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.

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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.

For Windows 7, this turned out to be pretty easy to do via PowerShell. I just had to look for a native image resizing library since the lock screen for some odd reason, only supports JPEGs up to 256KB in size. Probably one of those legacy items left over from NT, like the file system permissions dialogs, and the built-in environment variables editor… I ended up using WIA’s ImageProcess COM library which worked surprisingly well.

I noticed during the (many) meetings I attend that disconnecting and reconnecting my laptop from the dock reorganizes all my windows to the laptop’s display. This got annoying to have to drag and resize everything when returning to my desk, which has a 3 monitor setup. So, I wrote this small Win32 application to allow you to save the positioning and size of all windows and then restore them at a later time.

I hadn’t updated my Raspberry Pi (a B+ model for my rpi-drd project) in about a year. Pacman -Syu kept complaining about being unable to find files on any of the mirrors. So I, without thinking, ran reflector on an x86 host and copied it over. Oops. Now it definitely can’t find packages. The archlinuxarm.org website gave me the hostname I needed, but not the entire URL. Put this in your mirrorlist (as the sole entry) to restore functionality:

Surprise, surprise, my old favorite Gentoo Linux is now running on a Tesla Model S. Hope he doesn’t emerge world while driving.

I’m super excited for the imminent onslaught of consumer grade VR equipment and game support. I think it will change how games are played from now on. Not all games, mind you, it takes a certain level of involvement to strap on a head-mounted display and get into the experience. The military already uses similar technology extensively for training. It’s just a matter of months before equipment hits shelves. That said, there’s a serious problem with it already.

I’ve got a ThinkPad T410. I got it off craigslist in what was a somewhat shady transaction. Regardless, it came with a 300GB spinner. Not interested in finding out how much life was left on it I got a solid state replacement from NewEgg for “Cyber Monday”. A 240GB Intel one for $110, that’s less than 50 cents per GB!

The spinner has a single unencrypted partition with Arch Linux running on it. I wanted to run Arch on an encrypted partition. The main reason: If it’s ever stolen I don’t want to have to worry about any of the data on it. Bonus reason: Geek/spy points.

So, while there are excellent guides for installing Arch, and setting up encryption, and optimizing an SSD, there don’t seem to be any combining the three. In reality it’s not that much more difficult, and if you are motivated to setup encryption on Linux in the first place you probably know what you’re doing. Still, I was disheartened a bit at the lack of information so I decided to note how I went about it in general.

So, a while back I gave my wife a Farscape DRD kit. I promised to make it in to a robot. How hard could it be? Well, not too bad. A little more expensive than planned, though…