In Praise Of “Just Because” Hacks

December 31, 2022 by Elliot Williams 25 Comments

Sometimes you pick a project because the world needs it to be done. Or maybe you or a friend need it. Or maybe you don’t really need it, but it fulfills a longstanding dream. In my mind, the last stop before you reach “why am I doing this” is the “just because” hack.

The ideal “just because” hack is limited in scope. You don’t want to spend years on a whimsical project, and because of this a “just because” hack isn’t usually motivating enough to keep you going that long anyway, except for the tenacious few. A “just because” doesn’t necessarily have to be an easy win, but it makes sense for you to see your way out before you get in too deep.

I’m not sure if it’s the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon or not, but in the last week or so in the Hackaday universe, a lot of people have been singing the praises of “just because” hacks. (Check out this one discussion, for instance.) Mostly, it’s a combination of them turning out better than initially thought, or it’s about the learning that came along for the ride. Of course, many of them spin off into longer, serious projects even if they didn’t start that way.

Not everything in life can be frivolous, of course. But that makes the “just because” hack that much sweeter, and you should try to make mental room for them if you can. When the stakes are low, creativity can be high. You might still want to impose a deadline, lest you fall into eternal yak shaving, but take it easy. You don’t need a justification all the time: the journey can be the destination.

Hackaday Podcast 199: Ferrofluid Follies, Decentralized Chaos, And NTSC For You And Me

December 30, 2022 by Kristina Panos 5 Comments

This week, Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Assignments Editor Kristina Panos decided against using one of Kristina’s tin can microphones to record the podcast, though that might be a cool optional thing to do once (and then probably never again).

After a brief foray into the news that the Chaos Communications Congress will be decentralized once again this year, as COVID restrictions make planning this huge event a complete headache (among other notable symptoms), we discuss the news that the EU is demanding replaceable batteries in phones going forward.

After that, it’s time for another What’s That Sound results show, and despite repeated listens, Kristina fails to guess the thing. Even if she’d had an inkling as to what it was, she probably would have said ‘split-flap display’ instead of the proper answer, which is ‘flip-dot display’, as a few people responded. Finally, it’s on to the hacks, where we talk about uses for ferrofluid and decide that it’s one of those things that’s just for fun and should not be applied to the world as some sort of all-purpose whacking device.

Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

And/or download it and listen offline.

Continue reading “Hackaday Podcast 199: Ferrofluid Follies, Decentralized Chaos, And NTSC For You And Me” →

This Week In Security: Adblock For Security, ProxyNotShell Lives, And CVSS 10 To Not Worry About

December 30, 2022 by Jonathan Bennett 14 Comments

The ubiquity of ransomware continues, this time with The Guardian announcing they were partially shut down from an attack. Staff are working from home as the incident is being investigated and data is recovered. Publishing seems to be continuing, and the print paper ran as expected.

There have been a couple reports published recently on how ransomware and other malware is distributed, the first being a public service announcement from the FBI, detailing what might be a blindly obvious attack vector — search engine advertising. A bad actor picks a company or common search term, pays for placement on a search engine, and then builds a fake web site that looks legitimate. For bonus points, this uses a typosquatted domain, like adobe[dot]cm or a punycode domain that looks even closer to the real thing.

The FBI has a trio of recommendations, one of which I whole-heartedly agree with. Their first suggestion is to inspect links before clicking them, which is great, except for the punycode attack. In fact, there are enough lookalike glyphs to make this essentially useless. Second is to type in URLs directly rather than using a search engine to find a company’s site. This is great so long as you know the URL and don’t make a typo. But honestly, haven’t we all accidentally ended up at website[dot]co by doing this? Their last recommendation is the good one, and that is to run a high-quality ad-blocker for security. Just remember to selectively disable blocking for websites you want to support. (Like Hackaday!) Continue reading “This Week In Security: Adblock For Security, ProxyNotShell Lives, And CVSS 10 To Not Worry About” →

Retrotechtacular: Gibson Factory Tour, 1967-Style

December 29, 2022 by Kristina Panos 14 Comments

If nothing else good came out of 2020, we can say that we at least have “Instrument of the People” — some 1967-era footage of Gibson Guitars’ “craftory”, which was discovered sometime in the fall of 2020. It appears a bit boring at first — a suit slowly approaches the camera on a dimly-lit factory floor and you half-expect an ‘oh, I didn’t see you there’ type of introduction, but no. When he reaches the foreground, he finds a candy apple-red Gibson semi-hollow body guitar waiting for him. After giving the thing a quick once over, he assesses the straightness of the neck and then begins shredding on it, fingerpicking style.

