Know How... 102 (Transcript)

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Father Robert Ballecer: On this episode of Know How we are going to show you everything you ever needed to know about getting started with Linux and then we are getting kind of black hat with some ARP cache poisoning.

Fr. Robert: Welcome to Know How, it’s the Twit show where we build, bend, break and upgrade. I’m Father Robert Ballecer.

Bryan Burnett: And I’m Bryan Burnett.

Fr. Robert: For the next hour or so we are going to show you some of the projects that we had been geeking out with, so hopefully you can take that home and find a little geek project of your own. But before we get there, Bryan, we love this thing right?

Bryan: The little credit card sized computer?

Fr. Robert: The credit card size computer that really kind of changed the face of project computing. This is the Raspberry Pi. It is very inexpensive, $35 computer, single bore, that has pretty much everything you need to make a simple computer project controller.

Bryan: There are plenty of different projects out there that you can do. My favorite one was making the Retro Pi which was making a game arcade out of it. There are tons of things you can do with the Pi.

Fr. Robert: We did the game machine, We did a camera controller, we’ve done a Web server, we are doing a tour server sometime in the near future. This is one of these boxes that has enough power for you to really kind of test the boundaries of what your programming/ hardware hacking skills are.

Bryan: Absolutely. It made it a lot easier for more people to have access to computers also. I know in a lot of different countries, like Africa. They’ve been sending them there for kids to play with and learn programming and stuff. It is a great starter place for learning Python.

Fr. Robert: Especially since it has a very easy to install operating system. It runs Lennix. You could have this thing up and running within 30 minutes or so. From nothing, just a memory card and the board itself. It runs on next to no power. It is a very power efficient.

Bryan: Five volts, two amps or something like that.

Fr. Robert: Exactly. And it does HTMI, ethernet, it has two USBs, audio out and digital audio out. It is a decent board, but they’ve upgraded it.

Bryan: Yes. Because it’s been three years since the Raspberry Pi has been out. It is not hardware wise, it is not a significant upgrade. They kept the CPU the same, but they have added a few more USB ports and the SD card slot they have now is the type where you just slide the card in and it is kind of, you hope that it is in there all the way. So they’ve gone to micro SD cards now and it is more of a push kind of one. The example we have here is the older version.

Fr. Robert: The new version is called the B+. This is the old version and I think this is probably a really good reason why people thought, it is okay but I wish it was different. I don’t like the memory card being stuck like this. It is just friction, there is no lock. So if you accidentally jostle it, it is just going to pop out. The other thing, is the mounting points are kind of irregular. You have one point here, and one point here. It doesn’t stick in really well. The new, the B+, has four mounting posts that are regular. So it is easier to mount it this device. You’ve also got four USB 2.0 instead of just two USB 2.0. That was a drawback to the original Pi. A lot of us put in a USB hub.

Bryan: That’s what we ended up doing.

Fr. Robert: Which is a pain because with something so small you don’t want a bunch of stuff hanging off of it. Some of the other things that they did was that they retracted everything into the board itself. The audio connector, the ethernet connector, the USB connector, which gives you this nice square shape. Again, now they really understand where their audience is. People who want to take these and put them into other projects. That is what they built them for.

Bryan: That is the nice thing about the size of the Pi, is that you can fit it into so many different things.

Fr. Robert: Now, one of the other things that I don’t know if you will notice here, but they have given the audio circuit, the audio chip, its own power supply. It is a discrete power supply, which was a problem with the Pi. Because if you use the audio out, not the HTMI, but the audio out it was a little noisy.

Bryan: Yeah, you get that hum in the background.

Fr. Robert: So what you ended up having to do was to get a really expensive USB supply so that you don’t you didn’t get that hum. Now we you can, because they have isolated it from the rest of the Pi, which means that if you want to use this as a music player, go right on ahead.

Bryan: The Pi is evolving. The example I could think of is you know how when the Xbox 360 came out and it was big? And then they slimmed it down, it is kind of like that.

Fr. Robert: The Pi Slim?

Alex: If you wanted to make the music player with it you could make a PiPod. I’m trademarking that.

Bryan: Nobody steal that.

Fr. Robert: So for $35, it is the same price which means they are going to phase out the older one.

Bryan: I haven't seen the price drop on the older ones yet. But I imagine it probably will. They also added more GPU.

Fr. Robert: That’s right. So they’ve gone from the 26 pin GPIO which is the header so that you can connect things and have the mic control it. To a 40 pin header which will be nice because now you will get more functionality. You can use more devices, you can trigger more events. Essentially, they have turned the Pi into something that fits better into project enclosures and really caters to the project enthusiasts. You are going to see this a lot.

Bryan: I’m excited to play with it whenever we are able to get one.

Fr. Robert: Now one of the things that we have been working on here has been OS tips. We've done Windows and we did OS X. One of the things that we haven’t done, and this is actually gotten us into a little bit of trouble, has been Linux. We did Linux any time we did a Raspberry Pi project. But what we had to do most of the time was that we black boxed it. We told you, this is what you have to type, this is where you have to type it. People came back to us and said, wait a minute we want to know what that means. The problem is that…

Bryan: It’s a pretty broad subject.

