Recent content on Bleepity Bloopity

 Contents 
 
 The Efergy Engage Hub 
 False Starts 
 
 Fake Efergy Server 
 Hacking the Receiver Hub 
 
 
 Software Defined Radio 
 OmniOS the pain 
 
 Compiling 
 Passing a USB device to a zone 
 
 
 rtl_433 
 Bonus Round: Wait What is Power? 
 
 
 
 The Efergy Engage Hub 
 
 
 Yonks ago, I got a…

 Contents 
 
 The Hunt 
 A kernel driver?! 
 ITE IT8613E 
 The Iteration Cycle 
 Surfacing to userspace 
 
 
 
 As you know, I love monitoring my computers , and jank DIY fan controllers . I performed a mod on my Aoostar WTR Pro , replacing the stock 120mm, 1200rpm fan [ 1 ] with a 140mm 2000rpm one I had laying around [ 2 ] . This meant the new fan was…

 Contents 
 
 Hardware 
 
 Internal 
 
 Disassembly 
 Clock Capacitor 
 Other Capacitors 
 Modchip 
 SSD upgrade 
 Fan Replacement 
 Thermal Paste Replacement 
 
 
 External 
 
 WiFi Bridge 
 Controller Adapter 
 
 
 
 
 Software 
 
 A brief history of Xbox hacks 
 The Modern Era 
…

 Contents 
 
 SwiftUI on MacOS for Nerds 
 Connecting with the terminal world 
 Compile if you’d like 
 A real demo 
 Alternatives 
 
 
 
 I’m always using scripting languages like python or powershell to glue together existing tools and make my computer do what I want. At a previous workplace I made a powershell script that proved so useful that I…

 My Mac’s Time Machine backup disk got full. This shouldn’t be a problem, it’s only 2TB and can’t keep everything forever. So it did it’s job and dutifully deleted the oldest backup to make room for the new one. Except it was still too full, so it deleted more backups. It got to the stage of only having a single backup snapshot left. It at least realised that it shouldn’t delete the last one,…

 Contents 
 
 Ancient History 
 Modernity 
 Binary Patching with Ghidra 
 Bonus Round: Unlimited Power 
 
 
 
 Ancient History 
 
 
 I remember back in the early broadband days, Download Accelerator Plus was required software. It would split downloads into multiple parts and download them in parallel, doubling or even quadrupling your download…

 Contents 
 
 The Pain of Subscriptions 
 NameCrane 
 Getting out of Wordpress.com 
 Installing Wordpress on NameCrane 
 
 Admin Password 
 Image Thumbnails 
 Unicode Woes 
 Plugins 
 
 
 DNS 
 Bunny CDN 
 Performance 
 
 
 
 The Pain of Subscriptions 
 
 
 My partner has a couple of blogs of her own. She…

 
 
 Contents 
 
 
 
 
 - The Struggle - WiFi Media Bridge - Signal Strength - Antennas - Results - Lessons Learnt 
 
 
 
 The Struggle 
 I live that renter life. I’m also passionate about good internet, and would like to use the full 1Gbps that I pay for. In each new home, where I use my computer and where the internet comes in is always…

 
 
 Contents 
 
 
 
 
 - Building for Others - Hardware - Software - Working on Battery - WiFi Setup - Configuration - Web UI - Bin Day Grabber - Keeping Time - Tracking Bindication - Deployment - The Grand Reveal 
 
 
 
 I’ve received this meme from multiple people in my life. 
 
 I do always forget to put the bin out, and I do love…

 
 
 Contents 
 
 
 
 
 - Active State Power Management (ASPM) - Let’s turn it on - The Result - Bonus Round: ASPM-Tool 
 
 
 
 Remember when I got a new home server and found all of the temperatures to monitor ? I was pretty uncomfortable with the SSD controller sitting at 60ºC all the time. I put a heatsink on it, and it fell to 48º, but I…
The death of the touchbar has brought back not just a glorious escape key, but a whole row of old school mac function keys.
 
 So beautiful 🥹 
 
 
 
 However, the functions that these keys perform are no where near as useful to me. 
 
