philpem

philpem, 10 months ago to random

Outside socket is in. Now to do the inside wiring.

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philpem, 6 months ago to food

Tonight's #food, scratch cooked lasagne. And the first lesson is it's better to get over the feeling of "uurgh that Wusthof could take my fingers off" and just grab it. Especially for carrots. It makes the wee Kitchen Devil look like a toy.

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philpem, 10 months ago to random

I think that's the AC changeover board for the #solarpv system done. Input comes from a 16A breaker on the garage DB, but the output from the inverter goes through an RCBO before returning.
Changeover switch is so I can shut down the inverter and supply the 13A UPS-protected circuits from grid power for maintenance.

philpem, 9 months ago to repair

Cleaning the dirty old grease out of the focus mechanism on the microscope base. Thankfully the BHM mechanism seems much simpler than the BHTU in Carl Hunsinger's videos.
Remove trim. Remove slide block. Remove ball bearings and bearing races. Clean off grease, re grease. A 50/50 acetone and isopropyl mix in a Gu pudding pot is great for getting the old grease off the BBs and stopping them from escaping.
#OlympusBHM #microscope #repair

Twenty ball bearings soaking in solvent in a glass ramekin

philpem, 9 months ago to retrocomputing

My GA586HX v2 (with K6-II processor) won't POST. Hopefully this is one of those boards which plays possum if the CMOS battery is flat. Otherwise I'm in for a Not Fun Repair. #retropc #retrocomputing

philpem, 6 months ago to random

I didn't think this was going to arrive today but it has - a TI Silent 700 Model 709 KSR printing terminal, with the acoustic coupler. Sadly it doesn't do RS232, so I'm going on a deep dive into it...

philpem, 8 months ago (edited 4 months ago) to random

A bit of #AnalogCable #ReverseEngineering today! This is a General Instrument 824-566-000 ANIC (Asynchronous Network Interface Controller). This box sits in the headend PC and converts SCSI (!) to asynchronous (Manchester coded 13.98kbaud) Jerrold DataChannel data. It's an embedded 286 PC...!

philpem, 11 months ago to random

Here's a free warning. Stay away from the furry fandom. It's the most toxic, narcissistic, abusive thing I've ever been involved in. And I've been a weeb and a comics geek in the past.

Don't confuse this with "furries are evil": most of the ones I've met are decent people, but they really get drowned in the narcissistic preening and toxic destruction culture that space has.

Read others' stories on
https://www.reddit.com/r/RealFurryHours/ . It's not all sunshine and rainbows.

#furryfandom

philpem, 10 months ago to random

And the award for the most unfortunate "we picked four random letters" Amazon item brand name goes to ....

philpem, 7 months ago to random

The cardinal #digipres sin, the one that'll make preservationists scream:

"We tested the {tape/disc} in a machine so we didn't waste time making an image if it was bad. After playing the game for a few hours we found we couldn't load the tape again."

Lesson here is, take the image first, you can always write it back to a new tape, but that one read may be your only chance...

(the above sin was committed by a museum ... sigh)

philpem, 9 months ago to random

As I was going to St. ives
I met a man with seven wives
Each wife had seven sacks
In each sack was seven cats
And every cat had seven kittens

Kittens, cats, sacks and wives. How many were going to St. ives?

(It's an oldie but a goodie, if you know, give yourself a pat on the back - if you reply, please CW so as not to spoil it for others. And don't Google it!)

philpem, 1 year ago to random

I'm fairly certain these are chives - I've never seen them flower before. Sadly the mint (round pots) is probably dead :( #gardening #gardeningUK

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philpem, 4 months ago to random

"Whoever wrote this code clearly has no understanding of elementary mathematics or the most basic rules of programming."

Savage, but justified.

Page 17-18,
https://www.postofficehorizoninquiry.org.uk/file/872/download?token=_FC526YV

#PostOfficeScandal #HorizonScandal

philpem, 3 months ago to random

Good news on the #AnalogCable front: the Ghidra team have fixed a bug in the COFF loader. It can now load SysV (ISC) binaries!

I've been ripping into the ANIC utilities this evening. The ANICDownload utility (which boots the ANIC) has full symbols. Sadly the "LXTest" utility has been stripped...and seems to be written in Pascal! (it's full of Pascal strings)

philpem, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago) to Electronics

First chipshots from the new microscope. No idea what this chip is, other than by Motorola and with a mask code of B61T ZC419213. Does anyone recognise the artwork next to the batwing in the first photo? I'm guessing it's a country, county/state or city. #ICRE #siliconart #electronics

Edit: thanks to everyone who pointed out that's Switzerland! The chip also has the text "Motorola EDO" and "EDO Geneva" on it, which should have been a hint XD

philpem, 11 months ago to random

A quick post-work job tonight. Swapping the power supply on the fibre ONT for a PoE setup (injector and splitter). Reason for the injector? My router doesn't have PoE injection on the WAN port.
This should rid me of a wall-wart and is part of my quest to centralise the battery-backup. I'm bored of having UPSes everywhere.

philpem, 5 months ago to random

Does anyone know of a cheap way to host a static website with a lot of images? Total size is in the gigabytes.
I was thinking something CDN or S3 style, the goal here is cheap.

philpem, 9 months ago to random

When I get that #analogCable headend built, I'm going to have a channel that's 24/7 Defcon talks, and another that's 24/7 Computer Chronicles.
Anyone have other suggestions for TV channels I should have?

philpem, 9 months ago to VintageOSes

Today's brand of #riscos #retrocomputing insanity: trying to build a RISC OS Open (32bit) ROM for the Bush Internet TV set-top box.
https://www.riscosopen.org/wiki/documentation/show/Beginner%27s%20guide%20to%20ROM%20builds

philpem, 3 months ago to random

A little finishing work on the #AnalogCable ANIC tonight. Turns out General Instrument tapped the base screws for UNC 4-40 screws, but left the side screw holes untapped. These are going to be taking M3 screws.

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philpem, 7 months ago to VintageOSes

The sheer absurdity! I have the 32bit #RISCOS 5.29 running on a Bush Internet TV set-top box!

The guts of a Bush Internet TV set-top box strewn all over my workbench

philpem, 4 months ago to random

Odd to see a newspaper company CEO saying the quiet part out loud.

> Asked about the strategy of flooding its websites with stories, Mullen indicated that reader engagement and the quality of articles did not drive revenues as much as volume of content.
>
> “We are in the real world,” he said. “I need to get the page views, that is the way we sell advertising blocks, and advertising blocks deliver revenue. [...] We don’t talk about engagement and quality"

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/jan/23/mirror-publisher-print-titles-reach-digital

philpem, 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago) to random

I don't know what surprises me more - that someone is selling a home-made "encryption" app on ebay, that it's on a monthly subscription, or that someone actually bid on it.

"It uses newly created proprietary algorithm that has 8192 bits public key and PIN" 🤯 ⁉️ 🔕

First rule, don't roll your own crypto...

https://www.ebay.com/itm/204644271829

philpem, 2 months ago to random

Starting to repair the spectrum analyser power supply. Every single Nichicon capacitor has leaked, corrosion and rotting fish smell is everywhere. Ugh!

philpem, 2 months ago to random

I think I mentioned the #Chyron Lantern64 card I bought... Well this is it working! At the moment it's set to Free Run, I need to provide a video source to try out the overlay features.

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