hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr4471.txt

Episode: 4471
Title: HPR4471: Ti-82 Makes Music and Password Manager
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4471/hpr4471.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-26 01:01:55

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4471 for Monday 22 September 2025.
Today's show is entitled, Tai 82 Makes Music and Password Manager.
Is hosted by Operator and is about 16 minutes long.
It carries an explicit flag.
The summary is, I talk about Tai 82 calculators making music and last pass password manager
Hey oh, welcome to another episode of Hacker Public Radio with your host Operator.
Today I'm going to be talking about Tai 82's, Tai 80 calculators and trackers and also going
to be talking about password fillers and let me get my phone assignments here.
Password fillers and kind of where I'm at with last pass.
So I'll talk about last pass first.
I got laid off, I don't know, five, six months ago now and they took my phone, it was a
work phone that I was using with Google Voice and I had Google Voice set up there and
the fairly recent phone was like a S20 something like that.
Now what that problem is I'd never purchase a laptop even I have a desktop with a pretty
decent setup but I didn't have a laptop and I don't have a phone so that was a kind of
big piece that was missing.
So I started looking around and you know $400 for a used phone, $800 for a new one.
You've gone back to where everything is standard prices nowadays.
You basically can't get unlimited data for less than like 20 bucks a month.
You can get limited data for like three, you can get no data and no cell service and basically
just for SMSing and you get that for like, I want to say it was like $2 a month something
like that.
I was using Tilo or Tilo and I was just using them for text verification.
So I had no minutes and like two megs of data or something stupid and I was just using
it as a carrier because the bigger websites are starting to block VoIP providers so you
can't use a VoIP provider for a validation of your bank or whatever.
So I'm missing a phone, I'm missing a laptop.
The laptop I can kind of do without not the biggest deal but the phone is kind of a deal
breaker and the service that I had was pretty garbage because I couldn't actually have any
data or make any phone calls, I had to you know like get on Wi-Fi.
So I knew that wasn't going to work.
I quickly upgraded my plan and then my wife I think dropped her phone and started doing
some research around that whole space and it's all it's all the same thing.
It's like 30 bucks a month, you can't get around it.
You can maybe save $5 a month if you sign up for a three year contract and you can
say probably you know $200 on a phone or something but the end really kind of comes out
all in the wash when you pay fees and they start up in the service, charge or whatever.
So I just said you know what people throw away phones all the time, the amount of e-waste
in this country and everywhere is awful.
So I just had my wife Eskara and I asked around and my mom had an old, she had an old
S9 which I don't know what version of Android that is but I was able to get that and seemed
great, seemed fine.
The battery life was good enough you know would hold me about a day with normal use.
If I had heavy use I'd have to put it on the charger which I should actually do right
now.
Gonna put it on a little wireless charger.
Grab the crap wireless charger I got here.
The biggest problem and almost a deal breaker is last pass integration is not there because
the security and whatnot, the app doesn't exist in the app store anymore.
It did and I'd rather not use some unknown APK.
So if anybody knows a way to pull old APKs from Google Play Store please let me know because
I need the latest last pass that will work on an S9.
So anyways we're there, there's no way to root it, there's no way to anything, I guess
all the phones are locked down now unless you buy Google phone, all the carrier phones
are completely locked as far as the OS, I mean you can still unlock them for different carriers
but they're all physically locked as far as the software locked as far as all that goes.
So there's no ROMs or anything for the S9 which kind of was a big kind of disappointment.
I like having that flexibility to be able to install whatever I want to install and uninstall
whatever I want to install, like you know candy crush is the system app or whatever.
So anyways I asked around and got that phone and having issues with the last pass and
I said that what what can I what else can I use and I do use Firefox.
So I synced up everything with Firefox which I don't necessarily like syncing up my passwords
with Firefox as that increases my tax that surface significantly.
So I'm not the biggest fan of that now I'm going to try to find this different solution
but what I have to do is basically when I add new passwords to my phone if I sign up
for an account or I just bought something on target you have to get those passwords back
into the last pass somehow or you're going to lose them right.
And it's it's a bit of a process and you know I'm not going to like explain it or do
show notes but it's because it's going to change from version to version but you basically
load up Firefox on the computer I use portable Firefox.
