Would you like to play a game?

WarGames

The quintessential hacker movie, War Games, is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year with a special 1-night only showing on the big screen. (Wired ran a feature article about the movie today, as well.)

There is a Planypus event page where you can sign up (to let me know to look for you/save you a seat in our section), with a link to buy tickets online.

If we get a big enough crowd, we can do a happy hour/dinner before or after the movie. Perhaps a WOPR at Burger King.

HacDC at The Last Hope

HacDC’s effort at the Last Hope was a roaring success! Thanks to all who participated in the Hackerspace Village and HackersMart! We’ll definitely be bringing those to a con near you very soon (as in, after we get some sleep!)

And congrats to Eliot for his CNet mention! Mail us your HOPE links and writeups, info@hacdc.org

Categories: UncategorizedAuthor nootrope

Hacking the SmarTrip – Part I

Thanks to DCist – https://tinyurl.com/5spogg – I got inspired to rip apart an extra SmarTrip card I had lying around for when friends/family visit me in the D.C. area. Unfortunately for them, they will now have to buy the day-long pass until I am done playing!

To start, today I took the extra card and soaked it in acetone for about an hour and after that time I was able to rip off the initial plastic of the card. After that hour-long of soaking you’ll find the card becomes very flexible and if you attack the corners with tweezers you’ll eventually realize the 3 layers of the card. The face of each side should peel off rather easily, although a minute amount of force is required.

See the Flickr set here: https://tinyurl.com/6ck5q5

If you take a look at the images you’ll see that all of the electronics (controller, antenna) are now exposed and we can start to play. My girlfriend just handed me a Faraday flashlight with a GIANT coil of magnet wire inside of it, so now we’re working on extracting that wire to use as the antenna for the smarTrip’s microcontroller.

More to come…