Category Archives: tutorial

How to Mash Up BLE, NodeJS, and MQTT to Get Internet of Things

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We’re living in the world of connected devices. It has never been easier to roll your own and implement the functionality you actually want, rather than live with the lowest common denominator that the manufacture chose.

In a previous article I walked though a small python script to talk to a BLE light and used it to cycle through some colors. Now I want to delve deeper into the world of Internet Connected BLE devices and how to set up a simple Internet-Of-Things light. With this example in hand the sky’s the limit on what you can build and what …read more

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A ‘How To’ for Asset Tagging

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The systems in your environment are extremely important assets. Storing intellectual property, customer information, financial information, business automation, etc. If any of these systems are breached or become unavailable, there is a business and fi… Continue reading A ‘How To’ for Asset Tagging→

Learn FPGA Fast with Hackaday’s FPGA Boot Camp

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FPGAs have gone from being a niche product for people with big budgets to something that every electronics experimenter ought to have in their toolbox. I am always surprised at how many people I meet who tell me they are interested in using FPGAs but they haven’t started. If you’ve been looking for an easy way to get started with FPGAs, Hackaday’s FPGA boot camp is for you. There’s even a Hackaday.io chat in the group specifically for FPGA talk for questions and general discussion!

While it is true FPGAs aren’t for everything, when you need them you really need …read more

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A Custom Keyboard At Maximum Effort

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No one loves hacked keyboards more than Hackaday. We spend most of our workday pressing different combinations of the same 104 buttons. Investing time in that tool is time well spent. [Max] feels the same and wants some personality in his input device.

In the first of three videos, he steps us through the design and materials, starting with a layer to hold the keys. FR4 is the layer of fiberglass substrate used for most circuit boards. Protoboards with no copper are just bare FR4 with holes. Homemade CNC machines can glide through FR4, achieving clean lines, and the material …read more

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WeirdAAL (AWS Attack Library) Basics from the Authors

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The cloud is everything. Organizations have either moved completely to the cloud, have a hybrid approach, or are actively planning a cloud strategy. Penetration testers have always had to provide their services anywhere the client’s environment t… Continue reading WeirdAAL (AWS Attack Library) Basics from the Authors→

Impossibly Huge Depth of Focus in Microscope Photographs

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Sometimes, less is more. Sometimes, more is more. There is a type of person who believes that if enough photos of the same subject are taken, one of them will shine above the rest as a gleaming example of what is possible with a phone camera and a steady hand. Other people know how to frame a picture before hitting the shutter button. In some cases, the best method may be snapping a handful of photos to get one good one, not by chance, but by design.

[The Thought Emporium]’s video, also below the break, is about getting crisp pictures …read more

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Windows Privilege Escalation – Unquoted Services

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So, you’ve popped a user shell on a windows box and now you’re looking to escalate those privileges. Great! In this article we’ll look at one method of elevating your privileges by exploiting unquoted system services. A Windows servic… Continue reading Windows Privilege Escalation – Unquoted Services→

Webinar: How to Kill Browser Tabs and Tickets Using PowerShell

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Have you ever wanted to increase the automation of your IT processes, and kill some of the repetitive browser tabs that you keep open to use every day? It might not be as difficult as you think. JumpCloud® Senior Success Engineer, Scott Reed, rece… Continue reading Webinar: How to Kill Browser Tabs and Tickets Using PowerShell→

Quantum Searching in Your Browser

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If you’ve made it through the last two posts on quantum computing (QC), then you’ve seen the Quirk simulator, a little of IBM’s web-based offering, and how entanglement and superposition can do strange and possibly wonderful things. However, the superdense encoding I showed you didn’t really feel like a real computer algorithm. This time we will look at Grover’s algorithm which is often incorrectly billed as an “unstructured database search.” In reality, it is an algorithm for making a state — that is a set of qubits — match some desired state without simply setting the state.

By analogy, consider …read more

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