Nick Reynolds (he/him)

It's a Tuesday so that means it's a Hackspace day for me. Tonight's the AGM so I'm expecting it to be very busy.

The spinny ring of the Android update process.

Perhaps even sadder is an Android TV so anemic the UI is like swimming through treacle. I've wiped it and am updating it. Old school stuff might get dated but will never get worse. An Android TV most likely will. It's otherwise a nice TV.

The featured page of the marketplace which just shows SHOUTcast and TuneIn which I expect not to work if I did bother.

There's something quite sad about an old "smart" home entertainment product when you go into the app installer and it's a ghost town.

This afternoon I soldered up a 6-pin PCIe connector to the server PSU I bought for a pittance. The leads are short as I would like it held snug to the BC-250 like in the video. The BC-250 doesn't have a standard ATX power switch setup so I've made a latching one connected to a header on the BC-250.

The BC-250 with the centre of the heatsink "peeled". This took a few hours to do.

A 3D printed fan mount sat on top of the BC-250 with a 140mm Noctua fan attached.

The same fan setup taped up with aluminium foil duct tape and the fan spinning.

A shot of the BC-250 running Bazzite with the Cooler Control window visible. You can see the CPU/GPU temperature floating along in the low 40s.

I spent most of yesterday afternoon "peeling" the BC-250 heatsink and 3D printing a fan mount. It's a minimum viable setup with the duct taped to the CPU but it's working nicely. Now I feel OK to play some games and tweak the software. Next job is PSU wiring and a case. I still fancy a wooden case.

The heatsink with some of the fins in the middle section 'peeled' so a fan can blow down into it.

I can't avoid it any longer it's time to "peel" the heatsink which is a job everyone who does this to a BC-250 hates. This is necessary for conventional downwards airflow instead of the high pressure front to back airflow you get in the server rack.

A circular piece of glass art showing tall blades of grass with a stylised dragonfly and butterflies above. Nestled in the grass is a ladybird.

A circular piece of glass art showing a tall daisy-like flower with tiny bees buzzing around it.

Member Sunel has been busy creating this beautiful fused glass art at the Hackspace.

The glass pieces were cut on our Wazer waterjet into intricate shapes that would be incredibly difficult by hand. They were then arranged and kiln fused to create these vibrant designs full of colour and light.

The bare BC-250 sat on its shipping box and spaghetti wired to a flex ATX PSU, keyboard, mouse and monitor.

I thought my BC-250 was dead but I'd messed up the wiring to the server PSU. How exactly I managed that without killing it I'm not sure but after flashing the BIOS to the modded version I've installed Bazzite.

It's Tuesday so I'm at the Hackspace. I've got my perhaps-DOA BC-250 with me to look at but having arrived late due to horrendous traffic I'm not sure what else I'll get done.

Oh yeah, much as I've loved the thing I immediately went out of the moment because it wasn't expected at all. Not in a good way.

I watched "Edge of Tomorrow" again with friends on Saturday night while eating pizza and talking nonsense.

It's simply top tier action entertainment with attention to the little details that make it stand out in a very crowded field.

It's got all the time loop staples but never feels tired.

Last chance to play UKLTA #LARP for just £50 this year, early bird pricing finishes tomorrow.

This weekend, as part of the UKLTA committee I'll be doing a bunch of presenting at TagCon 2026. At 35 years old it's one of the older #LARP conferences in existence although in its early years the hobby was closer to team Airsoft in play style and has drifted over time to become what it is now.

I printed it and stuck self-adhesive copper tape to it. There's copper tape with conductive adhesive so you can add multiple overlapping pieces and it counts as one conductive surface. Then I used the second part of the mold to shape the copper, so that it sticks inside the recessed traces. Then I used sandpaper to file away at the raised ridges. The copper traces are now electrically independent of each other. Done! But if I want, I can remove the extra copper tape.

The companion mold at the bottom. This second 3D-printed part pushes the copper tape down into the recessed trace channels so it conforms to the shape. The two parts sandwich together with alignment spikes to keep everything registered.

screenshot of QZW Labs' raised pcb idea! here is their youtube video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLliKgzKKUI&t=592s

Adobe Illustrator on top (you can use any free tool that makes SVG vector files. I just own an old illustrator version. Bottom: the PCB Forge tool I made

I made a tool that turns PCB designs into 3D-printable molds. you sandwich copper tape between the parts, sand the ridges, and you have a real working PCB. no etching, no chemicals. I am losing my mind

castpixel.itch.io/pcb-forge

Predator: Badlands Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi) is a juvenile Yautja denied entry into adulthood by his disapproving father. Dek is a "runt" and a dis...

