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Richard Audette
Personal blog · hotelexistence.ca · on HN as raudettesecurityaiprogramming
Richard Audette writes Hotel Existence, a personal blog at hotelexistence.ca about security, ai and programming. Since 2023, 3 different Hacker News readers have linked it 13 times, most often “Remove Kindle DRM with OCR and web automation”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-09-21, and you can follow it by feed.
Richard Audette's personal brain dump: Opinions, Projects, Toronto
Most-linked posts?
- Remove Kindle DRM with OCR and web automation2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-03-14
What Hacker News says?
May be of interest to this thread - I created a script that drives the Kindle web reader, captures screenshots, runs OCR, and creates an ePub - this wouldn't be as good as the pixelmelt solution, as it requires OCR. Overview: https://www.hotelexistence.ca/remove-drm-with-kindleocrer/ (there's a sample conversion at the bottom, so you can see if it works "good enough" for your purposes) Script: https://github.com/rau…
Comment linking /remove-drm-with-kindleocrer/
on “How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM”Submitted Further Thoughts on Stealth AirTags as a story · 4 points
HN discussionA technique not covered here is setting up a wifi hotspot to impersonate a device. I wanted to reverse engineer the protocol used by an inexpensive action camera. I ran the Android app through a decompiler (JADX), and the app supported many different types of cameras, so it wasn't clear which calls were related to the one I owned. So I setup a Raspberry Pi with the SSID as the camera, logged the first API call. Then…
Comment linking /reverse-engineer-akaso-ek7000/
on “All the data can be yours: reverse engineering APIs”Submitted Remove Kindle DRM with OCR and web automation as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI actually did write this up if it helps anyone... I did something similar, my WordPress site only had ~100 pages, so I just put the page map in a table in the js: https://www.hotelexistence.ca/something-mildly-different/ (my ?p=### script is near the bottom)
Comment linking /something-mildly-different/
on “Show HN: I made a service to convert WordPress blogs to Hugo”Submitted Share a Secret Code Word to Bypass LLM Censorship as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThe way Find My has been built, it doesn't really matter what they do with the tags, it's fairly straightforward to build your own tags, or modify tags, that bypass any stalking detection. A phone's stalking detection just looks for a tag that's not yours that has been around you for a while. But you can modify a tag such that it selectively powers up, or build a tag that changes identifiers, such that the stalking…
Comment linking /exploring-bluetooth-trackers-at-geekweek-7-5/
on “Apple introduces new AirTag with longer range and improved findability”I have been working on a a bunch of disconnected "smart" bicycle dashcam ideas. See https://www.hotelexistence.ca/bicycledashcam/ for version 5, which was just blind spot monitoring. I've also played around with license plate recognition and depth mapping. Primarily, for me, this is a just a fun exercise. Looking at exploring: - Recognize the license plates of the cars around you. From a picture, it would look at th…
Comment linking /bicycledashcam/
on “Ask HN: Show me your half baked project”https://www.hotelexistence.ca/me/ Personal projects, problems solved, and workplace observations. Sample posts: Fixing ink blobs on Epson prints - https://www.hotelexistence.ca/me/?p=408 Building a 'smart' bicycle dashcam - https://www.hotelexistence.ca/me/?p=618 Also, kind of a personal blog - I scripted a blogging bot that writes a post daily, using the comments from the most commented article on HN, which today i…
Comment linking /me/?p=618
on “Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?”Related: for fun over the holidays, I created an ePub of a paperback copy of "I Brought The Ages Home", by Charles T. Currelly, which went out of copyright in Canada in 2007 (copyright in Canada changed from 50 to 70 years after the death of the author in 2022, but this did not affect works that were already in the public domain). I couldn't find a ebook online, so I found an old paperback copy and created one: http…
Comment linking /create-epub-from-paperback/
on “Standard Ebooks: Public Domain Day 2026 in Literature”