Zipit Z2 USB Charger

This is a pretty simple mod to the original Z2 Power Supply. First we start out with a Male and Female USB cable kit. This allows you to make custom USB cables. As you can see, the hood just snaps together with the USB connector inside.

These can be bought off ebay for pretty cheap.

Cut the original PSU (Power Supply unit) so you have a usable length of wire coming from the Z2 power connector, and attach the USB male end. Make sure you dont get the polarity wrong! If you look closely there will be one wire that has a white stripe on it, for my PSU this was the negative lead. I highly suggest using a voltmeter to make sure.

Here is everything placed out and soldered on. Notice how I removed the middle two pins of the Female USB. I did this to make it easier to solder, and so I dont accidentally cross the the D+ and D- pins with voltage , just in case I use this to power another device like a thumbdrive or what not.

If you need the pinout to the USB port check this URL for more information.

This is an image of the whole thing put together.

In the end you can charge the Z2 using a USB port, the original PSU, any generic USB Wall Charger, or even use an emergency USB Battery pack, like those found in stores to boost the battery life of your cell phone or MP3 player.The final product.

This is not very hard if you have the parts laying about and some basic soldering skill. I was able to complete this in about 8 minutes. It took me longer to heat my iron than it did to actually build.

Distrusting technology

Hello, I am a New York Lotto machine. If you play with me, you can become very wealthy with little or no effort! Look how cute I am, how can you say no?



I have a cute little backside. Innocent and unassuming. You can trust me.



Take a closer look, see? I know you want to play.


Look at my cute little hat! Everything about me says you can trust me, and love me in ways only rapists and pedophiles will know.




People put way too much trust into the technology that runs behind the eyes of their world. You do not realize that machines like this exist all day, every day, everywhere. Thy are here to make out lives more convenient, easier, or a little happier.

There are way to use both wired and wireless ways to access devices like this and exploit them. This is not some movie hype bullshit. This isnt The Matrix. The bottom line however is, that giving direct physical access to a communication port allows attacks to happen. The port on the back is a Network Port. The make and model printed above it is often times enough for a clever person to start digging up technical information as to the operational ability and tasks this machine was designed for, and also pathways into finding exploits and flaws in which this machine can be turned from a tool into a weapon. The wireless antenna on the top shows that the person doesnt even need to be inside the store and plugged in (possibly) in order to bend this machine over their knee and stick some well lubed code up its ass.

Think about all the tech in your life and how much you blindly confide in its ability to keep the things you say to it a secret. If you lost your cell phone, and someone found it, how much would they be able to know about you? Name? Phone number? Friends names? Where you live? Where you work? Where you play? Personal messages from lovers, friends and family? Your E-mail.... with all your personal accounts and passwords?

The world is not what it seems.

Review of the Feidaxin FDC-460A ham radio

I heard some decent reviews about the Feidaxin brand of ham radios. These have been what we call 'Rice Box' Radios. They hail from parts of Asia and with that come at a very cheap price. On average a single band radio will sport about $60 USD or so. Being that they are damn cheap makes them appealing, but are you getting what you pay for?



From my experience with my FDC-460A its not completely horrible. For $60 I cant complain much.

The good:
Inexpensive.
Works great as a spare radio
Just fine for a simple radio that does repeater, CTCSS, and DCS.
Unlocked in the entire 400-460MHz band, use as FRS/GMRS (or other) Radio.
Decent solid design, I wouldnt beat it up but its not a bad radio.
Ni-MH Cells, easy to upgrade or replace if you are handy with a soldering iron.
Full 5 Watt on all frequencies. Or 1 watt in low power.
Option for programming cable for the PC and software to program the memory channels.
99 memory banks.
Can be put in "Stupid User Mode" which allows the user to cycle through the programmed. channels, like a regular 2-way radio.

