[X] My Assistant

are you using one of those boards that has an ~rgb connector~ for driving led strips directly or just the generic china variety? also yes rgb has gone way too far.

Current computer does not have RGB just smoked glass and white lighting. Quite subdued.


Next PC , I think it does have a RGB connector but will probably have everything turned off.

rgb is for homosexuals

It's showing the default wallpaper for Xubuntu 20.04LTS in that pciture if I'm not mistaken. My PSU and bottom fans are mouted with 6-32 hardware. The case has a big grate for two large fans on the side. Plugged that with black cardboard from the mono's box, and just 8 small bugle-head wood screws.
I keep saying I'll get flat head 6-32 stuff to replace it, but they're holding just fine...

All campus network authentication (802.1X, wired and wireless, they're still using PEAP/MSCHAPv2/RADIUS) went dead yesterday, except that I'd pre-emptively whitelisted my desktop NIC's MAC address (through the portal they give to register game consoles in student housing) so one of my WRT54G's (which is connected through my desktop) is currently providing internet to around four of my friends in the building. No one can access the MAC registration portal anymore, so I'm the only game in town.

Maybe they could spoof their consoles' MAC addresses, if they had registered them in the past, though.
But basically, my foresight paid off. I'm using a VPN for my traffic.

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Sep 24 2020, 23:19

rgb is for homosexuals

Not if you say no homo every time you turn on the computer.


Personally I just find too much computer lighting annoying, especially if I leave the computer on over night.

RGB also gives me the shits, if it costs more but does nothing for performance or even lowers performance slightly.

My USB 3.0 expresscard sometimes gets very warm when in my laptop, even with nothing plugged in. Other times it doesn't seem to cause any problems at all.

I guess it's already well established that these cards are pretty much universally bad in terms of power optimizations, but it's the last thing I thought.

Also, RGB case lights (or keyboard lights, motherboard lights, RAM lights, fake RAM that's really just more RGB lights, GPU lights) are stupid and gaudy.

They'd also be a perfect thing to just put on an internal USB header, so I'm not really sure why manufacturers have special purpose-built LED headers instead. Probably just to artificially separate their markets with specialized boards that cost more.

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Sep 25 2020, 02:31

Mine has RGB and fan control headers, plus internal USB stuff.
My best guess is it's a borderline value-added type deal, but also some integration/stability. All the headers and outputs on my motherboard are controllable from the UEFI bios, and not dependant on the OS recognizing them- in xubuntu, I can't get any sensor data to poll correctly.
I'd be iffy on letting something like a device driver control cooling fans- if the thing deadlocks when running at full tilt you better hope the hardware has reasonable limits to turn itself off.
I digress though, RGB is just bling and doesn't matter for system stability.

Mine has RGB and fan control headers, plus internal USB stuff.
My best guess is it's a borderline value-added type deal, but also some integration/stability. All the headers and outputs on my motherboard are controllable from the UEFI bios, and not dependant on the OS recognizing them- in xubuntu, I can't get any sensor data to poll correctly.
I'd be iffy on letting something like a device driver control cooling fans- if the thing deadlocks when running at full tilt you better hope the hardware has reasonable limits to turn itself off.
I digress though, RGB is just bling and doesn't matter for system stability.

I control fans via a device driver on my powerbook; technically I'm actually controlling an adt7460 chip, which reads sensors and determines when to kick fans on/the speed to kick them on at. That being said I can set it to not kick the fans on until a CPU temperature of 120°C if I want to, and the datasheet for the PPC 7447A specifies 105°C as the maximum temperature recommended.

When the system boots the chip already has some somewhat reasonable default values (built-in or maybe provided from Open Firmware, IDK which), though, which means if I don't load the kernel module it will still work.

The source code for Windows XP and Server 2003 leaked; it looks like it's legitimate.

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Sep 27 2020, 06:38

A few project pictures now that it's reached working proof of concept phase.
(IMG:[i.postimg.cc] https://i.postimg.cc/WVXmK691/20200927-182406.jpg)
Wiring mess, need to clean it up, and add tail light wiring. The frequencies and PLs on the radio are wrong, and what I read out of it before reprogramming. Not posting the two ham repeater pairs in it now.

(IMG:[i.postimg.cc] https://i.postimg.cc/mTf7Mdr8/20200927-182243.jpg)
Rear detail. I need a bead of silicone around the taillight, with a small gap under the center.

(IMG:[i.postimg.cc] https://i.postimg.cc/fMN0kJHP/20200927-182536.jpg)
Details of brackets to interact with bike rack.

(IMG:[i.postimg.cc] https://i.postimg.cc/jxF7jc96/20200927-182520.jpg)
Long antenna, 1/2 wave. It doesn't do bad now, but isn't trimmed to length. I need to borrow gear to do that.

I need to finish the headset and PTT interface, get that label off, add a bracket for a spare battery, and add some feet so it'll sit well on a flat surface in addition to I mentioned prior.
I suspect it's running about 40W on 144MHz, but haven't hooked it up to my Bird 43 and a dummy load yet.

You'd probally be interested in how the radio programs, dragontamer. Panasonic CF-14, serial cable to an interface box, dc-dc12V usb dongle to interface box (it also has a 9v battery in it, but power dieing when writing a codeplug will brick the radio), and a dos program with a copyright date of 1990-1994.

