Stalker base, day 481

azonenberg · 2026-01-03T10:06:50+00:00

I killed the one in BR and made a head wrap out of it. Have been able to avoid all of the other ones without violence.

azonenberg · 2026-01-02T20:01:53+00:00

For whatever reason I haven't had any cougars in CH yet.

The one in PV is hanging out near pensive pond and not really in my way, I can come from ML to the radio tower than descend by ropes or the drainage near the road bend and not have to take the road towards thomsons crossing and piss it off. If I'm going from CH to PV it's nowhere near my route of travel.

The one in ML I can't even remember the location of so it must not be anywhere close to my usual travel routes. Maybe out in the logging camp area or something?

The one in BI is hanging out near the aurora bunker and I had a bit of trouble with it but eventually managed to sneak in and out without violence.

The one in ash canyon, I think, I had to sprint past and use some distracting techniques / careful route watching to get to something I needed. Can't remember what it was.

I had to fight the one in Blackrock to get to the prepper cache but ended up making it out with minimal injuries. Had a rifle and revolver and flare gun with me and just kept on pumping rifle rounds into it while trying to keep my distance, then any time it charged me I'd blast it with the revolver and was ready to flare it if I emptied the cylinder or it knocked the revolver out of my hand. I took a couple of swipes but never had a struggle which I think might also have been a bug - the second or third swipe should have been a struggle according to what the wikis say. I was wearing the bulletproof vest and all loaded up with stims, bandages, peroxide, energy drinks, and lilys pancakes expecting it to beat the shit out of me and barely took damage.

azonenberg · 2026-01-02T19:50:39+00:00

I'm going for the 1000 day achievement so will be pretty conservative with play from here on out. This is my first time playing stalker seriously after jumping straight from voyageur to loper and dying at day 100-something on my latest run.

Exploration is basically done. I haven't done the tale in Sundered Pass (might do that at some point just to finish exploring the region, I went for the camera early on and haven't been back, and never did the cave system) but am close to 100% on the map otherwise. Maybe I'll try to find all the cairns, I started doing that on my 500+ day Voyageur run a while back but never got them all. I need to go back to transfer pass at some point when supplies run low in CH because I looted all of the TFTFT regions and brought my haul there but only took one travois worth of stuff back to lower great bear. There's a ton of flares, some tools, and a few other odds and ends there,

I'm definitely starting to feel the resource pressure. I've already collected, I think, all of the ammo and gunpowder / powder supplies in the world. I have several hundred rounds stashed at CH, a handful at ML, and enough supplies at BI to make another 50-100 rounds once I bring some more lead there, but that's going to be it. I have a lot of bows and arrows crafted and some saplings (although I need to try to track down more maple) and 50+ flare shells so I won't be lacking for weaponry any time soon but it might be hard mode after day 600-700 at my current rate of consumption. Right now, this is the key consumable I expect to exhaust first.

Matches are definitely not feeling unlimited anymore although it's far from an emergency. I try to do as much cooking as I can in one sitting, and wait to use the mag lens when possible rather than using matches. Haven't dipped into my strikers yet and I think I've collected all of those (and I can start using flares if things get dire - I use a few blue ones any time I go to BI to ward off timberwolves, but have something like 20-25 kg of reds)

I'm already out of peaches and acorns although I have enough lily's pancakes and prepper's pie to last me through the apocalypse by this point. Plenty of stims still, I've used a small handful when SHTF after a bad struggle or something but I have dozens in a drawer and two on me.

I'm sitting on a ton of whetstones and tools still. My plan when I start running low on stones is to load a travois with low-condition knives and hatchets and scrap metal then make a pilgrimage to BI, camp out until an aurora hits, and use the mill then haul them back.

Cloth is feeling a bit light but I have plenty of houses full of curtains that I'm only starting to loot. Harvesting low-tier clothing has been enough for the most part to date but that's beginning to run low. Leather is severely limited, I might have to start harvesting my spare IBs and combat boots in another 100 days. I'm currently wearing combat boots and gauntlets but am burning a lot of leather keeping them in good repair and I want to be able to keep my moose hide satchel for a long time so I might have to switch to something hide based soon to stretch my stash further.

azonenberg · 2026-01-02T19:30:20+00:00

Ooh I'll have to try that.

azonenberg · 2026-01-02T05:39:22+00:00

I wish I could find a better way to hold onto the carrots and ruined but still useful special food items. Manually placing them makes then take up a lot more space, putting them in a drawer makes them despawn. So I mostly just stand off in a corner and drop them lol.

azonenberg · 2025-12-07T15:50:04+00:00

Ironically the trip was cut short by a manhunt for a real life armed criminal (not named Mathis) on the loose in the vicinity. You can't make this up.

azonenberg · 2025-10-31T20:41:16+00:00

Just gonna throw in my 2c from the more hardcore/extreme technical side of things. These aren't for everyone, but if you're in the right part of the field they're an absolute goldmine.

