RobotSkirts

I’ve hung onto a few boxes business cards over the years (these particular ones being from Netscape) with the intention of doing a project. I followed the instructions from the well known business card Menger Sponge project to turn 348 cards into 58 identical cubes. The cubes are quite resilient and resist falling apart; even the structures built with them are far more solid than you would expect. 58 cubes isn’t significant, it’s just how many matte white backed cards I had. (more…)

I enjoy the community I’m part of on Google Reader. They share interesting stories and leave insightful and humorous comments. I use Reader for the majority of my content consumption and it is the place I’m most likely to share an article I’m interested in than anywhere else (Twitter, Facebook, Google+). If you’re subscribed to a feed, it’s just a single click to share a feed item with your followers. If it’s content you find while browsing the web, there’s a handy Note in Reader bookmarklet that will share what you highlight on a page.

The Note in Reader bookmarklet works fairly well but usually you’ll see some weird formatting as it struggles with a chunk of HTML divorced from its stylesheet. The following is what I try to do instead of using the bookmarklet: I click on the page’s RSS icon like I normally would when subscribing to a new feed. This loads the feed into Google Reader and shows you a preview of how the feed will appear. Instead of clicking the Subscribe button, I scroll through the feed and find the item I want and use the share buttons as I would normally. It shares the item and I don’t have to do any sort of cleanup removing the feed since I never actually subscribed.

The key benefits of doing this are: The shared item will look way better since it’s appearing exactly like it does in the RSS feed and not scraped from the site. The item you’re sharing is the canonical version; you’ll see Likes by other users and if someone you follow is a feed subscriber and shares the same item you’ll see it globbed in with yours. Finally, it’s only one more click than sharing an item from a feed you’ve already subscribed to and you don’t have to mess around highlighting a selection.

… okay, so the benefits aren’t that crazy, but they’ll certainly keep your Reader shares neat and tidy.

My Droid X is running Verizon’s official build of Android 2.3.3 (Gingerbread) which is version 4.5.588. Luckily, there’s a very easy tool for rooting this: GingerBreak. Once you have root access you can run the BusyBox installer. I then used adb to get a shell and remount the /system filesystem read/write. I edited build.prop using vi to change two lines so the phone would pass Netflix’s model check. After that, the Netflix app just works. You do need the latest version and not the original leaked apk.

I have a handful of twitter accounts associated with specific events or websites. They’re often updated automatically with no regular intervention by me—I usually don’t even know their passwords. Everything works pretty smoothly until I need to do a manual update. Take the @hackerdrinkup account: It updates automatically with the week’s location, but if something unexpected comes up, I need to update it with the new venue. Many pro mobile twitter clients support multiple accounts and Brizzly supports up to five. I do these updates so rarely that it doesn’t feel worth the expense or setup time… and even if they were setup it still relies on my phone’s sometimes flakey data connection. I set out to build a simple solution that would work with a bare minimum connection. (more…)

A couple interesting documents have recently appeared on Public Intelligence related to electronics hobbyists. Pictured right is a doc circulated by the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center “Radio Frequency Jammers Used to Disrupt Communication Devices“. It features one of the most widely available cellphone jammers on the market (here it is on Deal Extreme). SFPD recovered this one—it was on at the time—from a car during a drug bust. These particular units are sold with a cigarette adapter, but as the article notes, the range is only ~15 feet. With such a short range, I’m not sure what the point of using a jammer is outside of say, an elevator. (more…)

I’m back in Los Angeles but I thought I’d leave you with one last image from ShmooCon. Larry Pesce from PaulDotCom has been been bringing new ShmooBall guns to the conference for the past few years. ShmooBalls are foam balls given to the conference attendees so they can throw them at speakers they disagree with.

This year Larry brought a turret mounted to a Power Wheels. You can see the 2008 and 2009 versions on Hack a Day.

Michael Ossmann gave a really interesting talk on bluetooth keyboard security at ShmooCon. He specifically covered the bluetooth HID profile from 2003 and the bluetooth 1.2 spec from the same time, which all current keyboards on the market implement. He covered many attacks on the system that take advantage of bluetooth not authenticating its devices.

(more…)

As was bound to happen, I put the finishing touches on my GPU post and immediately ran into David Hulton (h1kari) at Pico Computing‘s ShmooCon booth. As the organizer of ToorCon, he was the person that originally introduced me to the power of the FPGA.

(more…)

For having to fill a last minute ShmooCon opening, dragorn delivered a very provoking talk. You may know him for his indispensable wifi tool, Kismet. He blew through 100 slides in 20 minutes and I’m sure I’ll miss the finer points but it really turned out to be something potentially incredible (and destructive). He laid the ground work by discussing how open public wifi hotspots are so heavily used. Many of us understand the risk but he set out to show even more unexplored territory.

(more…)

I’m at the ShmooCon hacker conference in D.C. this weekend and will be posting about some of the more interesting talks. The Friday round of talks are limited to 20 minutes and cover a wide variety of topics. Collin Brack opened with a subject I’m thoroughly interested in: GPU based cracking.

(more…)