joshua stein

Preparing to do some real cutting-edge programming here

Now drawing text on the screen from my code with @fcambus's Spleen font in 5x8 (though eventually I'll need a 4-pixel-wide font to get 80 columns)

Programming an 8-bit computer from the 2000s with a 32-bit computer from the mid 1990s

December 2018 →

In 2019 I'll finally be able to receive e-mails with just a push of a button

@internetofshit: it took 1000s of years to get the amount of work to create light down to trivial amounts so everyone could use it

it took just 10 years to fuck it up and need a few megawatts of servers to turn one bulb on from the couch

Tinkering with a Mivo Mailstation I got on eBay for $5. It's a dedicated e-mail device from the 90's/00's with a built-in dialup modem.

It has a Z80 CPU, 128k of RAM, and 1MB of flash. Its diagnostic menu even has a built-in hex editor!

garbage[46]: Robot uprising

I feel like I could...

TAKE ON THE WORLD

For context: https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/130-lizard

Having a three-letter Instagram username sure does bring out the scammers

Watched
Rams (2018)
★★★★☆

I don't know what it is with these kinds of communities (also: custom Android ROMs) that they like making things so hard for anyone to understand the big picture at a glance with just a few links and FAQs. Maybe it's the crappy forum software that encourages it?

I had a similar experience trying to "jailbreak" my newest Kindle the other day to be able to show a custom image on the screen when it's powered off. It was days of reading forum posts that linked to other 100-page threads and downloading random files.

Mazda finally came out with a CarPlay/Android Auto kit so I bought it for my CX-5. For the installation instructions and firmware I had to read a Mazda forum and wade through a maze of posts with links to random PDFs, Youtube videos, and file-sharing sites hosting the firmware.

November 2018 →

I see Bitcoin is on sale for Black Friday.

garbage[45]: New fixes for old laptops

I recently used VFIO on Linux to get stereo sound working on the Dolby Atmos sound chip on my OpenBSD laptop
https://jcs.org/2018/11/12/vfio

OpenBSD in Stereo with Linux VFIO

ChiBUG is meeting tomorrow night
https://chibug.org/2018-11-13

Correction: SPI keyboard/touchpad drivers (not i2c). I started looking into developing these for the 12" MacBook a while back but it required a new Intel SPI host controller driver first, which bored me to death and I gave up.

Of course, that's after disabling Secure Boot and enabling external device booting from rescue mode (⌘-R at boot)

And in case anyone cares, OpenBSD compatibility:
- 6.4 loads kernel but just shows black screen
- 6.3 boots, NVMe needs PCI id added but instantly powers off as soon as scsibus probes (wtf?)
- Broadcom 4355 wifi doesn't work with bwfm
- Needs new i2c keyboard/touchpad drivers

I'm not sure why I keep trying new Apple laptops thinking the keyboard will grow on me, they are all terrible. I held out hope Apple might leave it alone for the MacBook Air refresh but this 3rd gen still sucks. I guess the 2015 MBP is the last usable laptop Apple will ever make.

@romanzolotarev: OpenBSD battlestation/desktop/screenshot
by @jcs
https://www.reddit.com/r/openbsd/comments/9ujgcx/post_your_openbsd_battlestationdesktopscreenshot/e96tyfi/

I'm still annoyed by this. Just guess the user's country by IP and default to that with an option to override it. Why force every user to click a map? Porn ads can geolocate down to your city but http://ups.com still doesn't know I'm in the US.
https://twitter.com/jcs/status/693273774284603393

"None of this [OpenBSD] stuff works on the generic MS Surface or Apple Mac stuff you see in 99% of the use cases"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18370903

I like when websites have that "Oh no the user is moving the cursor up to hit the back button, they're leaving! Offer them a coupon!" Javascript but I was only moving the cursor up to click on my password manager button

October 2018 →

Hi @AppleSupport please send your e-mails in a different format so I can view them on my Apple device.

