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 the contents of the zip file sprayed onto stdout. Then you can pipe it into dd. ...

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 the octets of one of the blocked IP addresses into octal, I tricked the blacklist checker into letting me access the naughty bits. ...

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 in several jobs, for example. So it’s not unreasonable that NSA would target them, to get the best bang for the buck. But it also seems possible that in order to achieve the things Dell’s executives promised to NSA executives in fancy sales calls, some Dell engineers would find themselves using what they know about Dell servers to write bad-BIOS malware to attack those very servers. ...

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?

[video width=“1920” height=“1080” mp4="//nella.org/maltournee/2014-04-15-21.mp4"][/video]

Apparently Ukraine does, again now.

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 advances has given me a much better instinctive feel for celestial mechanics. And that made me pay closer attention to the moon rise last month. After 40 years on this planet I just realized that the moon, being in the same orbital plane as the sun and earth, traces the same track as the sun. Whoa. That means my attic window is perfectly oriented to catch a nice time-lapse of the moonrise! ...

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 is, even in the late 80’s this was out of style. PCs were taking over and so I didn’t see a TTY again until university. There I saw plenty of DEC VT-100’s. And jarthur.cs.hmc.edu, our giant multi-processing machine from Sequent had an honest-to-god paper TTY attached to its /dev/console port. The sysadmins liked it that way so that they could see dumps on paper in the morning if the machine crashed at night. I learned about fsck that way, by watching one of them coax the filesystem back to health. (By the way, fsck is for babies. Real men fix filesystems with fsdb. Look it up.) ...

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 I could join it. Why? Well, to be honest, it never even occurred to me that IPv6 to the home was in production. The lack of IPv6 uptake has become one of those “so sad it’s funny” things in our industry. But guess what? ...

Your browser does not support the video tag. 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 easier to appreciate – without setting my alarm for 6 AM! ...