Fr. Robert: It’s a broad subject and you kind of don’t want to learn Linux by programming a Rasp Pi. you want a full exposure to Linux. So what we did, is that we asked one of twits Linux experts, Aaron Newcomb, to come on and talk about what you need to pick a Distro. So when you are choosing what flavor of Linux to start out with, Aaron is going to give you a couple of tips. But before we get to that, you know, I’m just thinking. I want one place. One easy place that I can go to. A central location where I can find media. I want pictures. I want videos. I want vectors. I want something that will let my creative side blossom.

Bryan: And you need as much of that help as you can get.

Fr. Robert: Because I’m horrible at that, right? Seriously, one of the things that I have been doing the last couple years is that I have been helping my organization, the church, deal with a presence on the Internet. And one of the things that you need is good graphics. Good visuals. You need to be able to express yourself in something other than a nasty webpage that is just black-and-white type.

Bryan: And when we are doing a show similar to know how I like to bring up certain images. And videos during that show to make it pop.

Fr. Robert: And so when we are doing all of those things, we do need that one stop shop to inspire us. And thankfully we've got one. The first sponsor of this episode of Know-How is Shutter Stock. Now Shutter Stock is a one-stop shop for all your media needs. Now you may be asking yourself why do I need a one-stop shop for all my media needs?

Bryan: Because it is easier that way.

Fr. Robert: Shutter Stock is more than just a repository. If you just wanted a repository of images go ahead and buy yourself one of those clipart CDs. Go and surf the Internet for some royalty-free video or pictures. But that is not what Shutter Stock is. They are a search engine for creativity.

Bryan: And they have so many good pictures.

Fr. Robert: They do. Shutter Stock, whether for your website or publication, or advertisement, a video or any other type of project, is the place you want to go to inspire you. You can choose from over 38 million high quality stock photos, illustrations, vectors and video clips. Now they source images from around the world and put them at your fingertips. A lot of contributors to Shutter Stock are professional photographers and artists. Which means you are going to get quality images. You are going to get a lot of different views of the same subject. You are going to find exactly the thing that you want if you want to start talking about Raspberry Pi.

Bryan: We need to stop searching food.

Fr. Robert: Now shutter stock reviews each image individually for content and quality before adding it to its library. So you are not going to get a Google search where 90% of it is junk or garbage. you are going to get high quality images. You are going to get high-quality videos and high-quality vectors. They also have flexible pricing. You can choose individual image packs or monthly subscription for the best deal. You can download 25 images per day with a standard subscription. And you can download any image, in any size, and you pay only one price. That is one of the things that I really dislike about some of these services on the Internet. Which make you pay for every version of the photo clip. That is not what Shutter Stock does. You get the subscription, you get what you want, download as many times as you need, as many versions as you need. Now Shutter Stock also gives you the images you need to bring your Creative projects to the next level. This is what I was talking about earlier, and they make it easier. They've got a sophisticated search tool. So for example, let’s look for a hippo. I want a hippo again. Now we have hippos. No, we need a purple hippo. Can we find a purple hippo? Because maybe I am doing a project and I need a purple hippo. See I can even choose exactly what I want. There’s got to be a purple hippo. There we go, thank you. One of the things that I really like about Shutter Stock is the ability to have shareable light boxes. You save images to a light box gallery in the new access them anytime and share them with other team members. So once I found my purple hippo, the hippo that I want, I can go ahead and drop it in my selection and share with the other people on the project. I’m going to buy that for you. My wedding present to you.

Bryan: Finally something that I needed.

Fr. Robert: It is perfect. Now they also have an award winning iPad app. So it lets you search on the go and uses it to display images during your presentation. They are also a global market place. They have multilingual customer service in more than a dozen international countries. And full-time customer service support throughout the week. So, here’s what I want you to do. You can try Shutter Stock today by signing up for a free account. There is no credit card needed. To start an account and begin using Shutter Stock to help imagine what your next project can be, like and save favorite images to a light box to review later. Once you decide to purchase, use the offer code knowhow714 and new accounts will receive 20% off any image file. We thank Shutter Stock for their support of Know-How.

Bryan: I spend so much time just playing on their website. Not actually downloading.

Fr. Robert: I’ve never actually used the eye dropper tool. That’s kind of cool. But it is super specific. You’d have to exactly match the purple. Anyway, you know Alex, run the video and lets find out how we are going to choose our first Linux Distro.