 Dashboard & Spotlight: Already have more familiar shortcuts; swipe up on the trackpad and ⌘-space. 
 Dictation & Do not…
I got a new system to run my OmniOS NAS on. While setting it up I needed to slightly modify my bash script to check temperatures to account for the different hardware present. Thought I’d share what I’m using to check the temperatures of everything. 
 CPU Temps 
 Illumos has a useful tool fmtopo to list hardware as part of the fault management system. It’s not documented…
Federal Labor have submitted the Online Safety Amendment (Social Media
Minimum Age) Bill 2024 . I don’t follow the news so this was absolutely bizarre and out of nowhere to me. 5 seconds of googling, turns out of course that it was the result of lobbying. A group called 36 months got the ball rolling in mid 2024. The public founders are Michael ‘Wippa’ Wipfli; A breakfast radio show host…
I’m a nerd so I have a computer plugged into my TV. I leave the computer on all the time so it can get my linux ISOs whenever. Then when I want to watch something I turn my TV on and it’s all ready to go. 
 An update to Pop!_OS suddenly meant that the PC’s picture wouldn’t return when the TV turned on. What worked for a decade now doesn’t. WTF is going on? I…
Pi-hole running on my little Pi 3 has been great, I use it to: 
 
 Block ads 
 Add names for my internal network services 
 Bypass my country’s internet censorship 
 
 But I want more, I want encrypted DNS. HTTP over TLS does a lot to keep your data private, but there are leaks that give away what websites you are visiting. When connecting, your computer’s DNS…
For YEARS I’ve been having a WiFi issue. My Asus RT-AX3000 has some kind of compatibility problem with ESP WiFi chips. ESP8266, ESP32, DIY boards with custom software, commercial products. All would connect at first, but eventually loose IP connectivity. My IR blaster would dropout within 24 hours, my solar inverter once every 6 months or so. These tasmota power switches/monitors…
Leopold Aschenbrenner has an essay/manifesto describing the future of AI. I came across it when it was used on hacker news as a source of why AGI is definitely going to be real and soon. It’s the most insane, self serving, evil take on AIs I’ve ever seen. I can’t stop thinking about how much I disagree that I’m writing this to hopefully get it out of my head.
Some people have been led to believe that using MFA can stop you from getting hacked. It makes it a bit harder but certainly not impossible. Evil hackers these days use infograbbers or something like evilginx2 , a tool that prides itself on bypassing 2-factor authentication. It acts as an invisible proxy, especially designed for login pages to act as a monster-in-the-middle. 
…

 2 Factor, a nightmare 
 So you want to add 2 factor to your accounts, because passwords alone are limited by our meaty brains to remember them, and can be stolen/cracked. You’ve got some options:
The badge for bsides Canberra 2023 was an ode to the iPod nano. Snaps for Peter Rankin not just designing an awesome badge but for giving a stellar talk for it. I really appreciated the desire for the badge to be useful after the con for other projects and hacking. I’ve previously repurposed the 2018 badge to make my IR Blaster , so I can get behind the idea. 
 The 2023 badge is a neat…
Just my luck, I move into a house with solar panels, just when the energy market breaks. Just about every day, electricity generation prices go negative when the sun is out, then skyrocket when it’s down. 
 
 Grid to my house: 7c/kWh 😁 My house to the grid: -8c/kWh 😭 
 
 

 Charged if you do, charged if you don’t. Any power I use costs me 7c/kWh, while any…
November 2024 Update 
 Some heroes campaigned the government to delay the 3G switch off, since a lack of VoLTE is a way bigger issue than the telcos are letting on. Mentioning “People will have phones that one day can’t make emergency calls” seemed a good way to signify the importance of the problem, since telcos had continued to treat VoLTE and calls a nice-to-have, instead…

 
 It’s Futurama season, with a new series coming out on Hulu. I’ve been going back through the original series, but noticed drama online with the early standard definition run being replaced with upscaled versions on streaming sites. Some claim that fan made ‘AI upscale’ releases are even better. 
 
 
 
 Disney+ 
 
 
 
 Fanmade…
I wanted to host Jellyfin on my home computer to be accessible to the world wide web. The internet said it was easy, but I’m picky and dumb so I found it difficult. 
 Reverse Proxy? 
 When initially researching how to do this, everyone seemed to be using apache or nginx to be the external web server, proxying traffic from Jellyfin. Totes makes sense for people with vast homelab…
There I was installing a fresh Windows to a new drive, when suddenly it struck. 
 
