Joseph Hewitt
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jhewitt.net
Joseph Hewitt
@jhewitt.net
Cybersecurity consultant with an interest in electronics. British, but now living in The Netherlands. Creator of the ESP32 wardriver: wardriver.uk
Noticed quite a drop at the load balancer that handles my incoming traffic but it seems to be slightly improving again.
November 18, 2025 at 11:49 AM
Obviously you should only do this to laptops you legally own and have the rights to modify.

But if you happen to have an old-ish Thinkpad with a supervisor password which you have, uh, forgotten, then maybe just using a piece of wire connected to ground is all you need to fix it :)
October 6, 2025 at 7:36 PM
I'm looking at this area of a ThinkPad motherboard with illicit intent.
October 6, 2025 at 10:51 AM
Finished editing the photos from @why2025.bsky.social and really like the vibe of this shot from one of the foggy evenings.
August 17, 2025 at 1:49 PM
It works. Also running 3rd party firmware (Rockbox) now.
February 19, 2025 at 10:11 PM
Opened it up and removed the mechanical hard drive. I'm going to replace it with an iFlash Solo which lets me insert an SD card for storage instead of a spinning disk.
February 18, 2025 at 6:56 PM
I used photorec to extract the files since the iPod had been reset, then used ffprobe to pull out the metadata from media files.

For each file synced with iTunes, you get something like this since iTunes often leaves quite some metadata. This makes it easy to see when syncs happened.
February 13, 2025 at 6:41 PM
Went for a walk recently and met this friendly cat :)

This photo was taken on Kodak Vision 500T 35mm cine film which I developed at home.
February 1, 2025 at 11:15 PM
Deactivated my Twitter account today. Still being on that platform after recent events just feels dirty.
January 24, 2025 at 6:23 PM
The relative humidity in my apartment averages around 30% so I got a humidifier. I tried to avoid it, but the one I got was an ultrasonic version (the site didn't say that though 😑). This graph shows the particulate matter (PM) after running it, since it vaporizes all of the impurities in the water.
January 11, 2025 at 2:39 PM
My Olympus OM-1 film camera jammed recently and I decided to look inside to see if I could find any obvious cause. I suspect the previous owner was a little rough with it because some plastic on this gear was snapped and the shard had jammed the mechanics. I removed the shard and now it works again.
November 19, 2024 at 7:06 PM
I put a bunch of these small E-ink grocery pricetag displays running OpenEPaperLink around my apartment.

I'm running StableDiffusion on my home server to generate AI cat pictures and push them out to the tags.
November 19, 2024 at 7:06 PM
The hardware is nice but officially it only supports an outdated customized kernel. I spent this weekend determining exactly what changes their kernel has to reproduce it on other versions.

Now I have a newer version and will soon work on fixing compatibility for kernel 6.1.
November 19, 2024 at 7:06 PM
I finally received and built my uConsole; a handheld Raspberry Pi based portable computer.
November 19, 2024 at 7:06 PM
I've now turned this into a smart fridge magnet showing the current fridge&freezer temps, a random cat photo, a QR code redirecting to the latest live temperatures, and the time the epaper was last refreshed. It updates every 5 minutes but that can be customized.
November 19, 2024 at 7:06 PM
I'm testing some wireless epaper displays. I now have them integrated into our home automation meaning I can display stats or random cat photos from an API.
November 19, 2024 at 7:06 PM
I got a used ThinkPad T480 today, happy to see it is configured to use an M.2 drive rather than SATA. I have spent the last few hours stress testing it and saw no stability issues.

I have a new 1TB SSD and 2x16GB RAM sticks arriving tomorrow to upgrade it with.
November 19, 2024 at 7:06 PM
I started an open source (hardware & software) project for wardriving based on the ESP32. It captures GPS coordinates along with information about nearby WiFi, Bluetooth, and cell towers. The data can then be sent to WiGLE for analysis.
November 19, 2024 at 7:06 PM
It's really simple but I made this board which is part of my open-source wardriving project. It lets you connect 2 ESP32s, GPS, an LCD, a uSD card, and a SIM800L together to capture WiFi and GSM data to upload to WiGLE.

There's no SMD on here to make it mostly beginner friendly to build.
November 19, 2024 at 7:06 PM