-
2024-10-26 17:06:30Declaring myself a nerd on my resume has not yielded many interviews. Therefore, I a studying for an A + certification because most jobs require it. Although I geek-out on obscure Internet protocols, that’s not what businesses want yet. They want people to prove they know what SSH and FTP are. They want port memorization and you must know that an Ethernet cable is called an RJ45 cable. I use these things all the time. I already knew SSH uses port 22, but I didn’t know it was over TCP the Transmission Communications Protocol. Luckily I read the book The 4 Hour Chef by Tim Ferris. I know what you’re thinking. What the F does a cookbook have to do with IT? Well, this book was really about rapid learning. The idea is to learn any new skill by studying 4 hours per week. The book teaches you how to learn how to cook within 12 weeks by studying 4 hours per week. The beginning of the book is not about cooking at all. One chapter teaches you how to memorize a deck of cards or the first 100 digits of pi. You do this buy converting numbers into sounds and sounds into images. It’s almost as if you use cenesthesia as a memory tool. I used this card deck memorization technique](https://tim.blog/2013/02/07/how-to-memorize-a-shuffled-deck-of-cards-in-less-than-60-seconds/) to memorize common ports and protocols. ## How I Use Mnemonics To Remeber Ports Here is an example of how I used this mnemonic to memorize SSH is commonly found on tcp/22 I used cartoon characters to represent Internet Protocols like tcp or udp. - For tcp, I imagine a character I call taco pollo because it’s the first thing that came to mind when I tried to think of something using the letters t, c, and p. That’s not a real cartoon, so I used AI to dream up a picture of some taco wielding chicken. It’s a strange bird. I know, and so am I, but it works. I also considered using the cartoon chickens from Breaking Bad, but it didn’t quite fit.  - Chicken’s with tacos represent tcp. I thought of this because the word taco has a t and c in it and chicken in Spanish is pollo. This combination is ridiculous, but the more ridiculous the better when it comes to memorization. The goal is to make it unforgettable like Nat King Cole.  - For udp, I use Captain Underpants. Udp made me think of Captain Underpants for similar reasons. I used actions for the names of ports I memorizing. For example, SSH is the verb shelling. I use an object for the port number and try to think of an object that fits within the rules of the [major number system](https://major-system.info/en/). Instead of memorizing that SSH is tcp/22, I create an image in my mind’s eye. Taco Pollo shelling The Nanny. I embellished this phrase a little using a prompt generator and ran it through Stable AI Core. Here is the prompt I used. `Chicken donning a taco hat, firing artillery shells, towards Fran Drescher as The Nanny; surreal, pop-art style, vibrant colors, high-definition, references to Roy Lichtensteins comic-strip art.`  - The chicken and taco represent tcp. - The artillery shell represents Secure Shell, a.k.a. SSH - The nanny represents the number 22 because the n sound represents the number 2 in the major number system. Therefore, Nanny = 22. **This is my mnemonic for memorizing the Internet protocol, and port number of SSH**. I happen to have already know many of the port numbers already just from working with servers. I used to use Yunohost and it required me to open up many of the ports that I am learning about. A couple years ago, I ran my own email server. It wouldn’t work at first. My research lead me down a rabbit hole that taught me I needed to open port 25 to send emails. This is because SMTP(Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) needs port 25 open. A good mnemonic for this would be “a chicken taco” smurfs a nail. What does smurf mean? I don’t know, but the Smurfs used it as a verb all the time. It also helps me remember SMTP because s and m are the first two letters in the word Smurf. I didn’t know DNS used port 53 until I created the mnemonic, “Captain Underpants dines with Lemmy.” Is it gibberish? Yes. Is it effective? Hell yes! npub1marc26z8nh3xkj5rcx7ufkatvx6ueqhp5vfw9v5teq26z254renshtf3g0 867,467 Originally published on: https://marc26z.com/memorizing-protocols-and-port-numbers-with-mnemonics/ [Read on Tor](http://p66dxywd2xpyyrdfxwilqcxmchmfw2ixmn2vm74q3atf22du7qmkihyd.onion/memorizing-protocols-and-port-numbers-with-mnemonics/)