jra's thoughts

Author: jra

  • Unzip -c is a thing, and it’s good (as long as you use -q too)

    —

    by

    jra
    in

    I just fetched a Raspian disk image via bitorrent. It is a .zip instead of the .gz I would have chosen myself. If you have a .zip and you don’t want to do a temporary uncompress of it to get the .img to use with dd, you can use “unzip -q -c foo.zip” to get…

  • Strange characters in IP addresses

    —

    by

    jra
    in

    A long time ago, I worked for WebTV. The part of WebTV doing filtering for parental control was comparing IP addresses as strings. I managed to evade the parental controls when I noticed that the IP address parser was using an atoi that treated leading 0’s as octal and leading 0x’s as hex. By converting…

  • Dell and the NSA

    —

    by

    jra
    in ,

    While I was reading this blog about how NSA’s bad-BIOS malware probably works, I was struck by a “coincidence”: Dell does significant amount of government contracting work. In fact, Ed Snowden worked for Dell at one point. NSA’s bad-BIOS targets the RAID cards in Dell servers. Now, Dell servers are widely deployed. I’ve used them…

  • Medium, what’s up with comments?

    —

    by

    jra
    in

    Medium.com, why do you require me to use Twitter or Facebook to comment? With all your respect for language, ideas, and design, is it really possible that you think people who choose not to use either of those services don’t have anything useful or interesting to add to your conversations?

  • Moonrise

    —

    by

    jra
    in ,

  • What fits into Russia?

    —

    by

    jra
    in ,

    Apparently Ukraine does, again now.

  • Moonrise

    —

    by

    jra
    in ,

    My time-lapse camera in the attic is still working, though I resorted to adding an auto reboot once a week, because the Raspberry Pi is not acting too stable. And even then, sometimes it hangs. I blame the power supply. Because it’s always the power supply, right? Anyway watching the sun’s track northward as spring…

  • Here’s a nickle kid, get yourself a better TTY

    —

    by

    jra
    in

    You know you’ve been doing this too long when nothing in an article like this is new to you. The first TTY I ever saw and (maybe) used was a TI, like this one. The librarian at my junior high borrowed it and used it to connect into Lexis-Nexis or something. But the funny thing…

  • IPv6 in Mont-la-ville!

    —

    by

    jra
    in

    When I got my Raspberry Pi up and running, I reactivated my AICCU tunnel to Sixxs.net. But then I remembered that two years ago when I last touched IPv6, Swisscom was running a beta test to do IPv6 in the home. So today I went looking to see if the test still existed and if…

  • Live from Mont-la-ville

    —

    by

    jra
    in ,

    The last few days I’ve been working on a new home hacking project. The eventual plan is to create a panoramic time-lapse of sunrise as seen from my house each morning. We’ve got a wonderful view, and recording some of those beautiful morning colors as the sun comes up over the Alps should make them…