This is a quick post to document my personal workflow of producing nice PDF documents from scanned images. Some of my obligations and hobbies produce paper documents with no option for digital copies, so I am left to digitze the information myself. Here’s how I do it. Scanning I was lucky enough to obtain an Epson WF-7610 from my local e-waste drop-off. Although I’ve never used it to print, its…
Several months ago, I heard that my local police department was proposing the purchase of a number of Flock license plate reader surveillance cameras. They had in fact been trialing these cameras for two and half years (for free), but that’s a story for another day. I did what I could to oppose it - I showed up to board meetings, said my piece, and watched as the town board unanimously voted to…
I’ve been on another home automation kick recently. I’d heard of Shelly devices, but I hadn’t gotten around to investigating them until recently. To dip my feet in, I bought a Shelly 1 Mini gen3 and a Shelly 2PM gen3. The larger Shelly devices have 1.27mm pitch UART programming headers, whereas the “mini” series do not. I was hoping to go the OTA update route to install ESPHome anyway, so that…
Due to recent life events, I’ve been engaging with realtors, banks, and lenders. In all cases, I’m looking for information on their services and start by filling out an online form which should lead me to find such information. Typically instead of directly providing the answers I seek, the process breaks down with a statement of “we’ll get back to you”. Then, at random hours, I receive…
Pointless Exposition I’m not in the Apple ecosystem, but I was quite enthused about the announcement of the airtag and the FindMy network back in 2019. The private-by-design protocol / implementation looked great, especially compared to literally any other existing tracker. And the reporting network being more-or-less all iOS devices made sure that it would have a very large userbase to begin…
I hope you’re ready for more smart home content . I’ve been wanting to get a “smart” thermostat for some time now. I put a lot of time into research, since all of the contenders suck in their own ways. Here were my requirements: Allows for physical control Has a humidistat and supports controlling a humidifier Relatively cheap (<$100 USD) WiFi-enabled (I don’t want to bother setting up Zigbee or…
Using a Fire Stick I bought a TV a few months ago. I hadn’t had one for a while, but I was ready to make a home theater at the time of purchase. I already had a 3.1 audio system ready, with a 4K capable Yamaha receiver. Not to mention, a trusty rooted Amazon Fire Stick 4K that had been collecting dust since the last time I had a TV. After initial setup, the equipment seemed to work well. It took a…
I’m not a huge fan of facebook. I had an account as a youth, deleted it in college, and then later realized that facebook marketplace was the new craigslist, and that I’d miss out on buying and selling local goods if I limited myself to the marketplace of web 1.0. Oh well, account reinstated (for marketplace purposes only). In order to sell items on marketplace, you need to use facebook messenger.…
I’m not going to go in depth regarding my Home Assistant setup at this time, but I’m generally a fan of home automation (when said automation actually makes sense and adds value). With that, I recently heard about the SwitchBot Blind Tilt. I checked its compatibility with Home Assistant and soon decided to purchase one. It was delivered a few days ago, but the setup process for Home Assistant…
I recently bought a new car - a 2022 Kia Niro Hybrid. Of course, one of the first things to do with a new vehicle is to change everything you dislike about it. Here’s the list of complaints that I have with it, and what I’ve managed to change so far. Virtual Speaker (VESS) sound is way too loud (and beeps in reverse gear!) I’ve driven hybrids before, so I was expecting an annoying speaker, but…
As a resident of the state of New York who likes to use the I-90 interstate on occasion, I was practically required to get an E-ZPass tag in 2021, when the I-90 switched exclusively to cash-less tolling. I have a number of privacy concerns with both E-ZPass and Automatic License Plate Recognition (ALPR) systems, so my decision to get one was not made lightly. Privacy concerns around E-ZPass and…
tl;dr - Download this app and configure a webhook for ntfy to publish as JSON . Note that when using a public ntfy server, your topic name is essentially a password , and that you need to trust that the server admins aren’t reading your messages. Thus, I recommend self-hosting with authentication required, if possible. I travelled internationally a bit last year, and at one point in my journey, I…
A friend of mine is in the process of building their first NAS. It’s a beautiful thing, really. In heated discussions about system requirements and configurable options, I recalled my foray into my first (and current) hosted file server from many years ago. I made some unique design decisions that I think are worth sharing, if for nothing more than your amusement. My goals for this fileserver were…
2022-09-15 Update This is a copy of my article from Datto’s engineering blog , originally published on 2021-09-13. As of the present, the server responds with an HTTP 502. The original text can be found on the Internet Archive . Unless you’re using the ACME protocol with a certificate authority such as Let’s Encrypt, you’re probably well aware of the annoyance of certificate rotation. Here at…
Over the course of the last six months or so, I’ve had the distinct pleasure of working with Securonix Snypr, an on-prem or cloud-hosted SIEM solution. I find SIEMs to be fairly boring, so after some time acting as a system administrator for the platform, I started pentesting it - and it didn’t take long to find some issues. In this post, I’ll discuss a remote code execution vulnerability that I…
I’ve recently re-discovered the sheer amount of great stuff that can be found both in physical thrift stores and on ShopGoodwill . If you’re unfamiliar, it’s Goodwill’s online auction platform. Like most Internet services that I interact with, I’d love to use it in an automated fashion, but they don’t make their API documentation public. That’s no matter at all, but reversing some webapp wouldn’t…
Although the Sony NW-A45 is a relatively new device (released in 2016), at its release, Sony still had yet to figure out that USB-C was the way of the future. Instead, it shipped with the long-standing proprietary Sony WM-PORT connector. It’s used for charging, data transfer, and more . Last year, I went on a week-long trip with the device, but decided against bringing a WM-PORT to USB cable,…
I’ve been an avid user of Signal for almost five years now. It’s a fantastic messaging platform, and brings end-to-end encryption to people that otherwise would not seek it out in a seamless fashion. A few years ago, Signal started to introduce client-side privacy features, including disappearing messages, view-once media, and remote message deletion. One commonality between these features is that…