Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

on the one hand, it's entirely my fault for selecting the wrong collection for my upload, of course I don't have write access to that collection
but MAN it would have been nice to know this was going to fail before I uploaded all 70 gigabytes

2026-05-08 05:47:49 UTC

a weird thing about my life is that sometimes I open my text editor and it reopens the last session's files, including an unnamed text document containing the following:
dgfsdasgdhjfhfhfgd7hgd-
gksfjhf7sf-
sgjhfhdh7daf-
fdjhagrsadfghkafg7fgda-
and I'm like "oh yeah, I know exactly what that is and where it goes"

2026-05-06 02:31:34 UTC

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The drive's still got the original motor/sensor board by Sankyo, which has one weird thing on it: An LED near the motor.
I have no idea what this is for. There are no sensors anywhere near here that could detect this (it doesn't use optical sensors anywhere except for the track-zero sensor!) and this shouldn't be visible outside the case.
And this isn't an index sensor, that's placed inside the motor and uses a hall-effect sensor.
https://digipres-club.s3.bhs.io.cloud.ovh.net/media_attachments/files/116/525/238/389/357/055/original/c3647d62c5a08510.jpg

2026-05-06 02:05:43 UTC

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It does support Memory Stick so you can have up to 128mb of flash storage, but instead of including a memory stick slot like some later Mavicas, they instead added support for the FlashPath flash-to-floppy adapters, so you have to put your memory stick inside one of these adapters (which take batteries!)
This is Sony branded, but it's based on the same technology as the other FlashPath products, Sony just licensed it.
https://digipres-club.s3.bhs.io.cloud.ovh.net/media_attachments/files/116/525/176/860/969/145/original/93904b3b74348b9e.jpg

2026-05-06 02:03:34 UTC

This is a broken Sony Digital Mavica MVC-FD87. This has a rare 4X speed floppy drive, so I thought I'd open it up and see if I could remove it and use it elsewhere.
(This is going to be a very abbreviated thread because most of my images are blurry, since I no longer have an office for reverse engineering teardowns)
This one is from 2001 and can take photos up to 1280×960 pixels, at which resolution you'll barely manage to fit four images on a 1.44mb floppy disk.
https://digipres-club.s3.bhs.io.cloud.ovh.net/media_attachments/files/116/525/165/792/070/309/original/78f4ca66e92966fc.jpg

2026-05-02 06:49:37 UTC

so my sis bought a spindle of CD-Rs the other day and it turns out that halfway down the stack of CD-Rs, there's a DVD-R that's been burnt, with someone's name and "disc 1" on it.
suspicious

2026-04-30 23:19:21 UTC

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@nprofile…k39g both of which are Known Problems with me. And my migraines have definitely been much worse this last week when I've been off my antihistamines

2026-04-30 23:10:59 UTC

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@nprofile…k39g I don't think so (I can't recall, most of that 16 months when I was bedridden are a blur) but I did go off my t-blocker for nearly a year, which definitely had some negative effects.

2026-04-30 22:59:24 UTC

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@nprofile…k39g YEP!
only relatively recently, though. I don't think I ever had any until last year.
(my current guess is that it happened because of my hormones being knocked out of whack by my health insurance (and health) imploding)

2026-04-30 22:12:28 UTC

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no migraines from 6502 hacking.
I suspect the connection isn't React, it's just that doing react coding is the kind of thing where I need multiple monitors (so I can juggle docs/vs code/firefox) and that's too much brightness so it's triggering my light sensitivity

2026-04-30 20:28:55 UTC

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@nprofile…28ea at this point we should all be putting furries in our projects just to preemptively scare these people off

2026-04-30 04:55:04 UTC

naturally the makers of the my little pony imageboard have forked their own ffmpeg, why wouldn't they have?

2026-04-30 02:25:50 UTC

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everything is going fine
https://digipres-club.s3.bhs.io.cloud.ovh.net/media_attachments/files/116/491/280/806/210/181/original/87fcc3531c17e642.png

2026-04-30 01:25:15 UTC

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trying to do something more relaxing and less migraine-causing today
reverse engineering some 6502 assembly!

