Archive for September 2019

Friday Fun: Studio 188 zero budget movies

This is how you remake a Hollywood blockbuster with zero budget (or almost). Studio 188 is a group of people that are creating low cost movie trailers. They say they have have is imagination. They have made several quite funny versions of well known movie trailers and posted the results to YouTube to https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCX3q2gub8M8NVVu4bCNIQ2g  

Day of the Programmer – Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day_of_the_Programmer The Day of the Programmer is an international professional day that is celebrated on the 256th (hexadecimal 100th, or the 28th) day of each year (September 13 during common years and on September 12 in leap years).

New SIM Card Flaw Lets Hackers Hijack Phone With SMS

SimJacker is 0-day vulnerability under active attack according to this article: Dubbed “SimJacker,” the vulnerability resides in a particular piece of software, called the S@T Browser (a dynamic SIM toolkit), embedded on most SIM cards. New SIM Card Flaw Lets Hackers Hijack Any Phone Just By Sending SMS https://thehackernews.com/2019/09/simjacker-mobile-hacking.html Huge security issue claims need some

Sunsetting Python 2 | Python.org

https://www.python.org/doc/sunset-python-2/ Volunteers who make and take care of the Python programming language have decided that January 1, 2020, will be the day that we sunset Python 2. That means that the people who develop python will not improve it anymore after that day. Even if people find catastrophic security problems in Python 2, or in

Stibitz demonstrates remote computing, September 11, 1940

Interesting historical facts according to https://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/edn-moments/4395946/Stibitz-demonstrates-remote-computing–September-11–1940: George Stibitz of Bell Telephone Laboratories used his Complex Number Calculator (CNC) to demonstrate remote computing for the first time on September 11, 1940. Stibitz was among a handful of engineers across the globe designing machines that involved using relays to implement binary logic at the time. You can

Microphone hardware hacking with a hammer

I have had for a long time an AKG D60 S microphone. The AKG D60S is advertised as an unidirectional semiprofessional dynamic microphone with smooth frequency response, a rugged all-metal body, an on/off switch, and removable wire-mesh grill.  It was proven to be a decent semiprofessional all-round microphone with hypercardioid polar pattern. Hypercardioid microphones are

Friday Fun: More oscilloscope art

It’s cool to see a functional tool like the oscilloscope manipulated to display unrelated art. When you input suitable stereo audio into an old scope in in X-Y mode, you can see all kinds of artistic creations. Salvaged Scope Lets You Watch the Music article introduces you how to use old scope for video art.

IoT interoperation lies

We were promised Intenet of Things interoperability on sales pitch, but we seem to end up is living with landfill full of proprietary shot-lived wallet gardens of crappy things. “But that Google can suddenly decide to sunset a cloud API that hundreds of IoT devices have been talking to for less than five years is

Proposed LED/wired IoT standard can reduce energy use

While switching to LED lighting certainly helps reduce power consumption, we can do more. Each conventional mains powered LED bulb has its own AC/DC power supply, which is needed for bulbs to be compatible with AC wiring and lighting fixtures with sockets designed 100 years ago. Having individual power supplies adds cost and decreases efficiency