 The infamous ‘windows could not prepare the computer to boot into the next phase of installation’ error. 
 
 

 This is caused by a bug in the installer that’s been around FOR YEARS. See, I’ve always been in the habit of just copying the install files from the ISO to…
Actual Budgeting has recently gone open source. It’s exactly the kind of app and data I want to be self hosted on my home server. So let’s try to get it running on OmniOS. 
 Actual server is a nodejs app, so lucky for us node-16 is already in OmniOS’s repos 
 # pkg install node-16
 Now the install instructions are reasonable enough: 
 git clone…
After upgrading my NAS’s NIC to a 10Gb card, none of my zones would boot. This made sense, since they were configured to use virtual NICs that still specified the old 1Gb onboard ethernet. 
 So I go and use zonecfg to remove the old one and enter a new one specifying the new ixgbe0 network interface. 
 ~# zonecfg -z myzone
zonecfg:myzone> remove net
zonecfg:myzone> add net…
Way back in 2018, the Australian government decided to ban Huawei equipment for 5G mobile networks. This appeared to come out of nowhere, since multiple networks have been using Huawei equipment. It has a precedent however, with Huawei being banned from contributing towards the NBN in 2012. Also there was a clue in the fact that USA three letter agencies have been trying to smear Huawei for the…
I’m getting sick of fixing my TV remotes. Universal remotes are all over priced monsters. So instead I thought I’d wack together an IR blaster from the spare parts draw. 
 
 The goal here 
 
 

 I thought it would be easy, infrared remotes use decades old technology. I wanted to use an ESP8266 I had laying around for its WiFi. Surely its a popular project with…
My Corsair AX760i PSU has some extra pins that hooked up to my fan controller to show power statistics in the link desktop software. 
 
 So juicy, I want it all 
 
 

 To add some pizzazz to my DIY arduino fan controller , I want to hook up to my Corsair 760AXi PSU and show these power usage stats. 
 The four pins on the PSU can either be connected to the Corsair fan…
Wasting nothing, I wanted to use the lil’ temperture sensors that my obsolete Corsair fan controller game with 
 
 Such a cutie 
 
 

 Somehow it took me way too long to determine that they are 25k NTC Thermistors. Mainly because many fancy thermistor libraries for arduino out there support a huge list of types, with no indication of what is the most popular. 
 After…
I’ve got a whole bunch of fancy Noctua PWM fans in my PC I want to control the speed of. How do I boss them around? The most authoritative source of how these fans communicate is from an Intel specification . Even better is a whitepaper by Noctua themselves that describes every detail you could ever want to know. 
 
 Cos numbering pins is for suckas 
 
 

 Okay so at least…
Back in 2012 Corsair started making PC parts that featured LINK, that connected to your internal USB header and let you monitor and configure everything. I went all in; PSU, water cooler, fan controller, all corsair and all viewable from their link software. 
 
 

 It did okay, but had a few limitations and a bit of jank. Setting a fan to percentage of duty would mean fans would…
I’ve signed up for an electric supply retailer that charges the realtime wholesale supply price. So at 1 am the price might be 5c/kWh, while at 6 pm when everyone is using their kitchen appliances cooking dinner, it can be 40c/kWh. 
 To take real advantage of this though, you need to shift your energy usage to when it’s cheaper. Without a house full of smart appliances, this basically becomes…
The Australian Department of Health released the COVIDSafe app yesterday. 
 The concept seems great; use a technology previously used by advertisers to track you and sell ads . Now instead it can be used to save lives. I love it. 
 Except a lot of the Australian public does not love it. Maybe because it was promised to be open sourced , then wasn’t? Or that they promised local data would…
My girlfriend and I almost exclusively communicate online over Facebook chat, so for our anniversary I thought it would be sweet to have some cherished moments printed into a book to keep forever. I found bookbaby which can print a single book for US$19 (I’m not being paid to advertise them, promise) and decided to give it a go. 
 After looking through our first messages, I found the process…
I was recently gifted a Google Home mini and placed it on my bedside table. Being able to turn off music with my voice while I was in bed and too lazy to move my hand half a metre to my phone has frankly been the best part. I quickly wished I could do the same for turning off my bedside lamp. I already had a cheap LED RGB light bulb that’s controlled by an infrared remote. I considered replacing…