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
I like how mediawiki exports pages because there's nothing I enjoy more than parsing a 1 gigabyte XML file

and I'm doing simple-english-wiki! it's way smaller than english wikipedia
I can only imagine how impossibly unparsable that nightmare is

fun fact: when programmers need to write code to extract data from an XML file, the process usually goes like this:
1. find XML file
2. open it in a text editor, see what the structure is
3. write some code that parses that

do you really want to open a 1 gigabyte XML file in your text editor?

do you want to fucking die?

I used to run into this problem back when I worked for the government, because sometimes I'd click a database query log (don't ask why our logs were in XML, it's... complicated) and it would turn out to be 100mb
TECH
foone
foone
@Foone
now that's a title screen


foolish people like to quote that "science says there are only two genders". This is incorrect.

Science instead says that in addition to the regular genders, there are 25 Science Genders, shown here. (tag yourself I'm Skull)


I have no idea how to continue with this game.
I clicked a bunch of things and the game just pauses for a second, except when I clicked electron it animated and then was replaced by... something


Quarky & Quaysoo's Turbo Science!

Turbo Science is like regular Science, but FASTER


oh I see

is this Gizmos and Gadgets but by Sierra?
SOFTWARE
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foone
foone
@Foone
So I was talking to @gewt about Job: A Comedy of Justice and I came up with a theory that I think explains why Heinlein's late-period work is so kinda-terrible and why I still enjoy it so much


So Heinlein had always been very interesting in the short parts of his novels, like the little snippets inside chapters. He had a very fun writing style, and wrote some fun dialogue with fun characters, right?>
It probably comes from how much of his early stuff was short fiction

And I think what happened with a lot of his longer works is that he'd just start writing fun bits and hope it would end up going somewhere or having a bigger plot by the end. like eventually he'd figure out where this was going, then go back and rewrite it into a cohesive whole

and I'm sure he had editors that'd help this process. No editor would let you publish something as rambly and changing-gears-every-other-chapter as The Number Of The Beast, for example... unless you were God-King Of Science Fiction 1980s Robert Heinlein.

so basically I think what happened is that by the 80s (when he was in his seventies!!) he lost the drive to go back and rewrite and he was too Untouchable for editors to make him.
CULTURE
foone
foone
@Foone
I'm pretty sure whoever designed this control usually makes gender selectors for websites...

Poly Bridge has a language SLIDER.


all languages exist on a spectrum from English to 한국어


next I want to see a game with a "choose language" button and it brings up this language map like it's a skill tree


gonna spend 200 XP to unlock Tamil

that's from
SOFTWARE
foone
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
SCIENCE

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Patrick McKenzie
Patrick McKenzie
@patio11
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.

Companies find it incredibly hard to reliably staff positions with hard-working generalists who operate autonomously and have high risk tolerances. This is not the modal employee, including at places which are justifiably proud of the skill/diligence/etc of their employees.
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Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
@vgr
There are only 3 real challenges to free speech at the tech level a) the need for CDNs at scale b) distortions of net neutrality c) nation-state firewalls.

All other claims are about social governance on private sites, where applying free speech doctrine is a stretch at best

Baseline free speech has expanded modestly since 1776 or whatever your reference point is.

About 20% beyond core case of government-critical speech in formally public spaces and media I'd say.

You can (for example) have more kinds of conversations in a bar without getting punched or kicked out by other patrons or management. You can teach more things in colleges than 100 years ago.

That's a genuine de facto increase in practical, informal free speech/expression.

But online free "speech" is, as @reneed has pointed out, not an expansion of free speech at all, but an expansion of reach. It is like the secondary freedom of the press to print as many copies as they can afford, not primary freedom to say what they want

If a newspaper wants to print more copies it has buy more printing equipment and front more upfront costs. Reach for a paper publication is not "free", but a function of desired circulation, which in turn is a function of demand prediction etc. But that logic is obscured online.
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Mike Metzler
Mike Metzler
@MTZLER
I’ve been flooded with Snapchat Spotlight questions after posting I’ve qualified for a payout 4 times. Here are the answers to the most common questions I’ve gotten in my DMs. These answers are my own experience and may differ from others .

