New semester

Well, I am about to start school again. I got a lot done over the summer though. Check bit.ly/barbierover for some updates on the rover project. I also got my server up and running. I installed wordpress (which isn't quite working yet) and drupal going as well. Drupal can do blogs though, so I might just use that. My server is running Windows Server 2008 database edition. I set up remote desktop and I installed loginexpress. The physical machine is sitting under my desk at home. I will have my brother turn it on and then I can remotely connect and add/remove roles and stuff. I am not completely happy with it yet, so I won't release the URL yet. I won't have a lot of time to work on it during the year, but I will work on it when I can.
My buddy Bandit5317 over at xbox-scene.com just made engadget with his micro xbox. He is also working on an xbox360 laptop. That dude is quite a craftsman.

meh

Haven't posted in a while because of work and the rover project. I am still working on my new server as well. I have a lot of projects going and they are all sort of coming together, since I want to host the rover control on my website. Anyway, keep following the rover blog and I'll put some other updates here when I have time.

Barbie Rover site up

Here it is: the project website for the rover.

http://www.prism.gatech.edu/~hscott7/rover

It has its own blog as well. Still working on it, but most of the updates will now go on that blog, not this one.

How to make an ad-hoc network between Windows and Linux

How to set up an ad-hoc network between Windows and Linux:

1. Disconnect both computers from any networks
2. make sure you have wicd installed on the linux laptop
3. On windows, go to control panel->network connections
4. right click on your wireless interface
5. go to properities and on the networking tab, scroll down
to Internet Protocol Version 4 (TCPIP/IPv4) and click on it once
6. Click properities
7. click use the following IP address and enter the following:
IP address: 192.168.1.2
subnet mask: 255.255.255.0
default gateway: 192.168.1.1
and leave the other boxes blank. Click Ok.
8. Windows may yell at you, just click ok or continue.
9. On linux, open wicd and click network->create ad-hoc network
10. name the network whatever you want (the ESSID)
11. Give it the IP 192.168.1.1
12. Click ok.
13. Connect to the new network with windows
14. You're done!

Coming soon

I just finished a website documenting the barbie car project. Once we get a video of the test run, I will post a link and go live. I will also announce the project on several websites and see if I can get on hackaday.

Random note:

Heron's fountains work underwater. The pressure from the water pushes down the air in the bottles. I could feel the water flow underwater and want to try it again with colored water in the bottles.

another update on the car

We are really only waiting on 1 part to come in the mail, our other motor controller.
Once we have that, it will take about 30 seconds to install it and get the remote control going. I was having a problem
the other day with my ubuntu laptop. After trying to install some stuff to get skype to work, I rebooted and my wifi
stopped working. I did everything I could think of and finally found a forum post that helped. It turned out that by
going to system->administration->hardware drivers, I had to enable the wifi driver. Once I did, it worked great. I rebooted
again and had the same problem, but this time the driver was enabled. I disabled it and it worked. I am now working on
getting the cameras to work. I am using ZoneMinder for linux. Its designed to be used as a home security thing, and
it can support multiple cameras. But most importantly, it can be accessed from the web and can record. It can even detect
motion and only record then, which is cool. So the way we are setting this up, we should need only a browser to control
then entire car. Just connect with hamachi and then access the page with controls and the monitor page. I also managed
to get a spare linksys wrt54g router going on only batteries. This will be how we control the car if there is no
wifi. Just fire up the router and connect to it and control it on a local network. I have been wanting to get some
relays for the arduino so i can turn stuff on and off like the router. I also got a bit more hardware done, including the
charging port. I noticed that on the back of the car was a little fake nozzle for gas. So I found a male and female
12v cigarette lighter connecter and installed it. Its pretty awesome, now you just open the little gas thing
and plug in the charger. I found a nice piece of pvc that I can use to make the rocket launcher. I plan on using
vex to build a holder for it and a gear assembly. Then we can pick what angle to launch the rocket from and put it at
0 degrees for storage. We might even be able to get a sensor on there that tells you what angle you are at or at least
when you have hit a certain angle. I also came up with a design to mount the camera with. Basically its just a
long piece of pvc with the camera at the top. Then just underneath it is the usb hub with the bluetooth and wifi dongles.
If I can find a pigtail, then I can also put the antennas from the linksys router up there for better connection.
That whole thing rotates. In the end, we will have 2 cameras. The first is the logitech that is for the main driver.
The second is the built in camera on the latop that will be looking at a multimeter monitoring battery and anything
else we want. I also still need to get some sort of tread for the tires. This thing is really close to done now.
We are planning on debuting it at bandcamp during a night practice. In which case it will need lights...

another car update

I know I haven't given a big update yet, so here it goes. The car is painted and we have 1 wheel and axel mounted. We solved the problem with the motor controller we were having: it turns out that the one we were using was broken when we got it. Once we started using the other one we order, the code worked great. The lights responded and the voltage went from -12 to 0 to 12. I emailed the company who made them and I found out that the PWM range is not standard for them. The PWM is Pulse Width Modulation, which is how servos get talked to. Instead of sending a static voltage, it sends pulses. The length and width of those pulses decide how the servo acts. So for us, pulses of length 1ms mean that the servo is going in full reverse (0 degrees on an r/c controller). 1.5ms is neutral (90 degrees) and 2.0ms is full forward (180 degrees). The duty cycle doesn't matter that much, but should be around 20ms. On the controller that we got, its cool because if you don't supply an extrernal battery, it executes the code using the 5v it needs to run (so you can get -5v to 5v). Anyway, so we got all excited and the multimeter was reading correctly, so we plugged in the motor and barely got any movement at all. We tried different size motors and they all worked ok. We concluded that it was drawing too much current. The controllers we got could handle 3 amps continuous and 9 amps max, at which point it cuts the power to save itself. It does the same for temperature. I noticed that even after only a few seconds, it started getting really hot. Based on everything that we had seen, we concluded that we were drawing too much. We calculated a theoretical draw of 13 amps (i fried the current measuring part of my multimeter). Our solution was a giant resistor. We did some math and decided that we would do 3- 1 ohm 30 watt resistors in parallel straight off the battery. We ordered those parts yesterday and they ship today. I am also going to try to get another motor controller in the mail to replace the broken one. If all goes to plan, then we should have it working maybe by the end of the week. I have to finish up some code for the arduino and the web interface. Right now the demo page for the web interface is just php buttons. I wanted to support keyboard use to make it easier, and it looks like a bit of javascript should do the trick. I will have the mouse be in a special box that reads the keystrokes. When a key is pressed, its ID is sent as a variable to another php page that isn't loaded. That way we should be able to have php do stuff without reloading the page each time. I am still experimenting with that, but the demo works for now. Then the only thing we have to do is install everything and get the extra stuff working. The extra stuff are things like rockets, speakers, lights, etc. We plan on debuting the car at bandcamp this year. Imagine this: its night, and they are almost done with practise. Then out of now where, a little power wheels are comes driving accross the field playing music with lights. It drives the the side of the feild and launches a rocket. It is this image that keeps us working. We are still trying to think of other things to attach to the car. I thought about some sort of turbo feature. Maybe use a relay on one of the arduino output pins to trigger a dump of like an extra 6-12 volts. We also will have a pan/tilt for the webcam. The webcam will be able to see my multimeter screen, so we can keep an eye on the battery, because it can't get below 10.5v. On that note, it turns out that you can charge a battery with a charger rated at the same voltage, but lower amp-hour rating. It just takes longer. The other thing we want to do it have an airsoft gun with pan/tilt as well on the back.

