@foone@digipres.club avatar

foone

@foone@digipres.club

Hardware / software necromancer, collector of Weird Stuff, maker of Death Generators. (she/they🏳️‍⚧️)

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. For a complete list of posts, browse on the original instance.

foone , to random
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I finally lugged my Highscreen SkyTower AT tower up to my office. This machine is beautiful, even when it's yellowed and dusty and grimy and rusty.

foone OP ,
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and yeah, it's got a sliding door in case you need to hide your drives!

And good god, look at how many bays this has.
2x 3.5", 5 5.25". It's amazing.

foone OP ,
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check it out: screwless entry. it has a handle you just slide to open it.

foone OP ,
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it's even got a drive in it! and it's not locked! yay. These caddies are too small for the usual tubular lock impressioning tools so they're a pain to pick. It's usually just easier to disassemble the fucker.

It's a Seagate ST32120A, 2111 MB

foone OP ,
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my got-damn JPEGifer is broken again. why am I uploading big PNGs?

foone OP ,
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okay I had to take an hour long break to fix pastejpeg.

Here's the insides!

foone OP ,
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CPU!
It's a A80502-100 SX963: A 100mhz Pentium 1, bus speed of 50 or 66 mhz.

This is post-FDIV fix. Boooo.

foone OP ,
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Okay, fan and heatsink cleaned up. Fan tested, and reattached.

foone OP ,
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bah. my battery box has gone missing. I can't find my CR2032s

foone OP ,
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I pulled out the Rustmaster 9000 PSU. This is not getting tested, it's going directly back into the swamp from whence it came

The front of an AT PSU, the grille for the speaker has rust and dust and grime all around it

foone OP ,
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Darn. My clean PSU isn't gonna fit into this case, the fan + power plugs are at the wrong location. I'll have to pull another one from my Car Fulla AT Towers.

foone OP ,
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But in the meantime, lemme just grab a modern PSU and my ATX2AT

foone OP ,
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Putting a modern gamer-black PSU in a classic AT tower is just wrong.

foone OP ,
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Hmm. Nothing from the motherboard: It doesn't ever init the VGA. I'm gonna need to find my POST card. Hoping it's just one of those units that won't power on without a CMOS battery

foone OP ,
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ooh cool, I was able to get the picante CR2032s!

foone OP ,
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Darn. No luck with the CR2032s. There's a possibly my VGA display is broken (it's acting weird) but there's no beeps.

I'll have to pull the other expansion cards in case they're dead, but I'm all dusted-out today

foone OP ,
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okay I pulled the cards.

We've got a 3com EtherLink-IIII, a 3C509B-IP.

foone OP ,
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And the modem is a Diamond SupraExpress 144i PnP. 14,400bps of blinding speed.

foone OP ,
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And our video card is a STB Systems Horizon+ PCI, built around a Cirrus Logic CL-GD5430.

This is a 2D accelerator with an entire megabyte of VRAM.

foone OP ,
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Good news! yanking the modem/network card (and reseating the VGA card) made it work. Beeps and boots and everything!

I did run into a minor problem with my portable VGA monitor. uhhhhhh

foone OP ,
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okay I spent a few minutes swearing at the bad menu system on this monitor and it turns out it's broken so that you can't mirror it left or right, it's always mirrored, but the left/right mirroring does turn off if you flip it vertically. So I did, and just rotated the monitor upside down. I guess that works.

foone OP ,
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I'm trying to dump the drives before I do anything with this machine and one of them has broken DMA. It's really annoying because I can't seem to turn it off, and every time I google it I get results from 2002 saying "the old way doesn't work anymore", which doesn't give me any reason to expect it'll work in 2024

foone OP ,
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there are 900 ways to disable DMA and none of them work

foone OP ,
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so the 2gig drive is still failing to work, but I imaged the 500mb drive, and it turns out this thing was running NT4.

