Thursday, August 14, 2008

Geekery

Had a nice ride home, my first round trip commute in quite a while.  I was energetic and spunky all the way home.  Did intervals for the first part of the ride, then took it a little easier once I hit Turkey Creek.


My wife went to Aldi (a store selling pretty much only generic food) while I was in Las Vegas.  She scored these Crescent Rolls, which I made last night to go with leftover spaghetti that I made Monday night.  Bueller?  Bueller?  (I know, it's not spelled the same, but I laughed)


The admission badges that we got at DefCon this year are all electronic and completely programmable.  The key?  You had to solder your own USB port onto it first.  I did, and it worked, but it was kind of a sloppy job.  I decided to clean up the solder job last night.  Yes, I use butane instead of electricity when I solder electronics.  Call me paranoid.


When you hook it up to your computer, you can see a console log of what the badge's on-board program is doing.  This isn't like anything I've ever seen before.  I love it. 


The badge is powered by a Freescale JM60 microprocessor, includes an SD Card reader (on back), 8 LEDs as well as an IR transmitter and receiver.  With the built-in program, it will send files from your SD card to other badges via IR, or it can be used as a TV-B-Gone, transmitting all the known TV power-off codes from its IR LED.  I'm probably going to spend a lot of time in the next few weeks figuring out what kind of reprogramming I can do.


Yes, I know I'm a nerd.  This is how I spend my evenings.

This morning, Lorin and I grabbed some coffee.  Yes, I caved in again.  I needed the boost.  I had a nice but humid ride in to work.  It's overcast today and it looks like it could be raining for my ride home.   The ride home will be interesting as well, because I need to swing by the Plaza and go to a meeting out there.  I'll probably get home after dark.  I really should start poring over some maps and figuring out how I plan on getting home.  My intuition usually serves me pretty well when it comes to navigating unfamiliar residential areas, but that's no excuse for not checking things out ahead of time.
Random Tunage:
Binary Finary - 1998
Accuface - Desire 

Yep, 1990's four-four trance music is in full effect.  Oontz Oontz Oontz Oontz!!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Very cool idea for an id. What fun!

Anonymous said...

Man, you aren't kidding. You are a geek! I mean that in a good way. My dad was like that with CB/HAM radios back in his prime. He still talks on the radios everyday but doesn't work on them as much. You went to a hacker convention. Ever consider they left a little "surprise" on the badge?

Noah said...

Bryan: I waded through the badge's source code (written by Kingpin) with Ryan Russell in my hotel room on Thursday night before I even attached it to my computer. ;) Although, I'd be more worried about malware on the CD-ROM they gave out, but it checked out, too. There are a lot of good presentation slides on that CD, though, if you're into information security.

Keep in mind that I do InfoSec for a living and all kinds of security (physical security, surveillance, tiger team type stuff) as a primary hobby. Bicycling is how I get around. Geeking out is how I make myself happy.

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