Hackaday Links: May 9, 2021

May 9, 2021 by Dan Maloney 17 Comments

Well, that de-escalated quickly. It seems like no sooner than a paper was announced that purported to find photographic evidence of fungi growing on Mars, that the planetary science and exobiology community came down on it like a ton of bricks. As well they should — extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and while the photos that were taken by Curiosity and Opportunity sure seem to show something that looks a lot like a terrestrial puffball fungus, there are a lot of other, more mundane ways to explain these formations. Add to the fact that the lead author of the Martian mushroom paper is a known crackpot who once sued NASA for running over fungi instead of investigating them; the putative shrooms later turned out to be rocks, of course. Luckily, we have a geobiology lab wandering around on Mars right now, so if there is or was life on Mars, we’ll probably find out about it. You know, with evidence.

If you’re a fan of dystopic visions of a future where bloodthirsty robots relentlessly hunt down the last few surviving humans, the news that the New York Police Department decided to stop using their “DigiDog” robot will be a bit of a downer. The move stems from outrage generated by politicians and citizens alike, who dreamt up all sorts of reasons why the NYPD shouldn’t be using this tool. And use it they apparently did — the original Boston Dynamics yellow showing through the many scuffs and dings in the NYPD blue paint job means this little critter has seen some stuff since it hit the streets in late 2020. And to think — that robot dog was only a few weeks away from filing its retirement papers.

Attention, Commodore fans based in Europe: the Commodore Users Europe event is coming soon. June 12, to be precise. As has become traditional, the event is virtual, but it’s free and they’re looking for presenters.

In a bid to continue the grand Big Tech tradition of knowing what’s best for everyone, Microsoft just announced that Calibri would no longer be the default font in Office products. And here’s the fun part: we all get to decide what the new default font will be, at least ostensibly. The font wonks at Microsoft have created five new fonts, and you can vote for your favorite on social media. The font designers all wax eloquent on their candidates, and there are somewhat stylized examples of each new font, but what’s lacking is a simple way to judge what each font would actually look like on a page of English text. Whatever happened to “The quick brown fox” or even a little bit of “Lorem ipsum”?

And finally, why are German ambulances — and apparently, German medics — covered in QR codes? Apparently, it’s a way to fight back against digital rubberneckers. The video below is in German, but the gist is clear: people love to stop and take pictures of accident scenes, and smartphones have made this worse, to the point that emergency personnel have trouble getting through to give aid. And that’s not to mention the invasion of privacy; very few accident victims are really at their best at that moment, and taking pictures of them is beyond rude. Oh, and it’s illegal, punishable by up to two years in jail. The idea with the QR codes is to pop up a website with a warning to the rubbernecker. Our German is a bit rusty, but we’re pretty sure that translates to, “Hey idiot, get back in your frigging car!” Feel free to correct us on that.

[Editor’s note: “Stop. Rubbernecking kills”.]

Reinventing The Wheel

May 8, 2021 by Elliot Williams 62 Comments

You’ve got a perfectly working software library to do just exactly what you want. Why aren’t you using it? Some of you are already yelling something about NIH syndrome or reinventing the wheel — I hear you. But at least sometimes, there’s a good enough reason to reinvent the wheel: let’s say you want to learn something.

Mike and I were talking about a cool hack on the podcast: a library that makes a floppy drive work with an Arduino, and even builds out a minimalistic DOS for it. The one thing that [David Hansel] didn’t do by himself was write the FAT library; he used the ever-popular FatFS by [Elm-ChaN]. Mike casually noted that he’s always wanted to write his own FAT library from scratch, just to learn how it works at the fundamental level, and I didn’t even bat an eyelash. Heck, if I had the time, I’d want to do that too!

Look around on Hackaday, and you’ll see tons of hacks where people reinvent the wheel. In this superb soundbar hack, [Michal] spends a while working on the IR protocol by hand until succumbing to the call of IRMP, a library that has it all done for you. But if you read his writeup, he’s not sad; he learned something about IR protocols. This I2C paper tape reader is nothing if not a reinvention of the I2C wheel, but isn’t that the best way to learn?

Yes it is. Think back to the last class you took. The teacher or professor certainly explained something to you in reasonable detail — that’s the job after all. And then you got some homework to do by yourself, and you did it, even though you were probably just going over the same stuff that the prof and countless others have gone through. But by doing it yourself, even though it was “reinventing the wheel”, you learned the material. And I’d wager that you wouldn’t have learned it without.

Of course, when the chips are down and the deadline is breathing hot down your neck, that might be the right time to just include that tried-and-true library. But if you really want to learn something yourself, you have every right to reinvent the wheel.

Hackaday Podcast 117: Chiptunes In An RCA Plug, An Arduino Floppy Drive, $50 CNC, And Wireless Switches

May 7, 2021 by Mike Szczys 6 Comments

Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams discuss the latest hacks from around the Internet. 3D-Printed linear rails don’t sound like a recipe for a functional CNC machine but there was one this week that really surprised us. We were delighted by the procedurally generated music from a $0.03 microcontroller inside of an RCA plug (the clever flexible PCB may be the coolest part of that one). There’s an interesting trick to reverse engineering Bluetooth comms of Android apps by running in a VM and echoing to WireShark. And we look at what the buzz is all about with genetically engineered mosquito experiments taking place down in the Florida Keys.

