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foone
@Foone 3 years, 4 months ago 809 views

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Keybort

This one is a MicroWeb Touch-1 XT/AT. Kinda.

See if you look up that keyboard you find the Deskthority page on it, showing this.
It's clearly pretty similar, but there are some differences.

Also that one uses a PC/XT/AT DIN5 connector, and this one uses some kind of RJ connector.

This one isn't in the greatest of shape, but considering I got it from the Chuck Colby estate sale, it's surprising it isn't completely water-damaged.

It's got some minor rust damage inside, where the metal clips rubbed off on the PCB.

And the control chip is a C35331E.
It's one of those chips you can find a few places that'll sell you one, but nowhere has a datasheet.
"8647" is probably a date code? 47th week of 1986.

That matches the chip on Deskthority.

And all keycaps removed! These are "Futaba MA series" (aka Futaba clicky switch) switches.

It's got 5 pins connected. AT is only 4 pins, but the PC/XT keyboard is 5 pins. So maybe this is a switchable keyboard?

the Deskthority wiki seems to partially agree with that:
There's a jumper under the tab key, which is theorized to be a XT/AT switch.

SO, what the heck is the pinout? I have no idea what the pinout of the IC is, and nothing to connect this to to spy on it, and no results online for googling the name other than the one that's shown up on deskthority.

Well, the PCB has two other chips on it.
They're both 74-series logic.
We can easily find datasheets for those and they should be sharing power/ground.

green is +5V
and either blue or yellow is GND.
(they both seem to be ground, at least as close as my multimeter can tell.

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foone
@Foone

Check out what I got today. You can tell it's something weird as fuck just from the box...

So this is a FISK ... thing.
It's a floppy disk fax machine! You can fax floppies to other people who have these things.

Apparently you can connect it to external drives, computers, or printers?

So I'm gonna do more research into this thing and how it works, but while I'm here, some of the other stuff I got today. Some 3.5" floppy disks. Single sided, double density ones! These were some of the very first 3.5" disks and basically nothing used them.

I also got this book: AutoSim, the Marketing Laboratory.
It's some software to help you sell cars, apparently! it was weird and cheap, so I got it. I'll of course image it.

foone
@Foone

argh chrome updated and it seems they've intentionally broken custom search engines. I have had a keyword search for "foone" which searches my own twitter, so I just type "foone BLAH" and it gives me a twitter search for when I said BLAH, right?

but now I get that option in the titlebar of "search twitter self-search" which is the name of the search"
if I just type "foone blah" now...

it ignores the search I have had defined for years and just googles it.

and this is definitely on purpose because they didn't just break it, they changed it. it's now "fooneblah"

there doesn't seem to be an option to make this stop and get the old behavior back :(

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foone
@Foone

So I got out some CF cards and noticed something odd about this one. Do you see the weirdness?

How the fuck is a CF card "USB Enabled"?

So CF cards are a weird beast that act as either a PCMCIA card or an ATA/IDE card depending on a mode pin.

They're definitely not USB.

And it's not like that weird SanDisk card I have which you can fold in half and plug it in as a USB device.

Flip it over, bend it in half, and now you can plug your SD card right into a USB port pic.twitter.com/jeBefP2xU1
— foone (@Foone) May 2, 2020

It turns out the reason for "USB Enabled" is because it's a Lexar drive from the jumpSHOT era.
This is a normal CF card in most cases, you can use it in normal CF card readers and such

foone
@Foone

does bubble memory count as solid state?
I guess? I mean, it has no moving parts. but it requires preheating and involves movement of magnetic fields across a surface...

it's kinda like a traditional hard drive where you don't spin the disc, you just trick all the bits to migrate off the edge

who called it "bubble memory" and not "lemming bits"

(obligatory "lemmings don't throw themselves off cliffs, that's an urban legend")

(obligatory "the idea that disney invented that urban legend it itself an urban legend, they just helped popularize it")

foone
@Foone

I think I've permanently confused KiCAD
it's reminding me that I need to connect this capacitor to Nothing

attach this end to ground, this end to +5v, and this end to THE VOID

I accidentally made all the capacitors gigantic and they won't fit anymore

halp

gonna design an ISA card using some of these

it's gonna be tricky to fit in the case

that's from this

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Some people really benefit from hearing advice that everyone knows, for the same reason we keep schools open despite every subject in them having been taught before.

In that spirit, here's some quick Things Many People Find Too Obvious To Have Told You Already.

Your idea is not valuable, at all. All value is in the execution. You think you are an exception; you are not. You should not insist on an NDA to talk about it; nobody serious will engage in contract review over an idea, and this will mark you as clueless.

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Here’s a SPAC thread covering some basics for new followers. I will pin this to my profile if you want to share to anyone interested in SPACs.

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$Trung Phan \U0001f1e8\U0001f1e6$

Trung Phan 🇨🇦...
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For decades, Jeff Bezos shunned ads.

But now, Amazon’s ad business is huge: it’s on a $30B+ annual run rate (more than 2x the combined sales of Twitter, Snap and Pinterest).

Here’s how it happened 🧵

1/ Amazon doesn’t break out its ad business separately in financial filings. However, most analyst believe ads make up the majority of its “Other” revenue segment.

This figure has exploded from $1B in 2015 to a current annual run rate of ~$32B.

2/ In 2009, Bezos said “ads are the price you pay for a crappy product”.

But the business is so lucrative that Amazon’s interface has been swamped with ads:

◻️ First 3-7 search results (left in red)
◻️ Most of the product page (right in blue)

3/ Prior to the rise of ads, Amazon set out to build the ultimate organic customer recommendations engine.

The approach was codified in a famed 2003 research paper: “Amazon Recommendations: Item-to-Item Collaborative Filtering.”

4/ In recent years, Amazon organic recommendations:

◻️"Customers who bought this also bought this"
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3/12 As opposed to ERC tokens, your custom Hathor token is a layer 1 token. It inherits the same features and security as the native token, $HTR, effectively giving your token the same level of security as the #Bitcoin $BTC blockchain.

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