Aaron Newcomb: I am Aaron Newcomb and in this section We are going to be talking a little about Linux. A lot of people would like to get started with Linux so we thought it might be nice to go through and talk about what the options are, how to get it installed and all that kind of stuff. So if you are an advanced user you can probably just skip this whole section because you’re going to know this already. But for a lot of you out there, and you would like to get started with Linux and you don’t know how, there are thousands of different distributions. Which one do you start with. And then, how do I get it installed? What if I already have Windows installed? Can I install it on a Mac device? How to why install Linux alongside my existing operating system? We are going to cover a lot of those topics, but for today, let’s get started just with which distribution should I choose? What is a distribution first of all? Well, the distribution of Linux is an operating system. Linux is really just the kernel. Linux runs at the core and then people build a whole operating system on top of that kernel. So that you can get things like email and word processors and browsers to surf the net all that other stuff that comes on top of Linux. So when you start adding all those things together then you have your own personalized distribution. It is called a distribution because we distributed out to the world, and people can download and install it on their devices. So that is what a distribution is. Today we are going to take a look at, and try to narrow down, many of the ones that beginners should start with. So what is the difference between Ubuntu and Fedora, for example. which one should I choose? So we are going to go ahead and start taking a look at that. Let’s start with Ubuntu. You will notice when you go to the Ubuntu website that it is all about cloud these days. In fact just about everybody is. Don’t let that dissuade you. There are a lot of good ways to get started with just the desktop. Which is what you want, you don’t want the server to addition or the cloud edition. You are going to run this on your desktop or your laptop. So you want the desktop edition. What Ubuntu has done That is really neat is that they have a tour. So if you hover over desktop or just scroll down to the bottom of the page and find the link, take the tour. This is a really cool feature. Because what this does is that it puts you in Ubuntu desktop running it out of your browser. So you can see, there we are. This is what the Ubuntu desktop will look like. Once you get it installed. So it gives you a nice little preview. We are going to go ahead and show ourselves around. You can see we are getting little tips over here. But this is what the desktop looks like. You can see that it is a little different from Windows and Mac. Mac usually has a menu bar and then a little tray down here. With Windows you’ve got the start menu and Windows a you got the grid. Applications and icons across the screen. With Ubuntu they have a nice little menu bar over here on the site, it kind of stays out of your way. And to find an application you can just click on that and start typing in the name of the application you want to find. In this case we will type in Firefox. And there is Firefox. We can click on them, and then Firefox comes up. Now this is running in the browser and so not everything works, but the browser is surprisingly functional in this little tour that they built to run in your browser. Which is really, really cool. So Ubuntu is the most popular. It is one of the most popular desktop distributions that you can get. The nice thing about Ubuntu is that they play well with others. This has been there mantra from day one. They really wanted to encourage community and encourage people to develop for Ubuntu. So, what they have done is they let people download bun to because it is all free and open source. People download that and then they create derivative distributions. What that means, is that you can create a distribution of Ubuntu solely for a single purpose. Maybe you would like to run media, maybe you like to run video editing or audio editing or something else. So there is a version of Google unto called media Ubuntu, that you can download and run. And it is very similar to Ubuntu. So Ubuntu is a good one to try. The interface is a little different but if you made the transition from Windows 7 to Windows 8, you are used to a transition in interface anyway. It is very easy. It works great out of the box. All the common drivers are there, there will be some things that you need to install bed, over all Ubuntu is a great one to start with. I wanted to bring that up first.

Aaron: Now, there is another Company out there that you may have heard of called Red Hat. What Red Hat is, is mainly for business these days. And, so they have something called Red Hat Enterprise Linux. This is not something that I would recommend a beginner downloading and installing. It is not meant for beginner users. This is meant to be run in the enterprise. Now luckily Red Hat has an open source sister/daughter project called Fedora. Fedora is where a lot of the development happens that eventually goes into Red Hat Enterprise Linux. And this is really meant to be run on the desktop for the average user. So with Fedora, you get all the advanced features even before they go into Red Hat enterprise clinic’s. But it still gives you, if you are familiar with Red Hat or you want to become familiar with red hat because you see yourself being a Red Hat administrator someday, this would be a good way to go. Because you are going to get all the same nomenclature that is then read that, you were going to get that right here in Fedora. Here is what the desktop looks like. It is kind of sparse, but they have gone for a minimalist look. That is one view of the desktop. Everything that you need in Fedora is accessible right here in the activities menu. So that is what Fedora looks like. Pretty simple, pretty straightforward. Not quite as fancy as Ubuntu. But it does the job. And like I said, if you are interested in learning about Red Hat then Fedora would be one way to go. Another way would be to go with something called CentOS. Since CentOS is meant to emulate, almost exactly, or as much as possible. They take all of the free bits that are published from Red Hat Enterprise Linux and put them in their own distributions so that if you want to run a Red Hat Enterprise Linux server and have it be compatible with everything that Red Hat Enterprise Linux, or REL, is compatible with CentOS would be a good way to go. So you have two options if you want to go with Red Hat compatibility or if you are looking to becoming a System Administrator in a big company or something, this would be a good way to go because you would learn what most people are running in the enterprise.

