Over the Christmas break I put together a small side project to emulate an Apple 1. I grew up with an Apple ][+, which has the same CPU. It was fun to look back at 6502 assembly language. The Apple 1 is a remarkable machine. Open source did not formally exist in 1976, but in the true hacker spirit, everything about the Apple 1 was well documented and publicly available. It came with instructions on how to modify the computer, it’s schematics and also the source code for it’s Monitor, which was really just a minimal way to enter programs by typing hexadecimal codes.

Learning a new technology is much more fun when you actually have a mission. So I decided to make a little web app that can show the departure times of streetcars in Toronto. This is possible because the City of Toronto has made the NextBus API available as part of its Open Data initiative, which provides info about routes, stop locations and arrival time predictions. You can see the end result in the screenshot below, or try the app yourself on my test server.

TL;DR Are you nervous when you include that Amazon Web Services secret key in a config file? Fear no more. With this weekend hack you can turn your Arduino Due into a device that securely stores your AWS credentials and let it sign AWS API requests. Introduction In the industry a device like this is commonly known as a Hardware Security Module; an appliance (or PCI card) that manages your keys and/or certificates and then allows you to execute operations like encryption and signature generation.