Hacks – Page 3 – sunapi386's Blog

The PennApps Hackathon

PennApps 2013s

Note Mar 6 2013: Rough outline posted. Write more on technical details.

Meta-info: This post will be roughly divided into diary-of-sorts, coding documentation, and overall experiences.

Part 1: Journal entry

airplane — On a plane to University of Pennsylvania at Philadelphia.

In this day and age, it seems that entrepreneurship is something mainstream. Everybody is saying they want to be an entrepreneur – just because it was popular. Well, I want to say that I was an entrepreneur before it got popular. I’d like to talk about the traits to become an entrepreneur. I shall explore into how the thinking process of a true entrepreneur differs from that of wannabes. I consider myself a true entrepreneur, and not a wannabe. I will attempt to list out the traits I think that would make me a true entrepreneur, and then describe and recollect my related experiences with that aspect.

My ideology is that you need to have a grand goal to work towards to in life.

One must be ready for an adventure. And this concludes the first trait of an entrepreneur. You must be up for an adventure. There isn’t a straight path to getting something you want. I think it’s most important for one to have a focus and general target. Then work towards that target in any method or path possible. With a target and determination (and lots of elbow grease), one can attain the goals.

Continue reading My Entrepreneur Ideology

Arduino

Playing around with an Arduino today, programmed it to count down. Very simple, I know, but it is just introduction to the usage.
This article is not meant to be a tutorial. It is to remind myself of what I did.

The arduino programming IDE basically just C++ with a different namespace. And a little deviation. You don’t need things like #include , and don’t need a int main(int argc, char** argv) program.

Continue reading Arduino

2600 HOPE Conference 2012

Well, it’s been a long time since I’ve updated my website. I was going through my old photos, and I found an album from the 2600 conference, HOPE number 9. I was looking forward to this trip for the past 6 months, I had gathered up some interested friends and all together there were 5 of us.

Backtrack is clearly the standard tool here still.

Homebrew macro mouse. Basically has hardware built in to send keystroke macros to a mouse.

Wifi hacking “gun”. Point and shoot at access point! Self made, with backtrack installed.

Free, good connectivity is important for any conference these days. The question is: do you want to be on the same network as 500+ hackers?

Lock picking lesson. This particular lock is magnetic. Damn near impossible to pick – magnets orientate the lock into place.

This man looks intense. He showed us how to break out of handcuffs. Not sure if he was really an inmate though.

Author of the book talking about phreaking and the stories from the old, golden days of phreaking. Has a forward by Wozniak.

Phreaking is a slang term coined to describe the activity of a culture of people who study, experiment with, or explore telecommunication systems, such as equipment and systems connected to public telephone networks. As telephone networks have become computerized, phreaking has become closely linked with computer hacking.

The Hotel Pennsylvania is a hotel located at 401 7th Avenue (15 Penn Plaza) in Manhattan, across the street from Pennsylvania Station and Madison Square Garden in New York, NY.

A blue box is an unauthorized electronic device that generates the same tones employed by a telephone operator’s dialing console to switch long-distance calls. [1] A blue box is a tool that emerged in the 1960s and 70s; it allowed users to route their own calls by emulating the in-band signaling mechanism that then controlled switching in long distance dialing systems.

The old school phreakers did a live demonstration of social engineering on some random poor pizza store.
Video:

Python Tutorial to serial programming

Python Tutorial

Edit Jan 29 2013: This site has gained some significant traffic, according to google. If you search “pyserial tutorial” this page is 3rd up. So hence I will edit and make it a bit more understandable, seems like there is actually a need for this!

This tutorial describes the process of connecting to a spectrometer over serial port, and writing a python program to automate collection of data. Normally we would need to enter in the wavelength and acquire the (transmittance/absorbency/concentration) result manually. Since the spectrometer has a serial port, we can write a program that automates this process. In order for python to be able to talk to the spectrometer, we need to get pySerial, which extends Python’s capabilities to include interacting with a serial port.

In this python tutorial, I will explain how to:

How to configure Python and pySerial
Verify serial port communication, with a spectrometer device
Write some functioning code in Python and use the spectrometer

Continue reading Python Tutorial to serial programming