@crashtestdev@woof.tech

Rhii Alexander 🏳️‍⚧️ @crashtestdev@woof.tech

· 3w ago

Replying to

Aparently there were also bugs in my code ... in a feature branch ... that I was actively working on when they told me to get out ... with 0 open pull requests It's starting to make sense now why their longest served developer had only been there a year and almost everyone else had been there for less than 3 months

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Rhii Alexander 🏳️‍⚧️ @crashtestdev@woof.tech

· 2w ago

i have found an unanswered question on comp.arch.embedded usenet archive which was posted the day i was born, 25 years ago, i know the answer to it, i am tempted to email them the answer

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Rhii Alexander 🏳️‍⚧️ @crashtestdev@woof.tech

· 2mo ago

Replying to

That C5 has been 20 fucking years of dreaming, 18 months of hard work and thousands of pounds spent, but to be honest what I find even worse it's a rare, historical artefact that is now permanently and irreversibly damaged If that kid had just admitted and apologised that they got carried away and crashed, I'd be totally fine, upset, but mistakes happen; the fact there was 0 fucking acknowledgement, and even the cheek to ask for another fucking go? I am so fucking lost for words And how braindead do you have to be to not notice the brakes aren't attached anymore, fucking incredible

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Rhii Alexander 🏳️‍⚧️ @crashtestdev@woof.tech

· 2mo ago

Replying to

Really do appreciate all the support I'm getting here, I bottled it up most of the week and I think I just needed to let it out Here's an update https://woof.tech/@crashtestdev/116979861612300051

Quoting

Rhii Alexander 🏳️‍⚧️

@crashtestdev@woof.tech

Update, had some sleep, feeling a lot better, I really did just have to get all that stuff off my chest In regards to the plastic, I think in my head it's much worse than it actually is, if I take my glasses off or take a cursory look, I can't see it, however just the sheer number of hours I have spent around it means I know what I'm looking for, just like when a scratch appears on the back of your hand I appreciate the suggestions on fixing the plastic, maybe "gouges" isn't the best word, deepish scratches at best, for which there isn't really a fix that wont just make it worse, main thing is to just scowling pad over it to remove any sharp bits which cast shadows and clean out any debris which makes it more obvious The small parts that are missing can be remade myself pretty easily, there a guy selling 3d printed mast top grommets for like £6 a pair Motor thing is probably nothing, it pulls me along just fine and the current draw also looks a-ok, just sometimes there's a very high pitched (almost inaudible), not-loud ringing which seems to be some resonance somewhere The brakes work OK, the disk brakes are a retrofit for safety reasons so the disk and calliper are modern off the shelf parts, and they're still usable, the disk just rubs a little on each rotation All that said, after a night full of work, the C5 will be Notts Pride today, at their 98% best And we will have a new adventure arriving too

Open quoted post

woof.tech

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Rhii Alexander 🏳️‍⚧️ @crashtestdev@woof.tech

· 2mo ago

Replying to

So pride went well, brakes 100% need replacing but as I said before they're a modern retrofit and a replacement is probably like £30, the high pitched squeak seems to almost be gone? Overall I feel a lot better towards it

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Rhii Alexander 🏳️‍⚧️ @crashtestdev@woof.tech

· 2mo ago

Replying to

It really wasn't doing a whole lot, it bleeped, PAGE cleared the screen, and not much else So I consulted the service manual, I initially looked at the keyboard, in theory in LOCAL mode or with TX/RX connected we should hear a bell similar to the one we hear at startup when CTRL + G is pressed, but alas nothing, checking the serial line on a scope, and sure enough, nothing! My first point of call was the keyboard, whilst PAGE was doing something, this existed outside of the keyboard matrix and was a switch which connected straight to the minibus backplane which contained all the control electronics Oh yeah - this machine is build before the advent of microprocessors, it's combinational logic boards on a passive backplane all the way down! A similar construction to contemporary minicomputers! After spending hours looking at the keyboard to understand it, I was rather blown away, this keyboard uses a 7 bit counter (using a 4 bit counter IC with some flip flops to extend it), feeding the lower 4 bits into a 4-16 line decoder which pulsed each row, and the upper 3 bits into an 8-to-1 multiplexer which scanned each column, when a key is pressed and the decoder pulses the row whilst the multiplexer reads the row, the output of the multiplexer goes low, stopping the clock going into counter, and the 7 bit number on that counter - it's the ASCII value of the key you pressed! #tektronix #tektronix4010 #vectorgraphics #terminal #vintagecomputing

