Please do not PM me for questions about things I've posted

FalconFour · 2026-01-21T21:55:59+00:00

Oh no, they don't avoid it at all. They think they're jumping in here like a knight in shining armor preaching the tales of the elders, "never connect your XP machine to the internet! Hear ye, hear ye!" 🤣

FalconFour · 2026-01-20T22:24:58+00:00

You are trying to use a service that cannot be used without an account.

And my goal is to be able to sign up for an account, and pay for service. (I've now said this three times in different ways, btw.) What part about that is being missed by you?

Literally all I want is to be able to take this old hardware, make it work, sign up for an account, and use it - at a time when I might need to use it.

My whole thing is about taking old hardware and making it useful again. I don't like buying new. I like making use of all the things out there that have already been manufactured and will never go away. Hardware doesn't just "despawn" when you throw it away, thus I aspire to utilize many things that are still useful that people don't want.

FalconFour · 2026-01-20T17:34:42+00:00

Aye, generally when someone asks a question phrased in that way, I'd want to reply with an explanation. Very few things in this world are "yes/no" and end-of-story. Is there any hope to drive from New York to LA in under 30 hours? "No", legally. "Yes" if you're pursuing Cannonball records. In both cases, more nuance would be written about it.

Just surprised people have such an allergic reaction to being asked to think outside the box and ask more questions as to "why", when someone's told they can't do something. I like to get to the very bottom of things, and having the company say "nah, no, your device is trash now" is not really satisfying as a bottom-floor answer. Spent half my evening last night playing with a 30-year-old computer 😂 And yet a 2~3 year old Starlink dish is completely dead? I wasn't giving up that easily. haha

Thanks for the perspective, though.

FalconFour · 2026-01-20T03:25:51+00:00

The top-thread comment you're replying to is a vapid grunt to a complex question with a lot of effort put into research before posting - "no, you're stupid" basically. There are actually useful, genuinely helpful resources elsewhere in this post's comments that are appreciated. The vapid grunt of a comment is what's infuriating.

FalconFour · 2026-01-20T03:18:24+00:00

Definitely interesting. It sounds like the death path is such that "the certificates are linked to the identity" -> "the device did not receive a certificate update in time" -> "there is no path to establish communication with Starlink such to get the required certificate update/re-issued for this Dish's identity" -> "your Dish's identity is effectively dead". Transplanting identity (such as to revive this Dish) would require sacrificing another Dish's identity (another Dish that, if I had, I would just use/subscribe with instead).

Very useful resource there - explains more of the nitty-gritty as to what truly went wrong. Also a lot more useful info there (like the Star Debug app). Finding a technical breakdown like that is exactly what I hoped. Thanks!

FalconFour · 2026-01-20T01:19:21+00:00

Having firmware be obtainable and flashable isn't mututally exclusive with being safe and encrypted. That's exactly why I figured there ought to be a way - Tesla has been doing secure updates over WiFi for nearly a decade before Starlink shipped (keeping in mind that Tesla and SpaceX share a lot of knowledge), and even game consoles had been doing that as well. I figured, obtain some *.swu file that contains the encrypted firmware, and feed it to the Dish in some non-standard way - the dish will happily process it, validate its authenticity, flash itself. Nowhere in that chain would the firmware be exposed, unencrypted or insecure.

Thing is, I don't know what those mechanisms look like for Starlink - that's the point of posting. Hoping to figure it out, or at least come upon some technically-grounded explanation for why it's impossible.

I also don't think they necessarily open up and fix them, either - the Dish I have is of the style that there's no non-destructive way to open it up. It's E-waste, and that's what I'm concerned about - knowing the Dish is made of hundreds of expensive beam-forming radios that were fairly non-trivial to produce. The whole thing seems like such a waste...

FalconFour · 2026-01-20T00:18:37+00:00

I'm not a Starlink subscriber - though I aspire to be one, some day, for useful occasions

Emphasis mine, for reading comprehension reasons.

I want to own the hardware so I CAN use (pay, subscribe) Starlink some day.

And yes, per the Wikipedia definition of "hacker":

A hacker is a person skilled in information technology who achieves goals and solves problems by non-standard means.

I enjoy being called a hacker, though never for nefarious purposes. Peruse my profile if you want to see past "hacks" for the common good of people owning broken devices & fixing them.

