Now Entering The Signal
THE SIGNAL
Dispatches from Pixel City. Home lab builds, fixes, experiments, and the occasional disaster — written while the solder is still warm.
Now Entering The Signal
Dispatches from Pixel City. Home lab builds, fixes, experiments, and the occasional disaster — written while the solder is still warm.
Pi-hole and Unbound worked. The awkward part was getting a locked-down BT router to tell the rest of the house about them.
17 emulators, one launcher, and the nine things that quietly went wrong building an emulation station on Windows.
An SDRplay receiver, Docker, InfluxDB and a custom neon workspace turned live ADS-B broadcasts into a private aircraft observatory.
Continuous Bluetooth scanning, a proper package structure, a device database, and manufacturer lookup — PixelScope stops exiting and starts watching.
Stop using other people’s tools. Start building your own. This is the first dev log for PixelScope — a Python Bluetooth research platform with a Rich terminal UI and a very ambitious roadmap.
The sniffer was working. But listening isn’t enough. Adding a second Bluetooth device turned into a troubleshooting session — and a proper realisation about why you need two completely different devices to do serious research.
How a tiny ESP32 mining Bitcoin sent me down a parts box rabbit hole — and back twelve years to three dusty ASICs and a 2014 wallet I’d completely forgotten.
The NerdMiner v2 — an ESP32 doing 1,008 KH/s against a network running at 600 quintillion. The odds are impossible. It's running anyway. And I regret nothing.
I pointed an RTL-SDR antenna at 1700 MHz, grabbed the thermal noise, and built a password generator out of it. Is it more secure than /dev/urandom? No. Is it more fun? Absolutely.
With the sniffer running, the next question was whether I could spot my own phone in a sea of Bluetooth traffic. What followed was a lesson in BLE Privacy and why that turns out to be much harder than it sounds.
From blank USB dongle to 40,000 captured Bluetooth packets. Setting up a proper BLE sniffer on Kali — the right toolchain, flashing the firmware, and watching real wireless traffic appear for the first time.
airodump-ng fails with zero explanation. Turns out Kali ships two competing drivers and only one actually works for pentest. Then the right one won't build on kernel 6.x. Three patches later, we're good.