Capture-the-flag tour of your machine

Brief

You're going to do a self-graded scavenger hunt across your own machine. The point isn't to learn anything new — it's to prove, in writing and with screenshots, that you have the vocabulary and the orientation Ch 0 promised.

You submit one Markdown file. Nobody else grades it. You grade yourself against the rubric below. If you fall into a yellow row, re-read the relevant unit and redo that row. If you fall into a red row, redo the chapter.

Make a new file called ch0-capture-the-flag.md somewhere in your Documents folder. Open it in VSCode. Work through the twelve items, in order, pasting screenshots and text as you go.

Acceptance criteria

Your submission must contain all twelve of the following. They're numbered so you can tick them off as you go.

1. The make, model, CPU, RAM size, and disk size of your machine. (From About This Mac or Windows About.)
2. The full absolute path of three files: one in your Documents folder, one in Downloads, one in your home folder.
3. A relative path from ~/Documents/ to a file in ~/Downloads/.
4. A screenshot of your file manager with hidden files toggled on.
5. The name of one dotfile in your home folder, with a one-sentence explanation in your own words of what you think it's for. (You don't need to be right — you need to look it up.)
6. The Get Info or Properties screenshot of one file with its permissions visible, plus a written prediction of whether you can read, write, and run it.
7. A demonstration of paste-as-plain-text. Copy a heading from a news site, paste it formatted into a rich-text app, paste it plain into a plain text app. Screenshots of both.
8. A list of twenty keyboard shortcuts you used during the chapter, with the action each one performs.
9. A screenshot of two apps tiled side by side using your OS's snap or tile feature.
10. A screenshot of Chrome (or your browser) with DevTools open showing the Elements tab on a real website.
11. A screenshot of Chrome with the Network tab open during a page reload.
12. A screenshot of the Console tab with the result of typing 1 + 1.

Rubric

Grade yourself once you've completed all twelve. Green in every row is the bar.

A green grade in every row is the bar. Anything yellow means re-read the relevant unit and redo that row. Red means redo the chapter.

Common failure modes

• You wrote paths from memory and got the separators wrong. Copy paths from the file manager. Don't type them by hand. Re-read unit 0.6.
• You used a screenshot of someone else's machine pulled off the web. That wastes your A$4,000. The whole point of this assignment is to know your machine. Take your own screenshots.
• You used an old browser, or the browser that came with your phone manufacturer. Use Chrome, Edge, or Firefox stable. Old browsers have stripped-down DevTools. If your browser doesn't have the Elements/Console/Network tabs, install one that does.
• You wrote one-word explanations. The criteria say "in your own words". One sentence minimum per explanation. Two is better.
• You didn't turn on file extensions before starting. Half the items become guesswork without them. Re-read unit 0.7 and start over.

Stretch

Optional. Pick one or more if you finish the twelve quickly.

• Find and screenshot the largest file on your machine. Paste its full path, its size, and a sentence about what it is. (Hint: your file manager can sort by size, but only inside one folder at a time.)
• Find and screenshot a .DS_Store file (macOS) or a Thumbs.db file (Windows). Explain in one sentence what it's for.
• Open Activity Monitor (macOS) or Task Manager (Windows) sorted by RAM use. Screenshot it. Name the three biggest RAM users on your machine right now.