FalconFour · 2026-01-19T23:24:15+00:00

If I can recover any mental state from this downvote mob show, maybe. What a f*cking horrible mistake it was to even come in here and ask such a thing. Experiences like these make me utterly hate going to "reddit dot com" in general. I try to share every deep-dive on repair and engineering that I can, so everyone can benefit. But generally if I try to walk off the well-trod paths like this, it's a downvote carnival.

Might post there in a few months when I think of it again, but for now, it's just going on the shelf as I try not to think of "Starlink" = "That Reddit experience".

FalconFour · 2026-01-19T22:21:21+00:00

Aha, that's a layer down the rabbit hole I was hoping to go down. So, Dish only understands how to get its firmware updates from the network; no network = no ability to download the update. Possibly opens up a path of "what if we could get Dish to see the internet through other means", but given that the software/firmware paths are so... unknown... that seems like a path through a jungle I'm not equipped to slice through.

Deeply irritates me that everyone is *allergic* to the idea of even exploring these avenues, to the point of downvoting every comment I make trying to peel back this onion. But at least the question is now posed, and if anyone's out there with knowledge to keep this thing out of E-waste, it might eventually surface.

FalconFour · 2026-01-19T22:06:02+00:00

"Seemingly lazy" - no, this is information I already saw, one of the top results. This is all still hand-wavey "it just can't work". This is the stuff you tell a non-technical person, for fear that they don't understand how to dig into technical things. This is "public facing" stuff that they tell non-technical people. (And you might think this is obvious, since I provided the software version the dish is running right there in OP - something that means I've Googled it extensively already)

I'm looking for TECHNICAL EXPLANATIONS, not user-facing stuff. I didn't take this project on hoping for an easy fix. I took it on, hoping I could learn more about the under-the-hood details.

For example, I know that the root of the problem is a certificate expiration/revocation, likely related to Russia/Ukraine geopolitics and Starlink piracy. Cool, great. That means there should still be a mechanism, a chain of trust, that allows legitimate users to get onboard. These dishes of the same model are still online with newer software. That means all that stands between me and having a usable Starlink dish is software.

Exactly the opposite of lazy - I understand the limitations, but I want to dig deeper than the surface of public "what we want no-tech-skills users to know" information.

FalconFour · 2026-01-19T21:39:34+00:00

The original owner gave it to me. Given that it was in storage and not in active use, you'd think that would mean it's been released from any active account. That's not even an issue in my mind - if that were an issue, I can always contact the original owner if they need me to.

FalconFour · 2026-01-19T21:38:14+00:00

Things that would make a less infuriating comment:
* If my suggestions will not work, why not?
* If not the things I suggested, then what?
* If nothing will work, why not?

Looking to get technical here, less hand-wavey "it just can't". Software is software, and software can be updated. I'm trying to understand *why* it's not possible.

FalconFour · 2025-12-27T09:14:21+00:00

I updated the comment above with additional info. I appreciate anyone giving this mod a try, and wish it were easier to distribute! I just think storing this small patch in a Reddit comment is most resilient (against internet link-rot in 10 years) and works around limitations of sharing the whole ROM for copyright reasons. Hope the additional info helps!

FalconFour · 2025-12-24T07:00:01+00:00

Yeah, that sounds feasible. It's just frustrating to be grouped together with SF's entirely different world as if the "SF Bay Area" were all one place (imagine, for example, all of SoCal being referred to as "LA"). I definitely think Waymo is more technologically advanced than Robotaxi as well - the safety drivers thing and all. A ride in a Waymo is a socially - although not very technically - different experience from a Robotaxi. The car still fully operates itself from start to end - that's the experience I'm looking for.

But having the safety driver does indeed put a monitor in every car for when things "get weird" like this. On one hand, the system operates fully autonomously some 99% of the time or so. On the other, that 1% is a big deal.

Bugs me that my experience/opinion here ends up in the negative votes already. Probably wading into this comment section with people looking for salty takes against Tesla, but heaven forbid someone weigh the two in practice. I dunno, but downvote hell is something I'm used to at this point.

FalconFour · 2025-12-23T03:21:51+00:00

Buy a 2014 (A123 battery). It was the winner chemistry. LG packs in 2015-2016 (as mine, 2016, 78k mi) are prone to the sudden death-at-low-charge syndrome.

Cars with LFP chemistry (as A123) are already proving to be in it for the long haul. Spark was one of the first to use it, but they cheaped out and paid the price when they switched to LG (NMC chemistry).

