Hackszine.com: September 2007 Archive

« August 2007 | Main | October 2007 »

Archives: September 2007

Page 1 of 3 1 2 3 >>

September 30, 2007

Don't update your iPhone... yet.

If you've previously unlocked your iPhone, or you are considering doing it in the future, you should probably hold off updating your phone for the moment. Apple's recent 1.1.1 firmware update has been bricking hacked phones, and though there's a method for downgrading back to 1.0.2, the telephony portion of the device will remain broken (well.. until someone resolves this, hopefully soon).

Hackintosh has this quick summary:

1) If you have unlocked your phone at all, regardless of whether it's to use another sim / carrier or even just for fun and you're still using the AT&T sim, DO NOT UPDATE to 1.1.1 unless you want to render your phone useless. It will not work afterwards as things stand at the moment.

2) If you haven't unlocked your phone and you haven't jailbroken it and want to update to 1.1.1, you will not be able to jailbreak it afterwards as things stand. Until someone does Jailbreak 1.1.1, this will not change.

3) If you are still using Firmware 1.0.2, you can still synch with iTunes. If iTunes suggests you update your iPhone, just say no. In Preferences, you can turn off the setting to look for updates automatically so iTunes won't even bother asking.

4) Your 1.0.2 Phone will not just brick itself. Apple can't beam an auto bricker to your phone....You have to help them by trying to update to 1.1.1 after you've hacked it. Apple warned you, there's countless tales of woe on these forums that should serve as a warning....JUST DON"T DO IT!!!

5) If you haven't hacked your phone in anyway whatsoever and you want a cute Starbucks logo to appear everytime you're near one (as well as the other updates) then you should be fine, as long as you're aware of point 2.

As I mentioned, if you've already performed the update, you can restore the previous os firmware. None of the phone features will work, but at least you'll have your applications and WiFi connectivity back. Methods for restoring the phone's original baseband firmware, as well as an unlock method for the new firware are in the works, so my recommendation would be to just hold tight with the 1.0.2 firmware until the kinks are worked out.

Downgrade from 1.1.1 to 1.0.2 - Link
Want to update to FW 1.1.1? READ THIS FIRST! - Link

September 29, 2007

Automate using your Mac on untrusted networks

When you're on an untrusted or unencrypted network, everything from what you browse to the email and IM messages you send can potentially be snooped by a third party. Sure, some sites use https and you can use ssh to connect to a remote server, but what if you want to jack in and enjoy the relative comfort of knowing _all_ of your applications are communicating over a secure channel?

For that, you need a secure proxy. By setting up a SOCKS proxy, you can have your applications route all of their network communications through a secure connection to a network you trust. Gina at Lifehacker put together a quick guide for setting this up, and once configured in OS X's System Preferences, most of the default apps like Safari will just start using your proxy and you're good to go.

A lot of your favorite applications--ie. Firefox and Adium--need to be manually configured to use the proxy, however, as they don't pull this information automatically from the system preferences. This is straightforward to do, but it means that every time you cruise over to the local coffee shop, you need to set up your proxy configuration in multiple places.

Albert Lee came up with a nice solution to this problem. An application profile manager called rooSwitch and some quick Actionscript is all you need to make a couple of command line scripts that will set up or tear down your proxy, as well as switching all of your application preferences.

If you save this script with a .command extension, then you can run it by double-clicking on the icon in the Finder like a regular application. When it runs, it will change the location, switch your profile, and start up the SSH tunnel. Enter your password and off you go!

I should mention that his script also introduced me to a useful mac command line utiliy called scselect. By typing scselect [locationname], you can switch your Mac's location straight from the command line.

