I like listening to instrumental music while I code, it helps keep me focused. On Bandcamp there’s an artist I like called Master Boot Record. Their albums routinely contain “secrets” as the album description text. They are small easter egg like puzzles. In this post I’ll go over how I solved or attempted to solve each one I found.
I’ve moved everything over to a static site. I did a few “while I’m at it” things as well:
So, WarpWallet is a so-called brain wallet for Bitcoin. That is, you only have to remember a relatively short password and it generates the corresponding private key for use. It uses a memory and CPU hard set of cryptographic algorithms to ensure that brute-forcing is slowed way down. That is, when generating the private key, it takes considerable time. Their Javascript implementation takes over 10 seconds on my machine.
So the makers of it had challenges setup. By the time I stumbled on it, only the last challenge was left, with 6 months remaining. For that challenge, the reward for cracking an 8-character alphanumeric password was 20 BTC (and BCH and BTG!), which was worth over $100,000 USD at the time of the challenge end date.
UPDATE 14 MAR 2020: For discussion, see the Google group. Comments from the old WordPress site have been migrated there.
I bought and really like my Kenwood Excelon DDX9903S headunit. I had it in my WRX, and moved it to my LS430. It supports Android Auto and CarPlay, which I find really useful when driving.
However, it has a nag screen every time it boots up. This got me curious as to how it worked, and see if it could be patched to skip this disclaimer. I figured it probably ran Linux on a SoC, as pretty much everything does nowadays. So I grabbed the latest firmware for it (mine was already updated to it), and started probing.
S_V2_7_0008_0600_AT1.zip
Extract that and you get 3 folders under S_V2_7_0008_0600/:
BOOT_V2_7_0008_0600_release/ MAIN_V1_0_2758_0400/ SOC_V2_7_0008_0600/
My RAID6 was originally planned with 6 drives, but only had 5 for a while due to space concerns with the case. However, I found as a file, media, and multiple cryptocurrency node it filled up the 2.7TB pretty quickly. So, I got a new case (and some more RAM), which has proper space for 6 3.5” drives (and 2 5.25”). When migrating to this I decided to add the extra 1TB WD Red NAS drive I bought but have not been able to use.
The case is a Fractal Design Define Mini, and I am thoroughly impressed. Six 3.5” slots, two 5.25” external slots, and lots of sound padding on the doors and sides.