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Rhii Alexander 🏳️‍⚧️ @crashtestdev@woof.tech

· 6mo ago

Sooo, my company have opened up for volunteer redundancies, if anyone needs or is hiring for a senior dotnet/python/rust dev who's entire personality is "I like making cool things work", I'm open

Some of my highlight include

- I wrote the entire train driver licencing management system for all of Great Britain, on my own, in a few weeks, with a completely unfamiliar stack

- Successfully defended the aforementioned project directly to the cabinet office when they blocked it and allowed it to continue to be deployed

- Once built a 64 bit computer in vanilla Java Minecraft (no command blocks)

- Worked on nuclear, medical, and autonomous driving systems, cannot talk about this too much, but this does mean I can absolutely talk your ear off about the importance of strict vigilance in software engineering

#fediHire #dotnet #python #rust

woof.tech

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Rhii Alexander 🏳️‍⚧️ @crashtestdev@woof.tech

· 2mo ago

Linus

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Rhii Alexander 🏳️‍⚧️ @crashtestdev@woof.tech

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@nottinghack@hachyderm.io Specifically on the +20v unregulated section, either that could just be that it is very old or because something made it blow We reformed the capacitors on a variac, checked over the PSU and made sure it gave out correct voltages, which it amazingly did, and got to work Of course, the fuse was blown due to a problem on the +20v unreg line, thankfully the genuinely amazing Philpem was there and found the closest matching service manual and found the wiring harness diagram, after several more blown fuses and multiple replaced tantalum capacitors later, we had +20v up! But oh dear, no lights or signs of life, after some more checks, +/-15v regulated was being tanked and was thus taking out the +5v where all the logic and the power LED lived, shortly after this Phil had to head home and myself, having been shown the ropes continued on an hours long task of finding dead tantalum caps on the +/-15v and later +5v, replacing, powering on, more dying and replacing more; eventually, we had all lines coming up, it was powering on, making a bleep, and showing a glowing display, and clearing it on PAGE being pressed Sadly, it wasn't doing much else

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Rhii Alexander 🏳️‍⚧️ @crashtestdev@woof.tech

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@nottinghack@hachyderm.io The story began on Friday 24th July 2026, when I see this holy grail of computing history on eBay for a price I can afford; and ensuring I am not dreaming, I buy it Cut to the very next day, I roll into Nottingham hackspace on my Sinclair C5 after doing half a day at Nottingham pride to meet with the seller who insisted they drive 2 hours to hand deliver it to me This turned out to be nearly perfect, as @philpem@digipres.club (who I cannot thank ENOUGH) happened to be down, and I discovered on that day they happen to have an encyclopaedic knowledge of Tektronix equipment and documentation to the point where they instantly told me where it was made as soon as I had removed the front cover and showed the Sharpied on serial number The original owner reported that they turned it on once, saw the whole screen light up and immediately turned it off, given that these CRTs are very rare and very bespoke, that is an understandable reaction, however based off of advice from Tom Stepleton (from the very good video above) and the user manual (which the previous owner had) showed this is normal, and you simply need to press PAGE to clear the screen. Getting the front panel off showed a more pressing problem though, a fuse had blown! #tektronix #tektronix4010 #vectorgraphics #terminal #vintagecomputing

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Rhii Alexander 🏳️‍⚧️ @crashtestdev@woof.tech