The Bad:
No Alpha tags, you have to memorize your frequency list, unless you put it in "Dumb mode"
Scan speed is slow, even for an HT.
Digital Squelch.
The charge dock mashes in the bottom row of buttons on the radio, its hard to dock.
Battery charge time isnt the best.
They have a male SMA connector on the radio, which is weird.
User manual is in horrible engrish, but with some common sense its not hard to figure out.
Programming software is usable but in engrish.
Some people report having defects.
Doesnt operate the best in extreme cold, so dont keep it in the car during winter.
Programming the radio by hand is a pain in the ass, but isnt that said for all HTs?
When using a headset you cant use the PTT button on the radio, you must use the PTT on the headset... thats just weird too.
No VOX Support (I dont like VOX anyways).

General
I use mine on both ham radio bands, local security (in hindsight I should have gotten the 410-470Mhz model), FRS/GMRS, and anything else in between. The squelch control is menu driven, you may not like it. I dont mind so much but being I have been an HT and Scanner user for many years I am very accustomed to manually adjusting my squelch while in the field. The 1W / 5W power selection does seem like a small drawback especially for battery consumption, but this is common on even expensive radios. I like having a Low-Medium-High setting. The fact that it can do full 5W (closer to 4W on the upper band) is nice though. I can pop on the FRS/GMRS bands at 5 Watt. Yes, I know it is not legal to operate over 0.5W on FRS Bands. Blow me, I dont give a rats ass. When an emergency arises I can hand out a small fleet of FRS radios and use this FDC-460 as a repeater node (with some additional hardware). I have seen report of some people making low-cost, low-power mobile/portable repeaters out of these lil' buggers. This is also great for an inexpensive APRS Radio

If you just need a spare radio to hand to the kids, wife, or friend to keep in contact via simplex, or have a friend that wants to get into the hobby and you dont mind being control operator for them, this isnt a bad choice. I keep this as a backup and when I am out hand it to my lil' lady Bunnie, or even my other friends when we want to go shopping and I want to fuck off. I see crappy FRS/GMRS radios that cost just as much and dont offer the features this thing has.

It also has full PL tone (CTCSS) and DCS Support which is also used on many security fleet radios, FRS/GMRS, and Ham Radio Repeaters. Unfortunately the lack of Alpha Tags you need to memorize what all your frequencies belong to. There is a mode you can boot the radio in by holding the [F] key and turning on the radio which puts it into what I call "Dumb mode". It will list each programmed frequency as a number in a list, rather the frequency. It also locks out the ability to manually tune in a frequency, play with the offset, PL/DCS, and other settings. This way you can set it up, hand it to an inexperienced user and just tell them "Tune to channel 4" or whatever...

I would definitely recommend getting the programming cable. Programming any HT for me is a major time consuming pain in the ass. Unfortunately the software is in Engrish as well. For me it wasnt hard to get working at all, but I am an experienced hacker and technophile. I have noticed that most Hams have as much computer skill as a 4 year old child on drugs, or worse. Just make sure you get the right programming cable, if you are using XP, go for the USB one. Dont even ask for OSX or Linux support! I wouldnt consider this a major purchase factor though.

Some minor quirks
For some odd reason they put a male SMA connector on the radio. Typically you see the male connectors on the Rubber Duck Antenna or Coax. A female SMA coupler fixes this though.

(Yes, it came with a very nice antenna)

Another small quirk I noticed is that if you use a headset you cant use the PTT on the radio. It will transmit but no audio will travel from the HT. You must use the PTT on the headset. There is no VOX control, which I dont use anyway. I find that loud cars, alarms, and background noise tend to false-trigger most VOX controls since I am not a typical fat, lazy ham that hasnt seen his penis in years. I use my radio out in the field and I am very active in general, and this radio has done a pretty good job so far. For $60 shipped... I cant bitch.

The funk never ends

As many of you from BSoD have noticed the show has been canceled due to a severe lack of help from the community. I have been griping about it for quite some time with the honest hopes of my blunt honesty it would perk people into helping out. After all of the unreliable boasts of segments, a busy and moderately unstable social life, and proceeding health issues, I do not have the resources to maintain the show with just the help of Mustang alone. He has been on the edge of severe diabetes for quite some time and I do not want to put any more burden on him than his health and family already do. I have plenty of segment content myself, but this isnt going to be The Foxx Show, ever, despite the fact that 90% of the fans of BSoD think I am the main man behind it all. I will take credit in getting things started, taking off in the direction we have, and sustaining interesting content for all these years, but I will never be the viable dictator commanding people to come forward to help that people assume me to be.

