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foone
@Foone 5 years, 6 months ago 1558 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
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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 :(

foone
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WOULD YOU LIKE TO ADD HOLLYWOOD STYLE TITLES TO YOUR HOME VIDEOS?
NOW YOU CAN!

This is the Sima ScreenWriter, a device for putting titles on your home videos.

It's apparently from 1992, and takes a CR2032 battery

The very minimalist IO panel. composite in, composite out, power and a switch.

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foone
@Foone

Lockpicking Floppies!

I don't know why twitter is refusing to insert a card for this one. In any case, It's the @LockPickingLwyr, and it's a floppy-drive-lock.

so I've been meaning to do a video or thread on these sorts of locks myself. I have several, of different designs.

generally they're all designed vaguely like this one: it's a plastic insert that goes into the floppy drive, then it has some bit that rotates with the key to hold itself inside.

and they pretty much universally use super-cheap low-security tubular locks like this. You can probably pick most of them with a ballpoint pen

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

foone
@Foone

So Sony has this format called Optical Disc Archive, right? It's a high-density storage cartridge, but it turns out it works by cheating.

because if you open it up (which you should never do. trust me on this one)
it turns out... it's blu-ray.

it's a big STACK of blu-ray

And the idea is that Sony built some very complicated drive which you can slot this cartridge into, and it'll open it up and grab out the right disc and just read/write that one

then when you hit the eject button, it shoves the discs back in and closes up the case, and hands you the cartridge.

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it's done.

a visual enigma machine simulator: https://t.co/eLE4Sb97HW

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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.

SPAC timelines consist of these stages:
IPO – SPAC raises cash and begins trading as a unit. The cash is placed in Trust.
Searching phase – After IPO, the SPAC management team looks for a company to merge with. This is typically 24 months but can be shorter depending on the SPAC

LOI/Rumor – A letter of intent is announced publicly or Bloomberg/Reuters etc. breaks news of a rumor that a SPAC is close to a deal with a target.

The LOI/rumor stage does not always happen, most go straight to a definitive agreement. Rumors should only be considered to have value if from a trusted news source, internet rumblings are pure speculation. During this stage, a deal can still fall apart and not be signed.

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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.

Technologists tend to severely underestimate the difficulty and expense of creating software, especially at companies which do not have fully staffed industry leading engineering teams ("because software is so easy there, amirite guys?")

Charge more. Charge more still. Go on.

The press is a lossy and biased compression of events in the actual world, and is singularly consumed with its own rituals, status games, and incentives. The news necessarily fails to capture almost everything which happened yesterday. What it says is important usually isn't.

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Tobie Langel
@tobie

Elastic didn't really relicense ElasticSearch. It forked it.

🧵 A thread.

1/18

There's a lot of talk in the open source community about the cost of forking.

2/18

- "Forking is best avoided."

- "Forking is a last resort option."

- "Forking is like a nuclear weapons. It's a defensive threat."

3/18

Forking is seen as impractical and extremely expensive.

And that's a Really Good Thing(tm).

It's a forcing function for figuring out solutions that are broadly acceptable across the community.

4/18

The thing is, the cost of forking is mostly a function of three things:

1⃣ the size of the community that you can bring along with you,
2⃣ whether you need to rename your fork (who owns the trademark), and
3⃣ how much infrastructure you need to rebuild.

5/18

Zed A. Shaw, Writer
@lzsthw

When you complain about an open source project's management you'll get the reply, "Use something else if you don't like it!" That'd be true except for the tiny problem that *many* projects also strive for complete monopolistic dominance.

Let me tell you about Java in early 2k:

I was programming in Java since it's release, and all through the late 90s into the early 2000s. At first Java was very determined to unseat C++ and it used various propaganda tactics to turn C++ and malloc into a weird enemy for all of us to hate. This worked great!

Everything was fine though because there were plenty of jobs in tech because of the dot-com boom, and then suddenly there were not jobs because of the dot-com bomb.

Overnight it seemed as if the *only* way to get a job was at giant companies, and they *loved* Enterprise Java.

Now, this is the golden ticket for many open source projects and corporations. They all want to be the top dog #1 in the industry for their particular use, and once they gain that position they become abusive by ignoring user needs and extracting wealth from them.

With Java the dominance was so insane that *every* language had to copy Java's weirdness to survive. If you wonder why a language has some odd CamelCase things it's because early Python, Ruby, and others had to copy Java's semantics and style to even be considered "serious".

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Ok, here is a thread for you.
What happens when you have:
Netflix
Apple
Amazon
WarnerMedia +
Disney+
SonyCrackle (Reboot)
Verizon All Access (after they buy CBS/Viacom)
UniversalSkyMedia
By 2021
Answer? Internet Slows To A Craw and Dies.
Why?
Bandwidth.

Netflix's gets 35% of all internet traffic.
Now we all know Apple Coming to Netflix Corner.
We know that WarnerMedia Planning One
We Know about Disney+
Now how will the net handle 8 Streaming Platforms all at once?
Answer - IT CANT.

But Novid, the speed, the 4K the all everything?
NOOOOO BUDDY.
Even if you could do it and even if AWS ran six million clouds, The Net Will still slow to a crawl. 35%, goes to nearly 90% if any of the 8 or all of the 8 eat at netflix's numbers.

Oh, they wouldn't be running at once.
FOOL. You forget how bad things were when game of thrones season premieres came around. HBO SERVERS FALL DOWN GO BOOM!

Now see if a season like 2021 come around and they air shows on a same day. It gets crazy. AT&T and others gonna realize they cant build out forever. Something will give and it might be your entertainment consumption big time.