Q: How will I know if I am getting paid?
A: You will get a message from Team Snapchat that looks like the below message 2-3 weeks after the snap has gone live. At this point it important that you verify your email address.


Q: How long after I’ve been notified I qualify, will I know for how much?
A: my experience is that usually 7-10 days after you get the qualifying message, you get a message with the amount, it will look like this. This message will include a unique access code for HyperWallet.


Q: How do I set up my HyperWallet?
A: Around three weeks after you get the payment amount you will get an email to your verified email from Snapchat Pay. It will look like this and will require you to fill out some tax forms, takes like 10 min.


Q: How long does it take to actually get the money in my account?
A: it took me like 7 days from when I had my HyperWallet approved before I got the money into my HyperWallet account. I recommend you set up auto withdraw. You can send money to PayPal, Venmo or bank account.
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Resist the Hologram - Stu Cvrk
Resist the Hologram - ...
@STUinSD
Thread – Dump the Legacy Media; Turn to These News Sources

A. We all need sources less tainted by the Big Tech/globalist narratives that are echoed repeatedly throughout the legacy media. My brother sent me a list of alternatives from the Noq report.
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Brian Balfour
Brian Balfour
@bbalfour
⚡️🧠Impact = Environment x Skill

A framework for making big career decisions by @iambangaly (Reforge Partner, Former Instacart, Instagram)

Full post -> https://t.co/dU0l7e0BWR

🧵 Thread...

1/ Career decisions about your next role/opp are the most impactful decisions you might make in your career. As an operator, all of your eggs are in one basket at a time, and we get a limited number of swings at the plate. So getting good at these decisions is important...

2/ At FB, Bangaly managed Rotational PM's. At the end of a rotation, he'd have the same convo: How are you going to choose your next rotation/role?

As a result, Bangaly got a lot of reps guiding this type of decision and created a framework to help with it...

3/ The framework is Impact = Skills x Environment

The goal is not to try and boil this type of decision down to a spreadsheet of inputs that spits out the answer, but rather it helps with 4 things...


4/ It can help with:

- Identify individual variables that are inputs into the decision.
- Evaluate each individual variable in a structured way.
- Understand the relationship between each variable.
- Narrow the decision down to the most important variable

...
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Priyanka (Astrology Guidance)
Priyanka (Astrology Gu...
@AstroAmigo
1

From today, we will memorize the names of 27 Nakshatras in Vedic Jyotish to never forget in life.

I will write 4 names. Repeat them in SAME sequence twice in morning, noon, evening. Each day, revise new names + recall all previously learnt names.

Pls RT if you are in.

2

Today's Nakshatras are:-

1. Ashwini - अश्विनी

2. Bharani - भरणी

3. Krittika - कृत्तिका

4. Rohini - रोहिणी

Ashwini - अश्विनी is the FIRST Nakshatra.

Repeat these names TWICE now, tomorrow morning, noon and evening. Like this tweet if you have revised 8 times as told.

3

Today's Nakshatras are:-

5. Mrigashira - मृगशिरा

6. Ardra - आर्द्रा

7. Punarvasu - पुनर्वसु

8. Pushya - पुष्य

First recall previously learnt Nakshatras twice. Then recite these TWICE now, tomorrow morning, noon & evening in SAME order. Like this tweet only after doing so.

4

Today's Nakshatras are:-

9. Ashlesha - अश्लेषा

10. Magha - मघा

11. Purvaphalguni - पूर्वाफाल्गुनी

12. Uttaraphalguni - उत्तराफाल्गुनी

Purva means that comes before (P se Purva, P se pehele), and Uttara comes later.

Read next tweet too.

5

Purva, Uttara prefixes come in other Nakshatras too. Purva= pehele wala. Remember.