2026-04-28 02:56:26 UTC

I think I'm allergic to React. I opened Visual Studio Code and immediately got a migraine

2026-04-24 04:35:09 UTC

good to know that SDL has finally, in 2026, reached platform parity with allegro 4

2026-04-22 22:42:41 UTC

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I just bought a new keyboard, and I'll be picking it up soon.
And my old keyboard just stopped working!

2026-04-22 04:06:57 UTC

I went to the store to buy a dock for my new laptop, and I got one that's a KVM-dock so that I can have it be the dock for my old laptop too, and I'll just KVM between them, right?
I got home and the old dock seems to have failed. Like, while I was out buying its replacement

2026-04-21 18:01:58 UTC

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And don't bother suggesting I should fix this with a LibreELEC box, that's already in progress

2026-04-21 18:01:27 UTC

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Also my TV remote is running flash on an embedded QNX system and I can never reprogram it because Logitech dropped support for the server it uses, but that's unrelated to the rest of this AV nightmare

2026-04-21 18:00:30 UTC

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This means, for example, if you're playing a YouTube video and hit pause on the roku remote, this wakes up the TV, starting the countdown. So you gotta grab the other remote and hit okay... But the roku will also see that okay press, which it interprets as UNPAUSE

2026-04-21 17:56:11 UTC

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Last night we were trying to watch someone play a Pokémon nuzlocke and by the time I got the TV back in control on the right input, it was playing the Sonic the Hedgehog cartoon

2026-04-21 17:55:03 UTC

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This causes the roku to play videos, install new channels, etc. Often while the TV is showing the wrong HDMI input, so you can't see what you're doing

2026-04-21 17:54:13 UTC

I've managed to get my AV setup into a deeply fucked state thanks to the unexpected power outage I had today.
If you press any key on the roku remote, the TV will initiate a 5 second countdown where it tries to switch away from the roku on HDMI 2, and instead shows you HDMI 1, which has nothing on it.
To abort the countdown, you have to hit the OK button on the TV remote, which will also be interpreted as an OK press on the roku.

2026-04-21 04:55:22 UTC

Sorry vibecoders, the only "OpenClaw" I care about is the failed grappling claw the CIA built into the Hughes Glomar Explorer for their attempt to salvage the soviet submarine K-129 from the floor of the pacific ocean as the classified Project Azorian.

2026-04-20 18:04:53 UTC

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I have made a terrible discovery.
My laptop is plugged into the wrong side of my UPS. My laptop isn't supposed to be on my UPS, because this UPS is here so that my electric recliner can always be safely escaped during an emergency.
So yeah my laptop drained my chair's batteries and now I'm stuck

2026-04-20 17:41:49 UTC

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It's a good thing that there aren't multiple misophonic people in this house OH WAIT

2026-04-20 17:29:59 UTC

A fun thing about having every part of your life on a UPS is that when PG&E kills your power for funsies, all those UPSes turn your house into THE BEEPOCALYPSE

2026-04-19 05:00:05 UTC

it's important to have a nutritious breakfast, you know?
https://digipres-club.s3.bhs.io.cloud.ovh.net/media_attachments/files/116/429/604/178/766/069/original/6b1f63a133c261f1.mp4

2026-04-17 21:04:08 UTC

I really hate posting these kinds of begposts, but this has gotten more critical since I posted it. I currently have -7$ until next month, and I need to feed three people with that.
#mutualaidrequest

2026-04-14 07:12:23 UTC

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user & group ACLs for each paragraph of my wiki

2026-04-06 17:54:07 UTC

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@nprofile…hc67 someone posted this sort of sentiment on reddit recently and I yelled YOU SHOULD LEARN.

2026-04-04 13:43:51 UTC

Twitch has a surprisingly useful feature that more sites should have:
Not only can you change your username once a month, you can change the capitalization of your username at any time.