#MovieReview Predator: Badlands

www.workshy.co.uk/2026/02/pred...

Two 20mm 3D printer calibration cubes with X/Y/Z on the faces which are a common test print.

These calibration cubes aren't going to win any prizes but this was a "I've a free printer a mate gave me, can you get it working because it sucks" situation and the orange silk filament is damp garbage that's been sitting in the open for months, if not years.

It's the modern filament, semi-recent slicer and the PEI textured spring steel print surface that have made the difference I reckon. It had a horrible worn out print surface you can't get replacements for easily and I modded the bed slightly to take the spring steel sheet.

An old Wanhao Duplicator i3 plus 3D printer. It's an old bed-slinger with a pressed steel frame. Somebody had previously done some mods with some stabilising rods and a new fascia for the display. It's printing a calibration cube.

Checking over a friend's old 3D printer before giving it back to them. After slicing stuff with Cura for modern PLA+ it works just fine. Unfashionable and slow by modern standards and probably ultimately a bit unreliable but a printer's a printer when you're on a budget and not in a hurry.

Later this year I'm part of the team running this Cyberpunk LARP, which we've been working at for a few years. It's grown from a one-off to an ongoing 'campaign' with a dedicated cadre of players and branching out into a longer event.

A BC-250 out of its anti-static bag but still sitting in its shipping box.

My BC-250 showed up yesterday but as I'd agreed to do some dogsitting I had to disappear straight away without playing with it. Very tidy looking out of the box though, like most it has that new old stock cleanliness. I have received the 'no heatsink gaps' variety which will make 'peeling' harder.

Tim's going to fire up the Popcake on Tuesday...

The Quiet Earth Zac Hobson (Bruno Lawrence) awakes in a motel room with a stinking headache. When he goes outside there's nobody around. This continues to b...

#MovieReview The Quiet Earth

www.workshy.co.uk/2026/02/the-...

GitHub - IoT-gamer/pico-ble-notify: A library that adds BLE notification support to the standard BTstackLib in Arduino-Pico for Raspberry Pi Pico A library that adds BLE notification support to the standard BTstackLib in Arduino-Pico for Raspberry Pi Pico - IoT-gamer/pico-ble-notify

The existence of these two confirms the BTStack wrapper in Arduino-Pico is a bit incomplete. Yes in principle I could write my own wrapper stuff but thankfully somebody has already done it, these fix my two "where's this feature?" sad faces.

github.com/IoT-gamer/pi...
github.com/IoT-gamer/pi...

It feels like I'm searching for the wrong stuff or using the wrong API or something, surely this is used by people? I can't find any information on configuring BLE authentication/security at all.

OK I'm trying to do some work with Raspberry Pi PicoW and BLE using the Arduino-Pico core in Arduino and boy am I finding meaningful documentation/examples hard to come by. I have it doing the basics but short of reams of "read the source" level listing of APIs/classes it's tumbleweed. Anybody help?

Black Phone 2 Years after the events of the first movie Finn (Mason Thames) still receives calls from the unquiet dead, which he rejects, and is developin...

#MovieReview Black Phone 2

www.workshy.co.uk/2026/02/blac...

A screenshot of an AliExpress tracking page showing the order as collected by the UK courier.

A view of the edge connector on an HP server power supply. There is a resistor and wire soldered to the smaller contacts and a pair of crocodile clips are connected to the large power pads, driving a 12V light bulb.

I'm really hoping the BC250 shows up tomorrow, although I still haven't sourced the GPU connector I need to power it, which I must do. Yesterday the HP HSTNS-PR28 server PSU I ordered showed up and I made it deliver power thanks info in a blog by some bloke. The decline of blogs is a sadness really.

Shelby Oaks A group of paranormal investigators, niche famous in the early days of YouTube, go missing while investigating the abandoned town of Shelby ...

#MovieReview Shelby Oaks

www.workshy.co.uk/2026/02/shel...

A screenshot of an AliExpress tracking screen with the status as "Customs clearance started".

It's in the country, I'm sure people are thrilled by these updates. I've been reading the BC250 Discord a bit and it's made me aware how far removed I am from the 'gaming PC' people who are agonising over minutiae of overclocking settings. I may tweak some of this but really I just want it working.

It's terrifying, I was running my fingers through my hair with stress as it ramped up. I may watch it again.