How Cake Wallet’s Broken Seed Generator Got My Bitcoin Stolen

This happened in May 2021. For years, I believed something had gone wrong during a Bitcoin-to-Monero exchange. Only now, after investigating Cake Wallet’s historical source code, analysing the blockchain transaction and checking independent vulnerability research, have I finally discovered what really happened.

On 24 May 2021, 0.02 BTC was stolen from my Cake Wallet immediately after it arrived. Cake later promised compensation, but never paid.

The evidence is clear. Cake generated my 12-word Bitcoin seed using a catastrophically insecure random-number generator. Someone reconstructed my private key, monitored my wallet and swept the deposit.

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SodaStream Crystal 3.0 CY-CQC-001: How I Fixed Very Low CO₂ Flow

Model: SodaStream Crystal 3.0
Type: CY-CQC-001
Problem: Very weak CO₂ flow, even with a new cylinder
Cause: Blocked CO₂ restrictor
Fix: Clear the tiny restrictor opening

My SodaStream Crystal 3.0 suddenly produced almost no carbonation. I replaced the Quick Connect CO₂ cylinder twice, but the problem remained.

Another clue was that after releasing the carbonation button, a small amount of CO₂ continued to flow for several seconds.

The problem turned out to be a blocked tiny CO₂ passage inside the Quick Connect assembly.

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Hoe ik een Big-ASS Battery ombouwde voor gebruik met Victron

Onlangs kreeg ik een aantal industriële Big-ASS Battery modules uit een faillissement in handen. Deze accupakketten zijn oorspronkelijk ontworpen voor professioneel gebruik en bevatten cilindrische LiFePO4-cellen (Lithium Iron Phosphate). Er zit echter één belangrijk nadeel aan de originele configuratie: er is géén echte BMS aanwezig.

In deze blog laat ik zien hoe ik deze accu’s heb omgebouwd voor gebruik met een JK-BMS v19, zodat ze veilig gebruikt kunnen worden met een Victron MultiPlus II, maar uiteraard ook met andere omvormers en energiesystemen.

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SolarEdge SE7K Modbus TCP

Ik wilde mijn oudere SolarEdge SE7K omvormer uit 2017 (de variant met LCD display) lokaal kunnen uitlezen en netjes softwarematig kunnen beperken bij negatieve stroomprijzen. De SolarEdge cloud/API werkt prima, maar ik wilde:

  • geen afhankelijkheid van internet/cloud
  • realtime lokale data
  • integratie met Node-RED
  • de omvormer automatisch kunnen curtailen bij negatieve prijzen

In eerste instantie ging ik er vanuit dat ik hiervoor de seriële RS485-poort moest aansluiten. Na wat verder onderzoek bleek echter dat deze oudere SE7K gewoon Modbus TCP ondersteunt via Ethernet. De netwerkkabel zat al aangesloten. Modbus TCP hoefde alleen nog aangezet te worden in het menu van de omvormer.

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Vue 3 TypeScript edition

The biggest notable new features for Vue 3 are the Composition API  and full support for TypeScript. Overall Vue 3 is mostly backwards compatible. The only change I’ve found rewriting the Bitcoin Converter is that in 3.x, filters are removed and no longer supported. Instead, they can be replaced by a method call.

And there’s a new build tool in the Vue ecosystem called Vite. Its dev server is 10-100x faster than Vue CLI’s. We used Vite instead of Vue-CLI this time to scaffold the project and to start the dev server.

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Mutual Exclusion in Javascript

According to Wikipedia Mutual Exclusion means:

Mutual exclusion is a property of concurrency control, which is instituted for the purpose of preventing race conditions. It is the requirement that one thread of execution never enters its critical section at the same time that another concurrent thread of execution enters its own critical section.

Well in short it means execute only a part of the code by one thread at the same time.

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Template Literals Templating

What are Template Literals?

Template literals are string literals allowing embedded expressions. You can use multi-line strings and string interpolation features with them. Template Literals are part of the ES6 specification.

Actually they even contain the basic requirements to use it as a templating language!

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Vue.js; AngularJS done right! – part 2

Just started with Vue? Please read part 1 first. It’s a small introduction into the Vue framework.

In part one we have created our first application using Vue. Functionally that application is complete but it is lacking a nice architecture, it is not translated, it did not have any unit tests and we did not leverage the complete power of single file components and CLI tooling to scaffold the project.

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Vue.js; AngularJS done right!

This post describes briefly my first impressions of working with the Vue frontend framework.

I have been using Vue for only a couple of days now and during these days I have created an example application (a bitcoin converter).

Before, I have created the same application using other frameworks like AngularJS and Backbone, so this makes a comparison between the use of different frameworks possible.

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