Safer Surfing on Untrusted Networks (Mac Edition) - Link
How to configure an SSH SOCKS proxy @Lifehacker - Link
rooSwitch - Link

September 28, 2007

Atari Punk Console - weekend electronics project

The Atari Punk Console is a simple electronic music circuit that you can easily put together in a weekend. The original concept was created by Forrest M. Mims III, writer of Getting Started in Electronics. At it's simplest it's just a 556 dual timer IC, a couple potentiometers, and a few capacitors and resistors. Hack together a slick enclosure, though, and you've got a beautiful little gizmo that pumps out sick square wave goodness.

GetLoFi has a few good links to schematics, sample audio, and enclosure ideas. Forrest himself even checked in and commented that you can use things like photoresistors or other sensors in place of the potentiometers to have the audio output controlled by the device's environment.

What are you waiting for? Go make an APC and send me a link to your project.

Atari Punk Console schematics - Link
Forrest Mims - Link, Books

September 27, 2007

Packet Garden

Packet Garden is a network visualization tool that maps your network traffic into a 3D representation, sprouting little plants on a globe whenever a connection is made.

To do this, Packet Garden takes note of all the servers you visit, their geographical location and the kinds of data you access. Uploads make hills and downloads valleys, their location determined by numbers taken from internet address itself. The size of each hill or valley is based on how much data is sent or received. Plants are also grown for each protocol detected by the software; if you visit a website, an 'HTTP plant' is grown. If you share some files via eMule, a 'Peer to Peer plant' is grown, and so on.

Packet Garden is GNU licenced and written in Python, so you can give it a try on supported Linux, Windows, and Mac machines. It doesn't run on Intel macs, unfortunately. As far as I can tell, Soya3D (the 3D library it uses) is the culprit and has not been compiled under this architecture. Anyone want to take a stab at porting this? I'm not familiar with the package, but it might be as simple as installing all Soya's required libraries and running a python make script.

Packet Garden. Grow a world from network traffic - Link
Soya3D - Link

September 26, 2007

Turn a Symbian Series 60 phone into a webcam

Smartcam is an open source utility that will turn a bluetooth-enabled Symbian Series 60 camera phone into a webcam that you can use on your Windows PC. Half of the application runs on the phone, reads from the camera and sends video frames to the PC via bluetooth. The other half of the application runs in Windows, receives the video frames and creates a virtual web camera that can be used in programs like Skype or Yahoo messenger.

There's not much documentation, and the project is still alpha, but if you can grep the source, you technically have everything you need to make other applications which pull live video from the phone.

SmartCam project page on SourceForge - [via] Link

September 25, 2007

Using the Wii Remote to correct perspective in digital photos

Daniel M. German found a way to automate perspective correction and projection adjustments for his wide angle photography. He does this by using a Wiimote to record the pitch and roll of the camera at the time a photo is taken. This information can then be fed directly into panotools, instead of manually entering control lines and processing the images to calculate these tilt values after the fact.

I modified an open source DarwiinRemote to record inclination. It happens that if you keep the WiiR in a stationary state, its three accelerometers can be used as two inclinometers. Fortunately most of the time, when one takes a handheld photo, one keeps the camera steady. Steady enough to read the inclination of the WiiR.
I also modified the driver to record the reading from the accelometers, the estimated inclinations, and the timestamp. I would then use the timestamp to match the images from the camera to the readings from the WiiR.

This is a cool idea. I would not be surprized to find high end cameras internally recording and stamping this information into photographs in the near future. A lot of consumer cameras already support panoramic stitching, so with digital accelerometers and tilt sensors being as cheap as they are, why not internally support adjustments like perspective correction or projection remapping?

Using the Wii Remote to correct perspective - Link

September 24, 2007

Fix an old iBook's video problems... with fire!

Well, now there's something you don't see every day.

Mark Hoekstra from GeekTechnique subjected his iBook's motherboard to successive rounds of burnination and managed to correct the infamous iBook video display defect. Had this not succeeded, I think I'd still have to give him 10 points for style.

