How To Train Your Robot

2021-01-202021-01-20

Analyzing a Zoom(link) hack:

Once in awhile a service may get compromised script or item in it – in a recent case, a Zoom link will actually take you to some random site as part of some sort of adware campaign??? However a closer look shows it is very important to test your links on email or sites:

The link I saw recently actually had a very odd looking script – script in a production service is generally minified sometimes, but won’t be oddly obfuscated or base64-encoded. The suspicious part of this script starts out in the <body> with an odd looking launchBase64:

2021-01-132021-01-13

New Zealand repeaters are up! and an intro to csv importing with fgetcsv()

This week, the New Zealand amateur radios on vhf.nz were added to the worldwide Hearham.com repeater listing. These are pulled in with permission and this now allows offline listing of the ham radio repeaters to work for folks in the Android or Linux version of Repeater-START (Showing The Amateur-radio Repeaters Tool):

2021-01-062021-01-06

FTP-able server with correct Apache permission settings

If you’re setting a local server you may want some trusted admins to upload to, one good way is the vsftp server. DigitalOcean has a good tutorial on it, but there are some odd issues.

2021-01-042021-01-05

SolarWinds hack shows importance of vendor trust, and why open source is so important

Much has been written about the recent SolarWinds hack – “Almost a cyber pandemic” that we may not know the true extent of for some time.

2021-01-032021-03-08

Cleaning up Python – and old libraries

Newer Ubuntu releases do not even pre install Python2, and after an upgrade and installing latest Python3.x included in the release, you likely have some old ones there too. Since you most likely will not be using the python2 unless you use some very old library, you can clean them up, clear a lot of disk space and use the “python3” / “pip3” command instead.

2020-12-26

Merry Christmas, and a Repeater Listing update

The repeater database has been udpated today as a Merry Christmas present for DMR Radio users! – over half of the radioid.net DMR listings have now been pulled in to Hearham repeater listing, with permission. This means users looking for DMR digital repeaters will find the RepeaterSTART app more useful in the future!

2020-11-302020-11-30

Newegg Black Friday bug… yikes!

Once in awhile a purchase allows a purchase payment plan, which is often paying more… but this particular one I found on black friday was ridiculous:

2020-11-232020-11-25

Building a Linux app part 8: Adding an options screen

As you may have noticed, the repeater-START app doesn’t currently have an option to change that internal km/mile calculation. It also does not have any option to filter the repeaters of VHF, UHF or your preferred band.

Let’s see how to add a new dialog, then store the options, and load them on your program’s start:

2020-11-082020-11-11

Review: Linux in the Ham Shack Linux

Budgie Desktop is an interesting Linux distro which you can see is the base of Linux in the Ham Shack, downloadable here.

2020-11-022020-11-02

Injecting commands and debugging a running Python program, with Project Euler example

How often has it happened to you… you build a simple script to calculate something, run some bulk process, and coming back after an hour or so it just hangs with no output. Is it doing something or stuck? You could debug it, using WinPdb or Visual Studio Code debugger or GDB to run it step by step, but that would lose the time that it has been processing. Instead, you can use Pyrasite, a program for looking in to a running Python script!