HN user

mkarr

128 karma
Posts3
Comments19
View on HN

A large part of these technologies making their way into consumer automobile engines was advances in material science, lubrication, manufacturing, etc, that allowed for them to exist economically and reliably. Those WW2 era piston engines were horrifically expensive, and required dozens to hundreds of hours of maintenance per hour of flight time.

As a hopeful note of optimism: I recently sent a large, expensive package (worth around $1500) cross-country via USPS. The package was sent out mid-December. According to the tracking it made it all the way to the destination Post Office. After that...nothing. It just never progressed. I filed both a mail search requests, and an insurance claim. I received nothing but radio silence on those as well. Fast forward to about a week ago when the package just shows up on my doorstep without notice. Hopefully byuu's package eventually does show up.

When the ESP8266s were first introduced, they came with a closed firmware that simply responded to AT commands over a serial port. To do anything with the chip, you had to have another micro controlling it.

However, sometime after the hobbyist/maker market started to take notice of the devices, an SDK was released, allowing for code to be run natively on the devices without a separate micro.

Nowadays, there are multiple options for running code on the devices. You can do it natively via C/C++ with the SDK, or you can try out one of the other firmwares that various parties have produced, like NodeMCU (Lua) or MicroPython.

The chips are actually pretty damn powerful compared to the Atmega series micros used with the classic Arduinos. And cheap too. You can get a NodeMCU module that already has a voltage reg. and USB->UART controller on it for around $3. Very hard to beat.

Either not getting a good ground, or not having a long enough antenna are two issues I have commonly seen with some of the more basic kits.

One of the easiest ways to get code running on the GBA is via the multiboot protocol over the link port. This was the primary way I ran code on the GBA circa 2003ish using a link cable spliced into a parallel port plug.

Unfortunately, parallel ports are exceedingly uncommon these days. However, it looks like this can be done easyly enough using something like a Teensy [0] or Arduino [1].

[0] https://github.com/tangrs/usb-gba-multiboot

[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20100815071014/http://blog.evildr...

In my opinion, a demo, in addition to artistic expression, is a showcase of the technical skill of its creators.

Using a pre-built engine is not quite up to the standard I would normally expect to see.

However, an argument could be made that the Unreal Engine itself is a platform (like the C64, PC, Windows, etc.), and pushing that platform's boundaries is keeping with the spirit of the demoscene.

If we restrict one from using something like Unreal, do we restrict also the use of something like OpenGL or DirectX? Or Windows/Linux itself? There are a lot of layers of abstraction we can remove.

What happens when you (somehow) fail to set the status of a toy you track to "recalled" during some part of the recall period, and then one of your subscriber's kid harms themselves with said toy? Have you anticipated how to protect yourself from your subscriber in such a case?

There are thousands of variations of C99 used by various 'hackers'. Many of which are obfuscated (base64, gzip, other more obscure encodings). Generally, searching for a combination of 'base64_decode', 'gzdecode', and 'eval' will find a great deal of them. Others may require more manual inspection. Just searching for 'eval' alone tends to find a lot.

There are a few tools floating about that try to use a more signature-based approach to searching, and clamav has some signatures for the shells, but they can be hit-and-miss, as the obfuscation often changes.

A few months ago, I removed an almost identical piece of malware from a client's account. Looking through the server logs, I noticed that the script was still being accessed on a fairly regular basis. I dropped a simple script to dump the contents of the cookies and request variables to a file when accessed. It didn't take very long to obtain the key.