quick update

I know I keep putting off a big post, but oh well. Got the car painted and got my code finally working. Tonight I will finish that up. I also got ubuntu and xp dual booting on my netbook. Here are the links I used:

http://www.boot-land.net/forums/?showtopic=4900

I also posted this on stack overflow which helped my code a lot:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/941744/keyboard-input-in-php


Still trying to learn AJAX enough to capture keyboard input so we can use the arrow keys to drive the rover. Until then, I will get a button based version going for electronics testing. A nice long post is coming soon with plenty of pictures of the rover process and code.

Catch up

Wow, a lot has happened. This is, sadly, a quick post to do a couple things.

1. A better way to do usb booting: UNetbootin will take an iso and make a flash drive bootable in a jiffy.

2. The barbie rover project is coming along nicely. Today we go most of the hardware done, so it actually has wheels and new motors and gears! The biggest thing left to do is software and electronics, plus any extras we want (speakers, rockets, etc).

I will post later with more pictures of the project and a summary of the code and the terrible process it has been. I can't wait to start driving this thing, and then start wardriving this thing. We are going to get some more work done tomorrow with the hardware and painting. I will be working on code tomorrow night (maybe afternoon to) and monday. I really hope my new plan goes as smooth as it is supposed to. anyway, more later.

Another car update

We have met once since the last post and have made several decisions. First of all, after getting the car, we pressure washed it and took it apart. The good news is that it now actually looks pink, not greenish gray, and the way it was laid out is friendly. We are going to order new motors for it, since the ones in it now are rusted. Replacement motors should run about $3 each. I am kind of in charge of electronics. Here is my plan. We will hook each motor up to a speed controller that will go in an arduino. The arduino will be powered from an onboard aspire one. The laptop will be feeding it C code, one program that takes in arguments that decide what to do. This will then be controlled graphically via PHP. To control it remotely, we will connect to the laptop with Hamachi. In the future, we will host a little http server on it and control it via a webpage. For now, we will use the laptop's wifi to connect to an access point. Ideally, we would have a cell phone piping internet to it so it would always have internet. Unless we can use my Dads phone, we will have to write an autoconnect shell script. I am thinking I am going to run ubuntu on it, but I am not sure yet. If so, then I have a couple shell scripts i can modify to aggressivly connect to networks. This is why 2 interfaces would be helpful. 1 onboard, 1 usb. It would always have 1 connected. The rules would be to always connect to an open network when the signal was above a certain level, and to try to crack wep networks by letting the operator know that they are in range and it is trying to crack. then it could store these keys on a keyring for later use. For the first beta test, we will be using a closed local network. You will also be able to control it via an ad hoc or p2p network. Then of course, you have to be within a certain range. There is a lot more to do, and we are going to order parts tomorrow. I can't wait to start playing with an arduino, I have heard so much about them. More later.
python -m SimpleHTTPServer

Which is way smaller than using Apache or something when all we need to serve is a single page of PHP. We will remote control it with SSH. I am less concerned with hard drive space than I am with RAM. The name of the game is minimal power usage, because we would like a long battery life. Yes, I know there are all kinds of great little linux boxes, or I could use a pico ITX, or a linutop (runs off 9v, very tempting), or even an EEE pc or something. The problem with those options is money. We don't have a lot to spend on this at all, and most of the money is going to be used buying the controller and battery. Unless we can mooch those off of someone, the budget is small. If we do end up having to buy a machine, we will probably end up getting a pico ITX, or an EEE pc because of simplicity.

As for scripting, I found something called airoscript yesterday. It is designed to be used with aircrack-ng and that suite of tools. It basically scans for networks and recommends attacks based on the encryption type. That combined with a simple network setup script should be really nifty. Airoscript even has a keychain thing so you can save old keys and use them again later rather than recracking. The problem with jumping on encrypted networks is going to be time. I really don't want to have to sit in front of a house for like 30 minutes waiting for IVs to come in, so that part will be experimental at first. Well, the whole thing will be experimental at first. Anyway, we plan on using 2 wifi cards, so we can be connect 100% of the time. I'm gonna go look for a cheap EEE pc now. More as it comes.

Edit:
Pictures coming soon. Also, to fund this, we are starting a little computer repair business. This will be interesting. Got a lot going on right now, will post more details when I have time.

Car Aquired!

Well, I got a barbie car. My neighbors had one that they didn't want anymore, so we got it for free. It doesn't work, and it needs some serious help. It had been sitting outside for a long time, so pretty much all the screws are rusted beyond ever being unscrewed again. It still has a battery and charger though. Here are some pictures of it with the seat removed. Luckily, new motors look pretty easy to install. We will be meeting in the next day or 2 to discuss hardware and everything, so parts should be in the mail soon. Yesterday I started working on a stripped down version of Ubuntu to run on an old desktop we will use. It is command line only, no GUI, and has a good collection of common linux tools. I wanted Ubuntu rather than something like D*mn Small Linux (DSL) because of apt-get. Waaaaay easier to install new stuff. So the main stuff it has on it is SSH, Python, and Remastersys which I use to make a liveCD of the current installation. I managed to get to version 2 yesterday (I'm not messing with partial versions, the first ISO I make is version 1, the second is version 2, etc). It also has gcc on it of course. It turns out that there is a really nifty Python command that spawns an HTTP server that serves the current directory:
python -m SimpleHTTPServer

Which is way smaller than using Apache or something when all we need to serve is a single page of PHP. We will remote control it with SSH. I am less concerned with hard drive space than I am with RAM. The name of the game is minimal power usage, because we would like a long battery life. Yes, I know there are all kinds of great little linux boxes, or I could use a pico ITX, or a linutop (runs off 9v, very tempting), or even an EEE pc or something. The problem with those options is money. We don't have a lot to spend on this at all, and most of the money is going to be used buying the controller and battery. Unless we can mooch those off of someone, the budget is small. If we do end up having to buy a machine, we will probably end up getting a pico ITX, or an EEE pc because of simplicity.

