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A thing I found
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A new adventure
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So after a long illness. that can only be described as a break from reality and a ” feeling that everything was dead” My good friend and former roommate L helped me to land a new job. Subsequently Saving my life and preventing me from becoming homeless.
Lets talk about L; I met L some time around 2017 while working for stereotypical San Francisco startup. You know the kind, a few smart engineers/phds and myself. working on a machine learning based signals intelligence cloud based platform utilizing deep neural networks to change the world by helping sales people sell things.
L was a perfect match fresh out of one of the standard silicon valley feeder schools. young Caucasian male, slightly emaciated. round glasses, tight jeans and appropriately naive and an occupant of what I have previously referred to as programmer pods.
Getting to know L over the next 3 years I found that he was a little bit different. He didn’t really like to do much work ( I want to be clear he is an incredibly talented programmer) he enjoyed spending the vast majority of his time making coffee, reading Tolstoy and self diagnosing himself with an abundance of questionable medical conditions. As you might expect L was eventually let go for not doing much work. The company was sold to a larger more well funded cloud based communications platform built on deep neural networks to ….. help sales people sell things…
And I lost my mind.
Anyways skipping ahead to today. L called and asked if I wanted to go out for a drive. In standard L fashion he showed up roughly 3 hrs late after I had already eaten and asked if I wanted to grab dinner. I didn’t . So on a whim we got on the high way and started driving.we stayed on the highway while chatting about largely nothing and as we ran into the Richmond San Rafel bridge L instructed me to get off the highway so we could avoid paying the toll and ending up at San Quinton.
point molate is dark, very dark and a largely abandoned former winery, military base and abandoned industrial area. It has no street lights and very few people at night time . We drove around. looking for a place to stop to sit around maybe look look at the bay and the , kvetch and head off to find something to eat.
Instead I found myself just driving further and further from the highway on deteriorating roads. After a few miles of driving through an abandoned former military housing some interesting old warehouses and a lot of barbed wire fences. We ran into a sign resembling the one bellow. at the base of a steep hill.
At the urging of L we continued to drive over the hill onto the other side of point molate. The drive was interesting. But unfortunately as we continued to drive we started to see strange black stars nailed to the trees. maybe one suspiciously occult black star every 3000 feet.
it was dark and I will admit to being a little worried. L insisted we keep driving. As we started to reach the peak of the the hill, I began to realize we had been driving for maybe 40 minutes on a twisty dilapidated road decorated with pentagrams in the middle of the night. and I got a little worried. As we began our decent. L ( not a bay area native) started to bring up the fact that there are known to be a few cults in the bay area,…and wondered allowed if the black stars were in any way related. Naturally around the next several corners we could see that we were headed towards a small minimally lit marina with what appeared to be small shacks and house boats… the perfect place for a black star idolizing and hopefully friendly Satan worshiping cult. Just as we arrived at the bottom of the hill we saw a sign labeled with the words ” black star” and a small goat with only a passing similarity to this guy.
about 1000 feet later we ran into a pen of live goats and at this point. I could only hope that the occupants of the animal sacrificing satan worshiping cult we had discovered at the end of a private road on an abandoned military base were friendly. As we passed the live goats. We found ourselves in a dimly lit parking lot with some rusty light heavy industrial equipment, and two empty mid 90s economy cars. The parking lot was separated from the marina and a another urt/shack by small embankment topped by a set of abandoned railroad tracks. At this point I parked the car so we could get out and stretch our legs smoke a ciggerte and decide what to do next.
Out of an abundance of caution and fear of whoever was living in the marina. I decided we should walk down the rail road tracks in the opposite direction of the potentially inhabited part of the marina. In the dark with really no good idea of where we were headed. On this side of point late you can see out into the bay but there is no lighting and I was sort of disappointed that there was nothing interesting to see. And then… we ran into this.
Is this just not a digital signal?
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I set out wanting to capture the signal transmitted from my gate opener (pictured at the very bottom) but the results are confusing so I am attempting to document what I did.
The first thing I I did was build a basic receiver in gnu radio to do the capturing shown here.
osmocom source: This an interface to our software defined radio (hardware)
- sample rate: 16M ( our hardware can effectively sample between 8 million IQ samples per second and 20M because of my initially confusing results I upped it to 16M hoping it was a resolution problem.
- Ch0 : frequency: ( center frequency ): 300M 300mhz
- Ch0: RF gain: 0 this this controls a rx amp built into our hardware)
QT GUI sink: ( just a way to out put our signal in the frequency domain )
the brown line is peak hold using this I estimated the transmit frequency to be ~ 300.2 mhz the blue spike at 300 is a gnu radio side effect which occurs at the center frequency.
The next step I assumed would be to attempt to “tune” and demodulate the signal so I built a another flowgraph for that:
- File source: ( just our IQ samples stored in a file)
- Throttle: This prevents gnu radio from sending data faster than 16Mps
- QT GUI sink : outputs the previous graph
- Frequency Xlating FIR FILTER ( was supposed to accomplish the fallowing)
- tune to our signal by downshifting captured spectrum by the difference between the center frequency and the tuning frequency
- low pass filter the shifted signal with a cutoff of 50kHz and a transition width of 1Khz
- decimate the outgoing data stream down to our working_samp_rate of 400kHz
- XFF details ( how we do the above with this block)
- Decimation: int(samp_rate/working_samp_rate)
- Taps: firdes.low_pass(1, samp_rate, filter_cutoff , filter_transition)
- Center Frequency : freq-center_freq
Demodulation:( maybe this is where I went wrong?) : I am only really familiar with on off keying so I use the so called “complex to magic” block to provide a high constant value when the carrier is present and a low ~constant value when the carrier is absent.