Onto my own personal affairs. Scuba from the BSoD community sent me a Wyse S10 terminal. It sports a 300Mhz AMD Geoge CPU, DDR RAM, and a typical 44 pin IDE header. The hardware is very similar to the WebDT 366. I have been trying to work my magic on it but one thing has really been putting roadblocks in my way, and thats nazi-computing. Wyse designed the BIOS so it will boot from USB only if it contains a specific partition and disk image layout which is 100% proprietary to their hardware. This thing is just a small form factor computer with a crippling BIOS so they can make sure you keep crawling back to them for support.

With the custom USB Booting aside I popped my Compact Flash card from my WebDT 366 into the Wyse S10 with the aid of an IDE to CF adapter and 44 pin ribbon cable. Besides the fact that the Windows XP install had absolutely no drivers for the hardware and I couldnt log into it, the thing boot just fine as expected. I could easily deploy a Linux distro from another host computer then tailor it once its in the Wyse S10. There is also the option to do a Network Install of an OS using PXE NetBoot, that is something I havent tried before so I will give it a whirl when I get some spare time.

The WebDT 366 is coming along as well. I caught a great deal on some Memorex 8GB Traveldrives. They are old but as soon as I saw them they looked a wee bit bigger than a typical Compact Flash or Microdrive. I decided to roll the dice and use my technophile intuition and I got three of them for about $8 a piece. As soon as I got them I popped one open and my assumption was correct, 8GB Microdrives! I tossed one onto the WebDT 366 IDE bus and installed XP a little hastily. In my excitement I didnt pay much attention to the finer details of the install so right now its far from optimal, however the Microdrive is operating in UDMA mode 2, which is a max transfer speed of 33.3MB/sec compared to the Compact Flash cards PIO Mode 4 which is only 16.5MB/sec. Any attempt to force these cards to operate any faster using BIOS settings make the OS crash almost instantly. I know these speeds sound like a ball busting crawl but hey, this unit is durable!

Something else I found out while doing all of this work with Compact Flash and Microdrives. I thought I had fried my CF cards because they wouldnt boot an OS anymore. Assuming I blew out some of the NAND gates in the MBR section of the cards, which is why I got the microdrives. After my second install of XP on one of the cards which I used for a different device I came across the same issue I had with the CF cards! Using a simple linux command recommended to me by another BSoD'er, Modat7, I did a full binary wipe of the drive inside of a linux virtual machine with the drive on a USB adapter. After the process was done I went back to work installing the OS on the native host hardware and dont'cha know it, it worked flawlessly. Unfortunately I cant exactly replicate the cause of this problem, or explain why it happens, but now I know how to identify and fix it.

With a little more time and patience I should have the DT366 in a field ready test phase. Ive unbricked my Zipit Z2, and the WebTV 2 RM4100 is running different OS flavors just nicely. The RM4100 needs a peck more work with some hardware hacks though. I have also reworked my Nokia n800 with a more stable and useful configuration for field work. With the help of Metatron I was able to get my WiSpy hooked up but the USB is so unstable its pretty much worthless as a 2.4Ghz spectrum analyzer. I will try out the WebDT soon but I need to focus on the OS and fine tune it to squeeze every bit, byte, and nibble of resources out of it.

Over the holiday I rebuilt the battery pack for a Microsoft Pharos Bluetooth GPS which I am quite proud of. Its sporting an interchangeable Ni-MH 3-Cell pack.


I also built a TNC-x kit which is (hopefully) going to air on BSoD once we kick back into production. I had to do some very minor modification to the serial port hookup which involved having to make a DIP socket Piggyback to get the leads out to the connector. I didnt have enough room to hook into the onboard DB-9 serial port and I didnt want to solder leads onto the PCB itself. I felt that it could be a cause for failure in the future.



In time all of these devices will be modular with one another adding onto their capabilities. They will combine to make different types of terminals, scanners, desktops, and portable mobile mayhem generators.

