The meaning of being a hard-core hacker from a 1985 recollection

6502-hand-assembling-and-programming

Gather 'round children, we're about to hear a story about the good old days. Except that this is really more of a horror story of what it used to be like as a code monkey. [John Graham-Cumming] shares his experience programming a 6502-based KIM-1 machine back in 1985. Simple, right? The caveat being that there was no assembler or hardware for loading the finished code! The machine in question … [Read more...]

HEX Out reveals the secrets your data bus holds

hex-out

[Quinn Dunki] is looking to augment the tools she has available at her electronics bench and built the HEX Out as a mock-logic sniffer. The device reads 8 or 16-bit inputs, showing the current state of those connections on a 7-segment display. This requires that you're comfortable reading Hex codes, but if you're not it's almost like studying flash cards; before long you'll be able to read them … [Read more...]

Hexacopter

Quad copters have been pretty popular for the last few years, but this one is new to us. Take the same basic layout, but bump it to 6 rotors. Then you'll have the hexacopter (google translated). With 6 rotors, built in GPS and stabilization and a camera mounted on the bottom, this thing is pretty well equipped. You can see how agile and stable it is in the video above. We know it isn't necessarily … [Read more...]

Recover borked HDD after Xbox 360 ban

xbox-360-hdd-unscrambling

[Incudie] tipped us off about a method to fix a borked HDD in your Xbox 360. Many of the one million consoles banned earlier in the month also had the hard disks scrambled making off-line gaming impossible as well. It turns out that this is caused by having a ban flag in the NAND chip on the motherboard. It has been discovered that because of wear levelling, the NAND will have two copies of the … [Read more...]

Manual protocol analysis

packetfu

As a followup to last week's post on automated protocol analysis, [Tod Beardsley] has written up how to start analyzing a protocol manually. He walks through several examples to show how to pull out the interesting bits in binary protocols. His first step was sending 10 identical select statements and capturing the outbound packets. He used the Ruby library PacketFu to help with the … [Read more...]