2026-04-02 23:50:48 UTC

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but the API wrapper is out of date so I'll have to modify that oh and it doesn't support local servers so I'll need to implement that and wait requests/urllib3/certifi/python's ssl module/python's _ssl module has a bug and can't parse my cert.
I can hack around that, who cares. oh I need to supply a client certificate? no problem, that's in my OS's certificate store, I'll just export that... okay it's marked as non-exportable. so I have to hack it out

2026-04-02 23:49:06 UTC

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like today I wanted to write a script that recurses through some folders, finds files matching a regex, and upload them to a local service. easy! I can imagine the whole script in my head even before my fingers touch the keyboard

2026-04-02 23:48:14 UTC

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the biggest hurdle I face with programming is that I often only have like, an hour or two worth of energy to work on it a day
and I can easily use that all up on bullshit

2026-04-02 19:53:54 UTC

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oh god there's a stackoverflow question mentioning this bug from 2015

2026-04-02 19:37:54 UTC

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oh it might be fixed in 3.15.0a6, which hasn't been released yet

2026-04-02 19:28:36 UTC

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I figured I could easily fix the problem in the one function I needed
I think I've now found a bug in python's standard library

2026-04-02 19:00:28 UTC

argh
the site I have to automate the API of has a nice python wrapper and the one function I need is marked "WIP sorry"
last modified in 2022

2026-04-02 15:49:24 UTC

I had a serviceman come over to fix my hot water heater and he had to turn off my water for a while, and when I got back to my computer, all my SSH connections had dropped.
suspicious...

2026-04-01 19:43:01 UTC

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the worst part of polyamory is how much fucking javascript you have to write

2026-04-01 19:00:03 UTC

can we compile VB6 into WASM yet?
this is putting a crimp in my social life

2026-03-31 20:13:09 UTC

PSA:
1. If you are not silly, it is vital you become silly
2. If you are silly, you must stay silly
2. If you used to be silly but have stopped, you must make all efforts to return to silliness

2026-03-31 08:45:15 UTC

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@nprofile…ws0j do you get extra points if you've already written (multiple) pride flag programs?

2026-03-31 08:43:48 UTC

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@nprofile…ws0j that's awesome!
also I'm wondering if you could get the file size right such that instead of random text it could be like a base64 encoding of the flag as a PNG or something?

2026-03-30 20:48:26 UTC

Software is great. I'm sitting in my car, and it pops up a notification that I have a message. Do I want to hear it? Sure, I tap the "play aloud" button.
There's a pause, and Sufjan Stevens begins to play

2026-03-30 19:44:16 UTC

I'm 19 months into unemployment due to illness, and I just got a letter that my earlier payment for storage didn't go through, and I have until the 1st to pay 2000$ or they're auctioning off my storage, which has 12 years of games & retrotech.
Any help you can spare would be amazing.
https://ko-fi.com/fooneturing/goal?g=0
#mutualaid

2026-03-28 21:20:42 UTC

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so the word "When" is encoded as :
81 16 82 07 04 0D 7F
[uppercase][w][lowercase][h][e][n][space]

2026-03-28 21:19:51 UTC

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oh god, they don't support uppercase: instead there's a "shift to uppercase" character, and a "shift to lowercase" character.

2026-03-28 21:10:13 UTC

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and I have text injection
https://digipres.club/system/media_attachments/files/116/308/847/603/643/195/original/51b0b64e7a31b429.png

2026-03-28 21:02:31 UTC

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found shifted text in the ROM!
00=a
01=b
etc

2026-03-28 20:59:54 UTC

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no ASCII or similar in the RAM dump, because why would anything be easy?