· 1mo ago

I love how technology has reached a point where 3D printing is more user friendly and reliable than fucking inkjet

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Rhii Alexander 🏳️‍⚧️ @crashtestdev@woof.tech

· 3mo ago

/rant

Docker, Vagrant, and any other devops automation is not a replacement for documentation

It's another layer of complexity to fail when person who knew the obscure and terrible DSL that the thing used to have left years ago and forwent documenting anything because people should "just run glassbottles start run" and have it work

Fucking document your runtime dependencies

/endrant

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Rhii Alexander 🏳️‍⚧️ @crashtestdev@woof.tech

· 4mo ago

RE: @crashtestdev@woof.tech

New contract signed

woof.tech

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Rhii Alexander 🏳️‍⚧️ @crashtestdev@woof.tech

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@chrisd@mastodon.social There was indeed 2! I think I may bring it next year (was discussing a potential vintage computing village) but it will be more static then

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Rhii Alexander 🏳️‍⚧️ @crashtestdev@woof.tech

· 4mo ago

Today was borthday, so I spent it going to Bletchley whilst tinkering with a wirewrapped 6800 sbc.

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Rhii Alexander 🏳️‍⚧️ @crashtestdev@woof.tech

· 2mo ago

Replying to

As cool as that was, we also learned the keyboard is totally fine, so the issue is elsewhere I then looked more into the minibus backplane, and what a better way to get used to something than making it into a KiCAD symbol and schematic to hopefully make a single extender! https://forgejo.crashtest.dev/jasonalexander-ja/tek-minibus-kicad (I didn't know about the 3.96mm pin pitch standard and I spent hours with board and a vernier and managed to get to 3.97mm... which I am proud of) This did allow me to better understand the architecture of this though, and specifically I thought I should look at the 4.9mHz and 614kHz clocks signals produced by the TC-1 logic board, 4.9mHz was OK (after I stopped checking with a 10mHz Tek 222 and used a more powerful scope), but 614kHz... completely still Turned out to just be a dead U9 7437 quad NAND on TC-1 which droves the line by pulling it down, sadly all I had to hand was a 7400, which is the same chip but rated for less current required for driving a line, so I soldered in a socket and placed it in, and what ya know, 614kHz came riiiight up, probably wont last, but with a replacement on the way and the chip socketed it certainly works for now! As for what effect this had, we now had serial communication in line mode!

Forgejo: Beyond coding. We Forge.

tek-minibus-kicad

KiCAD symbol and footprint for Tektronix Minibus

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Rhii Alexander 🏳️‍⚧️ @crashtestdev@woof.tech

· 2mo ago

Replying to

It was initially rather confusing, pressing a key seemed to send a random character every time, and this was looking at the scope so serial settings wouldn't account for that But serial in did something interesting, with 9600 7M2, sending a CTRL + G rang the bell! It's successfully reading and processing serial input, but what is happening internally with TX?! There was more symptoms, setting it to LOCAL mode and pressing CTRL + G on the built in keyboard it still wouldn't ring it's own bell, I figured it wasn't reading it's own keyboard correctly And more weirdly, the characters it was sending weren't random, each button on the keyboard pressed repeatedly send a series of 7 bytes starting with it's own value and ending on 0x7D and looping back again The wonderful Philpem to the rescue remembered that the keyboard is multiplexed on the TC-2 board as per the functional block diagram, sure enough he was right! Looking at the multiplexer I saw that it was being controlled by a 4 bit counter, probing that counter showed something very interesting, with each key press terminal side, the counter would increment, before resetting, which explained the 7 character sequence! Looking for the source of this clocking, showed it was coming from CBUSY from the serial communication card, this card is oddly an optional extra and it can work without it, we determined that this was a totally normal signal which indicated that the serial card was busy sending data

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Rhii Alexander 🏳️‍⚧️ @crashtestdev@woof.tech

