Category: Electronics

How to properly wurf. You douchebags.

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How to properly wurf.

Whenever dealing with old electronics, you will always run into some annoying tart who exclaims, “but look at wat its wurf on da eeeeebay!!” and waves an unsold buy it now listing in your face. I’ve written about this previously.

Here’s how to properly wurf.

Step one:
Skip bathing for a few days, rub the contents of an ashtray all over yourself and breathe through your mouth.

Step two:
Go to eBay and sign in. Don’t have an eBay account? WTF are you doing wurfing anyway? Repeat step one.

Step three:
Search for the desired item.

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No no no! That's not how much it's wurf.

For this example I’m using the Yaesu FT-101 which is a 30 year old HF radio, great for its time but now dated and a pain in the ass to maintain due to dwindling availability of PA tubes.

This is where your truly awful wurfers stop, upon seeing that high unsold buy it now price.

Step four:

Click Refine.

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Scroll down. Set condition to used unless the item is brand new in original packaging. Otherwise I’m gonna have to stab you.

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See that Show More option? That’s a magic button, pressing it will allow you to attain true wurf.

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Tap sold items. This will check completed as well automatically.

You have wurfed. Tap done and view the results:

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Guess what, twatchute, you're not sitting on a goldmine.

Yes, you can do the same thing from desktop eBay search, but most wurfing takes place on smartphones now.

You’re welcome.

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Fun with IMSI catchers.

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Yes, there are IMSI catchers being abused hardcore around south Florida. News to no one…

hork hork hork hork hork hork
From “Married To The Sea”. Click to visit their site.

Unfortunately, my dumb luck— I have a phone that tosses its cookies upon hitting one repeatedly.

It’s somewhere either at the Port of Miami or on Watson Island.

What’s it do? For one, upon connecting to it, any call or data transfer occurring gets dropped on its head.

Second, after being pinged enough times and taking to its semi broken CDMA network emulation, the phone deletes its APN settings! This breaks MMS messaging completely until it’s fixed. So far I’ve just been fixing it by dialing ##scrtn# which dumps the provisioning data and makes the radio reactivate to the network.

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But first, I have to get far away from this stupid IMSI catcher, because it pipes up and breaks the reactivation.

Aaaaarrrgghhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!

If I don’t fix the problem after moving out of range, the phone will actually get stuck in a useless limbo state until I do reactivate.

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SEEMS FUCKING LEGIT.

The final confirmation of it being an IMSI catcher was made using the wonderful aimsicd utility which caught the system’s LAC and BSID rotating between nonsense values. Oh and then I got THIS oddball call – strange but nowhere near as strange as the one I got when my old HTC COMPLETELY freaked out and died from the same thing; I found it almost too hot to touch, 25 minutes into a call to “#”. If I talked into it I could hear an odd echo, and it wouldn’t hang up. spoopy.

Speaking of spoopy here’s the Umigo website looking utterly wrong. You’re uhhh welcome

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If you want to detect these stupid things, get AIMSICD. You don’t need a rooted phone to detect the nasties, though there are a few functions in there that only work on one. So far I’ve seen one fairly permanently in use near the Port of Miami and American Airlines Arena, and one that gets moved around the Hollywood, Florida area (vehicle mounted?) – it logged an alert on my phone when it was driven by at 2 in the morning. Niiice.

Digital Illogic, or The Fnord Elevator!

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This is the control system for the freight elevator at work in a valid running state (idle, leveled at floor, doors open, ready to serve). I forgot to take a picture of its Fnord state but it looks much different. From the outside, the fnorded state is simply that the doors fly open with an unusually loud bang, leaving you with a six inch or so step up or down to the floor, followed by the elevator no longer responding in any way other than opening or closing the doors.

Update: I forgot, I actually have a video of it… BEHOLD! YOU CAN SEE THE FNORDS!

Many things can Fnord it. To unfnord it, one usually just cycles the power off for a minute then back on, and all is well. This time the Fnord levels were just too great and it needed intervention if the janitor was to be able to get their cart out of there. Read more “Digital Illogic, or The Fnord Elevator!”

Shotweld appreciation post.

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The Shotweld process was invented in 1932 at the Edward G. Budd corporation for welding 18/8 autensitic stainless steel without ruining its corrosion resistance, ductility, and fatigue resistance imparted by heat treatment. Shotweld requires accurate control of electrical current level and welding time for each shot. Done properly, it produces a joint stronger than rivets which does not create a hole in the workpiece (source of localized stresses at the hole edges, among other undesirables) and does not require a minimum spacing to avoid loss of strength (imagine the perforations on the edge of a saltine).

Plus, it lends itself to looking really awesome.

Rest assured, though Budd may no longer be making beautiful vehicles using this technique, electric resistance spot welding is still quite alive and well in modern industry, creating durable welded joints in all sorts of metals. The key of course is the regulation of time and amperage.

Properly done, the only way to remove a spot welded joint is to drill through the spot welds. It’s a good way of essentially turning several pieces of sheet metal into one.

Also, can we just take a moment to appreciate the fact that the gutter lip in the photo above has withstood over 30 years of Miami moisture and salt and shows no signs of every wanting to give up? That’s hard core.

High current Molexia, or “why’s the dryer acting stupid?”

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This is what you get when Molexia strikes at about 20 amps of load. It doesn’t smell great.

On a side note, I now understand why some dryers have a broken belt interlock switch that the belt tensioner lands on if it goes slack. On this Frigidaire stack unit, a broken belt lets the tensioner arm land on the motor shaft, causing them to loudly wear a divot in each other and rain metal fillings down into the chassis below.

