Does anyone else find it amusing that a cast metal and plastic drum is manufactured by a company called Touch the Earth? This is about as far away from their ideal as you can get without hopping a space shuttle.
Attention secret societies: you're really doing it wrong if your handbook wound up at Barnes and Noble.
Mist rising off the river near the Kennedy Center after a few days of rain.
A selection of four-resistor sound sequencers built on breadboards. Toward the end of the night we had a veritable symphony of beeps and boops sounding through HacDC
I just returned home a few minutes ago from celebrating the greater feast of someone whom I have admired greatly for a number of years.
Fjalar Ravia, better known to the hacker community as Fravia+, was a master of reverse engineering software. Not just for cracking the copy protection of games but reverse engineering for the purpose of figuring out how code works for the sake of doing so. He was also known for his skill at crafting search engine queries to uncover the damndest things in the deep web. Since 1995, he'd written an amazing number of tutorials on …
Yesterday morning, word got out through the Internet Storm Center that the web server of the Virginia Prescription Monitoring Program was compromised by an unknown attacker. The VPMP is tasked with recording all of the pharmaceutical prescriptions filled in the state of Virginia for the purpose of data mining to determine who may or may not be abusing prescription drugs, and probably who may or may not be selling their prescriptions on the street. Given that Virginia enacted some annoying laws a couple of years ago that require a photo ID to get hold of Sudafed and placed limits on …
You only need three people to make a blue box if you're standing around bored - two whistling at the proper pitches to make DTMF tones and a third to whistle in-band signaling tones. Finding someplace to whistle to is a bit trickier.
(Thanks, Lyssa and Jade! Anybody got an oscilloscope we can borrow?)
Thursday nights at HacDC for the next couple of weeks have been taken up with a nifty new class courtesy of Elliot - a basic electronics course in the guise of building noisemakers. From basic oscillator theory we moved on to... I couldn't make it to the second class due to a scheduling conflict, truth be told, so I don't know what was taught. Jade and I did make it to the third class which was about low-pass filters (which allow low frequencies to pass (the definition of 'low' is highly situational) but filter out high frequencies), how to vary the …
On Sunday afternoon I wrote about scoring a couple of tickets to catch the final Death Note movie, entitled L: Change the World. Having enjoyed the first two movies greatly, I bought tickets online then and there. Our plans changed a little at the last minute this evening but Lyssa and I drove to the AMC Movie Theatre at Tyson's Corner Mall this evening and met up with Hasufin (albeit briefly). We ate a hasty dinner at the food court because we were running a little behind (say what you will, but the kebab place is well worth the cost …
Last year I wrote about the theatrical release of the Death Note films in the United States for limited engagements. Much to my surprise, Viz Pictures is bringing the third movie in the series, entitled L: Change the World to the silver screen for two days only, the 29th and 30th of April. The evening of the 29th they'll be showing the subtitled version of the movie, and on the 30th they'll be showing the dubbed version of the movie (probably with most of the cast of Bleach providing the English voices). Showtime is at 1930 hours (7:30pm) local …
While wandering around northern Virginia recently, Lyssa and I happened across a couple of new stores that could really use patronage as well as suggestions if they're going to take off. The first is a little pagan-type store on Route 50 west called Sticks and Stones (9970 Main Street; Fairfax, VA; 22031; phone 703-352-2343) which opened its doors just a week ago. Their selection's not bad for a brand new shop - a little thin on books but they have a good selection of practical materials and good prices all around. They're taking suggestions for things to stock and classes to …
House centipedes have ninja-like powers of escape and evasion. The moment you go to squish one, they suddenly let go of whatever surface they happen to be clinging to and drop to the ground. This is why you never want to stand directly under one if it's on the ceiling.
The best thing you can do if you really want to take one out is to get it to fall into an open space and then hit it from above before it can scurry for covere.
Oddly enough, it takes just a few drops of water to incapacitate them, which …