2026-03-28 20:48:09 UTC

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okay, bizhawk's mupen64 isn't blurry on the text, so this is... doable.
https://digipres.club/system/media_attachments/files/116/308/755/506/830/940/original/ada574cdc73d5548.png

2026-03-28 20:43:32 UTC

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well, gopher64 is a blurry mess

2026-03-28 20:38:19 UTC

I'm going to try touching N64 emulation again.
start your startwatches, lets see how long it'll be until I'm replying to this with "N64 IS THE WORST CONSOLE EVER AND CANNOT BE EMULATED"

2026-03-28 19:30:50 UTC

Anyway played with infrared temperature modules? I have one I tore out of a cheap infrared temperature-gun, but the 4 pins are labeled S+, P+, P-, S-
Every single IR sensor I can find that looks anything like this is I²C, which this clearly isn't. Anyone have a datasheet for anything like this?
https://digipres.club/system/media_attachments/files/116/308/453/134/475/643/original/9521779c18f1771c.jpg

2026-03-27 01:26:34 UTC

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OuchDB, the first database optimized for BDSM!

2026-03-27 01:26:01 UTC

thanks to a typo I tried to npm install ouchdb instead of pouchdb

2026-03-25 02:55:21 UTC

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@nprofile…pkaf @nprofile…2pcx that'd be normal. she's adorable and cute

2026-03-24 11:57:28 UTC

Imagine you're encoding morse in a protocol that has only an instant pulse. you can't do a dash, only dots.
But you can encode a dot as two dots with a short gap between them, and a dash by two dots with a long gap between them.
And you can of course merge adjacent dots: V is ···-, but you don't need eight dots to represent that, you need 5:
dot-short-dot-short-dot-short-dot-long-dot
and an extra-long gap between two dots is a space
if my math is correct, you encode "hello world" in 39 dots

2026-03-23 21:00:50 UTC

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how am I supposed to shitpost if I can't get the exact dimensions for the module of this 1.5" diagonal LCD?!

2026-03-23 21:00:31 UTC

"mages are for reference only
See Product Specifications "
WHAT PRODUCT SPECIFICATIONS, MOUSER? YOU FORGOT TO INCLUDE THEM

2026-03-23 06:02:10 UTC

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@nprofile…ulnl oh neat, I must have missed that news then!

2026-03-23 05:57:50 UTC

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@nprofile…ulnl oh that's not a bug, that's an intentional design decision. windows reserves a bunch of filenames and it's a pain
the bug where this crashed the machine hasn't been there since windows 95, that's a separate issue

2026-03-23 05:43:27 UTC

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@nprofile…ulnl Win95 had that bug, yeah

2026-03-23 05:26:01 UTC

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BTW with the "pop quiz" my current best solution is 13

2026-03-23 05:17:54 UTC

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The system doesn't have a power supply that windows 95 can turn off automatically (It's a little too old for that), so while I could have the monitoring hardware watch the screen for the "it's now safe to turn off your computer" screen, I'd probably just make it wait 60 seconds after we issue the shutdown, then yank the power.

2026-03-23 05:15:49 UTC

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POP QUIZ: how many servos do you need, if you need to be able to type all the symbol keys on a QWERTY-US keyboard (49 keys), plus the following keys:
F5 (to run the program after we type in the code)
Enter (to close the popup after we take the photo, which will then trigger a shutdown)

2026-03-23 05:06:53 UTC

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could also get some servos and physically manipulate the keyboard. really air-gap it

2026-03-23 05:06:09 UTC

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but the far more fun answer would be to build a machine to eject floppies out of some other network-attached computer and inserts them into the Pentium, and vice versa.
Air-gapped

2026-03-23 05:05:27 UTC

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that could be done without being too difficult by simply using a Gotek running FlashFloppy and something emulating USB storage (or making a Trick USB cable that can be in two computers at once)

2026-03-23 05:04:28 UTC

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The next obvious option is to set up a floppy autoloader

2026-03-23 05:03:34 UTC

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same for a WiFi232 on the serial port. boring.
hey I wrote some code a while ago to emulate a PS/2 keyboard, I could just type it in!

2026-03-23 05:02:50 UTC

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But how does the generated Visual Basic code get into the Pentium-90 desktop?
Well, it doesn't have a network card. I could add one, but /boring/

2026-03-23 05:01:32 UTC

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How do you get the image?
Easy. We just photograph the CRT

2026-03-23 05:01:22 UTC

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set up a Pentium-60 to boot into Windows 95, compile some Visual Basic code, and then run it.

