Čollective №thing

Hackers are depicted by the media as criminals.  It's a sad truth that hackers have to live with and will always fight against.  But to better describe the hidden culture that mainstream media has no interest in discovering, here is my own personal analogy. My original analogy was that Hackers are like Butchers.   They both have skills that most people don't choose to learn.   They are both artists in their own way.    A butcher uses a potentially dangerous set of tools referred to as knives, most typically the butcher knife.    A hacker uses a set of potentially dangerous tools known as code, but most typically referred to as computers. But why is a Hacker a criminal while a butcher is not?  While some people think it's a stupid question, there are many hackers that are still baffled by this question.   So here is my latest analogy that will be easier on the comic book movie fans. Hackers are like superheros.   They do things that most everyone cannot do and achieve

It's rare when you get those moment's of calling someone's bluff and slapping them in the face with it....it's even more fun when that someone is a greedy utility like SRP and APS.

The internet has lots of free crap but sometimes publishers go to extra efforts to ensure you can't save anything from their site so you will either subscribe and give them money, or to prevent bots from duplicating their site so someone else can get paid. All good reasons, but sometimes I just want to save a picture for later and I don't like bookmarking all that much.  But thanks to sites that disable the right-click option, I can't just right-click and "save as..." for these images.   But, if I can see the picture in my browser, then I can save it if I really want to.  And thanks to the newer browsers implementing advanced debugging, it's even easier than it used to be.  Yes, you CAN just use a screenshot program.  But that will only allow you to save the resolution of which the HTML code is presenting it while displayed in your browser.   If you download the actual image, you can get the full resolution and in some cases you can get around javascript t

Always check your bill.  I rented a car and National charged me for a Loss Waiver after the fact.  One could assume that it's just standard for any car rental, but in fact it is not.  Insurance covers this nonsense and if it were standard then it would be included in the original estimate received upon booking the appointment. Here is the difference. The left is the estimate I received at time of booking.  The right is the final receipt after the rental was returned.   All the green items match up and were requested, including the fuel refill option (which I now know was a rip off but whatever I usually do that anyway).  The charges in black font on the right side were not requested by me nor were they included in the estimate. It's very clear this is just sleezy, vegas-hotel style pricing to make it seem like it's a much better deal than it really is.  I requested a refund on the items I did not authorize so we'll see how it goes.  But my advice is get the d

I invested in Adafruit's Trinket 5v regular board and ran into some annoyances.  After reading through A LOT of their forum messages, I found certain little tidbits that seemed to resolve my issues but were not mentioned in the Trinket tutorial .  I would like to have these items mentioned in the tutorial, but adafruit doesn't make it easy to contact them and putting this info on the forums is redundant given the info came from the forums in the first place. Avoid using pins 3 and 4 during development and testing if at all possible.  anything connected to pins 3 and 4 can (and likely will) interrupt the upload.  so if you change the code and need to re-upload, it may be painful to constantly disconnect and reconnect wires to these pins.   Once I moved my pin 3 wire over to pin 2, I could then use the trinket button to activate the bootloader as the tutorial recommends, the red light would blink as described, and the upload succeeded.  Before that, nothing would happen and t

This post is intended to provide clarity to the same problems I ran into while attempting to building the "firewalker" shoes found on the Adafruit tutorial page . I am in no way affiliated with Adafruit and this page is intended for educational purposes only so I am not responsible for anything you do.  On that note, my hat is off to the original designer(s) of this project.  it's pretty darn cool... first, the FW tutorial does tell you to first read the getting started with flora guide.  Make sure you do this.  this will ensure your computer has the drivers as needed.  But the Adafruit tutorial  covers the transfer of files and definitions in a way that (to me) seemed more complicated than needed, so the way I present below is just an alternative method.  both work just fine. Once you have verified your drivers are ok, you should also have your Arduino IDE platform installed already.  So, let's proceed. In the getting started guide, it tells you to download th

So the coming elections are causing a lot of misinformation to fly around like most any election.  So here is my contribution towards a fair representation of the truth. My friend had a solar installation on his rooftop and after asking him a ton of questions, I eventually found myself signing up as well.  since then I've seen what it can do and why the energy companies hate it so much. MYTH #1 - SOLAR CUSTOMERS AREN'T PAYING FOR THEIR SHARE OF THE GRID COMPARED TO NORMAL ENERGY CUSTOMERS. This is the biggest myth that annoys me the most, so I'm addressing it first. Anyone connected to the power grid pays a monthly service fee.  The service fee acts like insurance for everyone when something goes wrong and your power company has to fix it, this service fee basically pays for it.  Some people think they can do their own off-grid solar installation to avoid this service fee and "stick it to the man."  But if they did that, any problems with power equipment s

Like some I have a specific need to pet-proof my couch.  I am a foster parent for cats in need of adoption.  These cats tend to get conflicted on where they should do their business. Sometimes they are trying to send a message like all cats, and sometimes they just aren't getting it.  It's also well known that sick cats tend to go in abnormal places, pretty much anywhere but the litter box. Going in abnormal places is not too much of a big deal, but it really depends on where that place is.  Certain places like the bed and couch can be devastating when you later realize how difficult it will be to clean this mess. For beds, most people know you can get the plastic sheets at wal-mart or target.  But for couches, its a little different.  You can enclose them in the plastic couch "protectors", but most people (like me) think those are overkill, ugly, and uncomfortable. so after my last "incident" with my latest foster cat, i realized this is just going

(fyi this post looks funky in Chrome, but it's fine using Firefox) I built this system so I could have a fairly reliable temperature monitoring system at home so I would know if my a/c went out in the summer.  Being in Phoenix where it can get to 120F and I have cats at home, I felt it was important to develop a reliable monitoring and alerting system. This tutorial will guide you thru the setup and configuration of a home temperature monitoring system using a Raspberry Pi microcontroller.  You can also do this with Arduino, but without an operating system like linux, it's far more difficult to accomplish everything we will cover here.  If you've never used a microcontroller like a Pi or Arduino, it's recommended you get a breadboard and learn how they work before attempting to construct this project.  You will need a small familiarity with linux, or at least the open mind to learn a few new things. This is a fairly long tutorial so I will skip some minor items th