New this week is a game of “What’s that sound?”. Use the form link on the show notes below to send in your answer, one winner will receive a podcast T-shirt.

Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

Direct download (~55 MB)

Places to follow Hackaday podcasts:

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This Week In Security: BYOVD, Spectre Vx, More Octal Headaches, And ExifTool

May 7, 2021 by Jonathan Bennett 16 Comments

I learned a new acronym while reading about a set of flaws in the Dell BIOS update system. Because Dell has patched their driver, but hasn’t yet revoked the signing keys from the previous driver version, it is open to a BYOVD attack.

BYOVD, Bring Your Own Vulnerable Driver, is an interesting approach to Windows privilege escalation. 64-bit versions of Windows have a security feature that blocks unsigned kernel drivers from the kernel. The exploit is to load an older, known-vulnerable driver that still has valid signatures into the kernel, and use the old vulnerabilities to exploit the system. The caveat is that even when a driver is signed, it still takes an admin account to load a driver. So what use is the BYOVD attack, when it takes administrative access to pull off?

SentinelLabs is witholding their proof-of-concept, but we can speculate. The particular vulnerable driver module lives in the filesystem at C:\Windows\Temp, a location that is writable by any process. The likely attack is to overwrite the driver on the filesystem, then trigger a reboot to load the older vulnerable version. If you’re still running Windows on your Dell machines, then make sure to go tend to this issue. Continue reading “This Week In Security: BYOVD, Spectre Vx, More Octal Headaches, And ExifTool” →

Julius Sumner Miller Made Physics Fun For Everyone

May 5, 2021 by Kristina Panos 38 Comments

Let’s face it — for the average person, math and formulas are not the most attractive side of physics. The fun is in the hands-on learning, the lab work, the live action demonstrations of Mother Nature’s power and prowess. And while it’s true that the student must be willing to learn, having a good teacher helps immensely.

Professor Julius Sumner Miller was energetic and enthusiastic about physics to the point of contagiousness. In pictures, his stern face commands respect. But in action, he becomes lovable. His demonstrations are dramatic, delightful, and about as far away from boring old math as possible. Imagine if Cosmo Kramer were a physics professor, or if that doesn’t give you an idea, just picture Doc Brown from Back to the Future (1985) with a thick New England accent and slightly darker eyebrows. Professor Miller’s was a shouting, leaping, arm-waving, whole-bodied approach to physics demonstrations. He was completely fascinated by physics, and deeply desired to understand it as best he could so that he could share the magic with people of all ages.

Professor Miller reached thousands of students in the course of his nearly 40-year teaching career, and inspired millions more throughout North America and Australia via television programs like The Mickey Mouse Club and Miller’s own show entitled Why Is It So? His love for science is indeed infectious, as you can see in this segment about the shock value of capacitors.

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Linux Fu: Mixing Bash And Python

May 4, 2021 by Al Williams 24 Comments

Although bash scripts are regularly maligned, they do have a certain simplicity and ease of creation that makes them hard to resist. But sometimes you really need to do some heavy lifting in another language. I’ll talk about Python, but actually, you can use many different languages with this technique, although you might need a little adaptation, depending on your language of choice.

Of course, you don’t have to do anything special to call another program from a bash script. After all, that’s what it’s mainly used for: calling other programs. However, it isn’t very handy to have your script spread out over multiple files. They can get out of sync and if you want to send it to someone or another machine, you have to remember what to get. It is nicer to have everything in one file.

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TypeMatrix EZ-Reach 2030 Is Better Than Your Laptop Keyboard

May 4, 2021 by Kristina Panos 38 Comments

Maybe you’re not ready to take the leap into a full-on ergonomic split keyboard. That’s okay, that’s cool, that’s understandable. They’re weird! Especially ones like my Kinesis Advantage with the key bowls and such. But maybe your poor pinkies are starting to get tired and you’re ready to start using your thumbs for more than just the space bar. Or you want to be able to type ‘c’ properly, with your middle finger.

In that case, the TypeMatrix could be the keyboard for you. Or maybe for travel you, because it’s designed as a quasi-ergonomic, orthonormal layout travel keyboard to pair with your laptop, and as such it sits directly over a laptop keyboard without blocking the track pad. (How do people use those things, anyway?)

Of course, you could use this as a desktop keyboard as well, although it’s unfortunate that Control and Shift are stuck on the pinkies. More about that later.

First Impressions

When I saw this keyboard on eBay, I was attracted by two things: the layout, and the dedicated Dvorak light. (And, let’s be honest — the price was right.) I’ve always found myself generally turned off by chocolate bar-style ortholinear keebs because they’re so incredibly cramped, but this one seemed a more acceptable because of the slight split.

The first thing I noticed was the fantastic number pad integration. The different colored keycaps are a nice touch, because the gray makes the number pad stand out, and the red Delete is easy to find since Num Lock is squatting in the upper right corner. Why does Delete always feel like an afterthought on compact keebs? I also like the location of the arrows, and it makes me think of the AlphaSmart NEO layout. Unfortunately, it comes at the cost of burying the right hand Enter down in no-man’s land where you can’t exactly hit it blindly with great accuracy right away. If only you could swap Shift and Enter without messing up the number pad!

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