So I was correct! This machine smelled like NT4, and I was proven right.

foone OP ,
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it seems it was running InterMail Post.Office, a mail server for small ISPs

foone OP ,
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yeah, the other drive was kinda working before, but I couldn't get DMA to turn off, and now it's completely failed.

ata5.00: failed to IDENTIFY (I/O error, err_mask=0x2)

shame.

foone OP ,
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from what I did get off, it looks like the removable 2gig drive stored the websites this thing hosted.
and it was used at some point in 2007

foone , to random
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I listened to a podcast about the Therac-25 disaster ( where a malfunctioning radiotherapy machine injured several patients ) and I learned the funniest element of this whole situation:

at one point the company that made the thing issued directions on how to work around the error: They told the hospitals to go to their PDP-11 terminals, and remove the "up" key from the keyboards.

nobodyinperson , to random
@nobodyinperson@fosstodon.org avatar

I finally made it: an XOR mechanism that requires exactly one of two keys to be inserted at a time. I call it the 🗝️ .

This is very useful for example to track where important small things go: Want to take the car keys? You have to insert your name tag to unlock it.

My first mechanical project with and it was great!

EDIT: Now on : https://www.printables.com/model/793767-keyguardian-dual-key-xor-mechanism

video, showing honeycomb storage wall. a hand grabs a USB stick which is attached to a small white box. The USB stick can't be removed from the box. The hand then grabs a name tag labeled 'Bob' from the right, inserts it into a slot on the box, and the USB stick pops out. Now the name tag can't be removed from the box. In reverse, when reinserting the USB stick, the name tag pops out.

foone ,
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@nobodyinperson you fool! If you make a physical XOR mechanism, that's dangerously close to making a logic gate. What if someone prints 12 million of these and builds adders and ALUs and memory and now it's running doom!

foone , to random
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PSA: We're two days to a possible US government shutdown.

That means NOW is the best time to get out your Blonder-Tongues and other NTSC broadcasting equipment, get them connected, and ready to go.

That way you'll be able to begin broadcasting unlicensed pirate TV the very moment the FCC goes on hiatus

foone , to random
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It's kinda depressing how tumblr is imploding now and I'm seeing half my follow list go "man, after seeing both twitter and tumblr do this, it's really showing how it's a bad idea for a social media network to be run by a company who can make arbitrary changes without user consent.

anyway, here's my bsky: ..."

foone OP ,
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it's weird because it's not like bsky is any more tumblr-like than mastodon. and there are activitypub-based socials designed to work more like tumblr... but nope, mastodon is scary, so when tumblr dies, we'll go to bsky. what'll happen on bsky in a year or do? don't worry about it!

foone OP ,
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@mcc yeah. I joined some japanese-affiliated instance early on and then discovered that it was defederated from a bunch of instances because of the Japanese issue.

foone , to random
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What I want to see someone make: one of those Radio Shack 200-in-one electronics lab kits, but it's arduino compatible.

foone , to random
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I've no longer got a job, and I'm also kinda completely broke.

So if anyone has a few extra dollars they can donate to help me make it to my first payday, that'd be very appreciated.

https://ko-fi.com/fooneturing

foone , to random
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ahh, the classic sign of vertical deflection failure

foone OP ,
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this is off ebay.
the seller still wants 200$ + 50$ shipping for it

foone OP ,
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ebay->contact the seller

are you fucking high? you're selling a broken screen for the price of a new nintendo switch?

foone OP ,
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I mean, this can sometimes be fixed, sure, but still. 250$ is a lot of money to spend on a "maybe fixable" piece of hardware

foone , to random
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I'm always kinda surprised that Factorio is so popular with developers, given that it's basically "technical debt, the game!"

foone OP ,
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what if your technical debt was represented visually and sometimes got you killed?

NOW THAT'S A GAME!

foone OP ,
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although I guess it's like that quote about how techies are into pen & paper RPGs because of the fantasy of having a clearly explained quest that they can actually complete

foone OP ,
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the big draw of factorio is not that it's a giant spaghetti pile of technical debt of your own making... it's that you can spend an hour of intense work FIXING that technical debt. that's the unrealistic fantasy this game is providing

foone OP ,
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game: this factory is technical debt in visual form. every conveyor belt is placed in such a way that made sense hours ago but now is nothing but a blight on your dreams

techie gamers: why would I play this?

game: and you get to fix it without any meetings

techie gamers: THIS IS THE BEST GAME EVER MADE

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