This section of MS uses a slightly different theme (with a different color scheme) than the main forums. We're gonna take it up a notch, and put an actual, SC4, Cities Skylines, or Cities XL background on all pages within this section. 

We need submissions for a background! We will change these periodically. For the time being, if you have a nice screenshot you'd like to share, please post it here! (Please attach the image so that we can download it more easily for posting here. You may post an in-post link, or use our image hosting as well. (Our image host does not resize, compress, or otherwise re-encode your photos, so it works perfectly for site backgrounds.) 

If you have something you'd like to share, please post it here!

Okay I lied.
I'm not actually using an Arduino board this time.
Why?
Because they're bulky. 
And if you're going to try to do something questionable that might end up pissing off the person you're doing it to, then you want to be as discreet as possible, and fitting a MEGA2560 to the back of someone's computer isn't really the way to go about that.

Note:
This is a Work-In-Progress, basically a project journal that I'll be updating hopefully over the next week until I have a working prototype.
When it's complete, it'll probably look a lot more like my hash-cracking guide in terms of formatting and style.
For now, these are all ideas that I have in my head on how it will work and how I'm going to make it work.

So, without further ado, let's get into it.

Keyloggers:
What is a keylogger?
The short answer is, something that logs all the keys you press on your computer, in an attempt to grab sensitive data that might be unobtainable by any other means, due to encryption and whatnot. You might grab someone's email password and screw their life up from there, or maybe you just want to see what kind of 'videos' they watch in their downtime. 

Typically, keyloggers are pieces of software that just run silently in the background. The only problem with this is that antiviruses exist and keylogger detection rates are pretty high nowadays if you don't have code-signing certificates or driver-level execution. Both are relatively hard to pull off, so keyloggers aren't as popular as they used to be.

Background:
A couple years ago, one of my internet friends (in the security field) was recruiting people involved in electronics manufacturing and embedded development to come up with an undisclosed product. A year later, he came out with a Hardware Keylogger, with a nice shopify site and everything.

The cost was probably what a Rubber Ducky from Hak5 costs, about 50$ or so, and as we all know, Hak5 products are scams if you have the capability to make them yourself. I mean, you can basically create a Rubber Ducky using a 1$ digispark which already comes with a USB connector anyway so it's more or less just as discreet (if you're willing to 3D print a case for it or something to make it look like a normal USB drive.)

So, that got me thinking if there was a way for me to also recreate that product for 50x less cost and a little elbow grease. In the spirit of cyberpunks being hi-tech lowlifes, and without wanting to give up my hard-earned dollars on something I can probably make myself, I came up with the general idea of what the device did.
But, as that was years ago before I actually got decently good at embedded development, I put it off for a while.

So here I am now, with the general planning done and the materials acquired (rather, they were sitting around gathering dust and I figured I should probably put them to use and make something cool.) Here they are:

• 1 x Teensy 2.0 (AtMEGA32u4 16MHz)
  
• 1 x Female USB header/connector/port
  

Greetings, Zalost here and today I'm going to start with a basic overview of an idea I've sorta had for a while, the concepts behind which allow anyone to modify both car stereo systems and potentially use them to make custom home stereo systems, for cheap and or out of recycled stuff potentially.

ok so you can approach this many ways but the big one is that you need a central unit that can do the following.

*Adjustable volume control.
*Adjustable channel levels (stereo quadrophonic, or more if you want 7.1 etc.)
*At least 1 external input.

ok so to start with in my example I'm going to use as my central unit, your standard car stereo with cassette player.
Why a cassette player? because the one's used in cars are slot loading and take up way less space, also as I found out through tinkering with various ones, easier to clean and maintain since they're less complex electronically.

in this case we'll use an alpine 7288, it as a port on the back for an external CD changer, more on this in a moment.