Aaron: Okay, so those are two options. As I mentioned before, though, there are thousands and thousands of distributions that you can download. So where do you go to find out more? I know a lot of people are going to be screaming, you need to talk about Arch or you need to talk about Gentoo, or you need to talk about some other distribution. Well, we aren’t going to do that because we don’t have time but there is a place that you can go and see what all the other distributions are. It is called DistroWatch. distrowatch.com. These folks keep track of all the latest releases that come out for Linux. They catalog that and they have a nice little sight for news and what is new with Red Hat and what is new with all these other distributions. There is CentOS that I mentioned before. They keep track of all these announcements. The other thing they do is they also rank them. See over here if you go to the site and look to the right and scroll down a bit you will see the page rankings. They put this right on the page and this is one way that you know which are the most popular distributions of Linux that you might want to check out. You can see Ubuntu is there, Fedora is there that we mentioned. OpenZaurus is still there, that is an old one. that is still used quite a bit in Enterprises. You see Arch and all these other ones. So, you can click on those and take a look. See which one is interesting to you, or maybe like I said you are interested in doing something with media so you want to look for one with media. And you can read all about the various distributions. The one on the top here is something called Mint. Linux Mint. That is the one we are going to be talking about in the next few episodes. Here is what Linux Mint looks like. Linux Mint is the Most popular distribution right now. It is one of the derivatives of Ubuntu. They take what Ubuntu puts out and then they customize it and make it their own and change a few widgets here and there and then throw that out to the community. The reason why it is quite popular is because they take away a lot of the troubleshooting, the first steps that you might have when installing Linux, they take those out of the way. So things like proprietary drivers that you might need for an in video card or something those are built-in by default and you can install those during installations. Some of the other distributions don’t put that in there because they want everything to remain free and open and nonproprietary. That is understandable. But for people that are just getting started, I find Linux Mint is a great way to go. It has a very similar look and feel to Windows, you have a little menu with the start button down here. You’ve got some icons that you can click on quickly to get two things. It should look very similar to what you are used to coming from Windows 7 or if you have use Windows in the past at all, which just about everybody has. So Linux Mint is what I would recommend. It has great support in the community. And this will be a great one to get us started talking about how do you install, what kind of software, how do I add software, had it like keep all of my packages up-to-date for security reasons and all that kind of stuff. We are going to talk about this in some upcoming segments. That is the one that we are going to go with and next time we will talk about different ways you can install Linux. There are a lot of different options. You can use USB, CD-ROM, or all kinds of things. And how do you make room on your PC? Maybe you have a Windows PC or a Mac and how do you make room on that device so that you can install Linux? You may not want to overwrite your existing operating system. So we will talk all about that in the next segment. Until then, thanks for joining me. We’ll see you next time.

Fr. Robert: We want to thank Aaron for giving us some knowledge. For giving us the low down on Linux. we actually have been wanting to do this for a while. Because we know that there are Linux enthusiasts out there. And it does take time. It is a good thing if you take the time in the beginning to really look for what you need, so that you can pick the right Distro. Because there is nothing more frustrating then finding the Distro that everybody else says it is the one you need, and then it is completely unintuitive.

Bryan: And then you start to play with it and you don’t really like it that much. I like how you are able to preview them now. Because back when I was starting to play with Linux you had to burn it to his CD and then start that way. At that point you were already pretty much into the OS and you had to go with the one you downloaded. But now you can preview them in the browser and that is pretty cool.

Fr. Robert: When I first started playing around with Linux remember that computers weren’t that great. We had tablets. I remember I had a friend who was huge into open source and I suggested a Distro and he suggested five. So which one should I use and he said, what you want to do is install each one individually and then you can choose. I said, No, I’m not doing that.

Bryan: That’s why I leave it up to the experts like Aaron. What he showed me the day we recorded that I learned a lot more.

