@foone@digipres.club avatar

foone

@[email protected]

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

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foone, to random
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Do you ever think "I should hack the firmware on my tumble dryer so it'll boot faster"?
Or are you a normal person with a regular brain?

foone,
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@jason it's like 5 entire seconds

foone, to random
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So I ran memtest86+ on my desktop.
It didn't error!
or succeed. It just... hung, 25 minutes in.

that's probably not a good sign

foone,
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I'm gonna have to start pulling parts out and get it down to a minimal hardware setup and see if it still crashes.

like, I probably could disconnect the floppy drives. those shouldn't be needed just to run memtest

foone,
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even if they are clearly VITAL for day-to-day work

foone,
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yanked the odd hardware like GPU and hard drives, as well as the common stuff like DVI video capture device, both floppy drives, optical drive, and serial port

foone,
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I had to go find another keyboard though. my spare keyboard on hand is an AT keyboard, and while of course I have a (hand made!) AT-to-PS/2 adapter, this computer for some reason only has USB ports.

I can't understand these companies just expecting us to have obscure hardware on hand to diagnose their failures.

foone,
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I normally have it plugged into a KVM but I'm bypassing that on the extreme off-chance that there's some weird interaction between the KVM and the PC

foone,
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WE'VE GOT ERRORS! hitting a bunch of RAM problems around 31-39gb.

nastily that's divided between two banks. So... it's probably not just one pair of DIMMS going bad.
(and of course it's also possible it's some other problem that's causing RAM issues)

foone,
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yanked half the RAM to see if it still errors

foone,
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with half ram, I did two successful passes of memtest86+, no errors. time to check THE OTHER HALF (to confirm if it was just a needs-reseating/too much ram for the mobo problem)

foone,
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and it passes too.
So, either my motherboard has stopped being able to support 64gb, or it was just a reseating problem. Let's stick it back in and see.

foone,
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that's... probably not a good sign

foone,
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I really don't like that it corrupted outside of the text window.
That shouldn't be happening if this is just a RAM problem. That's like... a GPU corruption problem.

Which is very bad because I'm currently using the CPU's on-die GPU

foone,
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@manawyrm pointed out that my ram sticks weren't properly interleaved. So I'm trying memtest again with that fixed

foone,
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NOPE! it ran for 3 hours, threw a ton of memory errors, then crashed in the same matrixy way.
So, back to just one pair of sticks, and I'm gonna let memtest run for a while and see if that seems stable.

foone,
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OK so ran the half-ram test for nearly 8 hours with zero issues.
Now I've reattached the GPU, usb ports, serial port, floppy drives, and rust drives and optical drives (but not the m.2 ssds yet because they're boot drives) and I'm running it again, to confirm it's not a PSU problem

foone, to random
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TIL you can get a deck of cards where every card is also an RFID beacon. I can only think of evil things to do with this.

https://illuminati-magic.com/products/rfid-deck-playing-cards

foone, to random
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So this is a Smith Corona PWP 9000 LT DS: It's a wordprocessor.

foone, to random
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Is there a skin for Discord to make it look like mIRC on Windows 98 yet? Or do I have to do everything myself?

foone, to random
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It seems every company I've worked at has a person who looms large in their legend.
Like, they're often the person who built the core systems, everything was originally their design, but they left recently and in their absence they've had to hire like 5 more people to try and take over all their responsibilities.

I think next time I'm gonna track down that person, find out where they moved to, and go work there instead

foone,
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Pretending here the answer isn't "you had a 3x engineer and made then work like they were a 20x engineer and this burnt them out in like two years and now they're doing woodworking in a log cabin on the top of a mountain in Montana and if you mention computers to them, they'll shoot you in the face"

foone, to random
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There's a special hell for sites which have password requirements that are like 16 letters, one or more numbers, upper case and lowercase, at least one special character, and we disabled pasting/password managers

foone, to random
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remember kids: the point of the html "class" attribute is to list out the explicit formatting of every element on your webpage.

CSS was supposed to split formatting from HTML! and it did.

now instead of horrible HTML like <font size="7" color="red">, we have CSS!
So our HTML can instead look like:
<div class="size-7 color-red">

note: you'll need to include a few hundred KB of CSS libraries to make this work properly, but that's the price we have to pay for elegance

foone, to random
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ahh, the true mechanical keyboard experience:
you type something in a meeting while muted and google meet is like "hey, are you talking? you're muted!"

foone, to random
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I wonder if any company has set up a policy to temporarily revoke system access to employees on vacation.