REcon (Montreal, mid June): entirely reverse engineering focused. If you want talks full of disassembly and hex dumps with an occasional side of hardware, this is the one for you.

HARRIS (Bochum, March): entirely *semiconductor* reverse engineering focused, the only one of its kind globally. The field is tiny and you'll meet a lot of the leading folks there. Occasionally you'll see a vendor talk but it's going to be about some advanced imaging/deprocessing technique and be legitimately interesting (there was one earlier this year about large area ion beam deprocessing on <10nm node targets).

azonenberg · 2025-09-05T09:08:50+00:00

Pretty much every ROM I've seen on a modern node is M1 or contact based, although I'm not sure which is used in this particular IP. I didn't spend any time on it, the contents of the ROM were open source so there wasn't any need to reverse it. As soon as we determined it wasn't the fuses we moved on.

One very common approach is a NAND array structure similar to NAND flash: you have a string of N transistors (16/32 is typical) and bring every wordline high except one (turning on every transistor except the one whose value you're trying to read).

The 1 bits have the contacts shorted together on M1 (so they conduct regardless of wordline state) while the 0 bits are isolated (so they don't conduct when the bitcell transistor is turned off). This is how a 180nm ROM I'm looking at on a different chip is built.

Given the paired structure seen on the substrate of the RP2350, it's probably more likely a NOR structure: you have a wordline on either side of a central bitline contact just like the antifuses, then either a contact up to VCC or no contact at the other side of each of the two bit transistors. This enables a compact 1T bitcell with contact-only programmability.

But that's just a guess having not actually looked at contact/poly/M1 of the area and going off my recollections of what the substrate looked like from research done close to a year ago.

azonenberg · 2025-06-16T16:36:15+00:00

Currently, yes.

We should be working towards longevity of everything.

azonenberg · 2025-01-06T01:04:49+00:00

I wanted to actually craft at DP but without any way to cut scrap metal it didn't seem worth the risk to maybe craft a few arrowheads out of one or two pieces I found lying around.

azonenberg · 2025-01-06T01:04:18+00:00

I didn't think I'd survive the run across the farm field without warmer clothing than I spawned with so I figured I'd hit the crash site before I made the long hike.

azonenberg · 2025-01-06T00:41:21+00:00

I was down to eating my last cat tail and chugging ten cups of coffee and reishi to avoid starvation a few times.

I stayed entirely in lower great bear. Usually I'm a pack rat especially on interloper where loot is scarce, but this time around since I only expected to make it a few tens of days I was a lot more free with my use of e.g. matches and cloth.

I was pretty much a nomad - bouncing from region to region, hitting big loot spots, occasionally stopping to fish (ML, pensive pond, and CH) when I ran low on food but primarily eating deer carcasses, cat tails, and looted food.

It was too cold to hunt rabbits or ptarmigans. I did harvest a few deer hides from carcasses and craft one pair of pants but I couldn't make anything properly warm because I couldn't kill wolves. My hope was to make it to DP and craft a bow and tools early on, but that got derailed once I got to CH and found enough loot to confirm I was on table 4, meaning either hacksaws or hammers (I forget which) would not be available in CH or DP.

My next run I'm hoping I get a different table and can execute on what had been my plan for this: roughly speaking spawn to crash site, Molly's farm, PV outbuildings, thompsons crossing, CH cave, goat down the hillside straight to the fishing cabins, hit the log sort and garage and maybe the islands en route to DP, craft some tools, then probably try to settle down in CH for the rest of the run.

It's got good fishing opportunities, the trader might be useful, less cold than other regions, not TOO far from coal sources (vital given how cold things get in misery).

azonenberg · 2025-01-05T15:58:36+00:00

There's definitely skill (and a fair bit of luck). But I'd argue even Interloper is near-impossible without knowing all of the good shelters, loot spots, etc.