As for scripting, I found something called airoscript yesterday. It is designed to be used with aircrack-ng and that suite of tools. It basically scans for networks and recommends attacks based on the encryption type. That combined with a simple network setup script should be really nifty. Airoscript even has a keychain thing so you can save old keys and use them again later rather than recracking. The problem with jumping on encrypted networks is going to be time. I really don't want to have to sit in front of a house for like 30 minutes waiting for IVs to come in, so that part will be experimental at first. Well, the whole thing will be experimental at first. Anyway, we plan on using 2 wifi cards, so we can be connect 100% of the time. I'm gonna go look for a cheap EEE pc now. More as it comes.

First projects

Yesterday, my friend and I built a Heron's fountain. Wikipedia has a good description of you don't know what that is. Here is a video of it (sorry for the format, it was taken on my phone), and here is a picture of the first version. The first version we tried to get away with using Slurpee straws (we biked a couple miles to get them because we had no car) which didn't work. So once we got a car, we bought aquarium tubing and it worked great. The most important thing is the seal at each bottle. We first tried impression material (yes, we just had some lying around), which worked ok, but it set pretty fast and was hard to get in small cracks. We read somewhere that PlayDoh would work well. It didn't. Turns out that it actually dissolves in water. Finally, we had a stroke of genius and used hot glue. It looked much better and worked great.

Today, I made version 1 of a business card with planetary gears in it. Here it is. The problem is that the card stock I used is 20 pound, and its a bit too thin to let the gears mesh. I am going to try it again with 40 pound, or any thicker I can find. I also cut it out by hand with a scalpel and scissors. Most people did it with a laser cutter or a CNC. I found an instructable on how to make a laser cutter with 2 scanners, but I thought of a better solution: a lego plotter. I know that the Mindstoms set came with instructions on building a printer, I just need to change the pen to a laser diode, which is not hard. Programming would probably be a pain though. But I'm sure there's some homebrew stuff out there.

Lots more projects in store. Barbie car should be starting soon.

Finally

Hooray, first year of Tech done. I have so many projects I want to work on this summer. I'm going geocaching today, and my and my friend are going to start work on the Barbie Car soon. I am also working on getting a server set up for hosting. I'll post back as projects are finished.

one more thing

I need to write a script that will make me a daily/weekly schedule. It needs to generate the weather, stuff from my google calander, parse the facebook birthday page, put important rss feeds on there, etc. There are scripts that do some of this, I just need to modify them.

I lied

Had to write these down. These are the embedded electronics modules that I want to play with:

-XBee wireless
-arduino (lillypad, duamelavente or however you spell it)
-MAKE controller
-phidget
-vex controller
-ATMega

work

There won't be any posts for the next couple weeks because of finals. I will literally be studying 24/7 for the next 3 weeks. I promise I have lots of cool projects planned for the summer, and I will update that as soon as I can. Until then...

What are the odds?

Recently, my friend's dad got 5 of the 6 lottery numbers and won a bunch of money.

according to Wikipedia, the odds of winning the florida lottery is 1:22,957,480

(the odds of what her dad won are 1:81,409)

according to the national safety council website, you are:

4 times more likely to die from legal execution than win the lottery

3 times more likely to die from being hit by lightning

about as likely to die from excessive heat or cold from a man made origin

about as likely to die from being confined to or trapped in a low oxygen environment

2 times more likely to die from being struck by another person or from the explosion of a pressurized device

11 times more likely to be killed from an accident when you are an passenger in an animal drawn vehicle.


That is why I will never buy a lottery ticket.

small hack link dump

http://hack0wn.com/forum/index.php?topic=963.0

build this:
http://www.ladyada.net/make/wavebubble/powersupply.html

use this:
http://ikat.ha.cked.net/

watch this:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2160824376898701015

go to this:
http://dc404.kaos.to/index.html

buy one of these:
http://www.fon.com/en/

Fun with physical access to public computers

There is a common source of hacking that many people overlook. It is well known that physical access is total access. That is, if an attacker has physical access to a computer, it is not your computer anymore. Usually this involves a live CD to do things like grab the SAM file or replace it, etc. I want to concentrate on a situation where you have physical access, but have limited time and privlidges. We are also assuming that you can't boot to anything else. And we are going to say that you are not allowed to use a hardware keylogger. What can you do? Well, the objective is to get admin privlidges. Then, we will own the box. So. First, lets see about a shell. In my experience, I just write a batch file. This is the common source of hackery that is overlooked sometimes. Batch files and VBS scripts don't need to be compiled and the language is simple. As long as you have notepad, you are good. Batch files are just a collection of commands to be executed by cmd.exe. It also supports if and switch statements, and several other basic programming features. VBS scripts are just visual basic scripts. Most people use visual studio to make stuff with visual basic, but you can actually get away with only notepad. There won't be a GUI, but that can be a good thing. The only way to tell that either a batch or vbs script is running is the task manager. This is only one reason why disabling the task manager for users is a bad idea. Anyway, here is the batch script that I used to get a shell whenever I needed one.
[code]
@echo off
cmd.exe
[/code]
Yes really, thats it. Even if the admin disables the ability to execute cmd.exe if you navigate to it, this will work. You can google for all kinds of interesting batch and vbs scripts. Or you can be less lame and write your own. Once you get a shell, you can add yourself as administrator. You can also kill applications that you don't want running. In my situation, you could see the processes running but could not end any of them. So if I don't want VNC or other remote control software or access restriction stuff running, you can force kill them.

Or, use this:
This is a bloody brilliant site written by paul craig. He presented it at DefCon last year. It is designed to let you exploit internet kiosks. It basically automates the process of trying every possible way to get a shell. And it works great. Be aware that the site may be nsfw because of the giant picture of a girls naked butt on the front. That is the one thing that I do not understand, because you would think that you wouldn't want to draw attention to yourself. Anyway, I am working on getting a version of his site up without the picture on it. Until then, he has released a zip file with all the code for the site in it, so you can use that. Here's the site:

http://ikat.ha.cked.net/


I also recommend watching the talk he gave at defcon here. Its almost 100Mb, but its worth it. It gives a great explanation of what exactly is going on behind the scenes.