WebTV 2 Update

My larger compact flash cards can no longer sustain a full feature Windows XP OS, so I have fallen back to linux. There is nothing wrong with this, but linux on the RM4100 isnt new. The CoreBoot BIOS crew has been working on a replacement BIOS, which should kick my BIOS's ass, since they know what they are doing and I am just using blunt tools to carve away at something I dont fully understand. Dot get me wrong, I know how a BIOS works, but fucked if I can write one from source.

I have Damn Small Linux, Puppy Linux, and Debain on separate CF cards. Full debain doesnt run too well, a bit too bloated. If you are new to linux and want it on the webTV 2 RM4100 I dont suggest you start with Debian. There is some work needed to be done in order to get the TV Output working though. If you are not linux savvy then I dont know what to say. It will work, but if you arent wise with linux, just try and stick with the other prebuilt flavors.

All hardware in the RM4100 is supported under linux, except native TV output, but that can be fixed with the proper packages. No BIOS level support yet.

Save Now

You can check out the SeaBIOS here: http://www.coreboot.org/SeaBIOS
The main issue here is how do you flash the BIOS? Whelp, im working on a softmod method as well. Its based off the old BootROM Video Test Exploit, but do not expect me to make this work. This is not an area I am familiar with, then again, thats why I enjoy this.

Faceplant of sucksess

I promised I would post more often, and I am a man of my word. Although I prefer to spend my spare time hacking, modding, soldering, and tearing away at the inner soul of machines, my current situation has lent me a few minutes to update. Per previous posts and personality traits, I like to post about something thats worth a damn.

Like I mention over and over and over again, the Webb TV 2 RM4100 hacking is not dead. Not in the least, no way, no how. Time and the lack of it... anyways. Recently I pulled it out to confirm some of my BIOS hacking suspicions and try to make some progress. I have managed to podge together an AMI BIOS thats damn compatible with this RM4100. Only MAJOR BIOS level issues is that the machine cant restart itself. I suspect its an ACPI issue, but this is fixed once an OS is installed. Wait... what?! You got an OS installed?! HOW! WHICH ONE!

[ WebTV 2 RM4100 installing Windows XP SP2 - Click image to link to my picasa page ]

Yes this is my livingroom, which has suffered from a severe bulimic episode from my lab. Now to the fine details:

Using Compact Flash cards which is already onboard, native Primary Master and bootable on the RM4100, and and IDE mod, I hooked in a regular optical drive which has been powered off a separate PSU for now. The RM4100 does in fact have pads for an IDE header for the Secondary IDE chain, and even a spot for a molex power connector. I just havent gotten around to activating it. You need to add a few through hole electrolytic capacitors to get the onboard molex working. I have it set up and going on another RM4100 I have. Granted pre-install of Windows XP with SP2 was painful being that the BIOS had forced the Compact Flash card into a very slow DMA Mode 2 which is a crippling 33MB/s. After post install and I had configured Win XP with some minor tweaks, the typical action of turning off themes, indexing, restore points, and useless animations, then proceeded to install the device drivers... it ran pretty god damn smooth! I was able to get the CF card into UDMA Mode 4 which is twice the transfer speed. Performance wise I wasnt impressed, but I was surprised at how smooth it was, despite how the CF card was bottlenecking the OS Speed.

Performance does not compare to your typical PC today, but for what its worth this thing was running very nice, smooth, I couldnt complain. Except the Compact Flash cards were not in the best shape and it crapped out on me over and over again. I was able to test a few theories.

• IR keyboard/Remote is hooked to a microcontroller on the PS/2 bus. You cant put PS/2 back in, but you can use the IR keyboard if you remap the keys using some extra software. The keyboard doesnt have a full set of needed keys (Like the F-Keys and Esc)
  
• The BIOS can not get the TV-Out working natively. VGA is needed to configure the BIOS
  
• I was not able to get the Intel Extended Graphics to detect a TV display, chances being there is no load balance for the transmission lines that are used to detect displays. I can not force TV out with the default drivers. The CF Card shit out before I could install an application that will force TV output, but my assumption is that if we force it, it will work, and the registers for TV out in the IEGD (Intel Extend Graphics Driver) will TSR (Terminate and Stay Resident) letting the BIOS do TV out, granted you have the BIOS CMOS Battery in place to keep all the registers set. When I plugged in a display, it did detect a carrier sync signal, which means it IS spitting an output to the TV-Out!
  
