Notes

Random photos from #vcfmw

#vcfmw already feels crowded and there aren't even any visitors yet

I will be at #VCFMW this weekend, curious to see how the new larger venue works out

cozy computins

I've put my PowerBook 1XX battery model on Printables if anyone wants to make their own battery and/or take over selling these

https://www.printables.com/model/974484-powerbook-1xx-battery

In case you were interested in this "tinySniffer" device being sold on @tindie because you can SSH to it and copy USB pcap files, its capture functionality requires an internet connection because it calls out to a server in China for authorization every time a session is run, and then uploads the pcap files to their website for (seemingly legitimate) remote access.

https://www.usb7.net/products/tinySniffer

I contacted the maker to ask about this requirement and was told it was for anti-piracy reasons 🙄 I asked for a refund because this requirement wasn't stated up front and the maker offered for me to keep the device with a partial refund.

https://hackaday.social/@tindie/112853680686483880

I was finally bothered enough by not being able to quickly see recent statuses of people that follow me on my solo server that I wrote something to fetch the recent statuses of all of them, sort them by date, and then dump out a static HTML timeline of them so I can browse them quickly and find people to follow back:

https://github.com/jcs/mastofollow

ouch

https://github-roast.pages.dev/

For some reason I thought only electrolytic capacitors made during the "capacitor plague" era fail early, but my garage door opener from 2008 died the other day and it just needed a replacement 35v 300uF capacitor on its logic board to bring it back to life. The bad cap didn't bulge or leak though.

Maybe we can try this on more than just trains...

"We couldn't make this software secure, so this update adds googly eyes to it"

"Sorry your meal was awful, but we hope these googly eyes drawn on the bill will make up for it"

The TrackPoint cap and fingerprint reader filler were 3d-printed with flexible TPU filament which required a lot of experimentation with temperature and print settings to get a proper color, flexibility, and as little stringing as possible

The TrackPoint buttons and "i" in the ThinkPad logo were painted with a custom paint I had made to (eventually) match the final TPU prints as close as possible while also matching the actual Dolch logo

Dolch X1 Nano
(and its inspiration)

tired: overnighting car parts from japan

wired: buying car parts from some rando on ebay and hoping they're not fake or wrong when they arrive a week or so later