Bus pirate, 5110 LCD interfacing

The Bus Pirate has to be one of the handiest debugging platforms ever created. It makes it really easy to ensure you know how something works before placing it in your final design.

Creating my first (intentional) oscillator, part 1.

As part of my RF beacon project I needed to built an oscillator, not just wanting to copy something I had to jump through a number of hoops to really understand what was going on. The practical limitations when building oscillators are actually pretty complex.

Creating the perfect flashlight

Low cost flashlights are pretty awesome but I just couldn’t find one that did exactly what I wanted (nor a perfect mod). Being an avid Airsofter I was looking for something that I could use as a high power strobe but also as an every day carry light. Strobes on the market tend to be rather expensive for what you get and budget lights aren’t really suited for tactical strobes (although they do often have strobe modes).

Prototyping the MAX9814 automatic gain control microphone amplifier IC.

Not wanting to wait for a breakout for this IC I attempted to dead bug it instead. This IC is extremely small, at 3mm X 3mm and with 14 pins it looked somewhat daunting. From the pic you can see that it turned out fairly well. There’s really no point in being afraid of SMD parts, here’s a couple of tips:

Bypassing Imageshack hotlinking restrictions.

We’ve all seen the Imageshack “Domain unregistered” image, this happens when the domain the image is hotlinked from isn’t registered with Imageshack, it’s bloody annoying, especially on forums. Luckily there’s an easy way to remove it and view the original image and you don’t even have to do it on a per site basis.

Basic RF sniffing with the Bus Pirate

Getting some data out of those cheap dumb transmitter/receiver pairs takes the better part of 30 seconds. I hooked one up to see if I could capture some remote keyless entry traffic. (and it worked)

Crawling websites using curl and bash.

Every now and then I need to crawl some website or automate a web form, the easiest way to accomplish this is with a simple shells cript and parsing the data manually. I did this recently with www.samair.ru and decided to do a quick writeup.

Automated windows hash grabbing.

I was playing around with ophcrack this week which is included in the katana suit. I’d recommend looking into both of these if you’re never heard of them, anyway, ophcrack has a live boot cd that boots directly into a LM and NTLM password cracker, dumps the hashes from the local machine and starts cracking with some rainbow tables.

It works fairly well but could be a lot better, for one the live distro they use is real bloated considering all it does is crack passwords, secondly they could have made saving the results a lot easier. The only thing I found real novel was dumping the hashes automatically, for your enjoyment here’s a bash script that goes through all NTFS drives and tries to dump the hashes 🙂

Network topology plotting with bash and graphviz.

I was looking for a way to map the routing between me and a bunch of hosts in Linux but couldn’t find a program I liked. The nice thing about Linux though is the ease that you can put something together with other tools. Here’s a simple bash script that parses tcptraceroute output and graphs it using graphviz, enjoy.

Strange router behaviour.

I recently started getting proxy error messages while browsing, interesting thing is that I’m not using a proxy and as far as I knew my ISP wasn’t forcing an invisible proxy on us either.