In addition to other quality control problems like frayed wires in the display hinge, a huge amount of early model iBooks suffered from a defect where the display would just completely crap out, both on the internal LCD and the external monitor output. Apple used to take these in and service them for free, but their warranty lifetime is long expired.

The problem is that the array of solder points that connect the graphics processor to the motherboard tend to fail over time. I assume this happens with the repeated expansion and contraction of components during normal use. By heating up the graphics processor with a heat gun--or, more appropriately, with a big ol' flaming can of moonshine--you can get the solder to melt and reflow over the broken connections.

If your old laptop is currently serving out its final years as a paperweight, you may want to try this as a last resort... or sell it on eBay to someone with a crazy, laptop-fixing, pyro bent.

DIY obsolete iBook logic board repair - Link

September 23, 2007

HOWTO: check if malware is secretly connecting to the internet

Here's a quick command-line hack that you can run on your Windows boxes to see if there are any unsavory apps running in the background and making internet connections without your knowledge. Just run the following to trace applications which are opening sockets while you're not using the machine:

Start->Run->cmd
netstat -b 5 >activity.txt (In XP, use -o instead of -b)
Wait a few minutes, then press Ctrl-C
type activity.txt | more (or open activity.txt in wordpad)

This will repeatedly run netstat every 5 seconds until you hit Ctrl-C, logging all active TCP/UDP connections (legitimate or otherwise) to the activity.txt file. The -b flag will also show the name of the binary .exe file that's making the connection. In XP, the -o flag will do similar, showing the process id. If you see any connections being made that don't look legit, either to strange ip addresses or by processes that look fishy, you can check the task manager to kill it, and then run your virus scanner / anti-malware software to clean things up. [via] Link

September 22, 2007

T-Zones and iPhone: the $5.99 data plan

T-Mobile has a unlimited WAP data plan called T-Zones that's $5.99 a month. Unlike the normal $20/mo full-internet package, the T-Zones service blocks ports 80 and 443 (the default http and https ports).

There is, however, a T-Mobile WAP to HTTP proxy server that will (assuming your device is configured correctly) allow you to browse the web on the cheap plan, and this is just what Windows Mobile users have been doing for a while to get affordable, unlimited, mobile web service. Now that the iPhone is easily unlocked and usable with T-Mobile's service, you can do the same. You just need to configure your iPhone to use the proxy server. It's a little slower, but at 6 bucks, it's probably the cheapest data plan available.

T-Zones (a.k.a. $5.99 Internet access) on the iPhone - Link
iUnlock: free software-based iPhone unlock utility - Link

September 21, 2007

Recycle an old floppy connector as an SD card socket

You've probably got an old floppy drive edge connector or two lying around from an old computer. You can save a bit of money and recycle these as SD/MMC card sockets for your electronics projects. The card can then be used in MMC mode by just wiring up a few I/O pins.

Rob Wentworth documented using this faux-sd floppy connector to add SD support to his WRT54G router. If you're using the DDWRT or OpenWRT firmware for your Linksys, this hack can give you a huge upgrade with more data storage space and swap ram.

SD/MMC card fits in floppy edge-connector - Link
Adding an MMC/SD Card to the WRT54G - Link

Use Compact Fluorescent Bulbs in a Ceiling Fan

I bought some GE bulbs that are supposed to work in ceiling fans, but they flicker and flash big time. I was able to get them to stop, oddly enough, by activating the dimmer and finding a sweet spot for the settings, but that was a hassle. So I did some trial and error tests and as you can see in the embedded video, 3 CF bulbs + 1 incandescent is the magic recipe.

I think the problem is in the fine print that says the bulbs aren't designed for dimmer switches; even though the lights are set on full power by default, I think there's something in there that interferes. So a future project might be to remove the dimmer from the fixture, get a new fixture, or find a CF bulb that supports dimmers and ceiling fans.

September 20, 2007

Run GTA2 on Linux

Rockstar released a few of their classic games as a free download, including the original Grand Theft Auto series. The games are distributed as Windows executables, but you can still enjoy a little top-view criminal activity in Linux by running them under WINE.

