I can add ribbon cable repair to my skill set now… and it worked! My plotter shows messages on the LCD again!
Now on to the next problem, the carousel sensor isn't working.
Remote
Thea
@sitharus@cloudisland.nz
mastodon 4.5.18Coding, sewing, baking. I know far too much about AWS. 🏳️⚧️
Known to rant about chronic fatigue and the healthcare system.
1495 Followers
148 Following
49 Posts
Joined May 14, 2020
After more fucking around, an HP 7550 Plus plotter!
Doctors are always worried that taking Vyvanse for ADHD is going to suppress my appetite.
Definitely not, because when taking it I remember to eat.
Made a friend!
(Not really, only came for the food then left)
Huh. Eurovision have started to grow a spine and implemented a rule explicitly banning countries in an armed conflict, in a “sensitive geopolitical situation”, or where there is evidence of vote manipulation from hosting. All host rights and benefits are stripped, a new host is chosen by ESC.
Also actually reviewing the voting system! They’re talking about adding a minimum number of songs to vote for, and moving all countries to their online platform where they’ve just added more manipulation detection
Maybe I’ll be able to watch it again in a couple of years!
Also MoroccanOil pulled out of sponsorship just before the changes were proposed. Huh. Odd.
Paul Henry is being persistently disruptive, can I use reasonable force on him? I believe throwing a rubber object has precedent.
Boosted by @trending@homestead.social
I heard "It's just common sense" one too many times and got all ranty.
https://thea.hutchings.gen.nz/2026/July/common_sense_and_the_theory_of_mind.html
SMH people saying early 3D games were “blocky” and “angular”.
How are you supposed to show off how many triangles your 3D accelerator can do if you can’t see the triangles?!
Replying to
@witix I don’t know about anyone else, but I’d love to experience the power of [product name]! Sold!
Boosted by @fedicat@pc.cafe
Hey lazywebs, where’s a good place to learn how people who use accessibility settings and devices on phones actually use them?
I want to make sure the app I work on is as accessible as I can make it. Everything I can find says “use this and it’s accessible”, but when I try the accessibility tools the result is… well garbage.
So I want to find how who people actually use these tools expect them to behave so I can properly set up the app.
Items I did not have in my todo list this weekend: repairing a 36 year old flat flex cable. To aliexpress I go!
Replying to
OK I blogged about this, got it down to 654 bytes if you exclude Python 3.5, 672 if you need 3.5 support: https://thea.hutchings.gen.nz/2026/April/copy_fail_code_golf.html
setting up a Debian VM because apparently no two linuxes are alike…
Yesterday I learned that The Chemical Brothers’ Hey Boy Hey Girl’s lyrics aren’t “hey boys, hey girls”.
It’s a sample from The Roof is on Fire by Rock Master Scott & The Dynamic Three. The lyrics are “hey girls, b-boys, superstar DJs, here we go!”
But that song is also the basis of the song of the same name by The Bloodhound Gang. Then I realised I remember almost all the lyrics to the rap part of that song.
I don’t need to remember that! I need to remember the groceries!
I've seen a bunch of really weird "fixes" for copy.fail with strange modprobe things.
Add this line to /etc/modprobe.d/af_alg.conf or any .conf file in there you like:
blacklist algif_aead
I also disabled af_alg entirely because it's not useful on my machines:
blacklist af_alg
if lsmod | grep af_alg shows anything reboot, or use rmmod if you know how.
Replying to
This also is very much like early Twitter. I joined in 2007. Twitter was a cheap group SMS service, it connected you to your friends not to companies and celebrities.
I get that I’m not like most people. I grew up in a very conservative rural area so the internet has always been my connection to friends and peer groups, a way to converse with people rather than a way to escape or get famous.
Huh, plasma arc cooktops for gas-like cooking without gas! Sounds really good for wok cooking and making every amateur radio user in a kilometres or so hate you!