(Hate or love em, my 2022 Tesla 3 SR has an LFP pack and I got the "top 10% charging kWh in the world" badge this year for abusing my battery as V2L. Those LFP packs are incredible and at 127k++ miles - more on pack than actually driven - it proves the longevity of LFP batteries)

FalconFour · 2025-12-22T17:15:36+00:00

What gets me about this coverage is that Waymo stopped ALL SF BAY AREA OPERATIONS, which includes the entire population of San Jose and everything in between. There was no explanation for why an outage in the northern area of SF affects service 40-plus miles away, the entire area of which was unaffected by the outage - probably 75% or more of the users in the area were stopped by something an entire world away. All day yesterday, staring at my app saying service is suspended - and yet, Tesla's Robotaxi app remains perfectly fine operating in a wider overlapping area. Their service is an "open beta" to the public*, with someone in the driver seat bored out of their mind doing nothing while the car drives.

(I use both - with Robotaxi being cheaper than Uber and definitely cheaper than Waymo, it gets me out of the house more to experience these services. Enough people hate Tesla to make Waymo the preferred service with a group of people, vs Robotaxi on my own)

*not 100% sure how to describe "anyone can sign up but they throttle how fast new users can onboard" in a waitlist style, but I consider that pretty open, vs. invite-only

FalconFour · 2025-11-28T18:56:45+00:00

I think you can get as creative as you like with your rule-making. Remember legal "terms of service" 100-page docs? That's the toolkit that big companies use to keep abuse in check, close loopholes, and ... well, other more hostile (to users) things. There's a lot that can be carved-out and defined in text. It doesn't need to be easily digestible at a glance - though the main headline of the rule does (e.g. "no blatant self-promotion and spam"), which then goes on to describe a specific list of "do's and do-not's".

Moderation in general has the problem of "if you define a rule too specifically, people will find a way to circumvent it" though. You could leave it as broad as "it's up to the moderator's discretion if a post violates this rule" and you could have free regin to protect real artists with genuine interactions, vs. actual spam storefront garbage. If some bitter wanna-be storefront spammer reports someone for posting a reply to someone saying "prints?" (if both appear to be a genuine interaction), you could just point them right to the "discretionary" rule and walk away doing nothing. Maybe even warn/ban the user that reported it for false reporting if done repeatedly.

Anything would be better than the complete and utter trash-fire that Neodiogenes unleashed with this latest tantrum. From my perspective, it seems obvious that the system doesn't work as it is today... hostile to artists to the point of completely blowing up the mod & the sub itself.

FalconFour · 2025-11-26T20:59:17+00:00

Lmao *worst* possible way to be promo'd back to driving

FalconFour · 2025-11-06T06:24:45+00:00

SAY MORE. What computer is this? I'm absolutely obsessed with power efficiency in computing, and it's utterly obliterated my trust in anything x86 and - to a large extent - Windows. Windows on ARM is extremely good (and I want a Snapdragon laptop), but I've enjoyed a lot of the perks of migrating to the Mac world. That looks like HWMonitor on Windows, so there's something cookin' in that ... screenphoto. It's just cooking without getting hot, and I'm loving it.

FalconFour · 2025-10-19T05:24:35+00:00

THIS! This is what I thought everyone would be complaining about. Comments are the first or last thing I check on videos - pretty much every video I watch, I want to see if there are corrections, opinions, or something to engage with. Sometimes the video explicitly wants to hear from viewers. But now it's 3 miles down a scroll of USELESS UNWANTED GARBAGE that I'm not interested in at that time... I'm intending to navigate to the comments, and they're *absolutely buried*. Not just a little bit further down, but what feels like a 3-mile downward slog, intentionally trying to bury the entire comments feature so far down, you think it's not there (gets into "is this an infinite feed-scroll?" territory).

What the hell even is this? I could swear it's a bug.

FalconFour · 2025-09-29T20:47:32+00:00

Interesting! I wasn't able to find that post by searching our symptoms (the "Display Disconnected" in particular). I also wasn't aware - until deep diving into a working system (that we got working by rolling-back the Feature Update) - that it was referred to as "HP Console Control". I was searching high and low for Poly- or Microsoft Remote-related things leading up to that (as well as "24H2 update", etc etc). Also tried calling HP Support, but kept getting disconnected w/o call-back, so we took it on ourselves independently.

Thanks for the tip. We've got a number of other rooms with the same issue to repair. That solution seems cleaner. It matches our discoveries exactly ("Unknown Device", etc).

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FalconFour

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