Enjoy!

quick hack idea

Get a pineapple (fon router hack, hak5.org for more details) and bring it on a airplane with you. Set up a network called United Airlines Courtesy Wireless or something and see how many people connect. For bonus points, use your cell phone (if you can get a signal) to actually connect them to the internet. While deliberately setting up lots of wireless communication on an airplane may not be the best idea, I'd be willing to bet that everything on the plane is shielded and you probably won't crash the thing. I'd also be willing to be that the first thing people will connect to is their email. More bonus points for convincing the captain or flight attendants that the plane is already equipped with wireless via social engineering so that they announce over the intercom that free wireless is available. You could set up a captive portal that had them download a small file that allowed them to join the 'special airplane kind of wifi' and pack a little dummy program that displays a window with a bogus speed graph and the word "Connected!". Then using the iexpress packing method, also include an exe created from metasploit that executes after the dummy program does. Then it doesn't matter that the internet suddenly doesn't work and the captive portal redirects to a page that explains how, unfortunately, the connection to the ground is currently unavailable due to wind currents or something. By that time, the exe is already running and you have a meterpreter session on every computer that connected. Of course, the classic, easier hack for this situation is just the pineapple asking clients with wifi on for their autoconnect SSID and then silently connecting with them.

quick link dump

I am working on building a custom version of Linux by installing more packages and getting rid of some on Ubuntu. I have a basic version already done, but I plan on adding more things to it. Anyway, I have been looking up how to do a lot of stuff on Ubuntu, so I figured I would post all the links I have been using so I don't have to look it up again.

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/building-your-own-local-wordpress-blog/
http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/browse/sort-by-votes
http://www.howtoforge.com/ubuntu_lamp_for_newbies
http://rubbervir.us/projects/ubuntu_media_server/part2.html
http://ubuntu-tutorials.com/2006/12/28/how-to-setup-gnump3d-for-a-streaming-media-server-ubuntu-510-6061-610/

http://laptoplogic.com/resources/50-ways-to-impress-your-geeky-linux-friends

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ad17kma8rNM

http://elitebydesign.com/the-ultimate-wordpress-guide-for-the-absolute-beginner-part-1/

http://forums.asmallorange.com/index.php?showtopic=7037

http://www.petri.co.il/forums/showthread.php?t=15918
http://www.thinkdigit.com/forum/archive/index.php/t-98267.html



unrelated:
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001210.html
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001243.html

hooray for math!

Lately I have run in to several interesting mathematical 'things'. I like math, so I decided to do a post on them.

The first cool math law is called Benfords law. I read an article about it a while ago and thought it was one of the more interesting properties of numbers I had heard of. It was discovered in 1881, and then again in 1937. It turns out that if you have a really large set of random numbers, the percentage of occurrence of each number decreases by a lot as you go up the number line. In other words, if I have a million random numbers, the number of 1's in that chunk of data will be much higher than the number of 2's, which will be higher than 3's and so on. Because of this law, insurance companies and banks can screen for fraud because humans are really bad at making up random numbers. So if someone tries to write a check for an amount that doesn't look suspicious, the number they choose will probably have lots of 5's in it. It may be impossible to detect the fraud after only 1 check, but after a lot, a definite pattern begins to emerge and Benfords law is violated. This throws a flag and the bank investigates. You can read more about Benfords law at wikipedia and here.

Another neat math trick is the Markov Chain. The Markov Chain is based on a simple idea: that the current state captures and has all the information that could possibly influence future states. So, we can kind of think of the chain as being a closed system, where no more variables or anything are introduced externally. Chutes and Ladders and Hi Ho Cherrio are both games that can be exactly modeled with a Markov chain. This is all in the realm of probability theory, which can be very dense, but there are some really cool applications for the Markov chain. The way I first heard about it was its use in predicting sports outcomes. Several NCAA prediction algorithms are based on a Markov chain. It can also be used for predicting gambling (black jack card counting tables are calculated with Markov chains), generating music, and my favorite, generating text. There are several examples of using Markov chains on text to impersonate people and pass the Turing test. The basic way it works is that you give it a huge chunk of text and it breaks that text up in to 3 word chunks. It then looks at each of these chunks, finds words in common with other chunks, and combines them. This means that the sentences make sense syntactically, but the content makes no sense at all. Wikipedia has a great article on Markov Chains, and you can find a Markov chain Text generator here and the python code for it here.

I'm sure as I take more math and explore the internet more, I will find more of these kinds of things, and I will do another post on them when I do.

R/C wifi car update

An update on the status of the r/c car:


We are now in the planning phase of this project. We have also added another member to the group doing it. Between the 3 of us, we can split up the cost and get more ideas. Once we introduced our new guy to the concept, he loved it. He also gave us some good ideas that we will probably implement.
The first thing that we plan on doing is replacing the laptop we were going to use as the websever with a tiny computer. The motherboard will be one of those little Intel Atom boards that are about 7 inches by 7 inches. I love these things because of their size, power, and that they have USB, a PCI slot, and serial and parellel on them. Oh, and an ethernet jack. So we plan on making the ethernet jack and the PCI slot in to 2 wireless interfaces. then the phidget controller will go over USB, and the webcam will go over USB as well. Serial and parallel can be used for sensors or other microcontrollers. Depending on how the car looks when we get it, the motors may change. In either case, we will probably end up with an extra spot open on the phidget. For $45, we are using every spot no matter what. One of my ideas for a use was a model rocket launcher. Like an emergency flare or something. Or defense :). We also need batteries for it. That is the only weakness with using that computer. We think it draws around 50 watts, but I bet we can get it down by running minimal command line linux. The thing that will suck up the most power is going to be the wireless interfaces. All it has to do is run some C code, host a very small http server, a very small ssh server, and deal with the hardware. We also plan on sticking some wifi antennas on. There are a couple of tutorials on line that show how to make your own wifi antennas, so I want to try some of those before I spend like $50 on a nice omnidirectional antenna. We also planned on adding speakers to it. I don't know, I just have this image in my head of a pink barbie car driving down the street with several hundred dollars worth of electronic gear on it with several giant antennas sticking our blasting "I'm a Barbie Girl". I wonder if the cops would be called? In that case, it probably needs an LCD screen in the front so we can explain to people via skype what this thing is.

