Latest Posts

• I gave Claude Opus a Pi Zero and told it to surprise me

  I had a Raspberry Pi Zero W sitting around that used to be a conference badge. It ran a little ADS-B stats display at EAA AirVenture, and once the fly-in was over it just sat on a shelf with a Waveshare 2.13” e-paper HAT still screwed to it, doing nothing. I’d been meaning to repurpose it for months and never got around to deciding what it should become.

• A legitimate use case for an uncensored LLM

  Earlier this month one of my webapps went down and while investigating why, I found a SQL injection attack underway. Turns out it was an authorized pen test by a hired pen tester, and my client forgot to tell me about it. The interesting thing was it was not the kind that allowed an attacker to quickly exfiltrate enormous amounts of data. It was a weakly written boolean function. The attack was able to inject some SQL and see whether it was valid or not. So they launched an attack to determine the database schema by making guesses, one character at a time. It was slow, and by the time I discovered it all they had was the running MariaDB version and a few obvious table names and column names. No data had been exfiltrated.

• Cyberdeck Mark III V0.1

  Here’s the first pass, V0.1 of a cyberdeck for portable hacking. This one is powered by a Raspberry Pi5 and has a wide format screen. The 3D printed parts are a bit flimsy so I’m doing some redesign for V0.2.

• Ruby vs NodeJS performance on large text files

  I’m working on a project that uses weather forecast data from the Euro model, also known as the ECMWF. The standard format in the Meteorology world is called GRIB. It’s a binary format but laid out in a series of records where each record contains geolocation, a few other general parameters, then one significant parameter like temperature. For this project, I need temperature, dewpoint and wind. I’m having to make multiple passes over a GRIB file, one for each parameter I need. Add to this, the GRIB contains over 800,000 records within the geographic areas I want.

• 3D Printed Pen Holder for Journal

  I started Bullet Journaling last November, and to my surprise it’s really stuck! I’ve tried lots of different organization systems, and none have really resonated with my brain like this has. A few years ago, I read “Getting Things Done”, and while I really liked David Allen’s organization ideas, I just couldn’t get it to implementation. After reading Ryder Carroll’s “The Bullet Journal Method”, I found myself visualizing the parts I loved about GTD implemented in my own Bullet Journal. I can now say, after a few months, I am absolutely hooked. I now have a journal that is always with me, and I’m feeling much less stress. Before BuJo, I experienced anxiety and frustration over forgetting important things. Now, when the thought enters my head, I write it in my daily journal page and I can immediately get back to what I’m doing without losing my train of thought. It’s wonderful!

• Cyberdeck Part 4

  In Cyberdeck Part 3, I redesigned the screen brackets, and printed up panels for the USB hub and 12V power switch/connector as well as brackets for the G90 control head. I also printed up a center panel with speaker holes and a window for an OLED display.

• Cyberdeck Part 3

  In Cyberdeck Part 2, I worked out a good design for the frame and positions for the Xiegu G90 head and main chassis. In this iteration, I’ve designed and printed some brackets for the G90 control head. I also designed and printed a few of the panels. I made one that holds a USB hub, and another for the main power switch and the Power Pole connector for the main 12VDC supply. Next I designed and printed a center panel with speaker holes, and a place for the OLED display and a red push button to change the OLED display.

• Cyberdeck Part 2

  In Cyberdeck Part 1, I began printing off rails with hexagon holes that accept a hexagon brass nut. In this iteration, I’ve printed off more rails, these are a bit shorter to accomodate the curved corners of the Apache case. I also designed and printed some brackets to mount the touchscreen to the rails. I removed the control head from the G90 body and played around with locating the head and chassis. In the photo they are just sitting in the case and not mounted yet. I discovered that there’s not much clearance between the keyboard and the panel when the case is closed up. So I’ve decided to locate the G90 control head all the way to the bottom so the knobs can protrude into the space above the keyboard in the case lid.

• Cyberdeck Part 1

  Recently I was poking around on the internet looking for cool Raspberry Pi cases to 3D print. I have a few Raspberry Pi’s around that do various tasks, and I was thinking it would be cool to print up a stylish case. Well, this is how I stumbled on the idea of building a cyberdeck.

• Tracking high altitude balloons with WSPR

  I’ve always been fascinated with amateur high altitude balloons. I’ve always wanted to launch a balloon with a radio payload and see where it goes and what data it collects. But, never have I ever, launched a balloon or helped out with a launch.