Fr. Robert: We are going to have him back because everybody loves an expert. Speaking of experts. One of the things we love here on Know How is that for an hour a week you open up your knowledge holes. And we fill it up with stuff. The knowledge hole just bets to be filled. Which is why we have a sponsor now that helps us to fill that knowledge hole. lynda.com is the one stop shop for online learning. It is not like what you see on YouTube where you get a lot of those YouTube videos, which are great. We’re on YouTube, we do a lot of the stuff in an amateur style. But every once in a while when you really want to dig in, you want an organization that is going to put the time and money into building a studio and getting the audio and the editing done right. That is what Lynda is for. Lynda is known as the leader in online education. They keep you up to date with software, learning brand new skills and exploring new hobbies. With easy to follow video tutorials. Whether you want to take better pictures and video with your DSLR, learn the programming skills to developing your own mobile lab or edit your own video footage using Final Cut Pro or Premiere. lynda.com offers thousands of video coerces in a variety of topics. For any software you might rely upon including Microsoft Office, Adobe Creative Cloud, Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro and more, lynda.com can help you stay current with product updates and learn all the ins and outs of your software tools to be more efficient and productive in your professional or personal life. lynda.com just released a new iPhone and iPad app for IOS7 and they enhanced their Android app to provide Chrome Cast support. The IOS app includes a more visual intuitive interface and both new apps offer online courses and video viewing. Which makes it easy to conveniently learn, even in environments without internet access. Now lynda.com users can move seamlessly between mobile and desktop applications. That is one of the things that I really enjoy about them. Which means you can jump from device to device and just pick up at the lesson that you left off on. One of the things that I’ve been using Lynda for in the last couple of weeks has been to relearn my Adobe knowledge. Leo just made the official announcement that we made the switch over to PC’s with Premiere. That means we need to be up on our Premiere Pro, we need to be up on our Adobe After Effects and lynda.com is filling in all the gaps on all the things that I had forgotten. Now Lynda has over 2400 courses with more added weekly. All lynda.com courses are produced at the highest quality, as we said. They also work with software companies to provide you with updated training the same day new versions hit the market. So you will always have the latest skills. At lynda.com the instructors are accomplished professional at the top of their fields and passionate about teaching. They have courses for all experienced levels from beginner, intermediate and advanced. And whether you have 15 minutes or 15 hours each course is structured so that you can learn from start to finish. You can search the transcripts to find quick answers or read along with the video. They also offer certificates of completion when you finish a course. You can publish to your linked in profile, which is great when you are a professional in your field. So here is what we want you to do. We want you to learn something new with lynda.com. It is only $25 a month for access to the entire lynda.com course library. Or for $37.50 a month you can subscribe to the premium plan which includes exercise files that let you follow along with the instructors projects using the exact same assets. You can try lynda.com right now with a free seven day trial. Visit lynda.com/knowhow to access the entire library. That is over 2400 courses free for seven days. It is all at lynda.com/knowhow. We thank Lynda for their support of Know How.

Bryan: Kind of like with Shutter Stock, I’ve gotten lost looking at the GoPro how-to’s on there.

Fr. Robert: Seriously, I’m really big into all the Adobe Suite programs. I hate to admit this but I am still a PhotoShop newb. I’ve used it for 20 years but I kind of cut and paste. And then think, Okay, that’s how you use layers. Got it.

Bryan: They have cool stuff.

Fr. Robert: It helps me to kind of build that up without having to tell the world, as I just did….

Bryan: That you’re not so good at PhotoShop? The thing I use PhotoShop for mainly is to move people’s heads around and stuff like that.

Fr. Robert: That is pretty much all you need right? We’ve been playing with this. This is our lunch box build. It is a classic RC model. It is a 1/12 scale, sort of a monster truck thing. Now this is actually our second one. We have two hosts so we need two. But really we were pretty sure we were going to break something and we wanted a backup.

Bryan: Judging from past experiences, we probably need two of everything. Two Pi’s, two lunch boxes.

Fr. Robert: Last time we talked about the RC project, we talked a little bit about how it gets controlled. The receivers, the transmitter, the servos, the crystals and we talked a little about the power plant. How the motor works, and the speed controller. Now we need to talk a little about the wheels, the shock absorption, and about something a little bit in the transmission.

Bryan: I guess we should start from the bottom going up. Because the first name that contacts the ground is going to be the tires. These are the tires for the lunchbox. We’ve got these little rubber tires and inside is the…

Fr. Robert: Let’s rip this thing off.

Bryan: Are you going to take it off? I spent a lot of time putting the tires on.

Fr. Robert: So this is what the wheel looks like. This is a steering will, not a driving will. The way that you know the difference is this just goes on to a spindle. There is no way to actually drive this.

Bryan: And here is the driving wheel.

Fr. Robert: There is the driving wheel. So you’ve got little pinions that will grab onto those spokes to drive the wheel. To give it power and motion. One of the things that we were researching is that these are cool, because we like monster tires. But when you build a model or anything with tires that are this big that have this much volume there is a lot of gap so that gets kind of bouncy.

Bryan: The lunchbox isn’t intended for off road use. That is why it has these monster tires. If you hit a rock or something it is just going to deflect and bounce around. So we were trying to come up with some ideas of how to negate that. One of them was we were thinking about putting some foam inside along the rim.

Fr. Robert: Foam inserts. These are 2.2 inches. If you get a 2.2 inch foam insert that goes right on this will, what it will do is it will give us a maximum compression. It will compress by that much before it hits the foam and then it gives that much more resistance to compress anymore. So it gives you cushioning. But it doesn’t give you like a firm super bouncy ride.

Bryan: And then the other thing is, if we plug the holes on the RAM but then there is nowhere for the air to go which means it is a balloon and will bounce off of stuff. You want them to have a little bit of give.

Fr. Robert: And that is why when people say, oh I’ve got low-profile tires, what a low profile tire does is that it deforms less under acceleration overturning. Because you’ve got so much space between the wheel and the edge of the tire, every time you bump, every time you move you are going to deform this tire in some way and in deforming at you are going to change the characteristics of how it turns and how it accelerates. Adding a little stiffness to the tire gives you a bit more control, but again like we said, if we were to plug this up so that you don't get that air escaping this would essentially become a balloon and balloons bounce. That is not necessarily what you want in the handling of your RC vehicle.

Bryan: So, I think the only other thing as far as the tires go is that if you are following along with this project and you are going to be putting these on, makes sure that the treads are going the right way.