There is still the possibility of making it autonomous, or at least semi autonomous. I definitely want to write some scripts over the break that will automatically scan for wifi networks and connect. I think I should be able to modify an autoconnect script and add in a bit to flag wep encrypted networks and call a function to crack them and then connect to them. It would actually have to be fairly complex because it will have to decide which network is best, all availible networks would have to be ranked and then attempted to be connected to in that order. It also should have a safeguard in case the signal gets too low so we can turn around before it gets stranded.

If anyone reads this and knows bash scripting well, help. email is aloishis89 at gmail dot com.

I will post later this week on the stuff I worked on over spring break.

What Happened

Here is the complete story of why I missed the bowling thing. I heard about this thing that AirTran did for college age people where it was $70 for a one way standby ticket. I thought I would try it. The idea was that I would look up flight times to Tampa online and get to the airport early and get on a plane in the morning and be home by the afternoon. I was also going to carry on my luggage. About 24 hours prior to me leaving, I began to notice that the flights to Tampa were selling out. By the morning of me leaving, there were only 2 left and the earliest one left at around 3 in the afternoon. I decided to get to the airport early anyway in case there was room on an earlier flight. After getting on the Tech bus and then the subway, I walked up to the Airtran counter and told them that I wanted to buy a standby ticket to Tampa. This is where the badness started happening. I was told that all Airtran flights to Tampa were sold out and that my carry on bag was too big. This meant two things. First, I had to find another airline, and second, I had to either buy a ticket to check my bag, or I had to mail it home. I had all my clothes in there, so I had to check it. So I got on the phone with my mom who was on the computer at home looking at tickets (the internet is not free in the Atlanta airport, which is pretty much the gayest thing ever). I talked to just about every airlines and soon discovered that it was going to end up being a trade off of time and money. Delta (the next cheapest alternative) had a one way flight to tampa for $900. Or, I could get a cheaper flight by way of Philidelphia or Chigaco, which would mean an 11 hour flight. My mom was freaking out because it turns out trying to by a ticket to Tampa, WHERE EVERYONE GOES FOR SPRING BREAK, several hours beforehand, is not easy. Or cheap. Then who should come to our house but an old Northside alumni who was selling knives. So my mom has to go listen to a presentation on the knives that slice AND dice and come with a lifetime warrenty. After refusing to buy large quantities of knives, we had an idea. Flying in to the Sarosota airport would be a lot cheaper because it is so much smaller. And sure enough, we found a reasonably priced flight to Sarosota that made a stop in Charlotte, NC. So I go up to the US Airways counter and talk to a dude named Fred. Fred was marginally insane. He made a remark about my name being Hunter and then excitedly muttered something about hunting and wild game. He also told me that he had been working at that desk for longer than I had been alive. Interesting. However, crazy Fred was nice because he managed to get me a seat on that flight and even gave me an Exit row window seat (lots of leg room). After making it through security, I found the gate and waited. The plane was scheduled to leave at 1:55. If everything went well, I would be home by 7. Nothing went well. The plane ended up being delayed for an hour because of the weather. Once I landed in North Carolina, I had missed my flight to Sarasota by 15 minutes. My new departure time? 10 pm. 5 hours of layover. But wait! On the screens by the gate there was a plane listed that was leaving for Tampa at 6:30! So I went to go ask the workers if I could just get on that one. And that is when my checked bag decided to attack my plans again. If I had not checked anything, I could have been on that plane. But because I did check something, the rule is you have to fly with your bags. It is 38 degrees in North Carolina and it is raining. I have never wanted to be home so badly in my life. Anyway, I have 4 hours to go now, and I will wrap up the story tomorrow (assuming I get home and the plane doesn't explode). Anyone want to bet that my bag will get lost?

Bootable backtrack on usb

I just had to figure this out for a second time, so heres what you do:

-get the usb version of backrack at remote exploit
-format the usb stick to FAT32 and make sure it can hold around 900 Mb of stuff
-copy the entire root directory of the extracted backtrack folders into the usb drive
-run bootinstall.bat (or the shell one for linux) in BOOT

then you should be good.

Beta Test my game

I am taking a C programming class and we are developing for GameBoy Advance. If you want to try out the release candidate of my game, here's what you do.

1. Download a gameboy emulator here. Just extract the zip file and run the exe. There is no installation.

2. Download my game here. Once you save it to somewhere you will remember, just drag and drop the game file into the gameboy emulator window. The keys you need are Enter (the start button) and the arrow keys.

It is not a very complicated game and I only wrote it in a couple days. Please let me know of any problems or bugs you encounter and any suggestions you have for it. I am trying to get music going for it, but its very complicated. Thanks for trying it out, let me know if you have any problems getting it to run.

Geek Oceans 11

I have been reading up on card counting in Blackjack for fun. It turns out that you don't need to be a genius, you just have to memorize lots and lots of tables. The math theory behind it is pretty interesting. I will want to test my counting skills on my friends soon. Anyway, it turns out that some casinos now are embedding RFID in their chips. This got me thinking. RFID is not nearly as secure as some people think it is. What if you took some RFID chips in your room and read them with your laptop. The RFID radio will be forced to puke up its ID. Then all you need to do it get a bunch of RFID cards and spoof chip values. They probably assign each chip an individual ID number and encode its value in it. This lets the house know how much you have in chips and your betting rate, etc. This is also a way that they can tell whether or not you are counting cards. I am interested to know that if the system they use keeps track of anomalies like 2 chips reporting identical IDs. If it ignored this, then there is no way a human would know that several chips are in 2 places when there are hundreds of thousands of chips. If this is the case, then someone with several RFID cards spoofing chips in their pocket would essentially hide your betting from the house. You could also perform a DOS attack by flooding the reader with IDs. This would draw attention, but the security guys would think it was a hardware failure and ignore data from that reader. By selectively allowing and denying access to RFID IDs that represent different chip values, you could make it appear that you were betting much more or less than you actually were.

Brain dump time

Ok, its that time again. BRAIN DUMP!

Projects:
So my friend and I make this list every major break, like winter and summer break. I have posted our winter break list before, and now the summer list is underway. Here are some of the things that will make the list (I will post the full one when its done)

-web controlled car: My favorite IPTV show, Hak5 (go watch it, hak5.org) is doing a segment on building an r/c car that you can control over the internet. It works by basically using a computer controlled relay (Phidget) that responds to C code. The guys at Hak5 so far have written a crappy version of the C script that controls stuff in tank mode and then linked it to a PHP or AJAX page with a controller built in. So right now you can go to a website and control left, right, forward, back.