Notice the CD option on the 3rd button below the cassette bay.

see on the back there's a 7 pin DIN connector for plugging into a CD changer, but since it accepts standard Stereo audio input we can make use of it with a custom cable.



so once you have your stereo input the hard part is done, well outside of the power supply, but we'll get to that, it involves an old PC power supply

so once you have your AUX input (select CD on the main unit), what you need to do next is wire the stereo wires to a switch of some kind, I particularly like rotary switches for this but you can use any kind of switch you want, the number of poles is the audio channels you're switching plus ground and the positions/throws is the inputs so keep that in mind when you are selecting your switch/Switches.

in our case I'll be using this 3 position rotary.



basically what this does is let's you select the inputs on your device, you can also do a bus switch setup but that raises the complexity.

finally you'll need to select your inputs.

you've already got 2 thanks to that car radio, AM/FM and Cassette, you have 3 more for a total of 5.

in my example let's add a Bluetooth input 



Wire the channels as needed.

a CD player can be added using one of many projects involving a CDrom drive and an arduino or raspberry pi as the control and playback interface, many old CD rom drives also offered L/R channel audio out options reducing the complexity of this, just use the sbc as an atapi controller.

and finally your aux input, just wire up a standard headphone/aux jack to the front, unless you want to add dedicated RC plus in the back.

note: if you want to add both, use a bus switch (insanely cheap these), and wire the voltage line to the chip so that it switches if it detects signal, you can do this by wiring one of the inputs to both the bus and the VCC pins, I'd say do that for the front headphone jack input. (read 8mm TRRS jack)

you can obviously have fun and be creative with this, use multiple switches, use switches with more inputs, etc.

some of the inputs you can build/add include things like 8track players, Tracker file players (xm files, mod files etc.), MP3/digital audio players (read off SD card or flash drive, possibly combine with CD player?)

it's able to be whatever you want and that's the fun part.

finally you're going to need a computer power supply.

I recommend a modular one, that way you can make your own wiring harness for whatever devices you're rigging up and just plug it in after the fact.

the diagrams for the various pinouts are on the web, just remember that most of your car equipment uses 12volts so you'll need to account for this in your power supply.

luckily computer power supplies output 12 volts and are fairly regulated, just adjust the amperage using a variable resistor to make sure it outputs the correct amperage, most car stereos use around 5 amps so make sure to account for this when making your wiring harness between the power supply and radio unit, same with any other components.
here's the formula for figuring out what resistor you need.
(5-4)/0.36=R

do the same for all other devices, you'll find the majority are DC so just adjust as needed getting the starting voltage as close to the needed as possible, usually on the high side to step down and regulate it.

there's tons of information on the net regarding using resistors in DC circuits to output specific amps and volts so do more research on that unless you want to end up with the bad smelling "magic smoke" frequently talked about in electronics circles.

I'll answer any questions posted as they come up and post my own unit as I build it but I wanted to go over the theory and concepts first.

It used to be a hugely mainstream genre. Eddie Van Halen, Led Zeppalin, Triumph, Rush, Metallica, and so many others were so hugely influencial on music, and it was so much more mainstream. 

Now, it's niche at best. Metallica carries the torch, to some extent. Tool is still around. Rush was around until recently. Greta Van Fleet is true classic rock, and they're doing great. But these days, mainstream music has changed so, so much. It is now much, much harder for a band to appeal to the masses AND stay true to classic rock while they are at it. 

Panic at the Disco is the new mainstream rock. As much as they are a great band, they aren't true classic rock. Not even close. It's rock with a major pop twist. 

What are your thoughts? And of course, in ten years, what bands do you think are going to be carrying the torch forward?

Status Updates - Advanced Status Feed

Update May 2, 2020: I'm currently in finals week at university. Development will be resuming within about a week. Please check back soon!

We're working on a brand new plugin for MyBB to allow profile comments, status updates, and more. And firstly, it's actually mostly written! It's installed here in its full form. A little buggy, don't worry, we will be fixing that.

What makes this plugin very unique is that it is the ONLY MyBB status/profile comment plugin that supports replies. Yaldaram had one many years back. It is now gone, and no longer available or supported. 

We also have statuses show up on the postbit, and have a special "community wall" with all status updates. It's going to be a fully featured plugin by the time that we are finished developing it. 

What's already implemented:

•  
• Replies! In addition to writing statuses on your own profiles (or other user's profiles), you can reply to them. It's a unique feature to our plugin here. No other plugin (that I am aware of) supports this. 
  
• Built in alerts. (They are fully featured and actively being improved) 
  
• Support for user profiles, index page, portal page, and a standalone page. 
  
• Built in Jquery and ajax. (Will be expanded upon significantly.)
  
• Highly configurable. 17 settings already, even in the dev version. 
  
• Similar features to Profile Comments/MyProfile. Write a status on your own profile, or on another user's profile.
  

