The FAA, ADS-B, and the ISO Folly
Posted by FirmWarez on 22 Aug 2012 in Blog | 0 comments
There’s a quick little blurb over on AIN Online about the “disagreement” between the FAA and “hackers”. Well, specifically a hacker, RenderMan, who gave a talk at Defcon 20 on potential vulnerabilities in the ADS-B air traffic system. More on this at NPR. Check out the slides from the presentation at RenderLab. Anyway, after...
Read MoreAll Failures are Human in Origin
Posted by FirmWarez on 20 Aug 2012 in Blog | 2 comments
I’ve been in charge of a few engineering departments. Whether I should or not, I approach my engineers with a certain philosophical mindset. You see, for all the numbers, the hard facts, the mechanical algorithms, engineers and programmers are inherently creative people. In my experience more like artists than the stereotype nerd of Big Bang Theory. So...
Read MoreStart-up Techies: time for a Chief Social Architect?
Posted by FirmWarez on 17 Aug 2012 in Blog | 0 comments
I read this article over at Make Magazine about the question of “now what” for folks who 1) successfully get funding via KickStarter and 2) are in the ramp up stage between a low volume hand built product and something mass produced. There had been some discussion the dc501 mailing list about a local firm, qu-bd, that successfully utilized...
Read MoreRotary Encoders for your Bots
Posted by FirmWarez on 16 Aug 2012 in Blog | 2 comments
All your bots are belong to rotary motion. How to sense this? Rotary encoders. There’s a very good article over at DigiKey right now on rotary encoders. Of course they’re trying to sell encoders to engineers to solve customer problems, and here we’re talking hacking and making, so I’ll throw out some ideas of how to implement encoders...
Read MoreDefcon harassment?
Posted by FirmWarez on 14 Aug 2012 in Blog | 2 comments
Updated 26 Aug 2012: a nice rebuttal to the harassment article by a female DC attendee over on reddit. So I read this blog — “Defcon: why conference harassment matters”. To be honest, I typically just ignore feminist rants. This one caught my eye, because just as the author, my first Defcon was 3. I have one of those nifty badges too. I...
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