I thought this was cool, but a little $15 tank is kinda disappointing to drive around. I thought, how about something bigger? Those relays can handle up to around 100v, lets take advantage of it! Then it hit me: those electric Barbie cars, Power Wheels, that little kids have. I figured that once kids grow up, those cars (if they still work) are either thrown away or sold at yard sales. I have no idea how the motor(s) are attached or anything else, so a lot of it will depend on the specific kind of car we get. Then, we will probably upgrade the motors to drill motors and then just use the rechargeable batteries that they come with to power them. Then all of the motors get run through the Phidget which is connected to a laptop (my old Thinkpad). The Thinkpad has a webserver installed and has 2 network interfaces. The first one always connects to the strongest unprotected wireless signal. The second one is used as a backup when the primary interface is switching networks so that the connection is continous. When it is not serving as backup, it is sniffing WEP encrypted networks and cracking them. Then we can add that network to the list of OK'd networks to attach to and start communicating with. It will probably have to have a large wifi antenna, something like a 19dBi omnidirectional so we can get more networks. Then people can go to a website that is hosted on the laptop, go to the PHP (or Ajax) page, and control it. It will also have a camera (probably UStream'd) so users can see what they are doing. From there, the possibilities are endless. Depending on the amount of money we want to spend, we could add smaller r/c cars to act as scouts so multiple people can drive them. We could also make it sort of like the warcart that was done at MIT. It could have a seperate system of laptops and comm gear to intercept various frequencies. Imagine remote controlling a pink barbie car up to someones driveway and cracking their wifi, then sniffing their traffic and injecting your own http. All from the comfort of your home. Other possible mods include lights, GPS, stereo, whatever.


-cell phone rocket launcher: I tried this project once before but couldn't get it to work. The version I tried had a circuit you had to build, which I never got fully working. Instead, there is a much easier way. You simply connect the speakers on a cheap disposable cell phone to a component called a thyristor. A thyristor is basically a P and N type transistor connected so that it forms a kind of relay or switch. This is used to control the flow of a larger voltage that sets off the rocket fuse. So once you call the disposable phone, the speaker sends a small amount of voltage to the thyristor which then dumps all the voltage from the large battery in to the rocket ignitor, so the rocket launches. I am ordering the thyristor so it will be home in time for spring break. Hopefully I can get this one done then, since it is a pretty simple wiring job.

-laser cutter: This involves getting 2 old scanners from the salvation army. It turns out that scanners use a special kind of motor called a stepper motor, which if you buy them are actually kind of expensive. So instead, we use the motors and the axis from both scanners and interface them to an old win95 box via the parallel port. Then there is a open source software out there that will allow me to have them act as the laser cutter chassis. Then all you need is a laser. I was thinking of getting one from ebay, maybe a 500mW one. At that size, the come in convenient form: the laser is actually directed out a fiber optic cable, so you just fix that to the intercept of the 2 axis bars and turn it on.

-lab power supply: lab power supplies are expensive. There are a couple of tutorials on the web on how to turn an old desktop PSU into one. I will need a power supply for the project above, so hopefully I will be able to get one working.

-office supplies rocket: there is an instructables on this as well, I will put it up later.

All of this stuff will be complimented later with pictures, status, and more detailed descriptions.

quickie

To append the last post, here are some more remote solutions:

http://www.openjason.com/2007/11/28/11-free-remote-access-tools/

R/C computer anyone?

I thought I would do a write up on different options you have to get to your computer from the internet. All of these solutions are able to be used anywhere at any time as long as you have a internet connection. At most, you will need a thumb drive with a program or 2 installed.

Option 1: LogMeIn

LogMeIn.com is probably the easiest option. I have talked about it before, so here I will go into a little more detail. It is a webservice that lets you start an account and set up any computer to remotely connect to. When you start, you get a trial of the pro version and then it downgrades you to the free version. The pro version is like $20 a year, but the free version works fine, you can use free software to complement it so that it has the same features as the pro version. It works from a browser, so no software needed. It works by taking screenshots of the computer and then seeing where you click. I wish that it were a live connection, but the screenshot technique works on smaller bandwidth.

More Info: http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/logmein-access-your-pc-from-anywhere/

Option 2: VNC

VNC is great. It lets you see a live view of the remote machine. There are several derivitives. RealVNC costs money, TightVNC is the one I use. You have to start the server on the remote machine and the viewer on the local one. To connect you need a static IP address. The viewer asks you for either a domain or an IP. Since most of the networks you will be on will be DHCP, which means it will automatically give you an IP address that is different every time you connect based on what IP addresses it has left to assign (and how many other computers are connected). To make sure that you can type in the same number every time, you need to use a service called DynDNS. It will install small program that basically checks your internal IP every once in a while and tells DynDNS.org what it is. When you sign up, you choose a domain name like whatever.isageek.com (they have several to choose from) and that domain will be bound to your current IP. It is this domain that you will use to connect with. This will get you working with VNC, but VNC traffic is not secure. To secure it, we will tunnel the connection through SSH. You can tunnel any kind of connection through SSH, and it is a great way to make sure no one is listening on your connection. This will require installing Cygwin. This entire process is documented here:

http://erikjheels.com/?p=470

I am working on getting this to function, i posted here:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-software-2/cygwin-ssh-setup-permissions-error-702852/#post3440484

I will follow up this post with details when I figure it all out.


Option 4: Remote Desktop

Vista buisness and Ultimate come with remote desktop built in to them. It is a very common way to administrate from afar. You can set it up so that you can connect from another Vista computer or an XP one. There are several tutorials online for how to set this up.


Option 3: Everything else

There are lots of other little standalone EXE's that you can download that you execute on both the remote and local machines. The problem is that for these, you have to have a person on the other end as they are designed for remotely helping people with problems. Examples include CrossLoop and Ammyy.


For the most features and control, VNC over SSH is the way to go. If you have 5 minutes to set it up, then LogMeIn works great to.

Custom greasemonkey script

Here is my version of the Profanity Filter GreaseMonkey script that I talked about in the last post. The difference is that it removed some words that are not offensive and that would impede reading stuff.

Its a big list!

I actually had a request for a post on my firefox configuration. Here it is:

EXTENSIONS:
-Blank Canvas Gmail Signatures : used to make a cool custom HTML signature in gmail

-Bookmark Previews : I have it disabled right now, but it lets you view a screenshot of every bookmark you have.

-Download Statusbar : Basically moves the download window to a bar at the bottom of the screen.

-DownloadHelper : Lets you download videos from tons of sites.