Revive your Inner Carjacker: GTA2 on Linux - Link
Rockstar Classics (download the games here) - Link

September 19, 2007

Install several versions of IE at once

If you've ever had to do any web testing, you've probably found that it's a major pain trying to test out a site in multiple versions of IE, since new versions of IE tend to wipe out previous installs. I usually use a different virtual machine instance for different browsers and OSs I want to test, but this is difficult to set up and takes up a lot of disk space.

Yousif Al Saif put together a nice multi-IE package that bundles IE 3 through 6 into a single installer. Just make sure you have the latest version of IE first, then run his installer and it will create the other standalone IE versions, each with their own private set of DLLs and registry keys.

Install multiple versions of IE on your PC - Link

September 18, 2007

Open Source Seam Carving

For those of you who didn't catch our previous post about seam carving, it's a smart image resizing algorithm, invented by Dr. Ariel Shamir and Dr. Shai Avidan. Where you would normally have to choose between cropping or squeezing/stretching an image to change its aspect ratio, the seam carving method will attempt to find horizontal or vertical paths within the image that can be removed without altering "important" parts of the image, such as people or other objects that would look funny if squished.

There are now a couple of open source Actionscript implementations as well as a GIMP plugin that enable you to "liquid rescale" your photos.

I'm thinking that with a few simple tweaks, you could hack one of the Flash versions load a user-specified JPG or PNG and provide an interface for adjusting the image. It'd just be a simple matter of doing a screen capture to pull the result back into the image editor of your choice.

There's also a Photoshop plugin that claims to do this, but it's closed source, unavailable for macs, and the test version doesn't work for images larger than 640x480. To that I say, "Phtfphpht," but I've included a link in case you are interested. To be fair, it's probably cool... I'm just more excited to see the open source versions surfacing.

References:
GIMP Liquid Rescale (lqr) plugin - Link
Content-aware image resizing in Actionscript (Joa Ebert's original source) - Link
Seam carving in Actionscript (Mario Klingemann's optimizations) - Link
Pictual: Photoshop plugin for smart resizing - Link
Seam carving: content-aware image resizing - Link

September 17, 2007

Make new iPods work with Linux

With the new Nano, iPod Classic and iPod Touch devices, Apple altered the iTunes database slightly to include a cryptographic checksum, which immediately broke all third party iPod management software. Since there's no iTunes for Linux, this essentially meant that Linux users had to look for another solution for putting music on their devices. Great software like gtkpod and Amarok no longer worked.

This was a few days ago, and it looks like the hash used by iTunes has already been reverse engineered. Every time the database is updated--whether you change the name of a song file, or add or remove music--a new checksum needs to be calculated, based on the contents of the library and your device's unique ID.

Right now, you can continue to use your current software, and then generate and update the checksum in the database manually. No doubt that within another three days all of the nitty gritty details will be automated for you in your favorite open source iPod software.

Ian Monroe, makes this valid point, however:

Really the only "correct" solution is for folks to stop using Apple products. The iPod might have its own version of DAAP's iTunes 7 which has a checksum more difficult (apparently) to crack. But for the time being, things are fine.

Fifteen years ago, a lot of us started making the switch to Linux from Windows, even though the platform was a little foreign, took some work to learn, and was a bit crusty around the edges. The real catalyst was that Linux had a hell of a lot more to offer in terms of networking capabilities, a programmer-oriented free development environment out of the box, and a level of performance and stability that the Microsoft operating systems couldn't touch.

I'm not sure what the final motivating factor will be for people to switch to an open hardware/software platform for their mobile connectivity and media devices. The ability to use it with your preferred desktop OS--not to mention the ability to share your data between multiple devices and multiple desktop clients--is enough reason for me.

Making New iPods work in Linux - Link

Page 1 of 3 1 2 3 >>