K.C.'s Garage

The video of my DEFCON 17 talk has been uploaded to VIMEO, in case you want to see it: Old Skool Brought Back: A 1964 Modem Demo on Vimeo . Thanks to Jason Scott of Textfiles.com .

So, as I am writing this, the FAA's Air Traffic Control system is down. More specifically, it has been reported that the computer systems responsible for automated processing of flight plans is down. As such, Air Traffic Controllers are having to enter flight plans one at a time manually for each flight before departure. This is having predictably catastrophic effects on the flow of traffic out of busy airports like ATL. Interestingly, four months ago a presenter at DEFCON 17 named Righter Kunkel gave a presentation on how antiquated and potentially insecure the FAA's system - specifically the system for processing flight plans - was.   He pointed out that anyone with very little information could easily flood the system with thousands of bogus flight plans and cause chaos. That talk was published on the web, publicly, a few days ago. So, is this what happened?   Naturally, we'll probably never know.  It might be that, it might be an unrelated failure, it might be that t...

I created an Excel worksheet for easily computing, charting, and printing the weight & balance for my aircraft, based on an older version that I had found on the net somewhere. The values are specific to my aircraft, but the spreadsheet should be really easy to modify for other similar model Cessna 172 aircraft. The spreadsheet includes a simple macro to make printing the worksheet portion easy. If you get the "Macros Enabled" warning, that is why. To download, click the image: Enjoy!

Kim and I went to San Francisco for a few days. It turns out Kim's Birthday fell on Fleet Week this year, so in addition to touring a cool city we got to watch some airshows, too! The panorama shot below was taken from Alcatraz Island.

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

A coworker turned me on to this decaying textile mill in the middle of this West-side Atlanta Suburb.  I called up TK and we headed out there and took some photos.  Man, this place is decayed!  The main plant is (was?) two stories, but in many places the water damage from the leaking roof has caused both the roof and second floor to collapse onto the first. The office section has a couple of rooms that are no longer indoors.   Anyhow, enjoy the photos!

Several months ago I visited a decomissioned milk packaging plant that I once worked in as an IT engineer.  Unfortunatly, by the time I dropped by most of the interesting stuff had been removed. Though it looks like the Kool-Aid Man had gone on a rampage just before I got there!