GoPro Karma Stabilizer Teardown

I crashed my drone. Really bad. It literally snapped the Gimbal arm in half. So I had to order another one because I was stupid and I didn't get the extended warranty because I didn't think I'd ever fly that close to low hanging trees. Sinking this much money into a GoPro drone is worth it, though, because I've had nothing but good experiences with their products (although they're not great at figuring out what to do when upside down on the pavement. But, like my dad says, there are two kinds of remote pilots: those who have crashed and those who are going to crash. I guess technically I'm in both categories now. The point is is that I have a broken gimbal and I can take it apart now because there is a less than 0% chance I can fix it and I already have another one.

State of the Blog - Year 2

It has been exactly two years since I started this blog. In the past two years it's become something completely different than what I expected it would be, and I'm not upset about that at all. It's actually been a big source of growth and distraction for me, and I really like that.

Making a Smart Speaker - Part 3

The Orange Pi Zero came in the mail yesterday, so I guess we're ready to move on to the next part in the design of the smart speaker: audio input and output. We won't cover any of the intelligence behind the AI right now because all I want to do is get audio out of the Orange Pi and into the speaker at a reasonable volume, and maybe get voice recognition to work. By the end of this, we should have something that can play music files and maybe transcribe what I say. We'll see.

Making a Smart Speaker - Part 2

In this installment of Making a Smart Speaker, we're going to work on the non-lowend (mid-high range) audio output. I was disappointed when removing the lowpass filter didn't make the subwoofer output all ranges (the acoustics of the shape are too subwoofer-like), so we need to add another speaker to make this worth anything. In this part, we'll do just that.

Making a Smart Speaker - Part 1

Smart speakers are the "next big thing." You can tell because Apple started to make them, and they have such a good track record with the next big thing (not recently, but whatever). There are DIY solutions popping up all over the place, so I wanted to try and make my own as much from recycled electronics as possible. I have the things to make this happen (for the most part), so let's make this happen!

Reverse Analyzing PHP Malware

Hacking is a problem. Those who wish to damage things for personal benefit (or for fun) are really just bad people. Alas, hacking is a part of our world today and it is never going to go away. So we have to get smarter than the hackers, which means we have to understand how their code works and what it does. I'm sure they're doing this every day with Russian hackers. Personally, I think it's impressive what they're capable of.

But when you hack my mother's website, you've gone too far.

Writing a Discord Bot For Literally Anything

I love Discord. It is not only great for gaming chat, but it's awesome for chat in general, supporting arbitrary numbers of people, channels, and voice channels. It's really remarkable how much Discord can do. Discord, being the awesome application it is, exposes an API for you to develop bots with. These bots can do literally anything a regular user can, so we can make some great things with it. So, why don't we make all the things with it? Let's make a modular bot that has hot swappable components and can span multiple hosts monitoring multiple things. Sounds hard right? It's probably not, but as I'm writing this I haven't touched any code whatsoever.