Gregory P. Smith gpshead

Stevey's Google Platforms Rant

I was at Amazon for about six and a half years, and now I've been at Google for that long. One thing that struck me immediately about the two companies -- an impression that has been reinforced almost daily -- is that Amazon does everything wrong, and Google does everything right. Sure, it's a sweeping generalization, but a surprisingly accurate one. It's pretty crazy. There are probably a hundred or even two hundred different ways you can compare the two companies, and Google is superior in all but three of them, if I recall correctly. I actually did a spreadsheet at one point but Legal wouldn't let me show it to anyone, even though recruiting loved it.

I mean, just to give you a very brief taste: Amazon's recruiting process is fundamentally flawed by having teams hire for themselves, so their hiring bar is incredibly inconsistent across teams, despite various efforts they've made to level it out. And their operations are a mess; they don't real

Setting up Pi Zero OTG - The quick way (No USB keyboard, mouse, HDMI monitor needed)

More details - http://blog.gbaman.info/?p=791

For this method, alongside your Pi Zero, MicroUSB cable and MicroSD card, only an additional computer is required, which can be running Windows (with Bonjour, iTunes or Quicktime installed), Mac OS or Linux (with Avahi Daemon installed, for example Ubuntu has it built in).
1. Flash Raspbian Jessie full or Raspbian Jessie Lite onto the SD card.
2. Once Raspbian is flashed, open up the boot partition (in Windows Explorer, Finder etc) and add to the bottom of the config.txt file dtoverlay=dwc2 on a new line, then save the file.
3. If using a recent release of Jessie (Dec 2016 onwards), then create a new file simply called ssh in the SD card as well. By default SSH i

Swift Concurrency Manifesto

Author: Chris Lattner

Chinese Translation by Jason Yu

Controlling the Brother P-Touch Cube label maker from a computer

The Brother PTP300BT label maker is intended to be controlled using the official Brother P-Touch Design & Print iOS/Android app. The app has arbitrary limits on what you can print (1 text object and up to 3 preset icons), so I thought it would be a fun challenge to reverse engineer the protocol to print whatever I wanted.

Python code at the bottom if you want to skip the fine details.

Process

Intitially I had a quick peek at the Android APK to see if there was any useful information inside. The code that handles the communication with the printer in Print&Design turned out to be a native library, but the app clearly prepares a bitmap image and passes it to this native library for printing. Bitmaps are definitely something we can work with.

	# Heavily depends on:
	# libqrencode (fukuchi.org/works/qrencode/)
	# paperkey (jabberwocky.com/software/paperkey/)
	# zbar (zbar.sourceforge.net)

	# Producing the QR codes:
	# Split over 4 codes to ensure the data per image is not too large.
	gpg --export-secret-key KEYIDGOESHERE \| paperkey --output-type raw \| base64 > temp
	split temp -n 4 IMG
	for f in IMG*; do cat $f \| qrencode -o $f.png; done

	#!/usr/bin/env python

	# loopback test script
	# connect MOSI and MISO

	import spidev
	import time

	spi = spidev.SpiDev()
	spi.open(0, 0)

	"""
	Add mypy type-checking cell magic to jupyter/ipython.

	Save this script to your ipython profile's startup directory.

	IPython's directories can be found via `ipython locate [profile]` to find the current ipython directory and ipython profile directory, respectively.

	For example, this file could exist on a path like this on mac:

	/Users/yourusername/.ipython/profile_default/startup/typecheck.py

	#!/usr/bin/env bash
	#
	# Author: Markus (MawKKe) [email protected]
	# Date: 2018-03-19
	#
	#
	# What?
	#
	# Linux dm-crypt + dm-integrity + dm-raid (RAID1)
	#

	import hmac, hashlib

	# Data from I²C trace at https://hackaday.io/project/19480-raspberry-pi-camera-v21-reversed/log/52547-i2c-logic-analyzer-trace
	# Secret key from VideoCore blob

	# serial[8], serial[7:4], serial[3:0]
	serial = bytes.fromhex("EE8C196D8301230B59")

	# rPi -> camera random number
	numIn = bytes.fromhex("5805F3C898C3133154498E082F2E703516F2DBD1")