linux module for realtek wifi usb

Tall Paul is a great tech youtuber, and also reminds us that tech is to make life better and more interesting. A tool to improve the lives of those who (must) use it. Also just fun to watch.

I designed a fully revertible modification for a Vornado 633DC fan so I could control it remotely over WiFi. The final result is concealed entirely within the fan’s housing, leaving no visible modification.

If you’re interested in building one yourself, the schematic, BoM, and PCB design are all available here. In terms of firmware, I used ESPHome with an external component, for which the source code is available here. The rest of this post covers the research and development that went into the project.

Great story about debugging a problem with a line-of-sight bridge that would only work when raining.

neverssl.com will never use SSL. No encryption, no strong authentication, no HSTS, no HTTP/2.0, just plain old unencrypted HTTP.

collects the SSIDs of wifi networks passing devices try to connect to and re-broadcasts them, keeping an impression of previous visitors

When macOS goes to sleep, it starts a low-power ‘smart sleep’ mode which opens a network connection to see if there’s any updates. It’ll keep this behaviour up every few minutes until you wake the Mac. This is a sleepwatcher script to make it turn off Wi-Fi power (and thus disconnect you from the internet) and tell you exactly what it’s doing (the ‘verbose’ tag), then running it again to turn Wi-Fi back on. When using IRC, this prevents all the timeout/reconnects your Mac fills a channel with when it goes to sleep.

As an alternative, check to see if LaunchAgent has been added to the newest sleepwatcher brew formula. Instead, you could try brew services start sleepwatcher and then create/edit ~/.sleep and put networksetup -setairportpower Wi-Fi off in there (and chmod +x it) then perhaps create a ~/.wake if needed.

Article describes how to connect a non-WiFi computer to a WiFI network via a Raspberry Pi.