· 2mo ago

Replying to

There is however, a lot of logic and flip flops on TC-2 between CBUSY and the counter chip Pressing PAGE should set the terminal to "ALPHA" mode (I.E. alpha-numeric AKA text as opposed to graphics), and checking the counter chip, sure enough pressing PAGE sets it to make the multiplexer read from the keyboard My current working theory is that some logic should be triggering when PAGE is pressed, which in turn sets another flip flop, and prevents CBUSY from incrementing that counter on every TX event Thankfully the amazing @philpem@digipres.club is coming down to Nottinghack this weekend hopefully we might be able to put this theory to test

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Rhii Alexander 🏳️‍⚧️ @crashtestdev@woof.tech

· 4mo ago

AI Rant

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Rhii Alexander 🏳️‍⚧️ @crashtestdev@woof.tech

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@aj@home.ajacks.net That sounds pretty cool, I did leave pride pretty much after the parade to go work on something at Nottingham hackspace

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Rhii Alexander 🏳️‍⚧️ @crashtestdev@woof.tech

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@Vecna@mastodon.online Thank you! That does mean a lot, I now think the damage is totally minimal, I was just hung up on the nature of how that damage ultimately got there

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Rhii Alexander 🏳️‍⚧️ @crashtestdev@woof.tech

· 4mo ago

RE: @crashtestdev@woof.tech

I have an architect of this generation right now asking me and another principle dev to ask copilot the exact same question and report back the answer

I am speechless

woof.tech

Rhii Alexander 🏳️‍⚧️: ""OK dotcom boomer"" - Woof.tech (Mastodon)

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Rhii Alexander 🏳️‍⚧️ @crashtestdev@woof.tech

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@mattgrayyes@chaos.social find a spoon maybe?

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Rhii Alexander 🏳️‍⚧️ @crashtestdev@woof.tech

· 5mo ago

Replying to

We need like; hard AF regulation from yesterday, most of these are comming from UK distributors, so these deathtraps have been imported already been mass imported and are now readily available for anyone who only 1/2 knows what they're doing to seriously injure themselves

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Rhii Alexander 🏳️‍⚧️ @crashtestdev@woof.tech

· 4mo ago

I love it when transphobes are mocked in mainstream media

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJReUNyYJZQ&t=155s

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Rhii Alexander 🏳️‍⚧️ @crashtestdev@woof.tech

· 4mo ago

Software which I wished existed; something to convert schmatics in Paul Falstad's CircuitJS into a KiCAD schamtic

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Rhii Alexander 🏳️‍⚧️ @crashtestdev@woof.tech

· 4mo ago

Replying to on infosec.exchange

@avuko@infosec.exchange @cwebber@social.coop The annoying thing is that they will get it to the line of "it works" and throw that around like they have found the holy grail, meanwhile actual software engineers who take themselves seriously know "it works" is such a low bar it's basically meaningless It's so annoying that our field is in a state similar to the medical field at the turn of last century, we are full of barely-trained quacks just looking to get status and wealth with little to no care of the impacts of the systems we manage

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Rhii Alexander 🏳️‍⚧️ @crashtestdev@woof.tech

· 4mo ago

Replying to

@alexhaydock@infosec.exchange Although I will probably show up in the C5 on my first day just for the giggles

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Rhii Alexander 🏳️‍⚧️ @crashtestdev@woof.tech

· 18mo ago

So, for anyone not in dotnetland, MediatR is a library which is commonly implementing a design pattern known as CQRS, one of the many completely pointless "design pattern for the sake of design patterns" found within OOP and which I have been trying dearly to make people stop using.

2 months ago its lead developer posted in a comment to a reddit thread 'You can print it on a shirt “I will never commercialize MediatR”. And I will sign it.', only for that lead developer to, two months later, make it closed source...