I once you've got to load it up you will want to sync your account and then you want to
go to like the settings and going to passwords export the passwords to a CSV file remembering
delete that CSV file securely later once you load those CSV files you can import them into
last pass by going into logging into the website and going to settings and it'll tell
you Firefox import and click yes it'll actually do the duplicates for you so it'll get rid
of duplicates now there's some edge cases where if you change password or whatever there
might be some stuff there but I don't usually change passwords on my phone I'm usually
creating new accounts so Firefox is decent about catching those new accounts so that I can
push them to last pass so whatever that's pretty much it for like the last pass stuff
then password management deal I'll talk about the fun stuff which is the calculator deal so my
son got a TI-82 that was used TI-83 I think I don't even know TI-82 that was used from my wife
and she's like no games no games so okay fine and I'm looking around I'm like oh there's some
cool games you put on there but there's slow on the TI-82 so I looked around and found a music
tracker which if you don't know what trackers are it's kind of a whole thing that was built
back in the day with BBSs and IRC and it's kind of born out of whatever I don't know if it even
made the commercial market really it was just kind of a whole hacker culture thing it's basically
like chiptunes essentially if you've ever heard of those usually those are creative with trackers
it's a very binary very hexadecimal type of thing you got a tracker and you've got different bits
and everything 16 steps so it's kind of early MP3 there's mod xm's if you had had any
exposure to that so look in look online for mod or xm's or chiptunes and you'll find some stuff so
before mods and xm files those were like basically trackers with samplers you had regular trackers
that would just play like medium instruments or something so that's basically what this makes
your calculator into now you'll say you'll have a calculator doesn't have a sound port on it
but it does have a data port on the bottom and creatively enough someone was able to you know
make that generate audio and then they wrote a program with it so the steps are
get you a cable that matches your setup now I have windows 11 and I have a video and I have a zip
file with everything in there now some of this stuff is open source software but I've kept it
for my own because this stuff is dying it's from 2000's and the poster from 2016 so people
quit doing this stuff you know eons again so I've been I'm keeping it for posterity so I have
the binaries but you can go find the binaries for all this stuff online direct from the sources
I mean I'm gonna not gonna take a put malware on your calculator right so anyways we've got the
kind of the first process is a setup you want to get those drivers first it's called ZADIG 2.9
that basically forces your you can use that to force push the drivers for windows 11 to your
to your USB and I'm using the silver link USB cable not as regular serial cable USB to serial
and then serial to your calculator it's a USB to serial ti special thing it's like 30 bucks 25 bucks
on ebit and once you've got that cable you plug it in turn it on here the boopadoo
used days I followed the video but it's a usb is like when usb or usb when usb tov or something
that file and that will push the drivers to kind of forcefully install the drivers for a windows 11
for you to for me at least to see my ti 82 now the support for this Houston tracker too it says
something about ti 82's maybe some versions of ti 82's won't work or maybe the the
the connection software won't work so something said it wasn't made your mileage made very
type of thing so once you've got the driver setup you've got the cable connected you won't hear a
sound when you plug in the serial cable but you will hear a sound when you plug in the silver link
cable the usb portion your next step is installing ti lp 2 now it's ti lp 2 version 1.8 so if you see
1.8 you would think oh well I need the next version from that no it's ti lp 2 version 1.8 I think
something 1.08 or something that's kind of the latest version that they suggest using now if you
have Linux I think you can emulate all this there's no I don't didn't see any sound emulation with
the ti em 2 or something it's an emulator I did not see you an option for sound but that would be
cool if you could get sound with the emulator and then basically do it all on the computer but
then you might as well have a tracker then so anyways you've got it you got the driver pushed
you've got ti lp 2 installed you run it and this simplest thing to do is plug in the phone turn it
on put some characters in there on the screen and then do the screen capture button and that will
basically prove that you can talk to your calculator now you get the right settings mine defaults to
like gray cable so I have to click silver link every time and then I have to click ti 82 and make
sure those two match and the what I was doing before is I was doing send files and not restore
so the first part is restore and you want to push whatever shell you have the shell is crash
in my instance there's another one that's called like red or something now depending on what
calculator you have depends on what version you send and all that so mine was crash and it was
crash 8 to B and it was I had a lower case all of it I don't know if that's your miles my very
whatever and that's how I got it to push now I had to do restore of that crash dot 8 to B now that
is like basically the program that you load it will load I guess arbitrary calculator assembly
so the Houston tracker is not a program in itself it's a basically I guess a binary file it gets run
with the shell the crash shell so once you've installed the crash shell using the restore method
not the send file method then you can send the Houston tracker to which is ht 2 dot h 2 p that's
also a lower case for me and that's in files now when you're sending the restore it will confirm
on the calculator itself so you have to pay attention you have to put it in receive mode push the
file click click click click click click on the windows side and then you'll see you know restore except
restore whatever and if you missed that within a certain amount of time it'll time out and you
won't get the actual restore but once you got it all set up you'll start up crash and then you'll
have crash started up and then you'll have h ht 2 as an option and then you'll be good to go and
you can start playing around with it they have a separate app to push and pull files or basically
patterns songs from tracks from the tracker itself but I haven't done any of that because it kind
of freezes up on me what I found out that is after a while you play with it if you press the wrong
button or something it will only play like the first note of whatever the first take whatever you're
doing now the problem with that is it's not gonna do anything but eventually I just kept mashing
buttons on the front I didn't do an alternate which is the alpha button it's kind of like second
but it's not second so they use alpha s second and Houston tracker for whatever reason
and that would get weird and I've had it I've had to restore two or three times now but I figured
out somewhere on the main screen where you see all the trackers you can mash some button somewhere
and it will let it continue to play so I don't know what I'm pressing I'm pressing something
somewhere that is messing it up and my son's done the same thing too so anyways that's pretty much
it it's got a video inside of the zip file so if you just want to download the zip and watch the
video for and then download everything else from somewhere else if you don't trust my sources
whatever I feel free to do that but I captured all of it in a single zip because this stuff is
dying and I want to have it back to multiple places if you know the internet folds in on itself
or these these old you know forums or whatever go down now other than that I might come back
and do one for the TI I think a TI 92 I might have access here to a couple of different
calculators let's see yeah might get a TI another TI 82 and a TI 83 plus so that should be
interesting since I've already got all the cables and stuff I might as well play around with those
somebody has a couple of those that they might let me play around with and maybe I can get all
three go on at the same time and we can do one two three six nine tracks playing at the same time
make all the kids ears bleed I don't know maybe we could do a a band a TI 82 a TI band
anyways appreciate it take it easy if you're listening recording episode play with something
now I have one coming up that I really want to do about where I'm at with my
cheap DIY soda system I don't have previous episode but this one's going to be about using
flavors official flavors from Coke and going that route and what I what I've ended up with and
the measurements and all that stuff so it should be fun once I dial it in a little bit we'll be
good to go and I'll do an episode on that one so it should be fun I mean we're talking two leader
bottles of signature Coke bottle brands for like I don't know five cents a bottle something like
that for two liters like it's it's insane so it's almost no cost to doing this stuff once you
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