I’m just surfacing for a moment because I realize it’s been over 3 months without a post, which is just plain unacceptable.
HOPE XI just wrapped up, and I was there for at least a part of each of the three days – never really staying for the late stuff, but managed to catch at least 4 – 6 talks per day. The highlight was (as it was two years ago) Deviant Ollan & Howard Payne’s tag-team talk. This year was about the often abysmal state of physical security, manifested through commonly keyed locks. Their last HOPE talk was on Elevator Hacking, and the subject of keys was one of it’s focal-points. I highly recommend checking out the Elevator talk on YouTube.
Other highlights this year included:
- De-Anonymizing Bitcoin One Transaction at a Time
- How to Torrent a Pharmaceutical Drug – which included leaving a message for pharma-bro martin shkreli; that was funny, but the meat of the talk was terrifically delivered by Michael Swan Laufer
- Sunset or Evolution of the PSTN
- Iridium Satellite Hacking – A fairly in-depth exploration of the Iridium constellation, it’s coverage, and it’s protocols. Top notch material & delivery by Stefan “Sec” Zehl & Schneider.
- What Really Happened? Fact, Truth, and Research Techniques
- And of course Cory Doctorow’s keynote.
I’ve started playing around with Collective Access – an open-source Collection Management System geared towards museums, libraries, and other archival institutions. I found it after searching in vain for a WordPress solution for digitally curating the collection I present here. I’ve got about a dozen objects added so far as I learn how it works and tailor it to my needs. There is an underlying structure that makes it well suited for museum collections, but it’s highly configurable through the web interface; Vocabulary, relationships, meta-data, object hierarchies, and user-interfaces can be customized without touching a line of code.
It’ll be a few more weeks until I’m comfortable enough with my schema, and I may start to post about my progress.
While at HOPE, I caught up with Evan of the Mid Atlantic Chapter of the Vintage Computer Federation, who (among other things) gave an interesting talk on his work researching early computers. I’ve got the beginnings of an idea to use Collective Access to help them catalog their impressive inventory. There are some real gems there, and beyond just cataloging, I’d love an opportunity to take some glamor shots.
The 514 is slowly coming to life – The +225v supply isn’t regulating to full voltage, and I’ve narrowed the problem down to something on the upper deck (the input, vertical amplifier, and calibrator). With that disconnected, I get a nice, sharp, swept trace.
swept trace w/ upper deck disconnected
Sorry for the extended black-out, more to come!