FUN FACT:
if you build electronic devices which contain a raspberry pi in them, consider what will happen if one of them gets thrown out.
someone might open them up, stick the microSD card in them into a reader, and open up that tantalizing "apps.json" file which has YOUR GOD DAMN AWS KEYS? IN UNENCRYPTED PLAIN TEXT?
@foone Funner fact: I accidentally did this with an Electron app. It packaged up my local .env file in the release. Imagine my surprise finding a .txt on my S3 instance from a well-meaning user.
So there's always the debate between QWERTY and alphabetical keyboards, but everyone is missing the obvious way to solve this disagreement.
There's no reason the alphabet HAS to be in that order. It's arbitrary, and English would work almost completely the same if the alphabet was in a different order, you know?
So, let's just put the alphabet in QWERTY order!
It'd solve all our problems from Q to M.
@gsuberland@foone Refreshing indeed. It keeps saddening me to see more and more people using machines like those from Bambu Lab. It's like programmers / newcomers honestly using iPad OS… an insult to the craft itself in my opinion.
After all if you offer engineering machines like 3D printers, how cynical is it to build them in a way that increasingly shuts out the very people who are supposed to use them?
@foone I bought a Maslow cnc thing a few years back, and realized I either had time for woodworking as a hobby, or running a Maslow. So I get the feeling.
I sold the Maslow for a song and bought a shaper instead.
The fact that Sholes teamed up with Remington to sell his keyboards makes total sense.
Not only because duh, Remington was exactly the kind of company that knew how to make reliable machinery with small accurately milled parts, but because the keyboard is a weapon.
Someone needs to make a version of doom that works like those 1960s flight simulators that NASA used, where it's a physical model and the controls are just driving a video camera around it
So when I see a floppy disk anywhere my natural instinct is "ooh, I should image that and upload it to the internet archive!"
Which is a drive (no pun intended) that has served me well: I've imaged a lot of floppy disks.
Recently it has started betraying me, however. See, I've been doing a temp job where I digitize microfiche for the internet archive.
So now most of the time when I go "hey I should image that disk and put it on the archive", it's already IN the internet archive. Physically!
I saw this voltmeter at the electronics flea market. Look at that massive probe! It looks like you need to check your back blast before using it.
Apparently it's for REALLY high voltages? Like, 3kV?
@foone I'd go up an order of magnitude at least, you wouldn't need it that big for 3k. The little TV repair sized hv probes you probably saw around in various places are made for like 30
Fun bug: my wife and I were playing Wheel of Fortune on the switch. We each created female characters, but the game crashed while spinning the wheel. Fortunately it saves your mid-game progress, except when we resumed playing, my wife's character was now a man.
/*
this injects the decompression code into our own dll.
Originally this was just a fread() and call,
but with Windows XP SP3 turning on W^X (Data Execution Protection) we have a lot more work to do to avoid causing a security exception.
@grumpy@foone VHS-Decode (forked from Laserdisc Domesday) looks pretty interesting from an archival perspective, not least being you can store the raw drum head signal and reprocess it https://github.com/oyvindln/vhs-decode
@ryanfb@grumpy I've been intimidated out of using this project given how many RF capture points you need to have to do it comprehensibly. VHS is annoyingly complex compared to laserdiscs
@foone also, two-step logins where you enter your username or email, click next, then get prompted for a password, because they've accumulated a bunch of different auth providers and also have different "estates" for individual orgs with conflicting requirements and can't figure out how to glue all of those together in a coherent fashion.