2026-03-23 05:00:34 UTC

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2. hardware

2026-03-23 04:59:31 UTC

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Might get CEASE AND DESIST'd by Microsoft, but fuck it, it'll be funny

2026-03-23 04:58:47 UTC

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But where do we run the code?
Well there's two obvious options that are sufficiently Mad Scientist enough to be interesting enough to do:
1. In the browser. Do this client-side. Boot a VM in the browser that runs Visual Basic and then the resulting EXE and shows that to the user

2026-03-23 04:57:09 UTC

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"easy", for certain values of "easy"

2026-03-23 04:56:58 UTC

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So let's just automate that.
We take the post text, generate a visual basic source file for it, then boot windows 98, compile the visual basic, run the EXE, take a screenshot, shutdown

2026-03-23 04:56:08 UTC

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but I'm a Mad Scientist.
So what's the Mad Scientist way to do this? Well, how'd I do it before?
I wrote a line of code in my Visual Basic 6 IDE and ran it on my Windows 98 VM

2026-03-23 04:55:23 UTC

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but "I've done it before" is kinda boring and also windows dialog boxes have a surprising number of edge cases that I am unable to escape being autistically perfectionist about.
so adding win95 to the death generator, while it would be cool, is probably not happening any time soon

2026-03-23 04:54:08 UTC

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and the OBVIOUS answer for "how do I do that" is "extend the death generator to do windows 95 dialog boxes and then automate it".
I've done the second half before, automated the death generator. It's a pain and is ugly (the death generator is written exactly wrong to make this doable) but I've done it before, I can steal Foone's code for it

2026-03-23 04:53:12 UTC

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and I was thinking about automating it so I could do another thing: make a mastodon instance that renders every post on it as pixel-accurate windows 95 dialog boxes

2026-03-23 04:52:12 UTC

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and this post describes the behind-the-scenes of how I made these. (tl;dr it was manual screenshots)
https://digipres.club/@foone/116276567994297740

2026-03-23 04:45:18 UTC

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so I recently did a lets-call-it-a-poem about (specifically Windows) computers loving us back:
https://digipres.club/@foone/116276073266480193
and I was thinking I want a way to do this automatically, specifically I'd like (almost) the first one.

2026-03-23 04:39:04 UTC

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but it would make my mastodon and blusky posts at least 5% cooler

2026-03-23 04:38:42 UTC

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I haven't written line one of code on this project and I'm already thinking about how much dedicated hardware powered on and monitored I'd have to have to support indefinitely

2026-03-23 04:38:00 UTC

one of the problems with being a mad scientist is that you can scope creep really fast

2026-03-23 02:42:35 UTC

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weird punnet square of results:
EDIT hangs if you open "CON", but errors if you try "C:\CON\CON"
Win95 errors if you try to open "CON", but crashes if you try "C:\CON\CON"

2026-03-23 02:15:41 UTC

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https://digipres.club/system/media_attachments/files/116/276/077/026/711/077/original/17feee362059c4bf.png

2026-03-23 02:15:25 UTC

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https://digipres.club/system/media_attachments/files/116/276/076/086/336/406/original/53a82ba4402ec442.png

2026-03-23 02:15:10 UTC

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https://digipres.club/system/media_attachments/files/116/276/074/812/974/432/original/797b9c0b65ae921d.png

2026-03-23 02:14:34 UTC

https://digipres.club/system/media_attachments/files/116/276/071/544/446/567/original/57181a88ac983db7.png

2026-03-23 01:38:26 UTC

anyone tried opening the magic file "con" from MS DOS Edit?
I was hoping for an editor but it turns out instead it happily opens it but then hangs forever
https://digipres.club/system/media_attachments/files/116/275/929/117/062/858/original/155599f28e5d9276.png

2026-03-22 02:00:07 UTC

every time I read a job listing that says something about fintech I read findom
which is a very different kind of job