The ESP32 quietly became the most important chip in my smart home
…Basically, no one needs to pry open those devices to solder any extra components to hack them. You can flash a custom firmware, like from ESPHome, to make them compatible with the…
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Someone made an ESP32 controller where the game lives on the pad itself
…However, what if you could have a handheld console where the screen is on the controller itself? Or, better yet, if you had an ESP32 device that could act as a handheld…
I replaced my smart home hub with a $120 mini PC, and my smart home finally feels responsive
…None of them recognized my smart TV, smartphones, smartwatch, or any other smart devices automatically. I had to configure using skills and apply workarounds that felt like hacks. When my Philips Hue…
Nintendo built the 3DS to be unhackable, but a $5 puzzle game and a QR code proved them wrong
…also hacked the 3DS. However, everyone was wary of Nintendo, particularly if an exploit enabled piracy, which this one did as it was a full kernel-level takeover of the device. Still…
I turned my dusty Chromecast into a $250 smart home hub replacement
…Sign in to your XDA account If you've upgraded to a 4K Google TV , an Apple TV, or any other streaming device, you might find that your old 1080p Chromecast dongle…
Switching from Cloudflare DNS to a home-built resolver taught me how much I was trusting them
…I can run blocklists, block access from geographic regions known for hacking, and gain fine-grained control over which devices on my network can see. Look, I'm no fan of censorship…
Someone got Windows 95 running on a graphing calculator, and yes, it takes 7 minutes to boot
…But what if you had Windows 95 on your Texas Instruments device that you could boot up at any time? Using the power of Tiny386, someone has achieved just that, although it…
Your router's parental controls are security theater, and here's the firewall rule that actually works
…Router apps give you a false sense of security, but modern devices default to encrypted DNS over HTTPS. A tech-savvy kid doesn't need to hack your router. Their router natively…
My Fire TV Stick is infinitely better ever since I enabled this hidden setting
…The solution is buried in settings Toggle a setting in the Amazon Fire TV Stick To break out of that frustrating sandbox, you don’t need to hack your device or do…
Tailscale is the only home lab change I made this year that I actually noticed
…It's on my jailbroken Kindles, every Android or iOS device I own, and anything else that I could find a hackable way to put the secure overlay network on. And that…