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I recently found some USB devices on eBay (Epiphan VGA2USB LR) that could take VGA as input and present the output as a webcam. Given that I was keen on the idea of not needing to lug out a VGA monitor ever again and there was claimed Linux support I took the risk and bought the whole job lot for about £20 (25 USD).
We generally know that when we buy a piece of technology that it will not last forever, connectors wear out and/or go out of fashion. But I think the most frustrating reason to have to get rid of something is that drivers stop being made for devices.
Lately I have had the need to do real time video capture from HDMI devices as of late for a project, and while looking around the internet found that all of the capture cards that are aimed at gamers (windows / OSX support only) or full blown production capture (Very expensive, more inputs than I need). The other…
Tape storage is surprisingly not dead! If you are here then you may be considering using LTO tape as part of your backup or your long term archiving strategy. I’m here to mostly talk you out of it, or at best make sure that you are aware of what you are walking into.
This post is a textual version of a talk I gave at The 38th Chaos Computer Congress at the end of 2024. You can watch the talk that was recorded by the wonderful C3VOC team below if that’s your preferred medium:
Ethernet rules everything around us, a large proportion of our systems communicate to each other with ethernet somewhere in the line. And the fast pace race to the bottom for embedded systems means that almost all network equipment is smart to some degree these days.
A few months ago I stumbled on a tweet pointing out a kind of SFP optic that claimed to be smart, made by a Russian company Plumspace . After going through their Smart SFP product listings I was on-board and decided I needed to have some of them.
It has become clear that storing secrets in computers is hard. The best demo to the world that storing secrets on “online” computers is hard and sometimes devastating, is the large amounts of cryptocurrency theft due to critical keys being in memory of systems directly or indirectly connected to the internet.
This story, like another in the past , started as an eBay purchase that I would soon regret. I was scrolling through my favorite eBay supplier when I found a listing titled Job Lot Of Roughly 350 Various Network Cards . This of course piqued my interest. Some close photo inspection identified a whole load of cards in…