Jimmy, you have no idea how much of a favour you are doing for me

https://www.reddit.com/r/dotnet/comments/1iamrqd/comment/m9e36u2/

#dotnet #csharp #softwaredevelopment #opensource #oss

reddit.com

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Rhii Alexander 🏳️‍⚧️ @crashtestdev@woof.tech

· 37mo ago

Replying to

@quirk@computerfairi.es ObjC++ is what Imma call Swift from now on

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Rhii Alexander 🏳️‍⚧️ @crashtestdev@woof.tech

· 2mo ago

LP: this has seriously just broken me, I know it's silly, but the C5 is my dream car, that I had posters of when I was a child, and just have someone totally wreck like that and not acknowledge it I'm... fuck, it's like I can't comprehend it

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Rhii Alexander 🏳️‍⚧️ @crashtestdev@woof.tech

· 2w ago

Replying to

@mcc@mastodon.social ((((((((((machine (((lisp))))))))))))) one caveat that we need to move everyone to use lisp machines

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Rhii Alexander 🏳️‍⚧️ @crashtestdev@woof.tech

· 5mo ago

Replying to on chaos.social

@jonty@chaos.social it's really odd, I and another person I know have done the same, both also to mastodon.social, never heard of it happening to another instance

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Rhii Alexander 🏳️‍⚧️ @crashtestdev@woof.tech

· 18mo ago

Replying to

@maxitb@mastodon.social that only works if you can manage access to your resources, MedtiatR doesn't have any ability to do that, it just resolves handlers (often, very slowly) and uses dependency injection to inject any resources, no different from injecting them straight into your controllers but with the added delay of MediatR resolving the correct handler And moving away from MediatR specifically, most resources dotnet devs will ever interact with will already be controlled by a query/command handler, like in the case of databases, that's what the database engine/server is doing, and it's going to be better suited, optimised and battle hardened to handle and schedule queries than anything that could be slopped out in dotnet

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Rhii Alexander 🏳️‍⚧️ @crashtestdev@woof.tech

· 4mo ago

Replying to

Oh yeah, when I walked in the interview the CTO had a macbook with pride stickers incl. a "trans rights are human rights" sticker

❤️

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Rhii Alexander 🏳️‍⚧️ @crashtestdev@woof.tech

· 8mo ago

Replying to

@kuchinster This should be under "Do you hate yourself, and do you hate your computer"

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Rhii Alexander 🏳️‍⚧️ @crashtestdev@woof.tech

· 18mo ago

Replying to

@mbrdev@mastodon.social @maxitb@mastodon.social I have only ever heard of CQRS mentioned with MediatR and MediatR mentioned with CQRS, it seems pretty closely coupled in dotnet RE behaviours: do not use if you do not want future maintainers to not hate you, as nobody needs some poorly documented piece of code inserting itself between you call site and handler and then breaking

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Rhii Alexander 🏳️‍⚧️ @crashtestdev@woof.tech

· 4mo ago

That's why the upgrade to Fedora 44 broke everything it reverted back to nouveau

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Rhii Alexander 🏳️‍⚧️ @crashtestdev@woof.tech

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@chthonicionic@mastodon.online Thank you so much, and I think your comment about entropy rings to true

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Rhii Alexander 🏳️‍⚧️ @crashtestdev@woof.tech

· 5mo ago

Watched model float planes from my C5

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Rhii Alexander 🏳️‍⚧️ @crashtestdev@woof.tech

· 2mo ago

If anyone knows Look Mum No Computer at #emfcamp if he still needs a battery to work on the fire organ, I have a fully charged spare he can have, I bought 2 but I'm finding juat 1 gets through the day no problem

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Rhii Alexander 🏳️‍⚧️ @crashtestdev@woof.tech

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@neaveeng@hachyderm.io thank you so much!

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Rhii Alexander 🏳️‍⚧️ @crashtestdev@woof.tech

· 4mo ago

Replying to on infosec.exchange

@alexhaydock@infosec.exchange Sadly not, I have been fully remote working for the past 3 1/2 years

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Rhii Alexander 🏳️‍⚧️ @crashtestdev@woof.tech

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@aj@home.ajacks.net @zzt@mas.to Ransacking Tesla dealerships?

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