foone

foone, 7 months ago to random

Gah, I hate laptops. Yeah, they're portable, but at what cost?

foone, 9 months ago to random

why does a PS2 game have a file named COMMANDLINE.TXT in the main WAD file

what command line? this is a PS2 game

foone, 6 months ago to random

xfce4-session crashed with SIGSEGV in __strcat_avx2()

that's probably not a good sign

foone, 4 months ago to random

it has been ZERO DAYS since I have installed Windows 95

foone, 6 months ago to random

So I've got a fun thing that my roommate got at an e-waste place, and I'm gonna open it up and see how it works and if I can interface with it.

It's... a crosswalk button/speaker!

image/png

foone, 7 months ago to random

Imagine an alternate universe where USB instead used NEMA L21 twist lock plugs

foone, 6 months ago to random

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, 3 months ago to random

I'm not saying there's something wrong with my brain, but I just needed to mock up a UI for a demonstration, and my first thought was "boot my winXP vm and use visual basic 6"

foone, 7 months ago to random

Hey, quick question: what's the normal amount of laserdiscs to own in 2023?
Because I'm pretty sure this isn't it.

foone, 26 days ago to random

the world needs more recreational programming.
like, was this the most optimal or elegant way to code this?

no, but it was the most fun to write.

foone, 9 months ago to random

Bad idea: Buy 102 of these "Energy Harvesting
Bluetooth Low Energy" EVBUM2596/D switches and build a keyboard.

They're buttons that communicate over bluetooth and don't require a battery, as they're so energy efficient that pushing the button provides the required power.

https://www.mouser.com/ProductDetail/onsemi/BLE-SWITCH001-GEVB?qs=0lSvoLzn4L8T2idaVxoXbQ%3D%3D

foone, 6 months ago to random

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

foone, 3 months ago to random

I've never used one, so can someone tell me how the Sinclair
ZX81 keyboard works?

Because I'm seeing like 5 options per key, and only one shift key.

Like the "S" key: It's Save, ARCCOS,. "S", LPRINT, and that graphical symbol. How do you select between those?

foone, 8 months ago to random

hmm. I may solve a minor calculus problem by instead using multithreaded python very slowly

foone, 9 months ago to random

gah. searching for help with windows problems is so useless. At least when you google linux problems you find something like answers, or nothing.

you google a windows problem like "I try to reboot into the startup command prompt but it hangs/doesn't accept input at the select-user screen" and get answers like "go into IE and clear your cookies"

foone, 9 months ago to random

Socketed Toshiba TMP68HC000P-12, with 3.5" floppy disk for scale.

When you just need a 68k processor the size of a house

foone, 9 months ago to random

bad idea:
floppy drive that uses caddies

foone, 1 month ago to random

bad idea: A mouse cursor that's not just a simple floating pointer, it's a cat/dog paw... but it stretches all the way to an edge of the screen like it's a really long leg

foone, 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago) to random

Solar Winds (DOS, 1993) annoyingly doesn't use C-strings in the text embedded into the executable. It seems to use the PC BIOS convention of ending strings by a $.

Sadly Ghidra doesn't seem to natively support this

foone, 3 months ago to random

there's nothing more fun, as a reverse engineer, then checking into a DLL to see about cracking it (it's been out of support since the Clinton administration, so I have to) and just seeing "validate_license" as an exported symbol.

GEE I WONDER WHERE I SHOULD START LOOKING

foone, 8 months ago to random

the market for network-controllable power strips is weird
it's two things:

1. 50$ devices intended for use in the home. 3 plugs, connects to some cloud service, shiny and available on amazon
2. 300$ devices with 8 ports and you can talk to it over RS232 and 10/100 ethernet and the web stack fits on a 64kb eeprom and it's only purchasable on a website that was last updated in 2008

foone, 10 months ago to random

os.walk is one of my least favorite APIs in the python standard library

it's just such a pain to use. it's super flexible and powerful! at the expense of being overly so, requiring a bunch of boilerplate to just think about using it.

half the time I've needed it I've just gone FUCK IT and done subprocess.check_output('find -type f PATH') instead

foone, 6 months ago to random

the image is tiny, but horrible.

Who wants a CompactFlash to VGA adapter?

http://salestores.com/colvoyvgapcm.html

foone, 6 months ago to random

I wonder if I'll get in trouble if I put a patched version of the morris worm on github

foone, 7 months ago to random

I've been hacking on House MD (DS, 2010) and it's one of the weirdest games I've reverse engineered because of how aggressively un-weird it is.