You're on vacation, why are you logging into the JIRA instance? Go sit on a beach or climb a mountain or something.

foone, to random
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It's been 36 years but I'm still mad at IBM for using identical connectors for the keyboard and mouse on the ps/2.
Come on. Not even a key pin? Or just make them interchangeable, it wouldn't take much more circuitry!

foone,
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@jordan the connector has shared power pins but the keyboard data and mouse data are on different pins. So the connectors could be interchangeable, they just weren't usually

foone,
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They at least set it up so that the keyboard/mouse pins are different, making it technically possible to have universal ports and Y-splitter single ports, as well as making sure it doesn't explode if you plug in the wrong device.

But still. Terrible design. Different devices should either connect to universal ports where it doesn't matter, or not be possible to get wrong.

foone, to random
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So the Vine–Matthews–Morley hypothesis says that new crust is created by cooling of magma at mid-ocean ridges, and since the magma goes through it's curie point as it cools, it ends up recording the current polarity of the geomagnetic field. As the magnetic poles flip over time, this means the sea floor contains a bunch of different magnetic field directions, going back and forth and thus recording the historic days of the magnetic reversals.

So...

foone,
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This is also how floppy disks store data. It's a series of magnetic polarity inversions, known as flux transitions.

Thus, the earth IS A FLOPPY DISK!

foone, to random
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I joked on Tumblr about making a bad keyboard, and within 30 seconds someone reblogs it with the name of a chat platform connected to that fandom...
A chat platform I created 12 years ago.

foone, to random
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ahhhhhrhgghghr. I finally got around to digging into a Switch game for the first time, because someone wanted me to hack one, and the first thing I see is a filename:
img/unity_logo.png

foone,
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of course it's unity. everything's fucking unity

foone,
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YOU SHIPPED XBOXONE FILES ON THE SWITCH? SHAME! SHAME FOR PUBLISHER FOR A THOUSAND YEARS!

foone,
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WHY DO ALL THE (MALE) 3D MODELS IN WHEEL OF FORTUNE HAVE NIPPLES

WHO IS WHEELIN' TOPLESS?

foone,
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so looking at the full file paths, I think the reason is that there's a full "naked" texture map, and it's used for all the visible skin parts of the model. So even though there's no mesh associated with the topless man, it still uses the texture of a possibly topless man

foone,
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presumably the developer reused these avatars between games. And some other game might need a topless guy

foone,
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why is this anime girl in here, named "Jeff.png"?

foone,
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so @BestGirlGrace figured out this is Kirino Kosaka, from the incest-themed light novel/manga/anime Ore no Imouto ga Konna ni Kawaii Wake ga Nai, aka My Little Sister Can't Be This Cute.

huh.

foone,
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so I opened up the localization file:
"Wild Cards can be played any time and change the active color of play"
"If you have a lot of cards in one color, try to play as many of these cards before the color gets changed"
"Don't forget to call UNO when you play your second-to-last card!"

THESE ARE HINTS FOR UNO.
THIS GAME IS NOT UNO

foone,
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Just one of these days I want to take apart a game and find exactly what I expect.
No weird custom programming language runtimes, no leftover bits of other games, no random images from incest animes.

That'd be a nice change of pace

foone, to random
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man, google translate is NOT GREAT for finnish.
I keep getting it tell me things mean "sausage" when they actually mean "living room" or "bedroom"

foone, to random
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what kind of a fucking company releases a unix in 1998 that is available only on floppy disks? 22 of them?

foone,
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apparently the answer is "they actually released in 1994, but then did a minor 1998 update and didn't feel like rewriting the installer to handle CD-ROMs"

foone,
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This is Interactive UNIX, aka PC/IX, an OS by Interactive Systems Corporation. I'm using 4.1.1, which was released by Sun (because ISC got bought by Kodak in '88, who sold them to Sun in '91)

foone,
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"Remove the last diskette and press any key to continue" would be a good thing to put on a t-shirt

foone, to random
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ahh, that fun feeling when you're like "damn it, I need a tool to do X"
and then you realize there is one
and you wrote it
18 years ago

foone,
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anyway now I can do PNGtubering as a 3D Movie Maker Character!
With some annoying color artifacting because apparently the hard part is getting pixels from one app to another, but hey. it works.

I tested it out in a work meeting. It's listening to my mic, and shows a static pose until I talk, then it plays the talk animation.

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