• Sound is in fact muted on the hardware level. There are some specific registers that need to be set to desaturate a transistor that keeps the sound card in a hardware based mute mode. Drives are at full volume, but nothing comes out. Removal of transistor Q3002 on the board gets it working. Crude hardware hack but it works. I do not have the coding skills to set the proper registers on a driver level to unute via software, 3 seconds with my soldering iron is a lot easier for me
  

I made some decent progress, a lot of my assumptions were correct and my technical experience in internet appliances and embedded hacking hasnt failed me yet on this device. Unfortunately all of my Compact Flash cards are extremely unhealthy and do not provide a stable test environment for me. I have some parts on the way, so just stay patient with me and I will release as much as I can as often as I can. This device does show quite a bit of potential granted you know how to make the most out of your hardware.

WebDT 366, and beyond the stars.

Ive given up any hopes in hell to make a mating connector for my WebDT 366 IDE Flashrom Board, so I ripped out the 2mm pin header which is only half height. Surprisingly it was quite simple! Back breaking, tedious, and utterly mind-numbing, but I think many people can do it, granted they are comfortable with a soldering iron. Seeing how I had a busted IDE cable from previous attempts to get an IDE cable modded and working, I chose to solder the cable directly into the motherboard. Yeah... dont do that, major pain in the ass. You can easily install a normal height 2mm header so you can use a regular IDE cable. From there you can use almost any style IDE drive you want to use. ALMOST ANY IDE DRIVE!

The WebDT 366 IDE bus is limited to 3.3V drives, and no more than 350mA or so. I havent tested it exactly how much amperage it can handle. 300mA drives work fine, my CF cards are rated fr that, 500mA does not. Now we can "borrow" power from the USB port, but with my current direct-wire hookup, its not easy to disconnect the +3.3v lead from the board. After all, we dont want to directly hook something that can handle more voltage and amperage into the IDE +V line, now do we? NO! We do not! Of course the first thing that comes to mind is USB. Granted I think the USB on the WebDT is useless beyond text/mouse input, the dock does have some USB lines I will have a very unlikely chance of ever using. I can/will mod some of my IDE to CF afapters, and 44 pin to 1.8" IDE (aka iPod Drive) adapters so they directly take power off of the USB on the interna cradle connection, which leads to a 2mm pin header anyways. The mod will be pretty simple in general, granted you can grasp the general concept.


This is the general idea. Compact Flash drives work, but they are somewhat slow in PIO only modes. I used a 6GB microdrive that detected, but it drew 500mA (labeled on the drive itself) and I had major issues with what seemed to be random power brown-outs. Here is a stock install of XP Pro 2 with the themes pulled out, and some very minor optimizations. The OS still needs some work, but thats a matter of personal preference and wont really get into it.

Now for something kinda' cool. You may or may not know, I am into ham radio. Not the typical two fat fucks talking over a static repeater link about local news, weather, and bowel movements. There is a LOT more to the hobby. One of them being Slow Scan TV. Its is a method of encoding digital images into an analog signal and transmitting it over a radio carrier. Its like TV... but slower.. get it.. SLOW Scan TV (SSTV from herein).

SSTV was used on many space missions for imaging, and I am talking back in the 1960's. Technology has improved just a wee bit over the past few decades. Getting the hardware to get SSTV going isnt all too taxing in general. I loaded up MMHAMSOFT's SSTV software on my friend Ugster's WebDT, and on my laptop (for now, I dont have the right audio connectors) hooked into my Handheld Radios (HT Radio). One is a cheap $60 FD-460A 70Cm band (440Mhz) and the other is a Yaesu FT-60 dual band (google it). With some basic audio patch cables and software set up, we started sending some images.

The image is actually a macro shot of my eye using a Playstation 2 Eyetoy USB Webcam with drivers hacked to be used under windows, and a red LED for a backlight. The radio as stated is an FDC-460A