Free The Pot Thief Who Studied Einstein by J. Michael Orenduff Page A

bill has weird pastel colors added to the traditional green, and a metallic strip runs through it. The Federal Government – they made my profession illegal, tax me when I continue to do it, and now they have nothing better to do than tinker with our money.
    Tristan handed me the device I had come for. It looked like a middle-school science project, a perforated metal plate about six inches square with wires and little devices all stuck together. One wire dangled down the side and had a sort of plug looking thing, but not the sort that would go in a wall outlet.
    “You made this?”
    “Yep. Sorry it looks so messy, but you just need it for one use. I’m not going to market them.”
    “Could you?”
    “Not and stay out of jail. Let me show you how to use it. You plug this into one of the USBs on your laptop,” he said, indicating the wire hanging from the device. Then he handed me a small plastic device the shape and size of a piece of gum. “You put this in a different USB.” He showed me the USB slots in the back of the laptop. “Then you just aim this at the garage door and push this button. You’ll have to hold it down for a while depending on how long it takes to find the code. When you see the garage door start to open, you can let go of the button, but not before. Otherwise, you’d have to start over.”
    “I won’t need electricity to make this thing work?”
    “The battery in the laptop will supply the current. Make sure it’s charged up.”
    “So I’m using the computer just as a battery?”
    “No, the jump drive has a micro in it that will direct the device to run through all the possible codes in sequence.”
    I asked him what a jump drive was and he pointed to the gum-sized piece of plastic.
    “How long will it take?” I asked.
    “Given when Casitas del Bosque was built, they probably have second generation openers. Those are coded by setting dip switches in the transmitter and the receiver to a matching combination. Depending on the number of switches, there can be up to 256 codes.”
    “So the most switches they have is eight.”
    “Uncle Hubert! How did you know that?”
    “I don’t know what a dip switch is, but I recognize 256 as the eighth power of two, so if the switches have two positions, off and on, and there are eight of them, then the number of combinations is two raised to the eighth power, and that’s 256.”
    He was staring at me in admiration. It felt good but was fleeting.
    “Anyway,” he continued, “It can run through a signal every second, so the worst case would be about four and a half minutes.”
    I should have left it there, but I had to ask. “Why are they called second generation?”
    He laughed. Not at me, but because he thought the history of garage door openers had a funny chapter. “The first garage door openers just sent an unencoded signal. That was fine when they were a novelty. But the FCC limits their frequency to between 300-400 megahertz, so after a lot of them were installed, it would sometimes happen that two people in the same neighborhood would buy units that turned out to be sending on the same frequency, and when you pressed your opener, your door went up but so did the guy’s down the block.”
    “What’s megahertz, a super car rental company?”
    He likes it when I make jokes about technical terms.
    After a polite laugh, he said, “So they put codes in them that you set with dip switches like I said. But anyone with a few diodes and resisters and a soldering iron can make a device like this, so after a few burglaries, they came up with the third generation openers that have more complicated coding.” His eyes lit up. “And now there’s a new model that works by reading your fingerprint. You just put the tip of your finger over the opener and up goes the door. I’d love to have one of those. Of course, I’d need to get a garage first.”
    Then he looked at me and said, “Do I want to know why you need this?”
    “I’m not going