I am struggling for something to write today. I spent last night working on the second stage of a reverse engineering project, but I haven't made much progress yet and there isn't anything to show. Windows tools seem determined to be as alien as possible to use.

I had a look through my browser tabs, I still have what I consider the canonical bytebeat reference open. bytebeat is a sort of code golf based algorithmic music generation, the tiny snippets of code can manage to create some awesome sounds.

There are quite a few people working on audio from crazy systems. Captain Credible's excellent album Dead-Cats is generated with an attiny85. I have Blooper Eel mini synth kit from him that I have toyed with a ton at my desk.

And this is just the start of the rabbit hole, if you want to go up a level you should read the excellent noisepedals blog .

Reading: Litte Brother, Transmetropolitan

I seem to have a knack for finding the hardest problems to start with. Anyway I thought I would have a look at doing some android reverse engineering on a local transit app.

First you will need to get the apk application bundle for the app you want to have a look at. If you have the app installed on your phone this is really easy to do with adb .

$ adb shell
anddroid$ pm list packages
package:com.google.android.youtube
package:com.android.providers.telephony
...
package:com.android.documentsui
package:com.android.externalstorage
package:com.test.testapp

anddroid$ pm list packages | grep testapp
package:com.test.testapp
anddroid$ pm path com.test.testapp
package:/data/app/com.test.testapp/base.apk
anddroid$ exit
$ adb pull /data/app/com.test.testapp/base.apk

Now you will have the apps apk as base.apk and feed it to jadx . jadx is a dex to java decompiler with a pretty gui and the ability to deobfuscate code. When you fire up jadx with the apk you will get a complete break down of the apk bundle and decompiled classes.

At this point you should see the decomiled classes, but as I said I am great at picking hard targets. There is some decompiled java here, but there are also mono packages and a load of dlls shipped in the assemblies directory.

As I said, great at picking hard targets. To get further with this I shall have to find a c# decompiler, they seem to be quite common.

Reading: Little Brother, Transmetropolitan

Today has been a very slow start, most of yesterday was spent drinking shows and playing with radios. I wanted to post a gif from twitter, but my brain isn't work well enough to figure out how on earth to get hold of one.:

pic.twitter.com/O6m93MgvAW

— 豊井 (@1041uuu) September 13, 2016

I can embed a tweet here using the code twitter gives me, but the media preview doesn't seem to work. There aren't any errors in the console or in the network debugger in firefox.

It is Sunday, so that makes seven days of writing .

Reading: Little Brother, Transmetropolitan

Weather is horrible againg, looks like we are getting the tail end of some dramatic weather.

Hibby and I planned ot try some more line of sight microwave , neither of us fancied climbing a hill in this storm. Instead we did a bit hf from my QTH. Radio power meter looks mental when doing hell .

Reading: Little Brother, Transmetropolitan

It is raining so hard I can hear it over my music and the rumble of the bus. It is raining in the book I am reading. Completely unconnected events, but humans have this thing for making patterns where they don't exist.

In this book over centralisation leads to a complete media blackout. Decentralisation is a core ethical tenant , of course I enjoy the collapse of the media in the story.

But what can you do about centralisation?

Until the singularity you are going to be stuck as a centralised human being. I know it sucks, but one day we will be able to move past this.

The indieweb movement has great advice for getting started . The biggest single step you can take to decentralise yourself on the internet is to have another machine to represent you.

Once you have a VPS running somewhere in the internet, you have access to an constantly running, near permanent version of yourself.

Reading: Little Brother, Transmetropolitan