android – Made by Mikal

Claude Code is scary good at APK reverse engineering

Post author:mikal
Post published:April 2, 2026
Post category:Machine learning

A couple of weekends ago, Cat and I had a Bluetti home battery installed. Bluetti seems to be taking the open source community fairly seriously, and there was already a Home Assistant integration available on github, which is impressive. Before installation it was hard to tell if my EP760 inverter with "PBOX" IoT dongly thing was well supported or not, so we just kind of YOLO'ed it. Sadly, the existing open source Bluetti projects I looked at had pretty poor support for this model. However, I've spent a fair bit of time in the last year reading and watching tutorials on YouTube about Android reverse engineering, so I knew at least that JADX existed and how to run it to extract source code. I've also been playing around a lot with Claude Code, and it had done a fairly good job at analyzing malicious APKs from the courses I'd done, so I thought perhaps I could do something interesting here. Its super common for APKs to be obfuscated with commercial tools, but notably Claude is also pretty good at unwinding that obfuscation in a way in which its probably no longer a particularly effective technique for stopping analysis of otherwise…

On syncing with Google Contacts

Post author:mikal
Post published:December 16, 2011
Post category:Google

So, I started with a new company a few weeks ago, and one of the things I missed from my previous company was having the entire corporate directory synced onto my phone. Its really handy as an on caller to be able to give people a call when something goes wrong, without having to dig around and find their details. Back in the good old days at Google the way you got this sort of data onto your phone was to run a script written by one of the guys on the gmail team. The script grabbed the LDAP directory, and pushed it into Google contacts, which you could then sync with your phone. Now I wanted something very similar -- especially as the contacts sync stuff with Android is pretty reasonable. However, I'd never coded with the Google public APIs before, and that turned out to be the hardest part of the problem. First off I wrote a little script which dumped the corporate directory into a text file. I mostly did this because I wanted other people to be able to run the script in as light weight a manner as possible -- for example, if we wanted…

Cool people I have met at work

Post author:mikal
Post published:January 13, 2006
Post category:Google

The guys behind the PKD android project -- very cool in a geeky way. Jimmy Carter -- very cool in an unbreaking the world way. Oh, and apparently you're always a President, even if you're no longer in office, and you're meant to stand when a President enters the room. Oh, and clapping means "yes".