BC TECH
Saved by @Alex1Powell

I got a Toshiba T1200, which has a bad screen, and a dead CMOS battery, and I thought the hard drive was broken too...

 but I rebooted it and heard a KTHUNK and a really loud spin-up noise and holy shit, the hard drive works!
and it still has files on it. the newest date is January 1994.
It's a 21mb hard drive, with ~37k of bad sectors.

This fucker is never going to spin up again, so I better go find some serial cables and copy shit off now.
The backlight is fucked so I'm shining a flashlight on it.
without it, it looks like this.
FastLynx has a cool mode where you can use it between two DOS machines and you only have to install it on one of the machines, it bootstraps itself over the serial port to the one without it.
dang it. They're communicating enough to bootstrap, but not enough to actually work in fastlynx mode
ah-ha! It's this "Serial Accelerated (7-wire) Mode".
Turning that off makes it work.
COPYING! starting on the most useless files
I stopped it and reconfigured the serial port.
even with only 21mb, 9600 baud is way too slow
huh, gnu manuals? didn't expect to see that on a DOS machine not touched since 1994
and it's done copying! you can go to your rest, poor old hard drive.
the next computer I'm gonna work on is... another T1200!
This one is fully dead. No error blinks, nothing.
It's a surprisingly simple machine inside. Not super-cramped like a lot of portables.
it's got a cmos battery and a little speaker over here
Which is weird because the system has another battery over here.
neither of which are the main battery!
This one is also the same sort of setup where it's a floppy drive and a hard drive.
You could also get this in a dual-floppy model.
This little add-on here is the hard drive controller.
This was a weird thing. It kinda looks like it'd be a trackpad but it's on the bottom and this machine has no trackpad.
Turns out: it's RAM!
The whole motherboard
The floppy drive is by Toshiba, it's an ND-352S-A, or FDD4271G0W, or even a JAH1058939.
And it looks like a normal floppy drive but it's got the wrong connector. 26-pin IDC, for some reason.
The hard drive is even weirder.
It's by JVC! Yes, that JVC.
It's a JD3824G01-4.

And it has NO DEFECTS, woo!
And it turns out it uses the same 26-pin connector as the floppy drive.
the bottom of the hard drive is interesting
It's some kind of self-parking system.
This one also has something not in the other one:
A modem add-on!
The bottom.
That chip has an interesting pinout.
The sides have 10 pins, but they're arranged as two sets of 5, with a gap.
It's an HD637b05v0f, which is an 8-bit Hitachi microcontroller
Anyway I was hoping to combined these two into one machine, maybe even image the other hard drive?
But sadly I can't get machine 1 to power on anymore.
So I currently have two dead machines.
and I think that's all I'm gonna work on for tonight, so I'll have to hopefully pick this up some other time.
I have a third one in storage, but it makes these two look like they're in good shape
ooh, found a service manual:
https://t.co/E1I5AAzVuh
BTW a fun thing about this system is that the back of the power supply has two power switches.
One of them is for the system, and the other one is for the hard drive!
you can seriously boot up the laptop with the hard drive turned off. it's amazing.
also it has a function called "hard ram", which is why it has so many batteries.
You can set it up so that the expanded RAM is battery-backed, so you can set up a ramdisk that is maintained while the system is off.
Annoyingly the service manual doesn't explain the floppy or hard drive connectors.
It explains random pinouts for things like the display controller, but no hard drive/floppy pinouts.
oh neat. u/ConventionalMemories on retrobattlestations has built a CF-card adapter for these laptops, but it plugs into the expansion slot instead of the hard drive port.

https://t.co/WZXFPtnkGA

More from foone

foone
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.
TECH
foone
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.


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
FUN
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foone
foone
@Foone
You want to know something about how bullshit insane our brains are?
OK, so there's a physical problem with our eyes: We move them in short fast bursts called "saccades", right? very quick, synchronized movements.
The only problem is: they go all blurry and useless during this

having your vision turn into a blurry mess every time you move your eyes is obviously not a good idea, so our brains hide it from us. Now, imagine you're an engineer and you have this problem.