Replying to
@stephen@ephemera.vital.org.nz z-wave, though it’s expensive, ZigBee, and Thread - home assistant has details on setting up your own Thread border router, though there’s likely some premade thread routers that don’t talk to the internet.
Most of Ikea’s smart home products are Thread.
I now use all three of those - Hue ZigBee lighting, Ikea Thread air quality monitor, ZWave smart switches since I’ve had those the longest
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@stephen@ephemera.vital.org.nz z-wave has the advantage of not using 2.4Ghz, but the disadvantage of using region specific frequencies so you can’t import it without making sure it’s the NZ/AU frequency model.
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@pearofdoom@cloudisland.nz It's especially fun when you use Alpine linux, since it uses musl instead of glibc and doesn't use systemd
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Updated this post, the try/except block seems to be needed on machines that have a working af_alg, which mine apparently doesn't :D
Still got to the magic 666 bytes though!
Replying to
@gwen@tech.lgbt Neat! That gets down to 620 bytes with all the extra things I found in Python!
Replying to
@Heterokromia @xssfox Why aren't there programs to install second-hand panels for people who can't afford new ones? I'm no solar expert but even at 50% of originally installed capacity that's still better than none!
Replying to
@megahbite@cloudisland.nz yeah. I managed to tame it with tinted mode, reduce motion, and reduce bright effects. Still not good though.
Reduce motion is a bit too reduced for me, but the constant jiggling of everything without it is worse.
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@gwen@tech.lgbt @diazona@techhub.social after some testing I’ve updated my blog post. It appears that my home server is set up weirdly, that shouldn’t surprise me 😅
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@mejofi@ngmx.com setting up a Debian VM because apparently socket.recv throws on some systems as well... I bet this is something to do with musl and non-systemd systems :)
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@diazona@techhub.social @gwen@tech.lgbt iiiinteresting. Perhaps it depends on some system config, I use alpine for all my VMs so I guess it’s time to try Debian or something.
There is a previous draft of my blog post which criticises the slop on the copy.fail website and PoC a lot more... I decided it distracted from pointing out all the problems.
Replying to
@gwen@tech.lgbt I was wondering, but it's after midnight and I have work in the morning 😆
Replying to
@gwen@tech.lgbt I don't think a human wrote the Python at least, I haven't looked in to the ELF. It's clearly not machine minified, and if a human did that I'm very disappointed in them.
Basic things like socket.recv doesn't throw since Python 3.5, so there's no need for the try. Even if you were targeting pre-3.5 you don't need it there.
I agree that it's just trying to sound scary, but it doesn't need to be this obfuscated.
Life is like a hurricane
#NowPlaying
Replying to
@busesarecoolactually@toot.community you can search for hashtags and people, not on arbitrary content. It’s a deliberate choice to stop topic brigading. Also you can only search what your instance has seen, not the whole fediverse.
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@vapid@mastodon.nu it does, you can't search everything in the fediverse because it's not a unified network. Larger instances will (in theory) have more diverse connections and therefore more results in search.
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@marcosflobo@hachyderm.io it depends on your instance. Some are run for free because their admins want to and have spare server space, some take donations, some - like the one I use - have subscriptions. Back In The Day services like irc and usenet were often run on the side by ISP or university sysadmins.
Part of the decentralisation of the fediverse is that these different models can exist and communicate, we don’t have to find just one that works
Replying to
@mejofi@ngmx.com yeah. I’m starting to suspect that af_alg is actually totally broken on my machine for some reason. I re-enabled it and the OpenSSL benchmark runs much slower when using it…
Replying to
@canllaith@chaos.social @duckalini@cloudisland.nz @jsr@social.jsr.com they sold all the shoe assets (and liabilities!) to a fashion conglomerate to get the cash they’re going to throw in to the AI dumpster fire.
The shoes will be owned by American Exchange Group, pending a shareholder vote.
Uspol, silly
Replying to
@canllaith@chaos.social @duckalini@cloudisland.nz @jsr@social.jsr.com Ah, my client didn’t load all the messages. I thought it was about the AI enslopification they sold for.