K.C.'s Garage

I'll be speaking again at DEFCON this year, this time about the c. 1964 Livermore Data Systems modem that I have. So come out if you want to see it (and me) in person and watch a live demo. I've got some interesting things lined up, including some demos showing the versatility of the ancient Bell 103 modulation system used by the modem. Cheers! - K.C.

Duckie and I took the Cessna into town to shoot some aerial photos of the Metropolitan Industrial location for Freeside Atlanta .

Metropolitan Industrial: The "Metro" is a large warehouse space divided into three main partitioned areas. The first area has an enclosed space occupying roughly 60% of the width of the space. That enclosed area has a couple of single-office sized rooms (one of which is psychadelic painted with glow-in-the-dark stars) and a bathroom with a working shower in it. The second partitioned area has a kitchen built in it, complete with counter space, a kitchen sink, a range, a dishwasher, and an "island" counter with electrical power and storage space. At the back of the second partition is another enclosed space with two small office-style rooms, another closed-sized bathroom, and a weird small unfinished alcove-like room (not photographed). The third partitioned area is open warehouse space, with a small semi-wall dividing it from the two large roll-up garage doors in the back. My photos do not include the front area's enclosed rooms because they had dark...

Hi folks! Just a quick note - I've moved to a new hosting provider. If you see anything wonky, broken links, or other such weirdness shoot me an email. When I first migrated the database (a few days ago) I ended up with some spurious Unicode characters scattered throughout the website. (E.g. lots of strange à characters stuck in around words, &etc.) Turns out the problem was mysql. Wordpress was correctly backing up the database as utf8, but when I re-imported it, it was re-encoding it for some reason. The solution was to add "--default_character_set=utf8" on the mysql command line during the database restore/import. E.g.: # mysql --default_character_set=utf8 -u{username} -p{password} {dbname} -h {hostname} Deleting and re-importing the database with the --default_character_set option fixed it right up! (I'm posting this as a reminder to myself as well.) Cheers! - K.C.

Alright, here's some photos of the beast: And, in no particular order, some answers to the questions I've received: 1. This modem uses Bell 103A modulation, in "Originate Mode" only. Unfortunately, that means you probably couldn't have two Livermore Data Systems Model A modems talk to each other. The "Model C" seems to be the first one that also supported "Answer Mode" modulation. 2. This modem is solid state; it uses transistors (albeit early, metal canister ones.) It doesn't have vacuum tubes in it. (Whew!) It functions exactly as I received it twenty years ago - I haven't modified or repaired it in any way. Yes, I am as amazed as you are! :-) 3. The host used in the video, as well as all the accounts, credentials, &etc, were set up in my lab specifically for testing the modem and were taken down the next day. Hence, I didn't have to worry about obscuring my typing or login credentials, &etc. Than...

So I was going through some old stuff in my garage and I found this antique modem that I've had since I was a teenager.  Turns out it's a Livermore Data Systems "Model A".   I decided to hook it up and see if it works, and I made a YouTube video in the process: I'll get around to posting some better photos of it this weekend, I promise!

Kim, Willbob and I went to Puerto Viejo, Costa Rica on vacation. We stayed in a lovely house in the jungle outside of town. My pictures are below. You can also check out Kim's photos on her Picasa Album