-dragdropupload : Lets you just drag and drop files from your computer into upload forms. Saves a lot of time.

-FireGPG : Simple interface for using PGP encryption in gmail

-Fission : Makes the page download status bar go from the bottom of the screen to inside the address bar, like in Safari.

-Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer : Syncs all of your bookmarks to an external server. Really helpful if you have hundreds of bookmarks like I do and lets you access them from anywhere.

-Gmail Manager : My favorite gmail notifier, it lets you log in to multiple accounts and mouse over to see the first chunk of the email.

-Google Reader Watcher : Checks number of unread feeds in Google Reader.

-LogMeIn Remote Access Plugin : Allows for use of LogMeIn (I'll do another post on that service soon)

-Microsoft .NET Framework Assistant

-NoScript : A great plugin that makes sure you don't get hacked. It doesn't allow a site to execute any scripts unless you let it. For the first week it's kinda annoying, but once you whitelist all of the sites you frequent, it will keep the number of viruses you get really low.

-pageaddict : Used to generate statistics about browsing habits (I like that sort of stuff)

-PDF Download : Before you open a PDF, it asks you what you want to do with it. Reduces browser crashing because of PDFs.

-SQL Inject Me : A hacking extension that trys a bunch of common SQL injection techniques. Good for quick scans. Could be used for evil...

-StumbleUpon : VERY addicting, also great for staying current with internet memes and finding new cool sites. This is why I have 800+ bookmarks.

-Torbutton : comes with Vidalia. Basically allows for anonymous browsing.

-URL Fixer : automatically fixes domain spelling errors like .cmo instead of .com

-User Agent Switcher : Allows you to change the user agent of Firefox.

-WOT : Web Of Trust rates websites as safe or dangerous. When you are going through google results, this keeps you from going to virus ridden sites.

-Greasemonkey : allows you to run javascripts on every page you go to


I did GreaseMonkey last because I wanted to lost the scripts I am running on it. Here they are:

-Disable Text Ads : Does what it says on the box. Disables all google text ads.

-Text Area Backup : ever type out a giant block of text in a form and then lose it all by accidentally moving to another page or closing the tab? This saves it as you go.

-Google ads remover+ : Removes more Google ads.

-Profanity Filter : Parses the text on a page and replaces any red flagged words with whatever you want (default is ***). The only problem with this is that by default it red flags some words like 'nerd' and 'crap', so it needs some tweaking. If I have time I will post my version.

-NoDelay : Removes the counter from sites like RapidShare and MegaUpload. No more waiting for downloads to start.

-YouTube HQ + 702p : automatically shows the high quality version of youtube vidoes and if it is available in 702p, then it shows it in its full resolution.

-Facebook Remove Feed Articles : Removes all of the annoying ads that show up in your facebook feed.

-Googlenlarge : automatically enlarges images in google image search when you mouse over them.


And now, Plugins:

-2007 Microsoft Office system

-DivX Player Player Netscape Plugin

-DivX Web Player

-Foxit Reader Plugin for Mozilla

-Google Talk Plugin

-Google Update

-Java Platform SE 6 U11

-LogMeIn Remote access components

-Microsoft Office Live Plugin

-Move Media Player

-Mozilla Default Plugin

-PhotoSynth

-QuickTime Plugin

-Scorch Plugin : allows you to read sheet music online

-Shockwave Flash

-VLC



Are you sorry you asked?
Comment if you need clarification or have questions.

Did you know...

Ok, I just had a good idea, so I am dumping it before I forget. I love using Wikipedia for looking stuff up, but the only problem is that you need a computer or at least a smart phone to access it. However, the proliferation of internet enables phones and micro computing lends a hand here. What if you were able to combine a simple wearable computing piece of hardware with the internet to allow instant access to Wikipedia or anything else? I like the idea of just using some of these as a computer display. I would like to be able to use a phone for internet and as small a computer as possible. The closest thing I can think of is a PicoITX. Anyway, I don't like the look or price of video goggles, so I thought it would be easier to just use a pair of glasses like these with an embedded one of these. This is in the realm of wearable computing, which I know is a whole different deal with tons of research going in to it and stuff. But I still am curious to see how hard it would be to make me be able to read Wikipedia anywhere. No more need for Mosio or anything. Just put on the glasses. use your phone as a keyboard, and have the collective knowledge of the world at your fingertips. Actually, now that I think about it, you could just get a video out from your smart phone to the micro screen, which would give you a browser and internet and input all in the same very small box. Hm, hopefully some phone companies start seeing how awesome this could be and GET TO IT!

Free TiVo anyone?

So last night I set up MythTV. If you have never heard of it, it is basically a premade package for linux based computers so you can use them as a DVR. There is a lot of really good documentation out for it, so any problems you have can usually be solved pretty quick. I bought an Pinnacle 150e video capture card that I used with my XP box for a while. Once I got to college, I took it with me. It turns out that Ubuntu recognizes it right out of the box, which is awesome. And, to simplify things even further, you can download a version of Ubuntu that has everything preconfigured with simple wizards to change settings and stuff called MythBuntu. In a matter of a couple of hours, I burned the ISO, installed it to my closet server, and plugged in my tuner. After choosing some basic settings, I did a channel scan and was watching TV on my new 22" monitor. Now, there are still some things I need to tweak. For instance, there is no audio right now and some of the upper channels are not coming in very clear. Both of these problems should be pretty easy to fix.

As for things to add, I have some ideas. First, I need to be able to connect to it remotely. I have been using a free online service called LogMeIn for my laptop, but it only works for Windows and Mac. So I installed VNC and SSH, and I plan to just tunnel VNC securely through SSH. I may need to install DynDNS because the network is DHCP of course. I only have one wired connection that I can use, so I have to use a switch. However, the wired network requires that when you plug in, you have to sign on, do a security scan, and then restart the network. But, the only way it can tell if a new computer has been plugged in is a new MAC address. So any other computer I plug in, I just spoof the MAC address to match my laptop. That way, I can hot swap which computer the LAN is on and not have to sign in and wait and then wait some more and then restart the NIC.

The other thing I need to add is more space. Right now, it has a whopping 28 gigs free, which is not a lot to record on. I have another drive, but I'm not sure that it works. I also have my external 500 gig drive. I plan on plugging in that drive to the MythTV box and setting it up as a NAS. Then I can record to it and read and write to it from anywhere. The only down side is that it is not nearly as fast to add movies and stuff to it from over a network rather than USB. What I may end up doing is buying a smaller 500 gig drive, the ones that don't need external power and can fit in your pocket. I would use that to take with me for movies and stuff, and then leave the big one plugged in to a NAS.

