So Nissan published new versions of their mobile apps for the Nissan LEAF, with upgraded security. A-Good-Thing™. But doing so, they added an unnecessary level of complexity on their API: the passwords sent by the mobile apps are now encrypted! I battled most of the evening, trying to find how they encrypt the passwords, to be able to reproduce it, and I as finally able to! [1] They encrypt the passwords using “Blowfish/ECB/PKCS5Padding”, and the key is a string returned by the API before the login API endpoint is used.

Maybe you just want to back them up for when something goes wrong, or maybe you want to set up a new two-factor authentication app on a platform that Authy doesn’t support (cough Windows Phone cough). Whatever your reasons, if you want to export your TOTP secret keys from Authy, their apps or support guys won’t be much help to you.

The trick, that I just used to install all my existing TOTP secrets in the Microsoft Authenticator app, is to change one of their app of which we have the source, namely their Chrome app, to show us what we want.

So, you’d like to buy a refurbished product from the Apple Store, but it’s currently Out of Stock. And will probably be for a while, and when it’s not anymore, the few units available will be gone in minutes. So you need a way to be notified ASAP when it’s available, so you can have a chance to order it.

Here’s a simple way using cron.

Earlier this week, I stumbled upon an iPhone app that allowed users to receive push notifications on XBMC. When a notification is received in XBMC, it appears in the lower right corner of the screen. Pretty cool.

This made me think it would be nice to see incoming phone calls there.

So I took out the Ovolab Phlink device I had sitting on a shelf, and created a small ‘ring’ script for it. That (Apple)script checks for the caller ID when the phone rings (and for a matching entry in my address book), and if it is available, calls an external PHP script that handles the network-wide notifications.

A projector and 120" screen sure are nice to watch TV shows and movies, but having them on the 3rd floor of the house makes the projector unhappy.

Being on the ceiling of the almost highest point in the house, during hot summer days, that projector can become quite hot. And when it does, it tries to compensate by fuelling it’s fans with enough voltage to make them sound like jet engines. (Not PowerMacG5-running-in-single-user-mode jet-engines-loud, but still…)

To try to quiet it down a notch, I built what some people call a hush box.

My central HVAC system has issues cooling down the 3rd floor of our house during the summer. Even with all 1st & 2nd floor traps closed, the system, which is in the basement, has difficulties cooling down the 3rd floor. The higher the exterior temperature, the higher the difference of temperature between the 1st and 3rd floors. The average difference is somewhere between 4 and 5°C, and I measured differences as high as 10°C in the beginning of the summer.