It was a pleasure sitting down with Colton this afternoon to describe a little of what we’re all about at Rice County Skywarn!
Author Archive: Brian
New mechanical SCSI hard drive replaced in an Apple Mac SE FDHD
I replaced an old Quantum SCSI hard disk drive in an Apple Mac SE FDHD this afternoon. A project long overdue! I needed to use the third-party Lido hard drive management and partition utility to get the Apple to recognize a non-Apple hard disk drive. Just as proprietary and “closed ecosystem” back then as they are today!
Dashcam captures a car grazing a deer on State Highway 3 between Faribault & Northfield
A very close shave for the car!
Various Clips from our September 2023 trip to New York City
From Newark to Midtown on rail, Lower Manhattan, Central Park, Metro-North rail to Poughkeepsie, Little Italy, Grand Central, Times Square, and the rooftop lounge back at Hotel Scherman just off Times Square.
Minnesota Radioddity GD-88 Codeplugs for DMR
The Radioddity GD-88 is a neat, inexpensive new dual VFO analog/digital handheld transceiver. Since no codeplugs are publicly available for this transceiver that I have found, I made one based on the Anytone Codeplugs by Eric Ganske, W0EDG.
Check out the instructions and codeplugs at the link below:
The positives of a long, snowy Minnesota Winter.
This has been a long, snowy, perhaps difficult Minnesota Winter. However, I don’t ever remember one with such awesome sights. I can’t wait for Spring to arrive, but I sure don’t mind scenes of Winter mornings such as today, on the drive to Nerstrand.
Vinyl Outsells CDs
Who would have ever thought it? https://www.spin.com/2023/03/riaa-vinyl-outsold-cds-in-2022/
VIP tour of Johnson Space Center
Earlier this week, I had an opportunity to take a VIP tour of Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, and it’s definitely not something to be missed. Here I am in a now unused space shuttle flight deck simulator in the Shuttle Avionics Innovation Laboratory, as well as the visitor gallery of the historical Apollo and present day ISS mission control rooms. I actually got a chance to tour the Apollo control room itself.
Spyware in the Beijing Olympics Apps
Jonathan Scott, a PhD candidate that researches mobile malware/spyware/forensics in Boerne, TX, recently decrypted and decompiled the 2022 official Beijing Olympics Apps that athletes are required to install on their iPhone or Android phones. They are supposed to be used for data collection for COVID-19 and for Olympic medal notification. Instead, what he found, was that the apps not only record and send audio from the phone microphone and capture clipboard contents, but they contain AI technology that was trade blacklisted in the United States back in 2019.
While the spying in particular is not a huge surprise, what IS a surprise is that the app either 1) Got past both Apple and Google’s safety-assurance processes ensuring apps are safe to use (in fact, Apple specifically states there is no data collection from this app). , or 2) These apps were given special treatment by Apple and Google to work around the usual process for app approval.
Do I believe that Apple and Google, the top 2 of 3 technology companies in the world, had their top security experts fooled into thinking the app was safe? Well, certainly both have had instances of being caught not doing their due diligence, but both companies, about the same app? Interesting.
No comment from most U.S. press and government so far. The very first news agencies are just picking up on this story.
Decompiled App source code from Jonathan’s GitHub: https://github.com/jonathandata1/2022_beijing
Relevant tweet from Jonathan: https://twitter.com/jonathandata1/status/1486458526767661060
AppleInsider story: https://forums.appleinsider.com/discussion/226014