The fallowing shows but the input provided to complex to mag and the output afterwards:
So Looking at things in the time dimension demodulated or not I don’t see anything I would recognize as digital maybe a nice square wav? So I suspect that at least 1 of the fallowing things are true.
- My gate opener is broken
- my gate opener is not digital
- my gate opener does not use on off keying?
- Something else?
please don’t call me an expert
1. a person who has special skill or knowledge in some particular field; specialist; authority
As I get older I get reffed to as an expert more and more often. Now on a certain level I find this very flattering ( and I really do appreciate all of the flattery I can get) unfortunately don’t think this sort of thing helps me or any one else, in fact I think it does everyone real harm. and the fallowing is why.
In the last couple of years I have been referred to as an expert in computer security , “Devops” and most recently Telephony. Certainly I know a lot about these things because I have spent a lot of time learning about them and practicing them, for both work and for pleasure. The problem starts to occur when we look at the definition of an ” expert” ( at the top of this post) . Well I am a person so that part is good hmmm… maybe I am an expert ? has a “special skill” well this is where I have my first problem. None of these skills that I have been identified for “expertise ” are special.
I regard knowledge in these areas to be as necessary for living in the world as say the ability to drive, open a bank account or make a trip to the grocery store. “Devops” ( which no one really agrees on the meaning o anyways) is simply the practice of merging the development of software with the deployment of said software usually in the context of software as a service. Today there are literally millions of Sass products that billions of people use every day. Why wouldn’t every one want/need to have some understanding of how this is done? The practice is so common it should ( and does) offer some real advantage to the people who know how its done and because of how common it is and how important it has become to the functioning of the world; the knowledge on the subject is freely available in multiple languages from a huge number of easily accessible sources and practice can be accomplished from the comfort of your own home for the cost of a computer and an internet connection. Nothing about this knowledge is special and telling people that it is simply discourages people from trying to learn about something that is easy to read about and understand and even try yourself.
Lets take a look at the ” particular field part” this part does fit a little better but I still don’t like it especially when when you talk about expertise in Information technology or computers. In the modern world computers are seen in every profession from cab driving to medicine.If you don’t think your Doctor should have knowledge about computer security I hope you don’t mind your medical records being public. Because if she relies on the so called experts to protect your your records they most certainly won’t be private for long.
“authority” This one bothers me the most Certainly all fields have people who have been working in them a long time and people who are really good and on face value might be worth considering a trusted authority.But consider how many times these so called authorities have been terribly wrong. The fallowing are few of my favorite examples.
I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.
Thomas Watson, president of IBM, 1943
Newton, F= (GM¹M₂)/r – Law of universal gravitation
I like this one a lot because it has fancy math( which lots of people believe makes something authoritative). If you don’t know how this one ends; some patent clerk was able to prove this wrong and in the process created the “theory of relativity” Ironically even Albert Einstein may turn out to be wrong in many ways.
At one point millions of people thought this guy would save Germany….. woops !
Being able to rely on some magical authority would be nice but in reality there is no substitute for critical thinking! And this is another problem with the idea of experts It Discourages the non experts from giving there own shot at critical thinking. I am not expert but I think I saw more than 5 computers today.
Originally I had more to say on this topic but I need to try and sleep.
Thinking about what my dad said.
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I was talking to my Dad today about various life things. Work, lifestyle etc… One thing that never occurred to me before was that his advice almost never comes with a rationale behind it. To clarify he does not have reasons for doing things a certain way he just does them that way.
I find this noteable because I am not this way at all, I have a reason for doing everything I do, even the dumb things. It made me think though. My dad is a fairly successful guy with lots of life experience, maybe his way of going through life might at very least be easier ? if not Superior.
For example, one of his favorite things to say when asked why he does something that is obviously unpleasant ” is because I have to”. For years I have found this sentiment very annoying, obviously there is nothing one has to do ever( even staying alive is optional) Today however, I asked and he did qualify it by saying that usually the things he “has to do” no one else can get done for him at a price, monetarily or not that he can afford.
I think the thing to take away is that at very least I guess there is some cognitive cost that my dad is not incurring by not over thinking things? The question then becomes what are some things that are worth believing you “have to do”? in hopes of making life a little easier.
Any ideas?
Why good hackers make good citizens
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Hacking is about more than mischief-making or political subversion. As Catherine Bracy describes in this spirited talk, it can be just as much a force for good as it is for evil. She spins through some inspiring civically-minded projects in Honolulu, Oakland and Mexico City — and makes a compelling case that we all have what it takes to get involved.
Snowden at TED
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give the NSA a call
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Please contact at 3016886524 or DSN 3126226524.
15 megabyte Hard disk drive
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now that a good deal !
House of cards returns for season 2
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So as of midnight this morning ( thats always a funny phrase) house of cards is back ( and the torrent is available). I had mixed reactions to the first season I have always sort of felt that kevin spacey played a better supporting actor than a lead but I enjoyed it and I especially enjoyed not having to wait for 1 episode per week, so season 2 can be found at
netchosis 