Fr. Robert: That has actually happened more than once on build. Just remember the little chevron goes forward.

Bryan: You can tell from the rims that the lunchbox is a rear wheel drive vehicle. There are all-wheel-drive RC cars out there, but lunchbox is rear wheel.

Fr. Robert: Now, do you want to talk a little about the shocks? The suspension?

Bryan: Yes. So connected to these, and helping out the lunchbox absorb all those impacts and stuff, it actually has a coil over system which is what you would find on a lot of vehicles today.

Fr. Robert: It is essentially just this inside that. There is a plate on it or end so that every time the suspension impacts the ground it will comprise and it will want to go back up. It actually looks a lot like this. So if you look at this model, this is also using a quail over model. There is no oil in here, there is just a spring that is connected to the mounting points. Every time the arm moves because it makes an impact, it will absorb some of the shock and push it back out. Which is good. That is a good shock absorption system. The problem was something like this is it makes everything balance. If all you have is a spring, this thing is going to be bouncing all over the place and that is wearable for handling.

Bryan: You are going to hit a rock and the whole thing is just going to be unsettled. What you want to do is have the wheel connected to the ground without it either being pushed off the ground, or being too stiff. It is a very big balance. Keep the chassis balanced as much as you can.

Fr. Robert: Unfortunately you are not going to get a balance with the shock that comes in the kit. What we are going to do, is that we decided we are going to build this with aftermarket parts. So that you can get oil filled shocks. They do have a coil overs so it allows it to push back after it has been compressed, but because it has an oil filled shock which is simply a piston inside of a cylinder, it means that the compression when it is under duress is not going to happen as quickly. It is going to fight against the oil and when it comes back it is also going to fight against the oil, so you are not going to get that bouncing.

Bryan: That oscillating from the springs.

Fr. Robert: You want to stop that oscillation. One of these coil overs with big bouncy tires like this, and oil filled shock will kind of dampen it out. And that is what you want.

Bryan: We should probably do one lunchbox with the oil filled ones and then the other without and just see how they compare. I want the one with the oil filled shocks.

 Fr. Robert: Fine.

Bryan: I would not be surprised if I came in and saw that yours had like a turbo kit attached to it or something.

Fr. Robert: I may have already built it. Okay, now the other part that we want to talk about our bearings. Now, your kid is going to come with fees. These are just…

Bryan: Those look very cheap to me.

Fr. Robert: These are sleeve bearings. They are not actual bearings, they are just bushings. So the idea is that when you’ve got moving parts, this is a driveshaft is going to go into this. This is actually the transmission housing. So we eventually this is going to go through here and it is going to connect to the tire. Well, you need points to support this and this. Because you want this shaft free spinning inside this housing. Well the way that it does that is that it uses these the rest bearings to provide that support. So now it can fully rotate. These are not bad. Plastic bearings will work just fine. The problem is that they actually have a lot of friction. They don’t actually move in a slide.

Bryan: Right. And you want to reduce the friction. That is the whole point of them.

Fr. Robert: Because friction robs power. Anytime you have more friction you are going to rob power. And also these tend to deform after time. So you put your lunchbox through a lot of rough maneuvers, then…

Bryan: You will be replacing these eventually.

Fr. Robert: So, we’ve got these instead. These, are ball bearings. So compare these to the thrust bearings.

Bryan: They are not expensive. I think they were like $10.

Fr. Robert: For the entire set of ball bearings for your lunchbox. What these do is they are ball bearings. You have balls inside two sleeves. And they are oil filled. So when you have that outside sleeve rotating, the inner sleeve will maintain still. Which means it is going to reduce the amount of friction that your system is going to feel.

Bryan: It means you are putting more power to the ground.

Fr. Robert: Exactly. Less friction means more power goes to the wheels. The way it would work is that instead of the thrust bearings you would have these ball bearings. And believe it or not this flows so much easier. It is so much more fluid. And they are much less prone to death for limitation. So you can run your kit rough and you don’t have to worry about replacing the sleeves after a couple of weeks or months.

Bryan: Pretty cool.

Fr. Robert: This is a preliminary step. But we just wanted to show you some of the technology that is going to go into the build. Next week we are actually going to show you how the transmission comes together.

Bryan: I had no idea that it was that, not complicated but so much…

Fr. Robert: A lot of people think that it is a motor connected to wheels. But these are receipt kits have a transmission. There is gear differential, gear reductions, and pinging that goes on in the motor. It is pretty cool.

Bryan: It is. Because we are both kind of motor heads, so this is the kind of stuff that we like to geek out on. And hopefully some of the people out there are going to follow along with this, or maybe get interested in building their own.

Fr. Robert: Ed says just coat it in butter. Just what we want. Our remote control smelling like rotting butter.

Bryan: Use bacon grease. Not only does it smell delicious, but it lasts forever.

