container.
• A storage chest (~13 Liters of Volume): I had to drill holes into the top lid in order to get some openings for the net cups. My current setup is two plants per chest, which seems fine so far, but the plants are still growing. The only issue I have with the setup is that it needs a lot of space, a sparse resource in my growth tent, for now the chest is residing on my windowsill.

Currently, I have the following plants:

• 6x chili in soda can
• 1x tomato in soda can
• 2x chili in yogurt container
• 1x cucumber in yogurt container
• 2x tomato in storage chest

Here are some pictures of the plants:

Building a no-dig garden bed

I went out and got some municipal compost. The pricing was 2 EUR for 50 Liters of compost, but I had to fill the bag myself, still a good deal. One bag was enough for my small garden bed, now I am waiting for the cardboard to rot away. In terms of seeds, I already purchased sweet corn, bean and carrot seeds. Corn and beans are good companions, and the carrots should require little to no maintenance once they have been planted.

Progress on HackTheBox

My progress on the HTB Certified Penetration Testing Specialist is around 13%, a lot less progress than I was hoping for. This was mainly caused by me being more busy at work and thus not having the time to complete modules. Outside of work I spent a fair amount of time on the main platform hacking current boxes, I have completed all current easy and most of the current medium difficulty boxes and got my first user flag on a hard box. My current goal is to get “Pro Hacker” rank, I hope this is possible without doing the hard boxes, as those currently are above my skill level and will take ages pwn.

What surprised me about the stats is the global ranking: 531 seems quite high. I still would consider myself a beginner in the world of hacking compared to others, so either the HackTheBox community is a lot smaller than I thought, or most hackers are a lot worse than I thought.

Other Topics

Restructuring my portfolio

After not paying too much attention to my stock portfolio in the last year, I recently took a closer look at my positions and realized that most of them are in the US tech sector. So over the next couple of months I want to exit some of those positions and reinvest the money into other sectors and countries. One of the positions is started building up is Petróleo Brasileiro, I manged to get a fairly good entry and the position is already up 20%. I would have preferred for the stock to give me the opportunity to buy more shares, by trading sideways for a while, but I won’t complain about the financial gains.

Overall, while Petrobras gives me some exposure to South America and the energy sector, I still lack exposure to Europe and the manufacturing / industry sector. I have been looking at Porsche Holding, which currently trades at a discount of ~50% to its intrinsic value. Here is a German article talking about the company in more detail. Overall, I don’t want to allocate too much in Europe since I already work and live, which gives me a fair amount of exposure.

I will post a pie chart showing my allocations by country, sector and ticker, once I get close to the values I am aiming for.