TJ's Blog

Home Automation

Making a Dumb Lock Smart with DIY Hardware and ESPHome

It turns out you *can* teach an old lock new tricks!

Home Automation

Unlock the Full Power of Cheap Smart Plugs with Tasmota

Learn how to install open source firmware on a cheap Emporia smart plug in order to unlock its full potential.

Workshops & Guides

Creating a Comprehensive Personal Backup Solution

Learn how to create a comprehensive backup solution for all your important stuff based on the 3-2-1 backup strategy.

Short & Sweet

Linux Fingerprint Authentication on ThinkPads

Learn how to enable fingerprint authentication on your ThinkPad with a Linux distro.

Short & Sweet

Custom Scripts for APC UPSes

Write scripts that react to events that happen on your APC UPS!

Life

Life After High School—What's Next?

Why I'm skipping college and diving into a job hunt right out of high school.

Short & Sweet

Switching to Ghost

If you've been here before, you probably noticed that things have changed. That's because this blog is now powered by Ghost! It's a very nice publishing platform that really beats writing Markdown for every post.

Projects

Hacking Chinese Drones for Fun and (No) Profit

Reverse engineering a WiFi-enabled Chinese drone to figure out how to control it from my own software.

Hacking

Hacking Voting Machines at DEF CON 25

Let's rig some elections.

Workshops & Guides

Intro to Node.js: Making a Telegram Bot

Learn how to make a simple Telegram bot in this short workshop.

Old Posts

Back to School Vulnerabilities

Back to school. It sucks. But hey, I get to see how many security vulns there are in the school’s stuff. Not that I’m saying it’s a good idea to do that. Don’t.

Old Posts

CodeDay Geolocation

The geolocation on CodeDay.org has been really bad since we switched Geo-IP providers, the geolocation API built into most browsers fixes that!

Old Posts

CodeDay San Diego Fall 2014

A look back on CodeDay San Diego Fall 2014.