Fr. Robert: All right. Let’s get serious for a second. Put on your black hat, we are going to get a little black cat right now. Let me say right now that the knowledge that I’m about to teach you, do not use it for evil. Please, please, please do not. In fact if you know that you don’t have the moral fortitude to not use this for evil then…

Bryan: Turn it off right now.

Fr. Robert: What we are going to do is I am going to show you how one of the easiest man in the middle attacks work. Now it doesn’t just have to be an attack. Remember in previous episodes of Know How we showed them how to tap their network right? How to look at the traffic that is flowing over the network. This is another way to do it, it’s just using slightly different vector.

Bryan: It may not be your network.

Fr. Robert: It may not be. Now let’s look at the board. This is the diagram last week. This is what a typical network looks like.

Bryan: We like to recycle our chalkboard.

Fr. Robert: Because my drawing skills are horrible. So what we are dealing with on this episode is just the router and the devices that are on the network. Now you may think that your device talks to… let’s say computer A talks to computer B. And you may think it talks via the IP address right? Because that is what you type in. 192.168.200.201. That is not true. Inside the network they actually talk via Mac addresses.

Bryan: Ok right and each device has its own.

Fr. Robert: It is unique. The media access control, so every device has a unique 6 bite hexadecimal code. So for example: 111111. It would never be like that - that is an example. So how it works is in order for them to find out if they say computer A wants to talk to computer B and computer B is 192.168.200.201 it can’t just send something to 192.168.200.201 because that means nothing to this network. It means nothing to the switch. It has to find out what computer is actually attached to 192.168.200.201. So what it does, is that it does an ARP broadcast. ARP is a protocol that we have in networking. It is a way for computers to find out what is actually connected to a particular address. It is called the address resolution protocol.

Bryan: Okay.

Fr. Robert: So what this is going to do is that it is going to do a broadcast. It is going to broadcast to the entire network and say, Hey who is 192.168.200.201? And that will go to all the devices that are connected to the network. computer B is going to hear the broadcast and it is going to say, Hey, I’m 192.168.200.201. My MAC address is 01abef79c35e.

Bryan: And the other computer is like, cool. I’m going to send you…

Fr. Robert: And it is also going to cache that so that it doesn’t have to do it again. So if it ever has to send to 192.168.200.201 it knows ok, that is the MAC address that he gave me before. It doesn’t have to re-broadcast. That is called the ARP cache. As you have a network that continues to work, all the devices will slowly learn all the other devices. So that is how it works. Now, let’s say I have a computer that wants to talk to the internet. What it will do is that it needs to get to 192.168.200.201 - it knows that is the gateway to the internet. So it is going to do the same thing, it is going to say, I need to get to the internet which device is 192.168.200.1? Because that is my gateway. The router is going to hear the broadcast and say, that is me and my MAC address is 00000000000.

Bryan: Is that always the address for routers?

Fr. Robert: Every address is unique. They have two. One for the outside and one from the inside. So it just passes it on to the router and the router passes it on to the internet. The router gets is back from the internet and passes on to the individual computer. That is the gateway. So that is how communication on your network, works. Here is how an ARP cache attack, a man in the middle attack, works. Computer A says Hey I need to send something to the internet. Who is 192.168.200.1? The router is going to say that is me, here is my MAC address. My attack computer will hear that because it is all broadcasting and hears everything and it will say, oh, okay so 192.168.200.200 has that MAC address and the router 192.168.200.1 has this address and after the router has replied my computer will start screaming, NO NO NO, I’m 192.168.200.1 and this is my MAC address. So the computer is going to go, oh. So instead of the packet going to the computer, to the router, to the internet….

Bryan: It goes to the attack computer.

Fr. Robert: From the computer to the attack computer.

Bryan: And the attack computer… so it collects everything. It is like the hub.

Fr. Robert: This is just like a tap. This is a very basic man in the middle attack. That is how it works and what it will do is give you traffic from both directions. When the packet comes back from the internet it is going to go from the internet to the router and the router is going to say this was from 192.168.200.200 but this is pretending to be 200 so it going to go from this computer back to that computer.

Bryan: Okay. Now I know how that works. Is there going to be any noticeable bandwidth issues because of passing through another device?

Fr. Robert: Yes and no. No in the sense that a typical user probably isn’t going to notice. How many time you just think the internet it slow? You are not going to think something is having a middle attack on you. So now, we are going to show you how it works. So the program I want to show you is called Cain and Able.

Bryan: Isn’t that biblical?

Fr. Robert: It’s a little biblical. This is where you get it from. This is a legitimate security tool as long as you use it on networks that you own. The minute you use this on a network you do not own, I disown you and I hope they catch you.

Bryan: I just like knowing how this stuff works. It doesn’t necessarily mean I want to do anything malicious.

