Seemingly Mundane Search Results

News: Watch Out Amateur Mushroom Hunters — Death Caps Are Nothing to Mess With

There is a reason the Amanita phalloides mushroom is called the "Death Cap." It can kill you. Mushrooms are a type of fungi, an organism that produces thread-like mycelia that often produce spores. Spores allow the fungi to reproduce. Molds, lichens, and yeast are all fungi, but the most visible fungi are mushrooms. Some fungi are delicious, but others can cause disease or, and still others, like Penicillium, can cure it.

How to Hack Radio Frequencies: Hijacking FM Radio with a Raspberry Pi & Wire

In our first part on software-defined radio and signals intelligence, we learned how to set up a radio listening station to find and decode hidden radio signals — just like the hackers who triggered the emergency siren system in Dallas, Texas, probably did. Now that we can hear in the radio spectrum, it's time to explore the possibilities of broadcasting in a radio-connected world.

News: Meet the Nokia 8 — The First Android Flagship from the Iconic Brand

Long before Apple and Android became household names, Nokia dominated the mobile industry. The Finnish company was one of the first to develop smartphones, and their classic N95 with 2G "high-speed" internet connectivity was declared the "best smartphone ever" by some in 2007. Outside of the US, before the iPhone became all the rage, owning a Nokia phone was a status symbol akin to wearing a Rolex or Omega watch.

How To: Cook Any Cuisine Perfectly by Knowing the Right Ingredients to Use, Part 1

Home cooks are often quite intimidated when trying to reproduce the delicious ethnic dishes they enjoy at various restaurants. Thankfully, there are definite flavor profiles and spice/seasoning/herb combos that are very specific to various regional cuisines and cultures; with a little guidance, you can create dishes that are tasty homages to the cuisines you love to eat. In this two-part article (second part here), I'll cover both categories and sub-categories of some of the most popular ethn...

How To: Take Better Photos with Your Phone

It's truly amazing how far smartphone camera hardware has come in such a short period of time. It took roughly 5 years to advance the image processing capabilities from a pixelated mess to the crisp and clear photos we can take today. This reaches well beyond the megapixel spec race, since camera modules these days sport vastly improved optics, wider aperture, and even larger pixel sensors that capture more light.

How To: Get Started with MicroPython for ESP8266 Microcontrollers

For anyone interested in using cheap, Wi-Fi-connected microcontrollers like the ESP8266, the Arduino programming language can be a barrier to entry. Based on C++, Arduino requires knowledge of more computer science than languages like Python. Fortunately for beginners, setting up MicroPython on an ESP8266 allows anyone to write Python on affordable microcontrollers in a matter of minutes.

How To: 10 Privacy Settings in iOS 13 That Everyone Should Double-Check

Apple has seemingly always made it a priority to show how much it cares about user security and privacy — enough that it has a page dedicated to it, proclaiming that "privacy is a fundamental human right." It's true that there are few issues more important than user privacy when it comes to technology, and Apple only makes things better in iOS 13.

News: The Enterprise Leap — Robots, Gremlins, & Games Won't Save Magic Leap, but Tapping the Inner Child of CEOs Just Might

Mystery is a tricky thing. Used correctly, it can give onlookers the impression that wondrous and perhaps valuable things are afoot. However, once the veil of suspension of disbelief is removed in any significant way, that same mystery can quickly turn into not just skepticism, but outright anger at what may have seemed like an attempt to dupe trusting onlookers.

How To: Use a Virtual Burner Phone to Protect Your Identity & Security

Every time you make a call or send a text, you're giving the recipient your phone number. This can be quite the security vulnerability, opening yourself up to scammers, spammers, and the feds. In this how-to, we'll look at what a burner phone is, why you might want one, and how to get started using a free second phone number on your regular smartphone.

Hack Like a Pro: How to Build Your Own Exploits, Part 3 (Fuzzing with Spike to Find Overflows)

Welcome back, my hacker novitiates! In the previous two posts in this series, we looked at the basics of buffer overflows. In this post, we will look at one technique for finding buffer overflows. We will try to send random, oversized, and invalid data at a variable to see whether we can make it crash or overflow. This process is known as fuzzing. It is often the first step to developing an exploit, as we need to find some variable that is susceptible to overflowing.

Ingredients 101: How to Salt Your Food Like the Pros

In order to make your food taste good, your favorite restaurant is most likely using way more salt than you think they are (among other pro secrets). Which is why when you ask just about any professional cook what the biggest problem with most home-cooked meals are, they almost always answer that they're "undersalted" or "underseasoned." (In cooking lingo, to "season" food means to salt it.)