• Add a like button. (Done) 
  
• Provide proper myalerts integration (and expand native alerts as well). 
  
• Moderator CP report functionality. 
  
• More ajax. Remove the redirect when you add or edit a new status. Make it appear instantly.  (Done)
  
• Style the postbit (under the avatar) statuses much better. (Done) 
  
• Make the "Community Wall" page much nicer. Add sorting by user, date, most liked, etc. into the mix. 
  
• Add a "buddy list only" sorting functionality so that you can either get notified when a buddy posts, or only see those posts on a special page. 
  
• Twitter-like hashtags?
  

• Feedback and ideas. I can't know what features are needed (or how they are used) unless real forums share some insight on what they need! (Really can't stress this one enough. Trust me, it helps me as a developer quite a bit. )
  
• 3-4 people who will commit to helping test the beta version when it's released. (I currently have one comitted tester already. If you would like to join the testing team in the next few months, please reach out! )
  
• Some styling help. If you can come up with a few CSS or template edits on what we have here that will make them look awesome, please reach out! Design is not necessarily my strongest area, so I'm open to any contributions of any kind.  
  

This should be an interesting one... 

Many say that musical talent is born, not made. (Personally, I disagree. I was tone deaf for years... I eventually figured it out, after being at it for long enough) 

Graphics design seems to be an entirely different story. Some are absolutely great at it from the very beginning, even before they truly know and understand the tools. Others know the tools as if it were the back of their own hand, and yet their designs are still struggling. 

I think that passion is the true root of creativity. You can't really be creative until you're first passionate about it. What are your opinions?

I'm gonna go on a wild one here, and try and see what the general consensus is for what the world will be like ten years from now. It will be interesting to see how our predictions stack up. Try to be realistic. Nobody thought the cell phone/iPhone would have taken off the way that it did.

My prediction is that laptops and tablets will evolve considerably. We already use tablets extensively, but their use will outpace actual laptops and computers. We will be carrying around super thin devices (thinner than what we have now) that are running operating systems advanced enough to do graphics design, audio work, development and programming, etc. 

Windows will make another big flop after Windows 10, and once again try to get involved in the mobile sector. 10 years from now, they will have failed, and likely will be focusing on Cloud hosting and services as their main source of revenue. 

I also think cars will go back to slightly more classic look (much like websites started using square borders instead of rounded corners again). The interiors will be very nice. The exteriors will be (slightly) more boxy once again. But who knows on this one... Who knows.

What are your predictions? Who knows. Ten years from now, we will probably look back on this thread and see how it all stacked up.

Background, not really needed and slightly NSFW in the sense it involves drugs.

Quote:So I took an unknown pill after lots of testing and acetone washing to try and figure out what the substance was. Didn't have a Marquis test kit on hand, only Ehrlich and Ehrlich only tests for an indole group which you may find in LSD, DMT, regular Serotonin, or Melatonin, a common over-the-counter sleep aid.

My conclusion was that it was either:
1. MDMA
2. Amphetamine
3. Methamphetamine.

I won't disclose which one it was, but it looked like an E404 without the actual lettering imprint, just the cross on one side, so probably a press of something being sold as Adderall IR to students. Needless to say, a study aid would be nice today for me to finish up some Chemistry homework and assignments because I have a midterm coming up on Monday.

• My average reaction time is around 210 to 220ms which is slightly above average. I used to be quite the gamer back in the day, CSGO and the likes.
  
• My average typing speed sits somewhere between 70-75WPM, which is still considerably above average but nothing compared to what I was getting now.
  

For those of us who stay busy, how do you manage your schedule? I know some people who manage to work 55+ hours a week, and are in school full time. Never quite understood how they did it...  

For me, it's planning everything well in advanced. I'm very rigid with my schedule, and that helps a lot. How do you find yourself managing your time when things get busy?

http://www.rinmarugames.com/playgame.php...ar-creator

Might be a kinda weird art style, and unfortunately it's a Flash app, but it's pretty fun and is rather extensive with customization.
So instead of posting a photo of yourself because that's weird, make a photo of yourself using the assets.
Or go full fantasy if you really want, but mine's somewhat accurate to what I look like (minus the hair because although it does flange outwards at the bottom and my hair is pretty long, it's also a lot more straight than these portrayals as round. 

My coats are also a lot darker than the 'black' here.