Author Archives: Dale Nunns

About Dale Nunns

I live in Cape Town, South Africa with my awesome wife and cute cat Domino. I'm a software developer, hardware hacker, some time cook, wannabe writer, chief bottle washer and tamer of dust bunnies.

Wifi WPA Cracking

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Found this on a friend’s Buzz page, rather scary.

Basically these guys offer access to a cluster that has been specifically fine tuned for cracking WPA encryption keys for wireless networks and at the cheapest price it’ll cost $17. I’ve seen people online build machines with multiple graphics cards and then run the code on them as well as the CPU as the graphics cards (Nvidia is the example I read) are faster at doing the math the desktop CPU’s.

Should we all panic? Well if you read the FAQ on the site you’ll see that WPA encryption is still a little hard to crack, changing the SSID of the access point to something unique makes it harder and so does choosing a non-dictionary password for the WPA key.

Moving

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To my loyal fans (fan? Hi mom 🙂 sorry for the lack of updates lately but “real life” has been getting in the way a little. At the moment my wife and I are drowning in boxes as we pack up our lives into +/- 50 boxes and get ready to move to our new home.

Yes that’s right at the end of this week my wife and I are moving into our own place, no more renting… which means finally I’ll be allowed to drill holes in walls, fix creaking doors and re-arrange stupid cupboard designs.

That means that pages of this site are no doubt going to be filled with articles as we DIY our little place into the awesome place we both want. The move also means I’ll have my own little workshop/workbench where I can finally take things apart without fear of leaving sharp things behind on the floor for the wife to step on.

Drowned my Mouse – Autopsy + Repair

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Dead mouse, before autopsy, repair and cleaning

This afternoon I drowned my mouse with a cup of tea and?killed it. The mouse was a Microsoft Wireless 4000 Notebook Optical Mouse which I’ve had for over 2 years and liked a lot… Electronics + tea don’t mix 🙁

As previously promised on Google Buzz, I’m going to “autopsy” the mouse and see if I can revive it, below are the photos (gadget lovers may want to look away).

I’ve killed or nearly killed a few peripherals with tea… the trick to keeping things alive is to disconnect power ASAP after the spill, hopefully before things short out and the magic smoke gets let out.

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Voyager 2 – Extreme remote debugging

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Voyager 2 for those of you who don’t know is a space probe that was sent into space and was designed to study a whole range of things. (You can go read the Wikipedia page if you want more detail.)

For those of you don’t know a few weeks (months?) ago something went wrong and the space probe stopped sending coherent information back to earth. Now remember that this probe was launched in 1977. NASA managed to debug and fix the problem with the on-board computers remotely… which is impressive given how old the hardware is and the fact that it takes 13hours for info to travel from the probe to earth. I’m continually impressed by a lot of the “old school” space hardware that NASA built and how long it lasted and how they’ve often gotten it to work long after its expected EOL (End of Life).

You can find the?official?account of what happened and how it was fixed here.

Bookmarks for May 17th through June 25th

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These are my links for May 17th through June 25th: