Radio Free Meredith

I owe the Berlin trip a proper writeup, but some highlights: talk went extremely well, saw many old friends and acquaintances, came up with yet another paper we need to write with Dan Kaminsky, had some interesting discussions about a computer science curriculum that emphasizes security from the get-go, narrowed down the scope of some tools I need to write in the very near future in such a way that I can put together a proper spec now, got invited to give our talk or something very much like it again at Dartmouth. enochsmiles and I co-present extremely well, which bodes well for future joint presentations (which I enjoy better than solo presentations, when they go well at least).

We also sort of got stuck in Berlin after seeing foxgrrl off at TXL, as it turns out that trains from Berlin to Leuven are not to be had after about 2 pm; the farthest west we could have gotten was Liège. A glance at a rail map suggested a wild possibility: Saarbrücken, so on a wild shot I called oralelk's office and got him on the first ring. Despite not having had much contact at all over the last, um, five years (bad Meredith, no cookie!) he was still quite happy to have us crash on his couch for the night, even coming out to meet us at 11:30 at night, staying up to chat, and putting off going in to work until well past 11 am despite having quite a lot of work to do. It was rapidly discovered that Saarbrücken is one of the least convenient places in Germany to get to Belgium from; our options were basically the ICE high-speed train to Paris and the Thalys to Brussels, or a bus to Luxembourg and two trains for roughly a quarter the price. Thus I have now been to Luxembourg, making that eight countries so far this year.

I have also just received notification that our Black Hat talk has been accepted. Thus, I will be both there and at the Open Science Summit in Berkeley immediately thereafter, July 29-31. (Current plan is to arrive in CA on the 30th.) Unfortunately, this will mean missing DEFCON, for me at least; I'm not sure about enochsmiles.

It is going to be a wild summer, with tools to write and a journal article to finish and a couple of big chewy proofs to prove on top of all my normal work. But I'm excited!

Waking up with a solution in mind for a leftover bug from last night's hacking session, getting it implemented within ten minutes of being sufficiently caffeinated to work, and discovering that one of the subsequent items on my TODO is actually as simple as I thought it would be.

I basically skipped out on the Internet for most of last week. This was mainly because last year's router decided it was no longer interested in putting out a consistent enough signal for my WLAN interface to stay stapled to it long enough to do things like, oh, open a webpage. I am happy when things consistently work, I can troubleshoot them when they consistently don't work, but intermittent functionality interspersed with HA HA ONLY KIDDING makes me want to break stuff. Last year's router is now no more broken than it got to be on its own, but it has been replaced with 2007's never-used router, which was picked up at a Fry's in Vegas for something like $15, preemptively disassembled in case we needed it for a project we were working on that Defcon, and put back in its box still in pieces with a few extra bits attached. All the solder points are neatly covered in electrical tape, and it has red and black wires soldered to the pins of the 5V jack; I guess if we have a power outage we can run it off batteries. Also it works, which is always nice to discover when you put something back together. Clearwire, I take back most of the bad things I ever said about you; you are actually rather fast and reliable when used with non-gimpy hardware. Perhaps this summer we will share the internet on the beach at Oostende after all, with the help of the battery-powered router.

The router needs a name. For the last few years our naming convention has been "places that do not exist" -- thus far Arcadia and Erehwon. I am leaning toward Ruritania or possibly Latveria, though I note that Uncyclopedia's list of nonexistent places includes Belgium. The humour is hit or miss, but I cannot deny the truth of the following excerpt:

Belgium is the worst place to live during a Zombie Apocalypse due to the fact that there's more dead soldiers buried there than people.

I mean, if you're in Colma when the zombie apocalypse happens, the odds are stacked against you, but you'll be up against zombie hippies and dotcommers. I suppose our only hope will be if the zombie French and Germans hate each other more than they want to eat the brains of living Belgians.

The other cool discovery, in addition to Working!Router, was the SMT tweezers that I apparently also picked up during that Fry's expedition. These are no ordinary tweezers; they are large and sturdy with a business end that comes to needle tips, suitable for performing reconstructive surgery on fruit flies. I suppose I should really get round to converting a toaster oven into a reflow oven, since I now have most of the other tools I need to do serious tiny-circuitry work. The local hardware store even sells ferric chloride, though not in the handy solution form that Radio Shack dispenses -- no, here it comes in foul-smelling rusty orange lumps and must be weighed out by the gram. I can also obtain a wide assortment of useful acids, bases, and salts, in addition to the standard sodium hydroxide and 30% hydrochloric acid that they sell in the grocery store to clear out drains. I feel like I'm living back in Thomas Edison's day, when you could get kicked off a train for having your chemistry set accidentally set a boxcar on fire.

This weekend was also enochsmiles' and my third wedding anniversary, which would have been great had I not woken up with some gastrointestinal weirdness that forced me to instead spend the day puking myself stupid. (If you find that resultative construction unusual, I defy you to maintain any kind of intelligence while lurching to the sink every half hour to retch bile.) We are planning to celebrate this weekend instead; it will also be my little sister briaer's birthday, so that's two reasons to celebrate.

