Calling Bullshit

Posted on by Daniel Kirstenpfad

The world is awash in bullshit. Politicians are unconstrained by facts. Science is conducted by press release. Higher education rewards bullshit over analytic thought. Startup culture elevates bullshit to high art. Advertisers wink conspiratorially and invite us to join them in seeing through all the bullshit — and take advantage of our lowered guard to bombard us with bullshit of the second order. The majority of administrative activity, whether in private business or the public sphere, seems to be little more than a sophisticated exercise in the combinatorial reassembly of bullshit.

We’re sick of it. It’s time to do something, and as educators, one constructive thing we know how to do is to teach people. So, the aim of this course is to help students navigate the bullshit-rich modern environment by identifying bullshit, seeing through it, and combating it with effective analysis and argument.

https://www.callingbullshit.org/index.html

OpenFood Facts

Posted on by Daniel Kirstenpfad
Open Food Facts gathers information and data on food products from around the world.

To replace MyFitnessPal in our toolchain I am on the hunt for at least some quality food fact data.

The Open Food Facts data base seems to be one source – although in sparse and questionable quality (after first initial testing).

There is a comprehensive documentation about the fields of data supported. And there are several formats that the raw data can be downloaded in.

There are ready-made applications available as well. Definitly worth looking into further.

smart OpenVPN client for iOS

Posted on by Daniel Kirstenpfad

There is a free and well integrated OpenVPN client for iOS devices already. And as much as this one works quite well it’s also lacking some comfort features that are now made available through alternative iOS client implementations of OpenVPN.

OpenVPN is an open-source commercial software that implements virtual private network techniques to create secure point-to-point or site-to-site connections in routed or bridged configurations and remote access facilities. It uses a custom security protocol that utilizes SSL/TLS for key exchange.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenVPN

Meet Passepartout. The iOS OpenVPN client that comes with lots of comfort features. Of main interest for me is that Passepartout is aware of the connection you’re currently using and can adopt it’s VPN tunnel status accordingly.

Passepartout is a smart OpenVPN client perfectly integrated with the iOS platform. Passepartout is the only app you need for both well-known OpenVPN providers and your personal OpenVPN servers.

a 1980s style computer built today for fun

Posted on by Daniel Kirstenpfad

Can you display VGA and play audio on a Cortex-M4 in pure Rust? The short answer is yes, yes you can! Minus the hand-unrolled assembler loop for fixing the phase error in the RGB output. But we don’t talk about that in polite company.

Monotron project page

What currently is in place:

  • The Atari Joystick interface works, but two Joysticks would be more fun
  • The PS/2 Keyboard via the Atmega works, but the pinout was mirrored so you have to put the connector under the PCB :/
  • The RTC works
  • VGA Output works
  • The MIDI Out seems to work when looped to MIDI In, as does the MIDI Though.
  • The MIDI In seems to receive data when connected to my electronic drum kit
  • The Audio output seems to work quite nicely
  • The SD card works, but the power supply can’t handle hot-insertion of the SD card and it makes the TM4C reboot. More capacitors / some current limiting probably required.

I can load games and programs from the SD card into the 24 KiB of free Application RAM. You can interact with these games via the PS/2 Keyboard and Joystick. I can play simple games (like Snake) and play three channels of 8-bit wavetable audio simultaneously. I’ve even got a 6502 Emulator running a copy of 6502 Enhanced BASIC, if you want to go old school!

Localino – Indoor Location

Posted on by Daniel Kirstenpfad

As you might know I am regularly looking into indoor-location systems and opportunities to optimize my own system (based on Bluetooth…)

Now I cam across a concept by a german company called Localino. They’ve built their own hard- and software.

Localino has its own “satellites”, also called “anchors”. The mobile receivers are called “tags” and can locate their position based on the available anchors inside a building. Anchors and tags precisely measure signal propagation delays in the order of sub-nanoseconds, resulting in centimeter-accurate location. Any person or object wearing a tag can be located.

Localino website

There’s also a hack-a-day article on the system which states that all hard- and software would be open source. So far I did not find any source code though…

As far as I could dig into this so far it’s based upon decawave DW1000 hardware and an older base-library of this is available as source code here.

There are some other mentions which are back from 2017 when there seemingly was a big open source portion. Some python code is mentioned but nothing available right away today sadly.

Hack-The-Planet Podcast: Episode 10

Posted on by Daniel Kirstenpfad

Shownotes

Understand Maladay

Posted on by Daniel Kirstenpfad

Boomtime 5 Aftermath: The Apostle Malaclypse the Elder’s Holyday. A wandering Wiseman of Ancient Mediterrania (“Med-Terra” or middle earth), who followed a 5-pointed Star through the alleys of Rome, Damascus, Baghdad, Jerusalem, Mecca and Cairo, bearing a sign that seemed to read “DOOM”. (This is a misunderstanding. The sign actually read “DUMB”.)

Bulletin Board Systems in the wild

Posted on by Daniel Kirstenpfad

While recording a podcast episode we briefly touched on the topic of bulletin board systems and how we both had operated our own FidoNet BBS in the 90s.

To create a bigger reflux of thoughts:

Synchronet Bulletin Board System Software is a free software package that can turn your personal computer into your own custom online service supporting multiple simultaneous users with hierarchical message and file areas, multi-user chat, and the ever-popular BBS door games.

Everything there to set-up a BBS. Maybe I really need to get out a backup of my old BBS and bring it back online?!

Hack-The-Planet Podcast: Episode 009

Posted on by Daniel Kirstenpfad

TIL: iPhone Visual Voicemal is IMAP

Posted on by Daniel Kirstenpfad

Today I learned that the Apple iPhone re-purposes the IMAP protocol to implement the voice mail feature.

By sniffing the network traffic it was possible to examine the IMAP protocol revealing username and the corresponding hashed password (which allows to repeat a successful login) and of course all voicemail files. We want to highlight, that all the voicemail files have been transferred unencrypted.

Assessment of Visual Voicemail from 2012

replacing MyFitnessPal

Posted on by Daniel Kirstenpfad

Well, it’s about time to do something about MyFitnessPal. In our family we’re using their service by the daily. But just for logging. No reports, no further features used.

But still, we were using it for quite a time now:

almost 5 years logged every-single-day.

The service has started to roll out ads for some time now in their apps. There are only iOS / Android apps available. And a mediocre website.

Just recently they started to announce that their free service will restrict how many years back are going to be stored. From those 5 years we will loose 3.

In addition the whole integration has never gotten to a point where I would have decided to upgrade to the paid premium version. No functionality ever got added. No interfacing with scales, no optimizations for UI/UX, …

But they now reduce the functionalities and service and want me to cough up a bit of money:

I am not generally against subscriptions. But I am not getting 9,99 Euro of value out of the service. A shared google sheet would almost achieve parity. And the price itself is just not value based. For 2 Euro I probably would not feel the urge to move on. For 9,99 (times 2 for 2 accounts) make me move.

So I’ve sat down with my wife and we scribbled up some things we want to have in a replacement. The content and feature-set is agreed. Now I’ll throw up a prototype app.

It’ll be integrated with the MQTT scales. And with the flow we came up with we hopefully will reduce the interactions dramatically over MyFitnessPal. And it’ll never stop saving history. And I’ll learn something new.