First recall previously learnt 8 Nakshatras twice. Then recite those in Tweet #4 TWICE now, tomorrow morning, noon & evening in SAME order. Like this tweet if you have read Tweets #4 & 5, both.
VEDICNAKSHATRA
\u0936\u094d\u0930\u0940\u092e\u093e\u0932\u0940 \u0939\u093f\u0924\u0947\u0936 \u0905\u0935\u0938\u094d\u0925\u0940
श्रीमाली हितेश अवस्थी...
@HiteshAwasthi89
Varahi Amman, Madurai, Tamilnadu

Vaarahi is one of the Saivite Shakti deities with the group of goddesses known as SAPTAMATAS.
They are: Brahmi, Maheshwari, Kaumari, Vaishnavi, Vaarahi, Mahendri and Chamundi. 1/n


They are the Shakti (female) equivalents of their male counterparts. Vaarahi is the Shakti of Bhairavar who is one of the Amsam of Bhairavar.Created from the boar avatara of Vishnu, Vaarahi is often associated with Goddess Kamala (one of the Mahavidyas). 2/n


She is also called Dandini (Lady Commander of the forces of the Mother-Goddess, symbolizing the might of SriVidya). As Vaarahi ("hog-faced" or "the great consumer") she destroys evil forces that obstructs the devotees' progress, paralyses the enemies 3/n


and led the devotees ultimately to SriVidyas. She is also called Panchami). With Kurukalla, she is accorded the parental status to Sri-Chakra (Lalita Tripura-Sundari). While Kurukalla represents the full moon, Vaarahi represents the new-moon. 4/4

Jai Maa Varahi 🙏


Tag for 📷 credit
ALL
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History Of Rajputana
History Of Rajputana
@KshatriyaItihas
**Thread on Bravery of Sikhs**
(I am forced to do this due to continuous hounding of Sikh Extremists since yesterday)

Rani Jindan Kaur, wife of Maharaja Ranjit Singh had illegitimate relations with Lal Singh (PM of Ranjit Singh). Along with Lal Singh, she attacked Jammu, burnt - https://t.co/EfjAq59AyI


Hindu villages of Jasrota, caused rebellion in Jammu, attacked Kishtwar.

Ancestors of Raja Ranjit Singh, The Sansi Tribe used to give daughters as concubines to Jahangir.


The Ludhiana Political Agency (Later NW Fronties Prov) was formed by less than 4000 British soldiers who advanced from Delhi and reached Ludhiana, receiving submissions of all sikh chiefs along the way. The submission of the troops of Raja of Lahore (Ranjit Singh) at Ambala.

Dabistan a contemporary book on Sikh History tells us that Guru Hargobind broke Naina devi Idol Same source describes Guru Hargobind serving a eunuch
YarKhan. (ref was proudly shared by a sikh on twitter)
Gobind Singh followed Bahadur Shah to Deccan to fight for him.


In Zafarnama, Guru Gobind Singh states that the reason he was in conflict with the Hill Rajas was that while they were worshiping idols, while he was an idol-breaker.

And idiot Hindus place him along Maharana, Prithviraj and Shivaji as saviours of Dharma.
HISTORY
\u0936\u094d\u0930\u0940\u092e\u093e\u0932\u0940 \u0939\u093f\u0924\u0947\u0936 \u0905\u0935\u0938\u094d\u0925\u0940
श्रीमाली हितेश अवस्थी...
@HiteshAwasthi89
#Thread
Benefits of writing SRI RAMA Jayam!!!

Writing Sri Rama Jayam is known as Likitha Japam- Writing Meditation. This gives one a complete sense of surrender to an inner conscience and peace while writing or chanting the mantras.

#Sri_Rama_Jayam #RamaNavami

Cont 👇

You can write this in any language of your choice. It is the connecting chords with the divine and your inner self.

Below are some points that we came across on the benefits :

Cont 👇

1. Vedas tell that as the sun dispels the darkness, the chanting of Rama Nama dispels all evil and obstacles of life. It is a way of liberation and salvation of human suffering.

2. When you think, that all roads are blocked to walk away from day to day problems..

Cont 👇

writing ‘Sri Ram Ram Ram’ gives you the most needed clarity of thoughts to find away out of odd situations.

3. It was told that a calmness engulfs as one indulges in writing the Sri Rama Jayam bringing in more clarity of mind, tolerance & strength to withstand obstacles in life.

4. Devotion of service of life and its varied forms is devotion to God. So there is no right or wrong way of writing this. The very thought and process to write is a connection with god and finds a inner meaning.

Cont 👇
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Bartosz Ziembinski
Bartosz Ziembinski
@zmbnski
Still wondering about this 🤔


save as q
Q