Fr. Robert: So I’ve got Cain and Able loaded up. It is a small little program that installs very quickly. Here is how it’s going to work. What i need to do is set up my attack. The first thing I need to know is what computers are on the network. So I’m going to go ahead and go to the sniffer tab. I want to find out what is on my network so I’m going to hit the plus sign and I’m going to say, Search for everything on my network. Now it has told me that it sees two different devices. 192.168.1.1 and 192.168.1.108. 1.1 is the router. 1.108 is this other computer here. So now I know the computers on the network and I want to intercept all the traffic that runs between this computer and the router. So I’m going to switch over to the ARP tab and now I am going to add by hitting the plus and I’m going to say, I want to see everything that goes between 192.168.1.1 and 192.168.1.108. Add that rule. Now, I have to click this little button and you’ll see down below it is starting the attack. Full routing means it has inserted itself. It is now the man in the middle. So any traffic that runs between the second computer and the router is now actually coming through this computer. What can I do with that? Let’s do this. If you watched the previous episodes of Know How you remember Wire Shark. So we are going to start up Wire Shark because now that we are receiving all those packets on this computer I’m going to say, go ahead and tell me what is coming over the LAN. And there we go. Now it is showing me everything that is going between those computers. I’m going to put a DNS filter here so that it is only going to show me the DNS entries. Now I am going to this computer, let’s go to Twit.tv. And now it is finding all the different websites that are attached to twit.tv. Anytime you type in twit.tv you are getting all these different websites that are being called. But this is just to prove that I am now intercepting…

Bryan: What is coming from that laptop to the router.

Fr. Robert: So this is now a man in the middle between this and the router under the desk.

Bryan: This is now the tap that we did in the previous episode.

Fr. Robert: Except that it is a software tap rather than a hardware tap. What we did before is that we physically had a dvicd that would give us a mirror for all the packets that were flowing through our network. This is fooling all the devices on the network. It is saying, I’m the router give me all the packets that you have going to the internet. Now I can choose with this system, Cain and Able, I can choose to see the packets just flowing between two devices like the computer and router, or computer A and computer B or I could say give me everything on the network. Yeah. This will work really, really well on your home network. If a network is set up correctly, like the way I set up networks is that every time a user logs in he gets his own LAN. So if he gets a scan there is no one else on his network. He can run the attack all he wants and it’s not going to work. but if you ever run, let’s say you are lonely at night and you have nothing to do in your motel so you plug into the network and you find out that there are a lot of computers on the network and you start running a man in the middle attack you can get passwords, you can get DNS and something actually like chat clients all used to be unprotected. So, you could see conversations in real time. Which is actually kind of weird.

Bryan: So a more legitimate thing to do. Would this be a better way of seeing what is going on in your network?

Fr. Robert: That is why we are showing you. That is the legitimate use. People were saying, well you showed us the tap, but I can’t find the tap or I don’t want to buy it. You don’t have to.

Bryan: This is the way you could find out which computer on your network is sucking up all the bandwidth.

Fr. Robert: Exactly. It works the same way. Now I will say this. If you are doing it this way there are serious limitations because all the traffic traffic flowing through your connection and then back out through your connection.

Bryan: Right. So you'll get that thing, oh I guess the Internet is just slow.

Fr. Robert: It will bottleneck everything. The ARP cache spoofing is not always 100% effective. So you may miss some packets. But, it is a really good way if you suspect that there is a device in your network that is hogging up all the bandwidth this is actually a really good way to figure it out. If that is actually the device and what it is connecting to. Now, we are going to give you all the notes for this because we know that this was a little substantial. But it is a step-by-step process in seriously, even if you have none of the security software installed on your computer right now you could be up and running in about 45 minutes. Just please, please, please don't use this for nefarious purposes. And if you happen to use it for nefarious purposes and get arrested, don’t tell them a priest told you to do it.

Bryan: Also if you want to get more tips from us, you have to play nice. And then Padre would tell you more stuff.

Fr. Robert: We are going to take you down the security aisle. This is a nice easy way to get your hack on and pick up some Cain and Abel.

Bryan: We learned Lennon, which led next he would want to start with, we talked about suspension systems on RC cars, and then we went back to security on the network. We have been all over the place today.

Fr. Robert: A little weird. I think that works right?

Bryan: I think my knowledge hole is pretty full right now.

Fr. Robert: Now if you do want to find out anything else about some of the topics that we talked about, including the notes for the Cain and Abel at or what we are doing on our build, be sure and go to our show page at, where is that at?

Bryan: That would be twit.tv/kh.

Fr. Robert: You can also reach us, if you want to email us at… never mind we won't check it.

Bryan: It is just easier for us if you go to twitter, or the Google plus page. I never remember the Google plus.

Fr. Robert: On Google Plus the shortener has run out and we are going to have to fix that. Just go to Google plus and search for the knowhow page. You will find this and see my smiling face. No one has sent us a picture yet that includes the hippo.

Alex: You need to look on Shutter Stock for the hippo.

Bryan: Wooo. I like that idea.

Fr. Robert: Also you can find us on Twitter. You can find me @PadreSJ.

Bryan: And you can find me @cranky_hippo.

Fr. Robert: Until next time, I’m Father Robert Ballecer.

Bryan: And I’m Bryan Burnett.

Fr. Robert: And now that you know…

Bryan: Go do it!