Hack Correlation

Back in January I bought a cheap 55" TV, mainly to use as a low-latency monitor. On a random note, I haven't watched TV in years, all my TVs have been used as monitors in the past 10+ years. The model is  UHD SMART TV S55U5515MQ  and uses a dual-core running at 1.2GHz with 1.5GB RAM. It's running a version of Android TV 6.0. I think a very similar set is with a model name of Genesis, distributed by the same company - Jay-Tech. Was not expecting much for the price but it does a decent job as a monitor, with relatively low latency and relatively good resolution support. However the software on it is quite bad, even wrote the company to ask some questions but never heard back from them: there is no color calibration, even though it has a green tint from the factory there are YouTube notifications of new videos when the TV connects to a network, even with no account set up could not find a way to save the program list on USB as listed in the manual there's a Home and a Sta...

I was tasked with the issue of getting contact data from a broken Android phone (in this case Xiaocai X9). The touchscreen was functioning erratically, the display was blank, adb/developer debug was not enabled. I've tried for some time to enable debug by dragging randomly on the screen, making a screenshot (hold down volume key + power) and trying again but gave up after an hour or so. So: broken touch , broken LCD , no adb .

If you are following the project you might've seen that the new source code for the firmware and (Android) client application are up: Arduino firmware:  https://github.com/ligius-/DieselTuningBox Mobile UI:  https://github.com/ligius-/DieselBoosterClient With that out of the way, I've had about a month of testing with the new prototype and several months already with the old one. The definitive result is that there are significant fuel savings. Outside city limits I now get better than 6L/100km, at highway speeds (130 km/h) better than 6.5/%. I believe the highway consumption can be further improved but I haven't used the car so much lately to be able to fine-tune the settings. Previously I would get 7.6L/100km at best on country/county roads and 7.4/% on highways. So that would be a 12% mileage increase on highways and 21% on slower roads. Inside the city is where the story changes since that's where I did most of my driving and had time to tune the pa...

Similar to my Windows tools post , this one focuses on tools that make life a lot easier - on Android - or help you pinpoint and troubleshoot problems. AdAway If you cannot live without an ad blocker, this is probably the best one to use. Requires the F-Droid store. Root Explorer Quite expensive at 4 USD but I think it's worth the money - if you have root that is. You can find files, pack/unpack archives, change permissions, move stuff around, handle multiple tabs and work with SMB and FTP shares, Google Drive, Dropbox. There might be some free alternatives (ES File Explorer, Root Browser) around but at that time (~2012) there weren't many tools like this.. Titanium Backup Another paid tool, even more expensive (6 USD, I might've paid less) but I've used it hundreds of times. It does require root as well. You can back up an almost complete state of your phone/tablet and restore it to another device. The backups can be shared between accounts, so you can ...

In the previous post I touched upon the fact that simulating hardware input events was very slow and not really suited for fast, repeated actions. The second approach is based on MonkeyRunner, a free library included with the Android SDK. It is able to talk to the Android device using a Python-like language. Part 1:  http://hackcorellation.blogspot.de/2013/07/android-game-automation-part-1.html

I've been avoiding to do a write-up on this section for several reasons. First, I'm using the IDA disassembler which is pretty expensive and thus quite extensively pirated. Unfortunately there are no freely available tools that I know of that can perform this task. Second, I really suck at assembler and C so might not be the best person to do these analysis. I've used the freely available Thumb decompiler plugin which is able to translate assembly into readable code but only in about 30% of the cases. There's no substitute for knowledge, it seems. Part 1:  http://hackcorrelation.blogspot.de/2013/07/txtr-beagle-teardown-part-1.html Part 2:  http://hackcorrelation.blogspot.de/2013/07/txtr-beagle-part-two-software.html Part 3:  http://hackcorrelation.blogspot.de/2013/07/txtr-beagle-part-3-storage-and-transfer.html Part 4:  http://hackcorellation.blogspot.de/2013/07/txtr-beagle-card-parser.html Part 5:  http://hackcorrelation.blogspot.de/2013/07/txtr-b...

I started playing around with the SD card contents to see how I can parse it and verify the functionality. The result is a small Java program that is able to read the contents page by page and display it on a little panel. You can type the page number and press <Enter>, you can use arrow keys or mouse wheel to scroll.

Bluetooth Thanks to Moritz I was able to connect to txtr via the Bluetooth SPP profile. To do this you need to disable the txtr app that is installed on your phone and install any app that does Bluetooth serial debugging. I used "Bluetooth SPP", available freely on the Play Store. UPDATE : Andreas Schier has written an open-source java toolchain for Beagle:  https://github.com/schierla/jbeagle My own version:  https://github.com/ligius-/jbeagle UPDATE : Florian Echtler has built two Python scripts, one emulating the server and another one for the client. The server allows you to send images to your reader: http://floe.butterbrot.org/matrix/hacking/txtr/ Part 1:  http://hackcorrelation.blogspot.de/2013/07/txtr-beagle-teardown-part-1.html Part 2:  http://hackcorrelation.blogspot.de/2013/07/txtr-beagle-part-two-software.html Part 3:  http://hackcorrelation.blogspot.de/2013/07/txtr-beagle-part-3-storage-and-transfer.html Part 4:  http://hack...

First: this is borderline immoral so don't ask for any source code or help. My friend got me into a repetitive Android game that I will not name here. Basically it's a different kind of Farmville (I assume) that requires you to mindlessly click 'animals' to 'farm' money from them. On top of that you have to also activate two type of farms in order to feed the animals and evolve them. Feeding is not a requirement, so it will only be done in the second iteration of this automation. As a rule of thumb any task that takes you at least 5 minutes every day for a year should be automated if it could be done in less than 20 hours.