The last thing that would be cool is another tuner card. If I can get another one like the one I have for cheap on Amazon, then I can actually record 2 things at once, or record and watch at the same time. If I can get a video out on one of the cards, then we can use the TV. Of course with all of that, I will need several coaxial y splitters.

And this is all just for the MythTV box. If I had another couple boxes, I could have a separate frontend and backend, a smoothwall box to use as a router with a bunch of NICs, and a box with Server 2008 running several virtual servers like a Samba and Web server. At this point, I would have a giant network closet. And if I had room, I would also add the cluster as part of the subnet. Then I would really be cooking. Connect remotely to the MythTV box, watch a little TV, start recording a show or 2, then administrate my website, and check the status of the Folding@Home session running on the cluster (or if I need something cracked, send the hash to the cluster). But, unfortunately, none of this will happen until I either get a house, apartment, or random free space with air conditioning, free power, and a free really fast connection. Oh well, its still fun to plan.

Hopefully I will be improving the MythTV box though, because I can actually do that.

Battlebots FTW

Wow, its been a while since I posted last. I attribute that to the 3 tests I had this week. But, as for projects and the like, here you go:

Last week at BattleBots, we decided to to change the weight from 120 lbs to 220 lbs. The motor we are using is 30 lb and gets to 2600 rpm. It will be, in a word, ridiculous. It will be a full body spinner. We are working on getting a final design in CAD and I will post the CAD files when it is complete. We should start building around February 17 (thats when the tools will start to be free, another robotics team is using them now). We also plan to enter a medium weight bot and maybe a couple of ant weights. I've been thinking about designs for an ant weight. I actually like the idea of making a miniature version of our heavyweight. The team entered one last year that worked pretty well, basically a square with a saw blade set at a 45 degree angle. I was also thinking about using the gas engine from a small r/c car. I'm not sure how much they weight, but I know they can get an r/c car up to 50-60 mph. I figure if we hook that guy up to a blade of some kind, or use it to spin the bot, we could have a nice edge over everyone else using electric. One of the guys on our group is a grease monkey, so we could definitely get it working.

I'm tired now, so I'll do another brain dump soon.

Futuristic

I know CES is over, but it got me thinking. And in honor of it, I present these concepts that we will hopefully see at a CES soon.

1. and eInk book: why just have a kindle when you can have a 500 page book that has double sided eInk displays. The back cover could be a battery. That way, you could keep an entire library in a single book. I like the idea of flipping physical pages in a book. Solid state memory could hold it all, and you could stick in a wifi card so you could download books on the fly like the kindle.

2. a better netbook: CES this year was full of tiny projectors. That coupled with the new nVidia Ion made me think. What if you made something with the form factor of the nVidia Ion with an embedded micro projector. The keyboard could be projected, like the ones that are available for PDAs. It could be powered with a laptop battery. Unfortunately, the micro projectors that are currently out are only able to project a 20" display and probably aren't really bright. Once the second or third generation of these get out, then we can expect a much higher quality display. The Ion can now support 1080p resolution. Once the projectors catch up to this, you could implement a multitouch display. A series of infrared LEDs and receivers on the same side as the projector could allow someone wearing something reflective on the tips of their fingers to interact with the computer. If Synergy is installed on several of these, then you could fling files with your finger to the others. An alternative to the multitouch could be a modification of the laser projected keyboard. I need to do more research on how they work, but if it can detect where your finger is at that resolution, then I think you could make a mouse that worked on similar principals. Perhaps a projected circle that worked like a trackpad.

Back

Break is over, so here are the projects that I either made progress on or finished:

-Tiny Mammoth: My friends and I ordered the mammoths (see earlier post) and put them together at my house, and then used my dad’s acrylic from work to encase them. The first attempt did not go well at all. After assembly, he mixed the powder and liquid in a rubber mortar and poured it over the models. He then stuck them in a double boiler so it would react faster. The end result was a block so full of bubbles that it looked exactly like a crouton. So, we ordered more and tried it again, this time at his office. We used scalpels and surgical tweezers to pop the pieces out and then carefully assemble them. I even used a microscope which helped a lot. To encase them, we first laid down a base of powder, then set the mammoth on it, then covered him up in powder. We then squirted the liquid on top and let is seep down by gently squeezing the sides of the mortar. Last time we accidentally used yellow colored liquid, so this time we used clear. After the liquid seeped down, we put them in a pressure pot which applied heat and about 20 psi. Then we popped them out of the mortar and ground them to a square and polished them with pumice. The result was much much better than before. They all turned out really good. The only problem was that they all had a small amount of powder in the very middle of the acrylic that did not get any liquid. Luckily, it wasn’t much and we passed it off as a snow bank that the mammoth was walking through. If we try it again, or with another model, we plan on using an anesthetic needle filled with the liquid to inject to the middle of the powder. Hopefully that will eliminate all dry powder.

-Email alert owl: After much help and time spent on the Hak5 forums, I was unable to get this working 100%. When I tested the circuit I built, I could only get the owl’s eyes to blink and I couldn’t get the head to move. Since it was to be a gift, I didn’t want to give something that didn’t work 100% the way I wanted it to, so the person never saw it. The guy on the forums who was helping me said his worked no problem, but still seemed a little starved for power. I plan on tackling this again when I have taken more classes at Tech to understand how to design circuits to do that kind of thing. But the good news is that I learned a lot about how transistors work and how they can be used, and my friend liked the owl even without my mod.

-Rocket Launcher: I was able to draw up some schematics for my rocket launcher control box. I will be using a kitchen timer to count down and trip a relay that will fire the rocket. If you go to my projects link (in last post) you can look at the schematics. I didn’t have time to fabricate this, but I did get most of the parts. I still need to order the relay and another switch or two.

-Tiny laptop (Acer Aspire One): I did get this for Christmas, but unfortunately, it did not work. So I am now talking with the company I bought it from to try to sort stuff out and get a new one. My friend got his and it worked, so I helped him install Ubuntu 8.10 and install Wine and Skype and update everything. He has now been introduced to the wonderful world of Linux. On a side note, our Xbox 360 broke (error E74) so I also have to be looking for either a cheap new one or decide to pay $94 to get it fixed, or try to fix it myself)

-GBA emulated in a PSP emulated on VirtualBox: Turns out you can’t hack a PSP emulator. Doh!

Everything else didn’t happen either because I didn’t have enough time or money or both.