This is part of a multipart series where we’ll be modifying a homebuilt 6502 processor computer in strange and creative ways.

In this part of the series we’ll be building a circuit to demodulate (or decode) Kansas City Standard audio and load that onto our 6502 computer.

Kansas City Standard or BYTE Standard, was a standard developed by BYTE magazine back in in the late 70’s. It was used to store computer data on standard, low-cost, audio cassette tapes. It was designed to allow common people to be able store data at home as there weren’t many options to do so back around that time. There were even radio shows where they would broadcast out Kansas City Standard formatted audio and nerds like you and I would tune in to, listen to the broadcast and record the last part of the show to “download” a new computer program!

At the conclusion of this KCS build, we’ll be able to load our Ben Eater 6502 from tape!

Part 1:
We’ll go through the history of the Kansas City Standard, some deep level details, and then an overview/theory of how the circuit works. At the end of this video, we’ll have a demodulated UART stream ready to feed into the logic part of the circuit.

We’ll also be introduced to Mr. Monostable, a refined gentleman with a short temper.

DROP A COMMENT if you’re interested in a kit to perform this build yourself. I’ll put one together if there’s enough community interest.

Part 2:

In this video we latching (or holdon to) the data coming in and we FINALLY get to see some Kansas City Standard data being decoded!


…he’s watching.

Here are a couple ways I’ve come up with to reboot CradlePoint devices remotely. These were all tested on MBR1400 routers using v6.0.2 firmware. If you have proper HTTPS certificates installed for the web interface you can drop the ‘–no-check-certificate’ or the ‘–insecure’ options on the WGET and CURL commands. Also note that the CURL and WGET commands are using the password in the command. This can be insecure for many reasons.

Of course, you could always use the web interface too.

Using SSH:

ssh [user]@[ip address] 'reboot'

Using WGET:

wget --no-check-certificate https://[ip address]/api/control/system/reboot --http-user=[user] --http-password=[password] --post-data 'data=%221%22'

Using CURL:

curl --insecure https://[ip address]/api/control/system/reboot --anyauth --user [user]:[password] --data "data=%221%22"

Custom HTML using POST:
You can throw this code into a custom website, if you really feel the need.

<form action="https://[ip address]/api/control/system/reboot" method="post">
     <button type=submit name="data" value="1">Reboot CradlePoint</button>
</form>

Using SMS:
You can also use SMS to send a text message to the CradlePoint router instructing it to reboot. Unless you’ve changed the SMS password, the SMS password is the last eight characters of the MAC address. It’s specifically an SMS password (so it’s not tied to any user account).

The format of the text message:

[password],reboot<br />

You’ll receive a text back from the device:

Sometimes you may have a SID (objectSid) for an Active Directory object but not necessarily know which object it belongs to. You can find the object using PowerShell.

I’ve been thinking about building a plugin for MPD that would allow it to talk with Google Music for a while now. Currently, when I purchase music from Google Music, I have to download it and push the new music up to my local music share on my network. Once my music is there, MPD can stream it without a problem… I love MPD!

I came across a situation last week where I needed to finally disable NetBIOS over TCP/IP. While looking for a way to disable it, unfortunately, I found that there really isn’t a good clean way to do so using Group Policy. At least, if there was a good way, I couldn’t find it.