Finally, in the last bit of router-related news, now there are router botnets. This should surprise approximately no one -- "I bet I can put Linux on that" metamorphosed into "I bet I can drop a botnet on that" some time back, for values of "that" which can connect to the Internet -- but seriously, people, password your fucking routers already.

An enterprising open-source hacker who goes by the moniker Famulus, using polywell plasma confinement, has achieved desktop-scale nuclear fusion.

There are some really lovely photos of plasmas and lab equipment on the blog, and all the STL files for the polywell itself, plus Ruby source code for running the thing, are available on github. Go to.

ETA: That's fusion full stop, not "a sustained fusion reaction producing more energy than is consumed by plasma containment". I'd wager my left temporal lobe that he's running at a net energy loss. However, polywell confinement is one of the more promising technologies out there for net-gain fusion; interested parties should check out the work that EMC2 Fusion is doing.

Well, I know what I want for Christmas now.

It would be so cool if McMaster.com had a wishlist feature like Amazon's. Absent that, however, I really ought to check out wishlistr and pop all the parts into that.

The good thing about being an electronics nerd is that even when you're not doing too well financially, any day can still be Christmas thanks to vendor free sample programs.

Today I ordered a bunch of freebie parts for a couple of projects I'm actively working on (for varying degrees of "active" -- the 32-bit ARM Cortex uCs will probably collect a bit of dust before I bust them out), but I think next time I'm feeling really down I'll just work my way through Limor Fried's list of where to get samples and call it retail therapy.

(I am, however, tempted to try to come up with the weirdest possible combination of parts, just to give the sales reps a more interesting afternoon. "What could she possibly want with capacitive sensors and a handful of transistors rated at 1500V?" Sort of the electronics equivalent of going through the supermarket checkout with condoms, kitty litter and two gallons of Wesson cooking oil.)

Chording glove pattern prototype, version 1, three fingers and a thumb left to knit:



I am making this up as I go along, thus there are a few irregularities that I will correct in the next version when I take my notes and turn them into a proper pattern. I realized halfway up the index finger that I'd failed to knit a solid line up the thumb side (for mounting the thumb switches) like I'd planned to, and that ugly-looking line right across the palm was an experiment that didn't quite work out and that I couldn't be arsed to go back and fix. (The fishnet pattern is made by knitting two stitches together, then making a hole by bringing the yarn to the front, over and over again. The cool spirally pattern comes from having each row of holes offset from the next by one stitch, which was obligatory when I was making increases for the thumb; I forgot to alternate when I started going up for the thumb side of the palm.)

All in all, though, I'm quite happy with how it's turning out, especially since a couple of experiments succeeded -- you can rib lace after all! -- and some things that I was worried would look stupid, like the solid fingertips (for stability, and to have a place to anchor the switches), look okay after all. Since this is an attempt to figure out a pattern, I'm making this out of plain cotton, and will wire it up by sewing 30ga wire through the knit stitches (the thicker "lines" that you see on the glove), but I still want to figure out a way to work the wiring into the pattern itself, because it will look cooler and I am stubborn like that.

Barring anything weird happening, I should have the complete standalone USB keyboard glove working sometime this week. I have my wire-wrap sockets now, and have soldered in half of the discrete components (the ones I had spares of, by way of a test run); I'm going to hold off moving the rest of the circuit from the breadboard until I have the glove finished and the switches mounted and wired, but the actual wiring-up shouldn't take more than an hour or two.

I'm kind of tempted to set up an Etsy shop and sell these, though I'm not sure how much would be a fair price. The actual knitting probably takes about ten hours (spread out over a few days, since my hands get sore quickly), and the soldering goes fast; the parts are less than $20 total. Any thoughts? Would you buy one?

Snagged from michiexile.

1.Take a picture of yourself right now.
2.Don’t change your clothes, don’t fix your hair…just take a picture.
3.Post that picture with NO editing.
4.Post these instructions with your picture.



Me and my Arduino NG, with the accelerometer I just rigged up to it.

It is retardedly hot and humid in the late afternoon/early evening here. I have given up entirely on the notion of pants, and still cannot bring myself to do much of anything except drink water and read. Every window is open, my neighbours probably think I'm a pervert (we have big windows), and still all I can do here is lie here and sweat.

Pics later (of the chording glove, not my pantsless self, get your minds out of the gutter), I promise, but for the moment I'm going to try to keep from melting if that's okay with y'all.

I need to find some milk crates, a hose and a couple of half-amp motors; this is giving me ideas for a stackable modular swamp cooler.

Dear LJ Genie,

Here is a picture of an audio cable:



I know that I can go to Radio Shack and buy a screw-together or snap-together end for an audio cable, but the friend on whose behalf I am asking doesn't need an audio cable; he needs to provide more mechanical stability for a join, and layered heat-shrink tubing doesn't look nice. Is there a name for the thick plastic part of the cable that one holds onto while inserting the male end into a socket, such that I could search for it on digi-key?

ETA: It's a strain relief boot. Thanks, grepmaster and tikiking!