Category Archives: hack

Extending ASUSWRT Functionality, Part 2

Following up from my earlier post, Asus has released faster and beefier routers. But perhaps the more important change here is that they have moved from MIPS in the RT-N56U to ARM in newer routers. I have also upgraded to the RT-AC68U for better reception and hopefully to fix the poor battery life experienced by my Android tablet.

the Asus N56U and AC68U routers, side by side

After upgrading, I noticed that the method I described back then no longer works. Someone also noticed this, as they translated key portions of my post into Chinese, while pointing out some of the steps that didn’t work.

In this post, I’ll summarize the key changes required to get it working again.

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Decoding BCARD Conference Badges

Last month, I had the opportunity to fly halfway around the world to attend RSA Conference 2013. Everyone was given a lanyard and badge which contains your information entered during registration. When you visit booths, they can then scan your badge to collect your information and follow up by sending you spam.

RSA conference pass

The scanner varies across different booths, but mostly it’s an Android device that ran a custom software. Since it had a large NXP logo, let’s try to read it with the NFC TagInfo app. Looks like the tag identifies itself as a NDEF message but the data is gibberish.

Data in the BCARD as decoded by TagInfo

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Hacking Functionality into ASUSWRT Routers

This weekend, I spent some time to replace my aged Linksys WRT54G wireless router, which is running DD-WRT. The WRT54G is slow by today’s wireless standards and since I sync my iOS devices wirelessly, the speed was getting quite unbearable. When I bought my Macbook Pro in 2007, it already has draft 802.11n support and fast-forward to 2012, my iPad (1st generation) and iPhone 5 both support the 5GHz band.

The ASUS RT-N56U wireless router ranks up there on wireless performance, and the “feature” I was really after was a router that can run an alternative firmware such as Tomato or DD-WRT. The really good news is, I figured out how to get the functionality I wanted while still using the official ASUS firmware.

ASUS router photo

For proper reviews and better photos, you might want to check out these other reviews:

Read on to find my short review, as well as how you can run your own programs on the router without using a third-party firmware.

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Enable iOS 5 Multitasking Gestures on iPad 1

Now that iOS 5 has been released, it’s easy to enable multitasking gestures on the iPad 1, using the same trick as before for display mirroring.

Edit the /System/Library/CoreServices/Springboard.app/K48AP.plist file and add a boolean key multitasking-gestures in the capabilities dict, and set its value to true. You can add both display mirroring and multitasking gestures to the iPad 1 using this method.

That’s it!

Alternatively you can use Cydia or redsn0w to do this for you.