Notices by Ryan Finnie (foo@fosstodon.org), page 6

Tuesday morning email: "Your JLCPCB Order Is On Its Way To You". That is good news!

Tuesday evening: I'm sure I don't need to check the news to see if anything would be peripherally related to that good news.

@misty WD-40 was invented by Western Digital to solve a lubrication issue on the DIP-40 6502 fab equipment they acquired from MOS Technology.

Gritty tried to warn us, but we wouldn't listen

@squinky My family grew up with Oh's, which frankly isn't much better than Cap'n Crunch or similar, but at least had a thin veneer of acceptability.

@squinky About once a year, I remember that I didn't grow up with overly sugary cereal but I'm now AN ADULT and can BUY WHAT I WANT so I go out and buy a box of Lucky Charms and eat it and go "meh".

@maj @bsletten I was in North Carolina on a business trip last week, and somehow ended up in a sports bar eating poutine with Canadians on Thursday. Accidental solidarity!

@xan Be sure to smash that like-like!

Chinese fab companies: we promise 24 hour production turnaround, after the 3 day pre-production period and before the week it spends on the loading dock.

#protip If you're writing a disk image to a block device and then need to trigger a rescan for the various kernel stuff to see the new filesystem / partition table layout, the modern invocation is:

blockdev --rereadpt /dev/sdX

#TIL while mounting and using FAT32 partitions of up to 2 TiB have been pretty much universally supported (assuming your platform supports 48-bit LBA, circa 2003), the built-in Windows format utility had an arbitrary limit of 32 GiB for awhile.

That limit was lifted back in... *checks notes* August 2024.

@squinky https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVQUw2GpqnQ

I was in an airplane yesterday and was annoyed by the noticeable (to me) low-frequency refresh rate of the overhead lights, and took this video. Turns out it was simulating something similar to 3500K, not from RGB, but from CMY. (Filmed at 120fps, slowed down to 25.)

If you strike me down
I shall get up again
You're never gonna keep me down

@ariadne *pointing at locker* meat

@jeda You mean this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRqCVcSWbDc

Thinking about getting a BlueSky account. Which server should I choose?

I have an uncanny ability to start watching a livestream just as the host is saying "well that's about it for this stream..."

@foone See how many USB classes you can emulate in one device. Hold down another button and your keyboard turns into an HID mouse which is controlled Asteroids style by the keyboard. Hold yet another button and it becomes a webcam which displays abstract animations depending on the keyboard inputs. Etc, etc.

@foone The GP2040-CE is an open USB gamepad input encoder design. It's got a button on the PCB which turns it into a USB flash drive (because it's based on the RP2040, so that's not new). It's got another button which turns it into a USB ethernet adapter to give you access to a configuration web site.

@Nagaram Lenovo is good about this too. I recently needed to ship back a 50lb P620 workstation to my employer, and had saved the shipping box they sent it to me in. The box looks like it was designed to survive about 5 trips through commercial shippers, which is just the right amount of resiliency for the lifetime of the product. Same deal with their laptops.