A Super Cheap Desk Toy Becomes a Hackable Desktop Notifier
A good maker story is not just about a clever build. It is about what the project teaches, what problem it solves and what curious readers can borrow for their own experiments.
Maker projects matter because they show technology at work with the cover removed: parts, constraints, mistakes, trade-offs and the small decisions that make an idea real.
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Everything you think you suck at... is hackable.
Your voice. Your posture. Your presence. Your confidence. Even your hair.
You don't have to be born with it.
You can build it.
For those that don't know the Pebble, it was one of the first smartwatches.
Some things about it where there has been NO SUITABLE REPLACEMENT FOR IN ALMOST 10 YEARS (that have more than 3 of these):
- an e-paper display
- a Battery that lasts more than 3 days.
- simple (I don't need 1000 features I don't use but make the watch expensive and cost battery life. I only need telling time, notifications, music control, alarms, weather, calendar, sleep/step tracking. Thats it)
- hackable (you can't even create watchfaces on the apple watch, and for the google pixel watch you need the whole Android SDK and basically have to make an android app) the pebble had thousends of user created watchfaces on its store.
- freaking physical buttons. I loved to control my music from my wrist without having to look.
I've got myself a google pixel watch a few months ago and I hate not beeing able to control music blindly and having to charge it every 1-3 days. The only good thing is, that I can use Google Pay from it and control some HomeAssistant stuff.
New Post has been published on https://www.aneddoticamagazine.com/the-wiphone-project/
The WiPhone project
The WiPhone project is an open source mobile IP phone. WiPhone is intended to be hackable, modular, cheap, and open, while remaining usable.
The WiPhone project is an open source phone capable of making free calls through the internet. It makes calls over WiFi, without the need for a cellular radio.
It’s also an open source, self-contained Arduino development platform. It comes in a nice package, with a battery, power supply, and on/off circuitry, unlike most other dev boards. Once your project is done, instead of an eyesore of tangled wires, it’s discreet and visually appealing.
A Controversial Tool Calls Out Thousands of Hackable Websites
The web has long been a playground for hackers, offering up hundreds of millions of public-facing servers to comb through for basic vulnerabilities to exploit. Now one hacker tool is about to take that practice to its logical, extreme conclusion: Scanning every website in the world to find and then publicly release their exploitable flaws, all at the same time—and all in the name of making the web more secure. At the Defcon hacker conference next month, Alejandro Caceres and Jason Hopper plan to release—or, rather, to upgrade and re-release after a years-long hiatus—a tool called PunkSpider. Essentially a search engine that constantly crawls the entire web, PunkSpider automatically identifies hackable vulnerabilities in websites, and then allows anyone to search those results to find sites susceptible to everything from defacement to data leaks.PunkSpider's creators say it will catalog hundreds of thousands of those unpatched vulnerabilities at launch, making all of them publicly accessible. Caceres and Hopper acknowledge that in doing so, their tool could potentially expose those sites to real-world attacks. But they hope that visibility will force the web's administrators to acknowledge that their websites contain simple, glaring, and in some cases dangerous flaws—and hopefully fix them.Low-Hanging FruitThe sort of web vulnerabilities that PunkSpider finds remain incredibly common, despite years of warnings.
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