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I recently bought a USB reader/writer for 125kHz RFID tokens. It comes directly from china with no driver/API description, just a windows application called RFID-APP-E-N.exe or RFID_APP_EN.exe on a CD, and a PL2303 driver for the USB-to-serial convertor used by the device.

A reverse engineering of a USB capture allowed to have a good view of the serial protocol used.

Here's a python script/driver to handle the device: rfid_app.py

Read more: Serial protocol for a chinese RFID 125Khz reader/writer 10 comments

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As many owners of a macbook, the connector of my power adaptor sadly broke a few days ago :(. The cables and plugs seem too thin, and tend to break inside the magsafe connector after many bending. For all non-apple devices, connectors are reinforced to limit the being radius, which rises the life time.

So, let's try to repair it!

After disassembling the connector (using a pliers to pull on the metal part):

Read more: Fixing a broken MagSafe 1 T connector 1 comment

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The osx-pl2303 project proposes a Mac OS X driver for the PL2303 Serial/USB convertor. Unfortunately, the current version do not support 64bits kernel.

Here's a patch to allow to compile the source code for the x86_64 architecture (Intel 64bits):

# svn checkout svn://svn.code.sf.net/p/osx-pl2303/code/trunk osx-pl2303
# cd osx-pl2303
# ftp http://www.triades.net/downloads/osx-pl2303-intel64.patch
# patch < osx-pl2303-intel64.patch

And an installation package (the original PPC and Intel 32bits versions, with additional Intel 64bits support). Tested on Mac OS X Lion (10.7.x).

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