3 rants for the price of 1, isn't that a great deal!

1. HP, you braindead fucking morons!!!

So recently I disassembled this HP laptop of mine to unfuck it at the hardware level. Some issues with the hinge that I had to solve. So I had to disassemble not only the bottom of the laptop but also the display panel itself. Turns out that HP - being the certified enganeers they are - made the following fuckups, with probably many more that I didn't even notice yet.

- They used fucking glue to ensure that the bottom of the display frame stays connected to the panel. Cheap solution to what should've been "MAKE A FUCKING DECENT FRAME?!" but a royal pain in the ass to disassemble. Luckily I was careful and didn't damage the panel, but the chance of that happening was most certainly nonzero.
- They connected the ribbon cables for the keyboard in such a way that you have to reach all the way into the spacing between the keyboard and the motherboard to connect the bloody things. And some extra spacing on the ribbon cables to enable servicing with some room for actually connecting the bloody things easily.. as Carlos Mantos would say it - M-m-M, nonoNO!!!
- Oh and let's not forget an old flaw that I noticed ages ago in this turd. The CPU goes straight to 70°C during boot-up but turning on the fan.. again, M-m-M, nonoNO!!! Let's just get the bloody thing to overheat, freeze completely and force the user to power cycle the machine, right? That's gonna be a great way to make them satisfied, RIGHT?! NO MOTHERFUCKERS, AND I WILL DISCONNECT THE DATA LINES OF THIS FUCKING THING TO MAKE IT SPIN ALL THE TIME, AS IT SHOULD!!! Certified fucking braindead abominations of engineers!!!

Oh and not only that, this laptop is outperformed by a Raspberry Pi 3B in performance, thermals, price and product quality.. A FUCKING SINGLE BOARD COMPUTER!!! Isn't that a great joke. Someone here mentioned earlier that HP and Acer seem to have been competing for a long time to make the shittiest products possible, and boy they fucking do. If there's anything that makes both of those shitcompanies remarkable, that'd be it.

2. If I want to conduct a pentest, I don't want to have to relearn the bloody tool!

Recently I did a Burp Suite test to see how the devRant web app logs in, but due to my Burp Suite being the community edition, I couldn't save it. Fucking amazing, thanks PortSwigger! And I couldn't recreate the results anymore due to what I think is a change in the web app. But I'll get back to that later.

So I fired up bettercap (which works at lower network layers and can conduct ARP poisoning and DNS cache poisoning) with the intent to ARP poison my phone and get the results straight from the devRant Android app. I haven't used this tool since around 2017 due to the fact that I kinda lost interest in offensive security. When I fired it up again a few days ago in my PTbox (which is a VM somewhere else on the network) and today again in my newly recovered HP laptop, I noticed that both hosts now have an updated version of bettercap, in which the options completely changed. It's now got different command-line switches and some interactive mode. Needless to say, I have no idea how to use this bloody thing anymore and don't feel like learning it all over again for a single test. Maybe this is why users often dislike changes to the UI, and why some sysadmins refrain from updating their servers? When you have users of any kind, you should at all times honor their installations, give them time to change their individual configurations - tell them that they should! - in other words give them a grace time, and allow for backwards compatibility for as long as feasible.

3. devRant web app!!

As mentioned earlier I tried to scrape the web app's login flow with Burp Suite but every time that I try to log in with its proxy enabled, it doesn't open the login form but instead just makes a GET request to /feed/top/month?login=1 without ever allowing me to actually log in. This happens in both Chromium and Firefox, in Windows and Arch Linux. Clearly this is a change to the web app, and a very undesirable one. Especially considering that the login flow for the API isn't documented anywhere as far as I know.

So, can this update to the web app be rolled back, merged back to an older version of that login flow or can I at least know how I'm supposed to log in to this API in order to be able to start developing my own client?

I really like retro games and there is this thing called retropie which turns your raspberry pi into an arcade machine. Since I have way too much time, I decided to built an arcade machine case out of wood with an old TV and analog sticks from Amazon. So yeah, I wired everything together and wanted to share it with you guys. I'm still searching for stickers to put on the top and on the joystick panel, but for now I really like the result. Tell me what you think!

had wished for a raspberry pi as christmas present, ideally with a pi cam on top.
now i've got a pi cam😏 ... and no raspberry pi😐🤨😅
that was unexpected

Finally made good use of my RPi and setup pi-hole on it. After a painful 4hour long dist-upgrade and picking the right filters it is working like a charm. Why didn't I make this work earlier.

I've also wrote a little script which queries the api and displays different info on the AMOLED screen that was lying around unused for some time.

In case you are interested (from left to right and bottom), the traffic in the last 10 minutes with the max value on a graph, the most active clients query and blocked ratio as lines relative to the top one, and an overview of the total queries/ blocked queries and total clients.

At least I've finally spent a weekend useful not just playing games and watching anime.

Programmer: "Places : instead of ;"

Javascript: "What the fuck did you just fucking post about me, you absolute beginner? I'll have you know I worked for ten of the biggest silicon-valley industry companies, and I've been involved in over two hundred top secret projects including NodeJS. I am trained in refactoring the most fucked up code, and I'm the top C++er in the entire fucking internet-connected universe. You are nothing to me, but just another IP. I will fucking revoke your commits from your gitlab account with absolute dedication using only one Rasperry Pi client. Mark my fucking words. You think you can get away with posting that shit on one of my numerous very personal blogs? Your devices are fucking bricked, kid. My attack software can be anywhere, anytime, and it is tasked to remove your entire git contributions from planet earth. Not only am I extensively trained in remote cross-firewall device-hacking, but I have access to over 100 of the United States CIA and NSA git repositories. If only you could have known what doom-bringing C-one-liner you have raised from my fucking hands, maybe you would have held your fingers. But you could not. You did not. And now you're paying the price, noob. I will hail havoc upon your puny online-presence and you will drown in your own badly designed software. You're fucking offline, kiddo."

