Hack Correlation

This is a teardown and 'repair' of a common type of e-smoke cigarette. If you are reading this in the future (say, ten years from now, 2025) smoking is a type of pleasure that's dying in this year - 2015. It's an expensive drug (5-20%of monthly income) that takes a bit worse than soap and makes everything stink. It's still legal while other drugs (THC-based)  are still illegal. It forms a strange addiction to this bad smell and lack of brain oxygenation that augments alcohol consumption. Well, lack of oxygen will strengthen any other drug or high, but can be had even cheaper while trying to stay underwater in a sink. If you are underage and you are reading this then probably the parental filter set on the router has failed. Smoking is bad, m'kay? If you are reading this in the future, some people here are trying to get rid of this so-called nasty habit and enrich their gadget profile. This means that the thing they are trying to replace WITH has a microco...

This is a quick update to some projects that I've been working on. My txtr Beagle PC software fork has received an updated version. Changes and tutorial here: https://github.com/ligius-/jbeagle In Germany youtube gets to screw us twice - most music videos cannot be viewed and ads are shown on 90% of the videos. The iOS and Android youtube players cannot skip those ads. Here's my solution to that - buy a TL-WR841N router and give it as a present to some close friend in another country. It's a decent router and my custom firmware adds VPN server support so you can get rid of those pesky ads and private 'law' agencies monitoring* : https://github.com/ligius-/WR841N-VPN Afterwards just set up a normal VPN connection - works with Windows, iOS and Android, out of the box. For Android I recommend VpnROOT instead of the stock feature. *Those so-called agencies are private companies monitoring your traffic for 'illegal' content. They have automated softw...

I was asked to try to repair an Apple MacBook Air A1466 (mid 2012) that has received a cup of tea. When I first heard of the water damage I requested the user to stop using the laptop immediately and take the battery out. However, the laptop was still put in use for a few weeks after which it failed. Had the advice been heeded the extent of the damage would probably not have been so high. The symptoms were: some keys not working, including the power key, screen kept blanking out or flashing colors, laptop shut down by itself. Getting inside is pretty easy, if you have the right tools. You need several strange screwdrivers that can be purchased from iFixit: Most of the damage seems to be located in the upper left corner: Screen (LVDS) cable has a few corroded pins, the power regulator next to the right seems to have been cooking some tea: The screen connector on the mainboard looks heavily corroded: Obviously the water detection sticker has been triggered to a ...

I'm running a social experiment to see how many views would get a post targeted to a different audience. This hack is focused on Amazon's Kindle line since it does not allow changing the date via the settings, but it's applicable to all Android devices. I would suggest having a cheap tablet just for the game, since the clock will be way off. Also, connecting to WiFi will, in some cases, update the clock. The preparations will take around 15 minutes, only once, afterwards it should take around 20 seconds to get your life back. Actually, if you are playing this game, you are never getting your life back. Edit - quicker way: change the date 1 day after, go back to the game, see 5 lives restored, change back 1 day, go back to the game. What you need: Kindle Fire or Kindle Fire HDX rooted Terminal Emulator  - install the store version if possible or sideload the apk Hacker's Keyboard - not needed but highly recommended. Preparations: Disable WiFi to b...

As seen from the previous related post , adding data output to MS8229 does not take very long and it might prove useful at times. However, some people might undertake that modification - which for safety reasons I don't recommend - so here you get to see a proper isolated connection. First, the hand-drawn schematic: Some optocouplers and resistors were scrounged from crappy USB chargers. You need 2x optocouplers and 2x or 3x resistors. The left dotted side signifies the UART converter while the right side the multimeter. The circuit above has the added benefit that it draws no power if the data output is not connected to a computer -> if no USB is plugged into the converter the first optocoupler does not turn on, yielding no power to the second one. It also does the necessary inversion of the signal by weakly pulling RX to GND at all times (through the 3.3k resistor) while turning on the second optocoupler will pull the signal to VCC (3.3V). The resistors are rando...

I bought a Mastech MS8229 multimeter for a decent price because it offered a few compelling extra features which would be nice to have - sound meter and luxmeter. I also knew from this post that data logging was possible to 'bolt on' afterwards. Short review TL;DR: I would likely not recommend this meter for the money it currently retails for (45E). It has a really slow autoranging, especially on the Ohms scale, taking 2-3s to read a resistor. The input protection is almost inexistent, which is not a huge issue if you don't intend to use it at high voltages. It has a multi-purpose mode of resistance, diode, continuity and capacitance - which defaults to resistance. I am using continuity mode 90% than any other mode so I would have liked that to be the default or to have it's separate switch position. The rotary switch cannot be moved without holding the device with the other hand and it frequently goes between positions. While in that erroneous mode you have ...