Hacking an Aqara Door Sensor into a Dead Bolt Sensor

Here’s an exciting home automation project for you: Can a door sensor work as a way to tell if a door is dead bolted? Yes…but do you have any paperclips? I’m a big fan of home automation, especially since working from home, and I’ve been experimenting with the Aqara sensors. Their door, temp, water, and vibration sensors all work great for me, but what I really need is a way to check if the back door of my garage is locked.

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    Bret Taylor steps down as co-CEO of Salesforce

    Bret Taylor, whose career in tech can only be described as prolific, has stepped down as co-CEO of Salesforce. Salesforce said Wednesday that Bret Taylor will step down as co-CEO on Jan. 31, leaving Marc Benioff alone again at the top of the cloud software company he co-founded in 1999.

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      Where are the Passkeys?

      David Sparks, of MacSparky, is wondering where his passkeys are now that iOS 16 and macOS Ventura are out. With Apple’s latest round of updates, we’ve got a new password feature that lets your computer manage passwords for you in the background. … I’m curious, however, as to when Passkey websites will start showing up.

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        The Hacking Humble Bundle

        No Starch Press has once again worked with Humble Bundle to release a Hacking bundle which is a hell of a deal and raises money for a good cause. We’ve teamed up with No Starch Press for our newest bundle! Get ebooks like Hacking APIs, Bug Bounty Bootcamp, and The Hardware Hacking Handbook.

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          We Have Link Posts Now

          Going forward there will be a new post type on C33: The Link Post. This change won’t make much of a difference to readers, but will allow me to post more frequently and comment on various items that aren’t worthy for a full post. Link posts will show on the home page (but not in related or featured story lists) and their headlines will link out to the external referenced source.

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          Ventura + Keyboard Maestro + iCalBuddy = Confusion

          Early this year I setup a bunch of calendar related automations with my Macs, Keyboard Maestro, and the iCalBuddy script and they’ve been very successful. I have a button on my Steam Deck that shows when my next meeting is, and I have serval automations triggered when I’m currently in a meeting such as turning on a red light outside of my home office door.

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          Virtual Influencers - From Cartoons to Deep Fakes

          Studio71 Germany has recently launched not one but two virtual influencers and they’ve done a great job with the implementation and marketing around this project (disclosure: I am the global CTO of Studio71). I’ve been thinking about it a lot and on the one hand this idea of a “fake” or “virtual” influencers comes and goes over the years and every time it comes back we all like to pretend that it’s a crazy idea.

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          The Story of My Slightly Funny Coolio Joke

          Coolio, the rapper who absolutely slayed the 90s, sadly died today at the age of 59. Coolio, the West Coast rapper whose gritty music and anthemic hits like “Gangsta’s Paradise” helped define hip-hop in the 1990s, died on Wednesday in Los Angeles. He was 59. His longtime manager, Jarez Posey, confirmed his death.

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          The Topsy Project for DEFCON 30

          This year at DEFCON, the hacker convention, I joined the Hard Hat Brigade with Topsy, a hard hat that entertains while scanning the wifi environment. Here’s a video I made walking through the basics: I didn’t cover it specifically in the video, but you might be asking: “Um, why?” My answer is: “Why not?

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          Posting to Hugo from Drafts

          I’ve recently been playing with the popular Drafts app (macOS, iOS, and iPadOS) and I think I get it. It’s not yet essential to me, but the actions are quite powerful and I can Drafts becoming essential after a little while. Earlier this year I setup an automation to post from Craft (my long term text app of choice) to C33Tech.

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