Finally got my wall up to my desk in whiteboard. 4' by 8' sheets cut to fit the whole wall with a 1/8" clearance at the top. Ignore the raspberry pi, I have to set it up this way because I have no USB network adapter or long enough Ethernet cable. There should have been a magic mirror where the box is but on that specific spot in the wall the studs are only 13 1/2" instead of 14" like they should be...

Very excited, got my raspberry pi zero working over usb finally, gotta admit it took me a while to figure it out that the ifconfig IP assigned to the interface established isn't actually the raspberry pi's (seriously you don't want to see how far the visited google links go for all variations of "how to setup the otg ssh connection"), that only came to me once I was able to find the mini-hdmi to hdmi cable, before that it was a pure shitfest:

First I just tried all sort of configs, but the raspberry pi kept denying the ssh connection, slammed the microsd into my bigger Pi, even multiple times ran raspi-config, forced ssh to start in all possible ways, nothing.

Then I tried to use the TV-output on it together with my old small portable tv to maybe see some error-logs or the ssh not starting on the zero for whatever reason, even flashed a 2016 image thinking it is stretchs fault for not working, but then my fucking soldering iron cable disappeared, tried to quickly create my own, but that failed cause the 3.5mm connector it uses is different from the ones I had available, so I macgyvered a sketchy ass lose connection with male headers sticking through from the bottom and being sticked against the board with a female end on top, but the TV output wouldn't work, even with proper config options, so I gave up.

Some days later I've found the cable, connected it and realized the fucking IP it gets assigned is totally different from the interface, well fuck my life.

Atleast now I can make a clean image of that microSD and setup the portable laravel development raspi as I wanted, can't wait to try it once I get more time to fully set it up - btw even the internet bridge worked right out of the box, so I can easily use my laptops internet connection on the zero.

None...

My work desk is ordered chaos. It's an unspectacular white desk.

To the left paper for taking notices... And a collection of notes highly unordered.

In the top left corner of the desk the router.

Middle (front to back): Color sorted post it's with my backlog and all the stuff that I need to keep track off.

Keyboard, Monitor

Right (front to back): mailboxthingy, post it block, utensilo (made of bamboo)

That's the working desk. Like the "shining knight in armor"....

Next to the working desk is the play desk, a large kitchen table with a 5mm thick black rubber (keep your dirty thoughts for yourself ;)) as insulation and scratch prevention.

There is usually utter chaos.

Banana PI R2, test router, old hardware, hardware storage cabinet, screw and other small part cabinet....

And to the right is a large chest of drawers where I cram everything in that doesn't belong anywhere.

I'm pretty boring I guess.

Except you are kinky for old hardware and lots of weird stuff noone uses nowadays...

Then you're in heaven I guess.

The Pilet (better names wanted) C5, basically a raspberry pi with a 5-inch screen on top.

I recently bough a HifiBerry Pro DAC+ ADC for my raspberry pi.

That is when I remembered....

Linux is bad, but embedded Linux is worse.

I just wanted to connect via Bluetooth to a speaker and play sound through a microphone.

Unfortunately, after hours of configuring software, Bluetooth drivers and then testing python scripts with PyBluez, I still hate my life.

I guess the fancy new Linux GUIs (that compete with windows) really do not work correctly, because I swore the Bluetooth symbol was lit up in the top right.....

Kill me.

This should sound like a no-brainer but I need some opinions. Is it worth it to use a pi-top instead of buying a laptop? For programming on the road, i'll just squeeze in a commit while traveling, ill just code instead of talk to my uncle in this reunion, quick commit while le gf is cooking, etc..., purposes? Are the disadvantages worth it enough for the advantages? I was hoping for an overall general programming companion including IoT.

I can't wait for the release of Snips Air sometime in 2019 so that I can stop using my Google home. It's not even the privacy concern that bugs me, it's the stupid shit like alarm management. To preface, I've had a Google home since late last year and since I got it the alarms have been nothing but trouble. More than half the time when I ask it when my next alarm is, it will respond with "You have an alarm for Friday at 7pm that is going off right now" (At the time of this response it was Tuesday). Then snoozing sometimes just doesn't work, I told it to snooze for 10 minutes, it worked just fine. Then today I made the mistake of asking it to snooze a second time which responded with "Sure, snoozing for 5 minutes", I wake up 45 minutes later, and ask "Hey Google, when's my next alarm?", it responds "You have an alarm today for 7:00 snoozed until 7:15". I have an exam today so luckily I didn't sleep in too late but againg this isn't the first occurence. To prevent this I normally just have a backup alarm on my phone and the one on my phone will wake me up in case something happens. On top of that though I've had rarer cases where it will delete all my alarms and I'll have to go command by command reminding of each alarm. That's just alarms though, I also have it control several IoT devices, and me having to use IFTTT requires the utmost precision in my phrasing otherwise it won't understand ( although this issue is mainly due to how the assistant service trigger on IFTTT is configured ). It still does much better than Siri ( at least my home can set alarms unlike my mac ), I have yet to try Alexa though. Of course my last problem is the hotword, saying "Hey Google" is much better than "Ok Google" but it's still excessive when I have to repeat it for each individual command. This is why I'm so excited for snips air, a set of devices that look pretty great, hackable, and as a bonus much more private that the current options. I realize that I could get a dev kit or set up snips on a pi but the dev kit isn't exactly visually appealing and I doubt I could get something that looks or functions half decent on the pi.