There’s a lot to be said in favor of getting kids involved in hacking as young as possible, but there is one thing about working in electronics that I believe is best left as a mystery until at least the teenage years — hide the shrink tube. Teach them to breadboard, have them learn resistor color codes and Ohm’s Law, and even teach them to solder. But don’t you dare let them near the heat shrink tubing. Foolishly reveal that magical stuff to kids, and if there’s a heat source anywhere nearby I guarantee they’ll blow through your entire stock of the expensive stuff the minute you turn your back. Ask me how I know.
I jest, but only partly. There really is something fun about applying heat shrink tubing, and there’s no denying how satisfying a termination can be when it’s hermetically sealed inside that little piece of inexplicably expensive tubing. But how does the stuff even work in the first place?
If you are a connoisseur of analogue audio, it’s probable you might have a turntable and a stack of records at home somewhere. If you are of a certain age you may even have a cassette deck, though you’re more likely to have abandoned that format some time in the 1990s. If you are old enough to have been around in the 1960s or 1970s though, you may have owned another analogue audio format. One of several that you might have found in a well-equipped home of that period was the 8-track stereo cartridge, a self-contained tape cassette format that fit four stereo tracks onto a single quarter-inch tape loop as eight parallel tracks, four each of left and right. A triumph of marketing, really, it should more accurately have been called 4-track stereo.
8-track cartridges were developed from earlier tape cartridge formats, largely to satisfy the demands of the automotive industry for interchangeable in-car entertainment. Thus if you owned an 8-track player it was most likely to have been found in your car, but it was not uncommon to find them also incorporated into home hi-fi systems. Thus we come to our subject today. Our retrotechtacular series usually highlights a video showing a bygone technology, but today we’re going to get a little more hands-on.
Some time in the early 1990s, I acquired an 8-track player, a BSR McDonald unit manufactured in the UK and dating from the early 1970s. BSR were much more well-known for their turntables, so this is something of an oddity. Where I found it has disappeared into the mists of time, but it was probably at a radio rally or junk sale. I certainly didn’t buy it because I wanted it to play 8-track tapes, instead I wanted a talking point for my hi-fi, something quirky to set it apart from everyone else’s. So every incarnation of listening enjoyment chez List for the last quarter century has had an 8-track player nestling within it, even if it has never played a tape while in my ownership. Thus we have a unique opportunity for this retro teardown.
It was but two weeks ago when I told my story of woe — the tale of an LG Nexus 5X that fell ill, seemingly due to a manufacturing fault at birth. I managed to disassemble it and made my way through a semi-successful attempt at repair, relying on a freezer and hairdryer to coax it back to life long enough to backup my data. Try as I might, however, I simply couldn’t get the phone running for more than ten minutes at a time.
All was not in vain, however! I was rewarded for documenting my struggles with the vast experience and knowledge of the wider Internet: “Hairdryers don’t get as hot as heatguns!”
It turned out I had just assumed that two similar devices, both relying on a hot bit of metal and a fan as their primary components, must be virtually identical if rated at a similar power draw. I was wrong! Apparently the average hairdryer stays well cooler than 150 degrees Celsius to avoid melting one’s silky locks or burning the skin. I even learned that apparently, wet hair melts at a lower temperature than dry hair. Who knew?
Armed with this knowledge, I rushed out and bought the cheapest heat gun I could find — around $50. Rated up to 600 degrees C, this was definitely going to be hotter than the hairdryer. With the prevailing opinion being that I had not applied enough heat in general, I decided to also increase the heating period to 90 seconds, up from a quick 30 second pass originally.
I had great fun writing neural network software in the 90s, and I have been anxious to try creating some using TensorFlow.
Google’s machine intelligence framework is the new hotness right now. And when TensorFlow became installable on the Raspberry Pi, working with it became very easy to do. In a short time I made a neural network that counts in binary. So I thought I’d pass on what I’ve learned so far. Hopefully this makes it easier for anyone else who wants to try it, or for anyone who just wants some insight into neural networks.
I found myself staring up at the sky on the night of March 13, 1989, with my girlfriend and her parents in the backyard of their house. The sky was on fire, almost literally. Red and pink sheets of plasma streamed out in a circle from directly overhead, with blue-white streaks like xenon flashes occasionally strobing across the sky. We could actually hear a sizzling, crackling sound around us. The four of us stood there, awestruck by the aurora borealis we were lucky enough to witness.
At the same time, lights were winking out a couple of hundred miles north in Québec province. The same solar storm that was mesmerizing me was causing fits for Hydro-Québec, the provincial power authority, tripping circuit breakers and wreaking havoc. This certainly wasn’t the first time the Sun threw a fit and broke systems on Earth, but it was pretty dramatic, and there are some lessons to be learned from it and other solar outbursts.
A couple of weeks back a report came out where [Tavis Ormandy], a widely known security researcher for Google Project-Zero, showed how it was possible to abuse Lastpass RPC commands and steal user passwords. Irony is… Lastpass is a software designed to keep all your passwords safe and it’s designed in a way that even they can’t access your passwords, the passwords are stored locally using strong cryptography, only you can access them via a master-key. Storing all your passwords in only place has its downfalls. By the way, there is no proof or suggestion that this bug was abused by anyone, so if you use Lastpass don’t worry just yet.
But it got me thinking, how worried and how paranoid should a regular Internet user should be about his password? How many of us have their account details exposed somewhere online? If you’ve been around long enough, odds are you have at least a couple of accounts on some major Internet-based companies. Don’t go rushing into the Dark Web and try to find if your account details are being sold. The easiest way to get your paranoia started is to visit Have I Been Pwned. For those who never heard about it, it’s a website created by [Troy Hunt], a well-known security professional. It keeps track of all known public security breaches he can get his hands on and provides an answer to a simple question: “Was my account in any major data leak?” Let’s take a look.
