Stuff

This page is for some of the more geeky things I've done. There is no hope of creating even a concise list of all the little hacks that might be of interest to the diverse range of people who might stumble onto this web page, so here are just a few things.

Car stereo hack

A small project to graft an audio jack onto my car stereo. My cd stacker broke and i don't want to pay for a new one, and there was no way to play mp3s in my car anyway. I wondered if there was an easy way to fix that.

I pulled the stereo out a few weeks ago to see what i could do about that and only got around to working on it today. It took most of the evening but now i have an audio jack in my car to plug my mp3 player into. See the flickr link for more info.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/aelse/sets/72157602412975798/

I'm happy that i didn't blow up my car, my stereo or myself in the process.

Bluetooth screen lock

A quick hack to do proximity screen locking based on a bluetooth device being present. This was done late at night when I probably should've been sleeping and it could be done a lot better.

• phone-lock.pl

dns tunneling

I did a Crypto & Security course at UNSW in 2005. Most seminar groups had to present on a particular topic allocated to them, but mine was given the task of delivering a seminar reviewing the content of the course. I didn't think the Tunneling seminar covered enough, since they only talked about VPNs, so I came up with a basic implementation of tunneling through DNS. A set of scripts here can be used to turn a file into records for a bind zone file. These can be retrieved by other included scripts using DNS queries to reassemble the original file. I did a live demonstration of this and it worked well enough. I ended up tutoring this course in the following year.

• dnsdownload.tar.gz

Webmail

I had a project to create a webmail system and integrate it with Active Directory. It ended up being Horde/IMP/Turba on a Linux server and is working quite well. I did not find a whole lot of information easily about it, so I've written some information about it, in case it is of use to someone else. This might be useful to anyone wanting to accomplish something similar without having to read as much code or browse through LDAP directories.

• Integrate Horde/IMP with Active Directory and Exchange

Mazegen

I was working on an OpenGL xscreensaver hack. Part of it involves maze generation. Some sample output is here.