Category: Hobbies

Artificial satellites have transformed the world in many ways, not only in terms of relaying communication and for observing the planet in ways previously inconceivable, but also to enable incredibly accurate navigation. A so-called global navigation satellite system (GNSS), or satnav for short, uses the data provided by satellites to pin-point a position on the…

Read More “Knowing Your Place: The Implications Of GPS Spoofing And Jamming” »

As conspiracy theories go, one of the more plausible is that a cell phone could be running malicious firmware on its baseband processor, and be listening and transmitting data even when powered off. Nowadays, this sort of behavior is called a feature, at least if your phone is made by Apple, with their Find My…

Read More “This Week In Security: IPhone Unpowered, Python Unsandboxed, And Wizard Spider Unmasked” »

This is a story about two dogs I know. It is also a story of the US Navy, aviation, and nuclear weapons. Sometimes it is easy to see things in dogs or other people, but hard to see those same things in ourselves. It’s a good thing that dogs can’t read (that we know of)…

Read More “The Little Big Dogs Of Invention” »

Want your next project to trash talk? Dynamically rewrite boring log messages as sci-fi technobabble? Happily (or grudgingly) answer questions? Doing that sort of thing and more can be done with OpenAI’s GPT-3, a natural language prediction model with an API that is probably a lot easier to use than you might think. In fact,…

Read More “Natural Language AI In Your Next Project? It’s Easy Than You Think” »

Last last month, a post from the relatively obscure Good e-Reader claimed that Amazon would finally allow the Kindle to read EPUB files. The story was picked up by all the major tech sites, and for a time, there was much rejoicing. After all, it was a feature that owners have been asking for since…

Read More “Kindle, EPUB, And Amazon’s Love Of Reinventing Wheels” »

There is gathering momentum around the idea of ​​adding Rust to the Linux kernel. Why exactly is that a big deal, and what does this mean for the rest of us? The Linux kernel has been just C and assembly for its entire lifetime. A big project like the kernel has a great deal of…

Read More “Things Are Getting Rusty In Kernel Land” »

This year, we’ve already seen sizeable leaks of NVIDIA source code, and a release of open-source drivers for NVIDIA Tegra. It seems NVIDIA decided to amp it up, and just released open-source GPU kernel modules for Linux. The GitHub link named open-gpu-kernel-modules has people rejoice, and we are already testing the code out, making memes…

Read More “NVIDIA Releases Drivers With Openness Flavor” »

F5’s BIG-IP platform has a Remote Code Execution (RCE) vulnerability: CVE-2022-1388. This one is interesting, because a Proof of Concept (PoC) was quickly reverse engineered from the patch and released on Twitter, among other places. Let’s drop CVE-2022-1388 PoC pic.twitter.com/MmyvQGL6eO — 416e6e61 (@AnnaViolet20) May 9, 2022 HORIZON3.ai researcher [James Horseman] wrote an explainer that sums…

Read More “This Week In Security: F5 Twitter PoC, Certifried, And Cloudflare Pages Pwned” »

You’ve built a robot crammed full of servos and now you settle down for the fun part, programming your new dancing animatronic bear! The pain in your life is just beginning. Imagine that you decide the dancing bear should raise it’s arm. If you simply set a servo position, the motor will slew into place…

Read More “Animate Your Robot In Blender” »

As one of the most popular buses today for on- and inter-board communication within systems, there’s a good chance you’ll end up using it with an embedded system. I2C offers a variety of speeds while requiring only two wires (clock and data), which makes it significantly easier to handle than alternatives, such as SPI. Within…

Read More “Bare-Metal STM32: Using The I2C Bus In Master-Transceiver Mode” »