There was also a completely disintegrated foam gasket that interfaces the lint filter/exhaust duct to the blower inlet.. I never took a picture of it, but my solution was to angrily glob half a tube of rtv silicone there to stick the two back together.

Good Enough For Museum Work.

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Pooped Pop Video Player!

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Updated: Do not, for the love of cheeeeze, bump this thing while it’s running or it will throw a big scary blue screen NMI / parity check error and scare you to the very core of your being

wpid-wp-1435769410872.jpg Well well well, would you look what tripped and fell on its face today? This is an old Visual Circuits POPVideo Player, from the late 1990s. Amazingly, the only problem here was a bad power supply.

But let’s look inside, because, oh man, this thing should be a computing history museum piece.

 

The year was 1990-something. People were still dancing the Macarena everywhere. Grunge rock was still going strong, accompanied by some pretty nice sort of folk music, a lot having female vocalists and very little Studio Magic. Digital signage was just starting to really catch on and replace static signage in advertising and the like, using CRT televisions or video projectors… and the Pop Video Player was ready and willing to drive this.

The features: Hard disk video storage of MPEG-2 content… updatable via changing the removable hard drive out, or over IP via modem (!!!) or Ethernet interface. Windows NT 3.51 or 4.00 (hurrrrk!) based machine on an AMD K6-2 at 200 mhz…

Needless to say, a PC of this thing’s stature would have trouble playing any sort of video, so it’s got some custom hardware. Special cards with four MPEG-2 decoder ASICs, audio codecs, and framebuffers with S-Video and composite outputs were used. The software then only has to fill the buffers on each of the MPEG-2 decoders and respond to control commands which could be sent in by serial port (possibly over IP?).

And here we go on the magical history tour.

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Brand Name Necrophilia

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There’s a really weird situation with brand names, especially in consumer electronics, that really kinda drives me nuts.

So we had a lot of big companies in the electronics industry… to name a few, Curtis-Mathes, Westinghouse, Memorex, Magnavox, and even Commodore, which ceased to be over the years. Yet, you can buy products that are supposedly made by them today. Said products are complete and unfettered Chinese lowest bidder garbage. I call the situation “brand name necrophilia”.

What happened?

Crappy Funai VCR guts
Crappy Funai VCR guts

The problem is, their brand names were taken as more valuable than the companies. When those companies went bankrupt, or otherwise ceased operation, their brand names were sold to a licensing company that specializes in renting them out to an importer or retailer to have them stamped on whatever junk they’re bringing in, in hopes that the brand name recognition will fool consumers into thinking the product is actually designed, manufactured, and supported by a well established company.

You couldn’t be more wrong, sorry! That Westinghouse TV is nothing like the set you bought from them in the 70s. Enjoy the fact that it will take 3 seconds to respond to the push of ANY button on the remote and will fracture the screen if you as much as breathe on the bezel.

Good examples of this happening in the past include the Salton / Russel Hobbs corporation, now part of Spectrum Brands; the Westinghouse brand which seems to universally appear on the worst electronics imaginable, Sylvania, Emerson Radio, and quite a few others.

Funai Corporation was originally the manufacturer on many of these junkers, but in recent years they’ve lost traction since a retailer can just shop around themselves for the lowest prices on random Chinese manufacturing.

Mamma Mixer!!

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This is the big mama of all audio mixers.
It’s kidproof. I’ve witnessed kids climbing right on the fader knobs and causing no harm.
Holy wow. See my hand there? That’s not a small hand. That’s a biiiiig fader.

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Like a funky British audio console I worked on at a BBC World Service studio, this mixer just uses the control surface faders to set a gain control voltage to some offboard voltage controlled amplifiers (VCAs).

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I’ve just kinda overlooked this thing for years until today when I had to open it to change a set of captive, vandal resistant headphones screwed through it. What I expected was to find some cute little linkage connecting to a set of small faders. What I found puts Penny & Giles faders to shame!!!

Warning!! Engineering porn ahead!! Have some lint free wipes, DeOxit Fader Lube, mild dish soap and water ready before clicking…….

Read more “Mamma Mixer!!”

Apple iOS: “Try again in 40 years…”

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Whoop whoop, big surprise, there’s a BUG in this operating system! Apple iOS on the iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch, and iToilet have all been reported to do this once in a blue moon. Apparently it’s a result of a login failure followed by the system realtime clock resetting back to 0 seconds after Jan 1, 1970, 00:00:00 UTC.

At least on the desktop Mac OS X, a warning is thrown and sensible measures are taken to prevent meltdown when the system time gets lost like this. On the iBaubles, though, you may be faced with this: “iPhone / iPod / iPad is disabled, try again in 23,000,000+ minutes (about 40 years)”.

This would indicate that the login system is basically just doing something like this: if the password entered is invalid, it adds 60 seconds (or whatever) to the current time in seconds since January 1, 1970, then sets that as a deadline before which you cannot login again. Unfortunately this is stored in nonvolatile storage somewhere, but the time can still be lost by a loss of power, and no sanity check is present to reset the timeout if the system time is lost. (A much better method would be to just check the kernel’s register for system uptime!!) Since NONE of the Apple devices have user-replaceable batteries, this wouldn’t exactly be defeating the security granted by slowing down an attacker trying multiple passwords on the device.
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The solutions:

* Get the time set on the device again. Either move into range of a WiFi network the device previously recognizes, or into range of a cellular signal in the case of an iPhone or 3G/4G connected iPad. Upon reestablishing connection, the device may reset its clock and allow login again.

* Reset completely and restore from DFU mode. You will lose anything stored on the device…. but it’ll be unbricked.
DFU mode instructions here.

Gee, is it any wonder why I prefer Android? 😉