This post has been edited by Wayward_Vagabond: Sep 28 2020, 13:45

My Powerbook G4 started forgetting what the date was again today; it did this a couple times a month or two ago, but then worked fine for ages so I'm not sure if the (rechargeable coin cell) real time clock battery is actually failing/borderline or I have some other random issue. It probably is just the battery. I was really hoping I wouldn't have to order one for it...

For now I'm using my old 'date-fetching' script that just grabs the date from one of my other machines on my LAN. I should probably just have it try to find a date via NTP, but right now I'm just running 'date' on a remote machine via SSH and setting the time on the powerbook based on the result.

I've also noticed that when using ethernet cable to connect my machines, SCP from my powerbook seems about 5x slower than with my X201 tablet, despite both supposedly having gigabit NIC's. Guessing it's either bus-limited in the powerbook (e.g., PCI bus speeds) or the encryption overhead is just that great (maybe not optimized for PPC, or some optimzations are turned off for compatibility with even older cores),

You'd probally be interested in how the radio programs, dragontamer. Panasonic CF-14, serial cable to an interface box, dc-dc12V usb dongle to interface box (it also has a 9v battery in it, but power dieing when writing a codeplug will brick the radio), and a dos program with a copyright date of 1990-1994.

If it's using a DOS program and a serial cable, you could probably just log whatever it sends out over it on another machine and re-implement it in something that isn't DOS.
Not strictly necessary, but something for a rainy day maybe.
Love me some toughbooks. I googled the CF-14 and came up empty. You don't mean one of the "let's note" line, do you? Do you just mean a 14" toughbook?

The only brand new laptops I might actually want are made by Panasonic. Too bad about the pricing and the unavailability of most of them in the states beyond the toughbooks.

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Sep 29 2020, 09:31

Derp, CF-18. Retrofitted a PATA type SSD since I acquired it. turns out the drive is an msata inside a case. Felt rather silly wrapping the shock detection sensors and foam around it,
(IMG:[i.ebayimg.com] https://i.ebayimg.com/images/i/151519954907-0-1/s-l1000.jpg)
Not this exact one, but along these lines.

I don't know of anybody that's tried to write new RSS for the motorola radios, but I do know it directly bitbangs the bus at an unusual baud rate. I think it's something to do with being able to match with a factor of the radio's crystal.
It's in dos box with a slowdown program under windows xp right now, so far that seems to be working.

This post has been edited by Wayward_Vagabond: Sep 29 2020, 10:02

damnit, doubles

This post has been edited by Wayward_Vagabond: Sep 29 2020, 09:44

Derp, CF-18.
I don't know of anybody that's tried to write new RSS for the motorola radios, but I do know it directly bitbangs the bus at an unusual baud rate. I think it's something to do with being able to match with a factor of the radio's crystal.
It's in dos box with a slowdown program under windows xp right now, so far that seems to be working.

Interesting.

Wonder how well it'd work in dosemu (does anyone still use dosemu?).

The source code for Windows XP and Server 2003 leaked; it looks like it's legitimate.

i thought it was already leaked a while back. Its a bit of an issue for ATMs that are still running XP.

A few project pictures now that it's reached working proof of concept phase.

Thats pretty cool. Everytime i've gone into the outback I've wanted something like this because there is no reception whenever you need it.

i thought it was already leaked a while back. Its a bit of an issue for ATMs that are still running XP.

Hm, maybe. First time I heard of it though. NT 4 leaked ages ago, and 3.5 a few months ago.

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Sep 30 2020, 09:01

Managed to get RTX 3080, nice.
Wait for Cyberpunk begins.

Managed to get RTX 3080, nice.
Wait for Cyberpunk begins.

>fell for the 3080 meme
But really, if you got it at a fair price, good for you, I guess. I still don't need anything that strong and my PSU wouldn't be able to handle it anyway.

Did a dist-upgrade on the powerbook today and found debian finally started removing Python 2.x stuff a couple months ago. So I spent the last hour or so patching my old mcomix tweaks into the mcomix3 fork, and then fixing a couple more things so the status bar wasn't way too big (I blame GTK3 for that).

Now it should be ready for whenever the old mcomix breaks on my other machines.

I had to do a couple more patches to fix some annoying changes that they made in the porting process, like how they changed the "open with" menu escape syntax.

If anyone else upgrades to the GTK3 port/fork, be warned that your old configuration files will not be compatible and will be replaced. Back them up.

As another thought, I still don't like GTK3 programming. The built in inspector is sort of handy, but it's a shame it tries to use the client side decoration bullshit, and gtkparasite could do it for GTK2 and GTK3 anyways.

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Oct 1 2020, 09:10

>fell for the 3080 meme
But really, if you got it at a fair price, good for you, I guess. I still don't need anything that strong and my PSU wouldn't be able to handle it anyway.

Got it at msrp of course. Meme or not, it'll be huge upgrade and need it to run Cyberpunk at 4K.
Also upgrading my whole computer before it comes out, Zen 3 news next week will be interesting.

Got it at msrp of course. Meme or not, it'll be huge upgrade and need it to run Cyberpunk at 4K.
Also upgrading my whole computer before it comes out, Zen 3 news next week will be interesting.

I guess that'd explain it.
I still don't have or really want a 4K screen; hidpi issues and bad aspect ratios are my main problems with most of them.