The Big List of Naughty Strings Helps Find Those User Input Problems

Any software that accepts user input must take some effort to sanitize incoming data, lest unexpected and unwelcome things happen. Here to make that easier is the Big List of …read more Continue reading The Big List of Naughty Strings Helps Find Those User Input Problems

Simple Hack Completely Changes The Sound Of This Piano

We’re partial to musical instrument hacks around here, mainly because we find instruments to be fascinating machines. Few are more complex than the piano, and, as it turns out, few are quite so hackable. Still, we have to admit that this ragtime piano hack took us by surprise.

We always …read more

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ADSL Robustness Verified By Running Over Wet String

A core part of the hacker mentality is the desire to test limits: trying out ideas to see if something interesting, informative, and/or entertaining comes out of it. Some employees of Andrews & Arnold (a UK network provider) applied this mentality towards connecting their ADSL test equipment to some unlikely materials. The verdict of experiment: yes, ADSL works over wet string.

ADSL itself is something of an ingenious hack, carrying data over decades-old telephone wires designed only for voice. ADSL accomplished this in part through robust error correction measures keeping the bytes flowing through lines that were not originally designed …read more

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Save ESP8266 RAM with PROGMEM

When [sticilface] started using the Arduino IDE to program an ESP8266, he found he was running out of RAM quickly. The culprit? Strings. That’s not surprising. Strings can be long and many strings like prompts and the like don’t ever change. There is a way to tell the compiler you’d like to store data that won’t change in program storage instead of RAM. They still eat up memory, of course, but you have a lot more program storage than you do RAM on a typical device. He posted his results on a Gist.

On the face of it, it is …read more

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