Category: General

Hello friends from the search engines! If you’re reading this, you’re not the only one to receive one. With apologies in advance for turning this blog into an archive of my snail-mail, here is an “invoice” I got the other day, for a magazine I used to have a gift subscription to years-and-years ago. As…

A very quick note to my future self: AFAICT the KoolStone (iKoolStone?) belts are plain rubber O-rings, which come in standardized size numbers. For the KoolStone (C1? 2.5lb capacity) rock tumbler, it is size 231 (approximately 2-5/8″ ID, 2-7/8″ OD, 1/8″ width). Durometer unknown, but 50A durometer seems to be working well. These can be…

Growing up, when someone was attempting a job that was clearly too big for them, my uncle would say: “You don’t have enough ass in your pants for that!” What this expression meant of course was that all the strength, gumption or determination in the world were irrelevant, and the task at hand just required…

So, I had this brilliant idea for a legitimate passive income opportunity: Start a company with an online presence and terrible information security. Buy personal information in bulk, store copies of it on our servers, then sit back as eeevil hackers steal it. Repeatedly. Each time it happens, offer the affected customers 12 months of…

TL;DR: Watch one of the first 10 videos in your “Watch Later” list and see if it magically reappears. Doing a web search for this problem reveals it has been an issue for some time, but possibly for varying reasons in the past. The above is working for me on Web + native clients as…

Look, I get it, updates are important, and so is installing them timely. But after waking up this morning to find yet-another overnight job lost to an automatic reboot, it’s the last straw. To afford nice things (you know, like computers), I need to do my job, and that requires actually using my computer and…

About 2 years ago, sharing movies from my desktop (Windows 10, alas) to the old Linux Mint laptop acting as a Chromecast-that-plays-local-content-without-weird-workarounds randomly stopped working, with Gigolo reporting the very helpful error, “Connection timed out”. Fair enough, it’s not Gigolo’s job to diagnose problems caused by dodgy Windows updates. After more Googling than it should…

I’ve just been busy with a couple of little things. Now that the littlest one is figuring out this whole sleep thing, I might have time for projects again :-)

This delicious solicitation for an upcoming DARPA project rolled …er, scuttled? across my desk last week. Now, I’m no stranger to unconventional protein sources with way too much exoskeleton, but this project might be food for thought if you plan to enlist. Excerpts, emphasis mine: Component: DARPA Topic #: SB172-002 Title: Improved Mass Production of…

The Fix (Tl;dr): The Mazda Connect (a.k.a. “JCI infotainment” or Johnson Controls Infotainment, etc.) firmware available as of 1/2016 has a problem with long tags in Ogg Vorbis files, specifically the tags used for album/cover art. Vorbis files containing cover art will likely cause the radio to freeze and then reboot. To fix this, you…

Well, it happened. Despite all my talk about “Internet of Things” hype being teh suck and not ready for primetime yet, I’m now an official IoT Hero. I suppose I should actually do something about that. Today, we explore cheap-as-free data exfiltration for mobile IoT gadgets using a trick known as DNS tunneling. Internet of…

TL;DR: Successful toolchain setup, flashing and functional radio network! Still todo: Fix network connectivity between the radio network and host system, and find/fix why the CPUs run constantly (drawing excess current) instead of sleeping. Over the last few weeks (er, months?), I build up and tried out some circuit boards implementing OpenWSN, an open-source low-power…