I finished my 1010 game for the Arduboy, which I developed on OpenBSD with my updated Arduino/Arduboy ports (https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-ports&m=153989390409353&w=2)

https://github.com/jcs/arduboy-1010

@openbsd: OpenBSD 6.4 is out now! https://www.openbsd.org/64.html

Grab the goods: https://cdn.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/6.4
Upgrade guide: https://www.openbsd.org/faq/upgrade64.html

@mjg59: Psst being passionate about something doesn't make you good at it

This guide was super helpful for setting up Linux to pass the PCI device (audio chip) to Windows under qemu and dump all PCI I/O to a log file. Now to try to make sense of all the data...
https://hakzsam.wordpress.com/2015/02/21/471/amp/

Lazyweb: what's the best way to log all I/O for a PCI device under Windows to reverse engineer what a driver is doing? Run Windows under qemu with some kind of PCI passthru? A shim driver on native Windows?

OpenBSD-themed fish & chips with @kremlinkremlin

This morning's hack to go with your tinfoil hat
https://github.com/jcs/login_duress

garbage[44]: /* +1 (252) 88-TRASH */

Garbage now has a voicemail feedback line, so you can call in and leave us your questions and comments and we'll play them on future episodes https://twitter.com/garbagefm/status/1047860385456513024

garbage[43]: What year is it?

September 2018 →

Chicago Area BSD Users Group is meeting next month
https://chibug.org/2018-10-10

After primarily using a fanless laptop for the past year, it's hard to go back to one with a fan even if it's not that loud or on constantly.

Coil whine is worse though. I've been playing with undervolting and limiting TDP to see if I can minimize it, but it's still there.

Aw shucks, the Intel ME seems to have been neutered and doesn't work any more

And we're live... thanks @mjg59

Flashing coreboot on the X210

These last two episodes of The Daily have been really hard to listen to

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/13/podcasts/the-daily/hurricane-harvey-houston-floods-emergency.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/14/podcasts/the-daily/hurricane-harvey-houston-floods-emergency.html

But on the plus side, ThinkLight!

I'm sad the modem is still a Winmodem though and won't work in OpenBSD

My 51nb ThinkPad X210 finally arrived that I ordered long ago. Kaby Lake R quad-core i5-8250, 1920x1200 IPS, outfitted with 16Gb RAM (expandable to 32Gb) and a 500Gb Samsung 860 SSD. I swapped in a palmrest from an X200 to get rid of the useless miniature touchpad.

I always picture Comic Book Guy writing the one-star reviews of @PushoverApp on Google Play and it makes me slightly less upset

First mention of Linux in a commercial BIOS? https://twitter.com/hdevalence/status/1038305566517415936

"Please be informed that there was a mix up with another server and your drives were removed."

k

Fridays are supposed to be read-only, right? One of my dedicated servers with 2 1TB SATA drives (softraid RAID 1) spontaneously restarted according to the iLO and now neither of the drives are recognized by the BIOS/AHCI controller. Sounds like a long day of tarsnap recovery...

August 2018 →

OpenBSD on the Microsoft Surface Go https://jcs.org/2018/08/31/surface_go

OpenBSD on the Microsoft Surface Go

Yeah but for most people, there's no difference between Samsung and Android
https://www.appbrain.com/stats/top-manufacturers https://twitter.com/ntcomplete/status/1031596340923363329

Wow, my Galaxy S8 test device shows this notification every couple weeks recommending that I restart the device just because it's been a while. Android really is the new Windows.

What is the best practice for doing customer support when a user loses their 2FA device/token? Tell them they're SOL? Just reset manually and confirm by e-mail?

The last thing I backed is a year past its delivery estimate and they just e-mailed all of us to advertise that they're now selling the product from their own website (before sending out any product to backers).

I really need to stop backing things on Kickstarter. Aside from the Pebble and Thimbleweed Park, everything else I've backed has ended up being garbage.