If you like this or any type of guitar music, then hang on to your headstock, because it lilts nonstop throughout this 20-minute tour as we see a parade of nameless, and often headless, players showing their stuff on various styles of Gibson both electric and acoustic.

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Linux Fu: Miller The Killer Makes CSV No Pest

December 28, 2022 by Al Williams 27 Comments

Historically, one of the nice things about Unix and Linux is that everything is a file, and files are just sequences of characters. Of course, modern practice is that everything is not a file, and there is a proliferation of files with some imposed structure. However, if you’ve ever worked on old systems where your file access was by the block, you’ll appreciate the Unix-like files. Classic tools like awk, sed, and grep work with this idea. Files are just characters. But this sometimes has its problems. That’s the motivation behind a tool called Miller, and I think it deserves more attention because, for certain tasks, it is a lifesaver.

The Problem

Consider trying to process a comma-delimited file, known as a CSV file. There are a lot of variations to this type of file. Here’s one that defines two “columns.” I’ve deliberately used different line formats as a test, but most often, you get one format for the entire file:

Slot,String 
A,"Hello" 
"B",Howdy 
"C","Hello Hackaday" 
"D","""Madam, I'm Adam,"" he said." 
E 100,With some spaces!
X,"With a comma, or two, even"

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All About USB-C: Illegal Adapters

December 27, 2022 by Arya Voronova 107 Comments

Let’s be clear – it’s not enough to have USB-C to USB-C cables. There’s a lot of cables that we might want to acquire for our day-to-day use, perhaps, for a transition period while we still own some amount of devices not adorned with a USB-C connector. However, the USB-C specification only accounts for a limited amount of kinds of cables, explicitly or implicitly excluding a range of cables that you might want to buy or make.

It’s my firm belief that, as a hacker, you should be able to buy any USB-C contraption that you could ever need. Hackers don’t need restrictions driven by marketing – they need understanding of how a piece of tech can or cannot be used, based on how it operates internally. I would like you to provide with such understanding, so that you can make informed decisions.

On the other hand, USB-C is designed to be used by less-than-skilled people, even if it often fails at that. (Cable labelling, anyone?) Clear definitions of what complies to a standard can help enforce it. Here’s the notorious story of a USB-C cable that killed a Chromebook, and launched a career of explaining USB-C specifics online for [Benson Leung]. There’s many such failure stories, in fact. Today, we’ll go through USB-C contraptions which might or might not fail you, depending on how you use them. Continue reading “All About USB-C: Illegal Adapters” →

Hackaday Links: December 25, 2022

December 25, 2022 by Dan Maloney 21 Comments

Looks like it’s lights out on Mars for the InSight lander. The solar-powered lander’s last selfie, sent back in April, showed a thick layer of dust covering everything, including the large circular solar panels needed to power the craft. At the time, NASA warned that InSight would probably give up the ghost sometime before the end of the year, and it looks like InSight is sticking to that schedule. InSight sent back what might be its last picture recently, showing the SEIS seismic package deployed on the regolith alongside the failed HP3 “mole” experiment, which failed to burrow into the soil as planned. But one bad experiment does not a failed mission make — it was wildly successful at most everything it was sent there to do, including documenting the largest marsquake ever recorded. As it usually does, NASA has anthropomorphized InSight with bittersweet sentiments like “Don’t cry, I had a good life,” and we’re not quite sure how we feel about that. On the one hand, it kind of trivializes the engineering and scientific accomplishments of the mission, but then again, it seems to engage the public, so in the final rinse, it’s probably mostly harmless.

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