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jbiton Casio F-B100W-1A

Have you released your reverse engineered endoscope camera work? It's something I've been thinking about doing myself, since the vendor apps leave a lot to be desired.

jbiton Rust is rolling off the Volvo assembly line

Hightec also have an ISO26262 qualified compiler focused on automotive: https://hightec-rt.com/rust

So there's lots of focus on having a good alternative to C/C++

jbiton Intel undercut a standards body to give us the PCI connector

There were a few vendor-specific VLBish busses:

Opti local bus was the most common, and had a few different boards: https://ancientelectronics.wordpress.com/tag/opti-local-bus/

Gigabyte had one that was only used for the "GA-486US" motherboard. The connector was just two 16bit ISA cards back to back: https://theretroweb.com/motherboard/image/ga-486us-front-60b...

I believe there were some others from different vendors.

The signaling for all of these was pretty similar to VLB, since it was just the 486 bus on a connector.

jbiton Show HN: Send me an IRL message and watch it arrive

Check out the `--shutter` option for `libcamera-vid`, it allows you to tweak the camera's exposure time which might help with the screen refresh banding. `--shutter 60` sets the exposure time to 60ms, which might be a good starting point.

EDIT: Ah, actually the unit is microseconds, so `60000` would be 60ms

jbiton GNU Boot sent a cease and desist to Libreboot

https://web.archive.org/web/20230719185342/https://libreboot...

For context, this is the page the cease and desist was referring to.

jbiton Free SVG images and icons, released under Creative Commons CC0

I wonder how legit this site is. It says:

> These SVG images were created by modifying the images of Pixabay.

And indeed, the images seem to be taken from pixabay (e.g. [0], [1]), however the pixabay license is NOT CC0, and specifically forbids redistribution [2]:

> Don't redistribute or sell Pixabay content on other stock or wallpaper platforms.

[0]: https://svgsilh.com/image/1801287.html

[1]: https://pixabay.com/vectors/grooming-cat-kitty-kitten-feline...

[2]: https://pixabay.com/service/license/

jbiton Breaking into ASOS

Or even find the /etc/shadow contents in the hexeditor and empty the root password field. Searching for "root:" usually gets you to the right place.

Most *nix systems are happy if you pad the left over bytes with newlines, so there's no need to mess with the filesystem metadata or anything like that. :D

jbiton How did anyone do math in Roman numerals? (2017)

I'd never heard of this documentary, so I took a look. I assume you meant "The Bit Player"? ( https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5015534/ ). It looks interesting, and it's on Amazon prime video so I'll give it a watch. Thanks!

jbiton Show HN: Memos – Search engine for your screenshots and photos

Adding to this:

f-droid also encourages reproducible builds: https://f-droid.org/en/docs/Reproducible_Builds/

This means you can verify the APK on the f-droid store matches what's in github by building it yourself and comparing the signatures.

And if you want to do this, f-droid has an automated way: https://f-droid.org/en/docs/Verification_Server/ Of course, you still have to trust the verification server source code, but that runs locally on your hardware and is auditable.

jbiton Why did old PCs have key locks? (2017) [video]

Why not also add the kitchen sink! http://www.john-ward.org.uk/personal/john/computers/html/roc... :)

jbiton Ask HN: Will Rust replace C/C++? What's holding it back? Are you using it?

Rust has a lot of good IDE options these days: https://areweideyet.com/ They decided to focus on the "Rust Language Server", which many IDEs use, rather than on one specific IDE.

jbiton Linux Kernel Lockdown and UEFI Secure Boot

As well as the IMA Appraisal feature that mjg59 mentioned, you can also integrity check your entire filesystem with verity[1]. Android uses it to make sure the system partition isn't tampered with.

[1] https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/device-mapper/verit...

jbiton Build yourself a Linux

The embedded version of CLFS (Cross-Compiled Linux From Scratch) covers building a musl + busybox system: http://clfs.org/view/clfs-embedded/x86/ But the more resources available on this kind of thing the better IMHO, there's not really a one size fits all :)

jbiton I included emoji in my password and now I can't log in to my Account on Yosemite

As somebody who uses numerous keyboard layouts on a daily basis, this is an interesting idea!

I wonder how hard it'd be to make a script where you specify which keyboard layouts you're likely to encounter and it finds the common symbols...

Of course, if you specify dvorak it'd wreck everything :)

jbiton BB-8 Droid Teardown

> Also note the lead weights used here to make the product feel more substantial

Are these weights really made of Lead? Or is "lead weight" just an industry term for anything heavy? If they're actually Lead, how do toys like this conform to RoHS?

jbiton Dear Google Mail Team

Google Apps has a few more knobs at least: https://support.google.com/a/answer/2368132?hl=en

jbiton Explanation of 44.1 kHz CD sampling rate

I believe all NTSC equipment is required to support Black&White System M signals, which are exactly 60Hz[1]. It probably made their equipment much simpler to forget about colour encoding entirely. (And it made the 44,100Hz fit too)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CCIR_System_M

jbiton Intel unveils tiny $99 MinnowBoard Max open single-board computer

Small correction: The MinnowBoard MAX only has 8MB of on-board flash, not 8GB. (It's an SPI chip to hold the firmware)

jbiton NSA data volumes in terms of STASI filing cabinets

While I agree that they likely store much less data than five zettabytes, your assumption that all their storage is on constantly spinning hard disks seems flawed.

(Tape libraries and various other offline/nearline storage solutions would be viable for most of their data)

jbiton Exodus - A cycle-accurate Mega Drive/Genesis Emulator

Indeed it's rare, but not unheard of. For example the "nocash" series of emulators has extensive debug support (breakpoints, memory viewers, disassemblers, hardware traps, etc)

http://nocash.emubase.de is the website if you want to check them out.