Author Archives: makomk

There’s been a lot of controversy over the White House Press Secretary using a potentially-doctored video to justify banning CNN journalist Jim Acosta from the White House, with the Associated Press, Buzzfeed, Motherboard, and an endless cavalcade of Twitter users … Continue reading →

For some time GPG has supported storing the private keys you use to sign and decrypt e-mails and log in to servers over SSH on a secure smartcard or USB token. This protects them from being copied even if your … Continue reading →

A while ago, Google created a two-factor authentication scheme called U2F. The general idea is as follows. You have a little USB dongle that you can register with sites. When you enable U2F on a site, the dongle gives that … Continue reading →

My Motorola S9 Bluetooth headset had getting a bit long in the tooth and wasn’t lasting very long between charges – time to replace the battery! Too bad that it’s got a non-replaceable battery, but since when has that ever … Continue reading →

I recently bought a DE0-nano FPGA development board, which I’m currently using to mine Bitcoins. It’s kind of a neat board, but one downside to it is that it uses linear regulators to provide the 1.2V core supply to the … Continue reading →

A while back, I picked up a bunch of 4 assorted smartcard programmers off eBay. A CLaNZeRS Phoenix/Smartmouse version 2.1 with at least one bad solder joint and no crystal in its socket, a CLaNZeRS MCESDK that requires Windows-only software, … Continue reading →

OK, didn’t post as many things as I’d have liked, partly because they required masses of cleanup and partly because I finally figured out an easy way to do something I’d been puzzling over for a while: encrypted webcam chat. … Continue reading →

I’ve been having a fun time trying to use VLC’s official Python bindings on 64-bit Linux, and by “fun” I really mean “swearing as pointers get truncated to 32 bits and my app segfaults”. Anyway, turns out the bindings are … Continue reading →

Hmmmm. Kinda got distracted and didn’t post as much as I should’ve. Anyway, the next thing is an ISO-7816 smartcard interface based on the Arduino. What is it? This Arduino sketch lets you talk to some ISO-7816 smartcards that use … Continue reading →

What is it? Cajeput’s the server end of a virtual world, written in C++ and intended to be vaguely compatible with OpenSim (which makes it a clone of a clone of Second Life). It’s actually surprisingly lightweight, especially compared to … Continue reading →