L'Etat, Chez Moi

A large and small nail clipper set still in their package, branded "Tweezerman"

🎶🎵The only one who could clip my toenails was the son of a Tweezer Man🎵🎶

I really don't think Qualcomm buying Arduino is a good thing.

It's better than Arduino getting bought out by private equity, but not by much.

YouTube video by Neko Case - Topic Magpie to the Morning

Not sure we deserve Neko Case.

Magpie comes a calling
Drops a marble from the sky
Tin roof sounds alarming
"Wake up child"
"Let this be a warning"
Says the magpie to the morning
"Don't let this fading summer pass you by"

I'm "nice" to them and their predecessors just because it's a good habit to be nice and I didn't want to build in any sort of if/then logic for nonliving things. I've been "nice" to pliers before too.

But I think I shall become obsequious and parenthetical from now on, just to help them burn cash.

August 24, 1981 photo of Space shuttle orbiters Enterprise (OV-101) and Challenger (OV-99) in the two construction cells at Rockwell's Palmdale facility. Challenger lacks most of her tiles and payload bay doors and is surrounded by work platform. Enterprise does not seem to have any work platforms and looks to be enjoying quality time indoors before her extended outdoor stay at KSC later on. there is a building several stories tall between the orbiters, and a sign saying "WELCOME" between them. Next to the welcome signs are smaller signs with "OV-101 Enterprise" and "OV-99 Challenger" with arrows pointing to their respective work cells.

Oh, crimony I love these machines so much. Some of my favorite shots of them are under construction. Here's one I found on aamalebourget.fr/la-navette-s... of Challenger and Enterprise hanging out in the same place.

Sand that thinks is cool and all, but hydraulics do (does?) not get enough love for changing the world.

I'm betting some of it is plain greed. People thinking they're hopping on the biggest money train in a generation and doing what they can to make sure the train keeps going forever.

The display from my last few posts, but this time the four rightmost digits have the current local time: 19:24 (7:24pm).

The #RP2040 has a Real Time Clock, so now my display has a clock. That makes a little over two dozen clocks in the house, I think.

Maybe I'll use the #picow and get the clock from the internet so it's self-setting...

@raspberrypi.com #pico

You're not the boss of me! Gloobflot! Stromglito! Chork!

Back on the Trilithic display.

Doesn't seem like much, but it's a major feature of interfaces. There's a lot below the surface! Initialize with zero, monitor the encoder for changes and update the display. Lookup bit patterns and OR them into the 80 bit stream.

@raspberrypi.com #pico

Huh. I wonder if I say, "fuck JK Rowling and fuck anyone who doesn't think she's a despicable bigoted git" if I'll get blocked by James Payton too?

The dog from the Mother Goose & Grimm comic and Syd Barret go on adventures solving crimes.

1984 Camaro

YouTube video by WGON Music Case/Lang/Veirs - Down 1-5 (with lyrics)

Holy cats.

This popped up on Pandora and the combo of Radiohead-like percussion and Neko's ~*amazing*~ voice took me completely out of what I was doing. Not to take away from the harmonies or anything, which are lovely!

And Sebastian Steinberg on bass!

*R.E.M. Feeling Gravity's Pull voice*

Cool! Man I've been wanting to wade into Meshtastic/LoRa but I haven't had the spoons.

Do you have any recommendations for a n00b?

I need to get into it for the outdoor-exploring LoRa robot I want to build (I want to be my own little JPL and drive my own little Curiosity/Perseverance).

Just seeing that box art makes me hear the super loud SCSI drive on our Dell server in 1998.

The Trilithic display from previous posts with "420" showing.

A spreadsheet calculating the hex numbers to OR into the serial stream to make numerals 0-9 appear in the third digit of the display.

I used a spreadsheet to help me calculate tables for each digit and numeral so that I could put a given number in a given place more easily by ORing values into the serial data.

Was hoping to find similar tables in the original Trilithic firmware, but alas.

@raspberrypi.com #pico

Grateful for a TurboNerd week off. Starting with scraping rust off my C programming skills and finishing with diving into code in foreign CPU architecture with #Ghidra.

None of it was for work and it's unlikely to impact my career trajectory, but I stayed off social media and learned a ton.

A Trilithic Tricorder 3 display above some graph notebook paper. The word "HEY" is spelled out on the display. The graph paper contains some messy notes about figuring out how to notate each of the 67 segments.

Hey! Finished reverse engineering the positions of all the segments in the LCD and managed to shift in something coherent.

Rev-enging the segments was done using the rotary encoder, lighting up one at a time and noting the bit position and segment name.

@raspberrypi.com #pico

Looks like the display only has 67 elements. But the seven-segment digits are all split in half, with 3-4 segments together and a big gap to the remaining segments in the shift register. Not sure if I'll have the patience to make something cool from it.

A brown front panel hooked up to a Raspberry Pi Pico through a level shifter. The display has 7.5 digits, decimals and other lit up segments. Also on the panel are six buttons and a large round dial.

Taking a break from the HCMS display to reverse-engineer this Trilithic Tricorder 3 front panel. The LCD is run by an OKI MSM5265. Each segment is somewhere semi-randomly in a 160 bit register. Have to cycle through to reverse engineer the LCD. :v

@raspberrypi.com #pico

ADC 1201577 H2TU-C388 HDSL CO LN UNIT VACJ1KD | eBay PART NUMBER: 1201577 VACJ1KD. MANUFACTURER: ADC.

I'm about 83.2% sure that some of these old ADC HDSL cards have amber ones. However I literally just got a $350 vet bill so I'm going to be good and not blow $30 on one for nostalgia/harvesting.

ebay.us/m/eIkWvO

They are surprisingly expensive new! But really pretty. I need to scour eBay for the amber ones that I remember seeing at an old job, but they don't seem to be super common.

Some C code calling a function named "SendChar" eight times with individual letters in the phrase "Hi Bsky!"

Photo of HCMS-2915 display on a prototyping breadboard with "Hi Bsky!" in a 5x7 pixel font. The individual red dots of each pixel are easily seen.

Slow going tinkering with the HCMS-2915. Still, I have added a font and can now just toss ASCII characters at it and have them show up:

@raspberrypi.com #pico

Is it a void thing to try to balance on things too narrow for him? My Meco desperately wanted to hang out on a dresser mirror that was 2" wide. At 3 in the morning. Every morning.

#BlackCatBestCat

I like a lot of covers more than the originals, usually simply because I heard them first.

This is one of the exceptions.

Ha! Was right on the Commodore keyboard front, but wrong on the 8-bit front. :)