20100821 Lunamon SVG Trace

Here's another SVG trace of another Digimon character: Lunamon.

20100820 Lua Blob v86336 Release

Nothing major here, just a quick update to the Blob library to allow proper storage and retrieval of signed integers.

20100813 Car Hax

Yo dawg, I heard you like hacking, so we put a bug in your Bug so you can crash while you crash. Yeah, apparently new cars are being equipped with sensors on their tires. Wireless sensors. One guess how secure these sensors are.

[Attackers] could alter and forge the readings to cause warning lights on the dashboard to turn on, or even crash the ECU completely.

Wirelessly crashing the engine control computers of passing cars? It's like a sci-fi nightmare come true. Can we please start requiring some sort of "I know what the hell I'm doing" license to be allowed to program things that can kill people? I don't even want to think about the possibility of a buffer overflow exploit.

20100812 Google vs The Internet

So, this is not exactly the most punctual article I've ever written, but better late than never. It seems Google has done a quick 180 and gone from protecting net neutrality to directly attacking it. Specifically, teaming up with Verizon to come up with a Trojan horse legislation that will pave the way for the end of the free unregulated Internet as we know it.

20100811 CD64 Mods, Part 2

Was hoping to post this earlier, but anyway... I traced the CD64's expansion connector. It's definitely one of the simplest I've ever seen for the number of pins. A diagram is available here but unfortunately many programs can't render SVG flowed text correctly. This version has the text converted to paths, so it will show up properly in most programs, but it's also much larger (1.1MB) and not easy to edit.

20100805 CD64 Mods, Part 1

A while ago I picked up an interesting gadget: a CD64 backup unit for the Nintendo 64. It's exactly what it sounds like: loads ROMs from CDs. It's also supposed to be good for development, but without the adaptor to connect to a PC, it's not really much good for that.

Anyway, it needed some repair, and when I opened it up I was intrigued by an unused expansion connector inside. Apparently they had planned to add an MPEG decoder here for VCD playback. Well obviously I'm going to have to make something cool out of that.

20100801 Lua Blob v85840 Release

Although I've never officially announced it, it's no big secret that Rena is written almost entirely in Lua*. This beautiful language is what allows for such flexibility and extensibility.