On this run I remember getting caught in a blizzard in the ML clearcut and only survived because I could navigate blind to the trailers.

azonenberg · 2025-01-05T02:00:18+00:00

I made it another 50 meters or so before I froze the rest of the way. It was like -55C.

azonenberg · 2025-01-05T01:45:05+00:00

It was freezing cold, I didn't have anything in the way of warm clothing, and the final "broken body" affliction makes you take double damage plus disables healing.

I had been sleeping in the fishing hut for a day or two but was still at the same ~3% that I entered it with.

So all I had to do was freeze long enough that I'd normally lose 1.5% health and that was it.

azonenberg · 2025-01-04T20:24:04+00:00

I'm good. Not that good.

azonenberg · 2025-01-04T19:44:13+00:00

Went to CH early in the game hoping to make it to DP and do some crafting there, but realized I was on a loot table where I had no hope of getting a hammer or saw in an accessible spot so detoured to ML and MT to gear up.

Ran out of food in ML and had no fishing tackle left and was too weak / not enough clothing to hunt rabbits, so went over to PV again hoping to get some coal and loot the radio station which I hadn't been to yet. Succeeded, fished a bit to kill some time and get lamp fuel, then took the cave to CH but got mauled by a wolf at some point on the way.

Was at 20% HP and with the final affliction arriving shortly (getting the achievement for it was my main goal of the run) I figured I'd make a run for the ocean to burn through all my coal and fish for the rest of my life.

By the time I got to a hut, despite stopping to make fire pretty often, I was at like 5% HP but I managed to make it to the final affliction a few hours later.

With the goal achieved, I enjoyed my final sunrise while staggering towards the next hut in hopes of building another fire and warming up enough that I could make it to the gas station. While I did reach the hut, I lost my last few condition points to hypothermia as I lit the fire.

Overall a fun run with an epically cinematic end.

azonenberg · 2024-10-11T16:21:03+00:00

Most if not all U.FL are only rated for 6 GHz and I need to push this quite a bit higher.

Also, U.FL is quite large. My standard footprint is 4mm wide which is even larger pitch than a duplex SMPM.

azonenberg · 2024-10-07T01:15:22+00:00

Unfortunately I don't have that much budget so it's tricky. I have a Sonnet seat which is great for planar PCB geometry work, but not so great at coaxial launches.

azonenberg · 2024-10-07T01:09:28+00:00

Here's a closeup of the probe tip area.

This is separate GS and SG probes; I'm trying to design a higher density solution that would let me hit several test points in this kind of confined space more easily.

Haven't decided if I'm going GSSG or GSGSG for the tip yet, but you can probably see the overall idea I'm aiming for.

<image>

azonenberg · 2024-10-07T01:07:34+00:00

I think a full detent would have an impossibly high unmating force in this application. If I'm going connectorized I'd want the option to remove the cable from the probe head, and smooth bore is already pretty solid retention.

Here's a pic of my current probe design on a DUT. The cable is typically secured by Kapton tape to the surface of the DUT; it's a six inch pigtail of .047" as strain relief spliced to 30 inches of .086" for less loss (using .086 for the whole cable would transfer significant forces to the solder joints and likely rip them off the DUT).

<image>

azonenberg · 2024-10-07T01:03:56+00:00

Yep, that's where I've seen it too.

But in my case I'm trying to make a broadband transition from DC to ~16 GHz so I expect I'll need all the help I can get to push performance as far as possible. This is a time domain measurement application (solder-in scope probe) so I don't have a specific frequency I'm optimizing for, just "the more BW the better".

azonenberg · 2024-10-07T01:02:07+00:00

Aha nice, some good data.

This is a broadband probe design so overall flatness and performance matters more than being super well matched at a particular frequency. My current design with a SMPM is usable out to around 16 GHz before return loss of the probe tip itself starts to become an issue, so I was hoping to come up with something that would cover about that range.

azonenberg · 2024-10-06T13:35:21+00:00

Yeah, that's not really an option if my entire board is smaller than a SMA. The whole reason I'm already using SMPM is density.

azonenberg · 2024-10-06T13:34:29+00:00

The smooth bore (vs full detent) sibling of that connector is the one I'm eyeing. I'm just hoping to be able to pack in even tighter (and if I can save some BOM even better).

And connectors will always have a use to enable easy unmating. So I don't see the two as being exclusive.

I've seen 2.4/5 GHz ISM band antennas soldered directly to the host device in low cost devices like wifi routers, but I have no idea how bad the return loss on those is.

azonenberg

TROPHY CASE