You've got some obvious solutions you could do.
1. make the vision go black during movement. (Some VR games do this!)
2. just keep showing the last thing we saw prior to movement

both are good options with different downsides, but OH NO. this is assuming everything makes sense and is chronological and (regular) logical.
Your brain does neither of these options, really.

first, it basically puts your visual system on "pause". You're not seeing blackness or even nothing, you're just not seeing period.
then when you finish your saccade, it shows you what you now see at the new position. and then it pretends it can time travel.
ALL
foone
foone
@Foone
I've only got one quest in The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, and it's always active.


wow, I think I just rolled a critical failure on my image capture.
I told my script to take a picture of Oblivion and instead got a badly cropped screenshot of Heroes of Might & Magic III, a game I don't even have installed


the endless questions of trying to capture fonts from modern 3D games:
1. what's the native resolution?
2. IS there a native resolution?


it looks cleaner at 1024x768 (earlier one was 640x480)
but not perfect.
maybe 800x600?


nope. I think it's 1024x768, for a simple reason:

this splash screen! it doesn't scale based on resolution, and it seems to be sized the same as 1024x768
GAMING
foone
foone
@Foone
I think chrome is intentionally providing shitty user experience for the blocking of HTTP downloads on HTTPS pages, in order to push developers to fix it faster.

you click a HTTP download link on an HTTPS page and what happens? NOTHING. No error page, no pop-up saying "BLOCKED BECAUSE SECURITY", the browser is just like "did you click? I didn't notice"

it just sticks an error in the JS console.

which I'm sure everyone notices


BTW, this is probably going to get fixed soon, but as of Version 87.0.4280.141 (which seems to be latest) there's a bug which lets you bypass the block, most of the time.

Incognito mode.

Basically chrome won't let you download it because it has the context of you clicking it from a HTTPS page.
But it loses the context if you use the "open link in incognito window" option.
TECH

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Today we’re going to talk statistics and semantics. I’m going to do so via the medium of one of Twitter’s favourite stats 1.7% (aka “intersex is as common as red heads.”). The statistic comes from Fausto-Sterling’s work, which you can see a review of

To understand the statistic, we have to drill down into what the meaning of the word intersex is. Most people think of hermaphrodites. Let’s stress at the beginning there has been no example ever of a human being with both sets of working reproductive organs.

There is a very tiny percentage of people who are born with both testicular and ovarian tissue (what Fausto-Sterling calls “true hermaphrodites”). And when I say tiny, we’re talking intersex tiny, as in 0.0117/1,000 live births, or one in 1,000,000. These are very complex cases.

So, how do we arrive at 1.7%? What Fausto-Sterling does is apply a wider scope. Instead, she argues that intersex is anything that doesn’t fit into a platonic ideal. The platonic ideal, in this case, being a phenotypically perfect XX female and a phenotypically perfect XY male.

This means that intersex, used in the context of the 1.7% statistic, includes people for whom there is no sexual ambiguity. Take for example Klinefelter syndrome (XXY males). As Fausto-Sterling acknowledges, many males can go their whole life and not realise they are XXY.
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Me : Do you map?
X : Yes
Me : Like this?
X : No. What's that?
Me : A map of a tea shop.


X : Why is that a map?
Me : Long story, all to do with how space has meaning. To keep it short, maps help people to focus on user needs, the components involved, to communicate missing components and scenario play ideas like staff becoming robots.


Me : They’re also good for measuring and managing capital flow, making investment decisions, removing bias and getting rid of duplication.
X : I don’t see how that helps with innovation?


Me : Well, innovation is a tricky word because we use it to describe many things. If you’re talking about differentiation with the adjacent unexplored then you’re experimenting in the “uncharted” space e.g. immortality with magic provided by the special custom built kettle.


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Please please please take your cyber security seriously even if you don’t consider yourself a high risk person. Here are a few easy things to start with. 1/n

Switch from WhatsApp to Signal and enable disappearing messages. Most of us cannot stop using WhatsApp entirely but at least turn off back ups to Google Drive or iCloud. 2/n

Do not have private conversations using the messaging service on any social media platform like Facebook, Instagram or Twitter. 3/n

Switch from Gmail to ProtonMail or any other secure email service provider. 4/n


Switch from Google Docs to CryptPad or RiseUp Pad.
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(1) Some haters of #Cardano are not only bag holders but also imperative developers.

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It is, however, intuitive for people with IT financial background, e.g. banks

(2)

IELE + k framework will be a real game changer because there will be DSLs (Domain Specific Languages) in any programming language supported by K framework. The only issue is that we need to wait for all this

(3) Good news is that the moment we get IELE integrated into Cardano, we get some popular langs. To my knowledge we should get from day one: Solidity and Rust, maybe others as well?

List of langs: https://t.co/0uj1eBfrYj, some commits from many years ago..

@rv_inc ?

#Cardano

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Now a user writes to request you delete their data. Where is it? How do you do that? Who's responsible for privacy in your business.

How do you operationalize privacy rights?

Primary stakeholders:
* Legal
* Business
* Engineering

We spend a lot of time on Twitter analyzing the legal rulings, but it's harder where the "rubber meets the code" 🥁
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