Tyler Oderkirk's Blog

Some people require engine block heaters to start their cars in cold weather. I have the luxury of a garage so I don’t. My problem is far more serious: my subwoofers don’t kick when they’ve been sitting all night at ~zero Fahrenheit. My solution last weekend: run a ceramic space heater in my trunk for 15 [...]

We’re upgrading our Makerbot Cupcake CNC with a stepper motor-driven plastic extruder. Here are the components of the new plastruder: Polulu A4983 Stepper Motor Driver Carrier Makergear Plastruder Pack Kysan 42BYGH243AG14 Bipolar Stepper Motor John Yang’s PSCC V1.5 carrier board kit I just finished soldering the carrier board kit with the shweet new Hakko 936 [...]

Introduction It’s a hassle to shop for physical goods online because you don’t have the opportunity to put your hands on the item before making the purchase. For camping gear this means you can’t… Yank on a zipper to see if it’s sturdy. Set up a tent to see if your other gear will fit [...]

One of the biggest North American electronic music festivals, Ultra, just wrapped up in Miami. I think it’s about time that I blogged about my experience there last year. I attended last year’s edition with Carolyn just prior to a return trip which included visits to… Florida State University in Tallahassee, FL Georgia Tech in [...]

The problem Have you ever named a file something like… main.cpp.GOOD … to indicate a “known-good” copy of `main.cpp`? This simplistic method for storing file metadata is great because it’s filesystem-agnostic – the metadata (e.g. “this is known-good source code”) “follows” the file wherever it goes – from ext3 to FAT32 to NTFS, etc. However, [...]

Way back in 2004, I spied an offer in Circuit Cellar magazine for a free evaluation kit from Aladdin Knowledge Systems (AKS), manufacturer of copy protection tokens. These are the little gadgets that you often need to plug in to your computer to prove that you ”really” own the particularly expensive application you’re trying to [...]

Have you ever wanted to transform a run-of-the-mill photograph into a complete 3D scene automagically like Jack Black does in this mildly-NSFW 35MiB 2min clip from Enemy of the State? Well too bad — it’s just not possible to ascertain details that are hidden from the camera’s view! You can get pretty close, though, with [...]

After a few false starts this Winter, I finally made it to Boston this weekend. I went with Carolyn and Jumbo. It was great to take a road trip where I wasn’t in the driver’s seat `:]` We stopped at the Museum of Science as soon as we arrived. It housed an excellent “history of [...]

I’m happy to announce the first release of a credentials (e.g. “usernames and passwords”) management system that I’ve been working on for the past few weeks. It’s called Creds101 and this excerpt from the documentation gives some more detail: Creds101 has 2 parts: Software that you run on your computer (the “host”) to send commands [...]

“A5/1 [the encryption scheme used in most cellular voice calls] has operated unchanged for the last 21 years but it has now reached its cryptographic end-of-life, engulfed by the march of Moore’s Law. However, the operational end-of-life of A5/1 may still be decades away as there are approximately 2 billion GSM subscribers, commanding about 80% of [...]