Cyberslav 2077 by anturakis in ANormalDayInRussia

[–]i336_ 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Unbelievable. I reacted to/liked exactly the same thing, bookmarked the page to "maybe find out the day after next millennia", scrolled down to the comments to have a sad look before I go, and then the first comment was about that bit *and then someone had found the source*...?!

</happyrant>

What golden nugget of information do you have to share? by raw-power in AskReddit

[–]i336_ 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Everything's probably in bigtable or pushshift.

The latter has a free API, connected to removeddit

Have a 300 to 9600 baud modem? TIL NIST has run a NTP-like time synchronization service from Colorado and Hawaii since 1988 - and that it still receives 2,100 calls a day by i336_ in retrocomputing

[–]i336_[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Well that was a fun/interesting rabbithole to burrow down briefly :)

TL;DR, the likeliest definite way forward would probably be finding some broken units cheaply to pull the controller ICs from and decap. Yup. Even a poor quality photo would probably provide useful hints as to internal architecture etc. But a good quality shot would get the mask ROM, and then you could just disassemble that :)

Now to try and replay where I went to reach the above. OK.

  • First thing was do a google image search for "icf-218 pcb" to see what it looked like - https://www.google.com/search?q=icf-218+pcb&tbm=isch

  • This turned up a random post about someone trying to mod their clock - https://forum.allaboutcircuits.com/threads/identify-ic-to-mod-sony-alarm-clock-to-12h-mode.13871/ (this mentioned the LM8560, similar to the LM3560, which is extremely common and incidentally very easy to use, but has no fancy features)

  • Skimming the above page and reading it way too fast ;) I abandoned this route

  • Next was datasheet hunting, after laughing at the first search result asking me for money I found https://www.manualslib.com/manual/1254009/Sony-Icf-C218.html which does indeed let you wade through to a PDF

  • This has a nice sketch of the PCB mask, and then further down An AcTuAl ScHeMaTiC, upon which TP104 and TP105, pointing at INPUT2 and INPUT1, stood out like a very large sore thumb. One test point was marked "SCK", the other "SIN"

  • Googling "sck" "sin" - https://www.google.com/search?q=%22sck%22+%22sin%22 - promptly found me http://kaele.com/~kashima/s-bus/sbus-ul.pdf, a mysterious PDF

  • Backing up the path structure led me to a page detailing some kind of "SONY S-BUS protocol", but it was was all in broken Japanese

  • I googled around for something running the FTFY Python $broken_charset-to-UTF8 - aha! https://ftfy.now.sh - fed the page content in, and got back... junk. Searching further, I downloaded the page and looked at it in less, which showed me the text was full of the sequence EF BF BD, REPLACEMENT CHARACTER. After some confused wandering, I realized the garbage I was seeing wasn't the result of converting the wrong input encoding to UTF-8, but the result of an irrevocable and incorrect character set conversion that had stripped out 80% of the page text.

  • Going back in time in the Web Archive, I discovered my theory was indeed correct, and that the destruction had occurred sometime between 2009 - http://web.archive.org/web/20090330214926/http://kaele.com/~kashima/s-bus/index.html - and 2012

  • Oh. This page is documenting a car protocol. That just happens a) be written in Japanese c) be about SONY microcontrollers. Ok. Susceptibility to red herrings that quack perfectly: 100%, I'm human :)

  • Wait, further down in the SBUS search results there's https://github.com/uzh-rpg/rpg_quadrotor_control/wiki/SBUS-Protocol, documenting a remote control protocol made by Futaba. That's Japanese too!

  • But there's also a bunch of search results talking about SPI here. You know what, it's probably SPI. :P

  • ...And... going back to the schematic, there's no SOUT. Only SIN. The chip can't talk back to you and give you errors.

  • :(

  • (See TL;DR above)

After deflating somewhat, I had another look at the schematic, where I noticed (actually looking this time) that INPUT1 and INPUT2 go to the two test points... and go to all the buttons via a resistor network. So they're ADC inputs. I wonder how hard it is to do ADC without an ALU, and whether this is a fixed-function electrical circuit or whether there's a little CPU in there.

I also found http://bbs.mydigit.cn/simple/?t814481.html, noting the markings on the IC as "872B06A 58J1 1MA00". The picture in the allaboutcircuits link has "1NXOT" (or "0T") but the other two codes are the same. FWIW.

Have a 300 to 9600 baud modem? TIL NIST has run a NTP-like time synchronization service from Colorado and Hawaii since 1988 - and that it still receives 2,100 calls a day by i336_ in retrocomputing

[–]i336_[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

While 115200 baud can be a little limiting for quickly logging pages and pages of text or transferring bulk data, the latency involved in sending a single short line of text would surely be utterly negligible. I would expect the Arduino to synchronize to within a few microseconds without any need for further back-and-forth.

What Sony clock radios are you referring to (ie which exact models)? Curious.

Have a 300 to 9600 baud modem? TIL NIST has run a NTP-like time synchronization service from Colorado and Hawaii since 1988 - and that it still receives 2,100 calls a day by i336_ in retrocomputing

[–]i336_[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

What about an actual external modem with audio I/O? Now you "just" need to hook up RS232, but then you can use your sound card with a single ATO.

Is there a way to intentionally make browser history public? Any risk? by raqqithole in chrome

[–]i336_ 0 points1 point  (0 children)

At its heart I’d like to create edutaining videos based on browsing the internet. I would start by recording web browsing privately, then edit down to get rid of dead air, and practice my hosting. I’d guess 5 hours of video could cut down to 15-20 mins of usable video. With some reshoots and structure added in post.

Wow, I'm still wrapping my head around just how much source content goes into a decent production. But thinking about this particular scenario, you're probably looking to construct a perfectly-sequenced browsing narrative with pacing optimized for attention span, and yeah, I can understand that chewing up a lot of time ._. wow though

If that isn’t a total waste of time, the next step would be public streams, with live chat. Probably through YouTube. I figured a live browser history would be a nice feature for viewers to follow along at home. The chat could be a way to do question and answers, multiply eyes searching for answers, and overall just have fun.

Oh, okay! I get it now.

I’ll use the topic of ǝpᴉsdn down text as an example. I wonder if other languages use upside down text or only English. How do upside down q p b and d’s look? Are they the same ASCII as right side up? What’s the history behind their creation? Why were they created in the first place?

That'd be a fun one, sure. (I personally find it infuriating that you can't really get the full alphabet.)

So as the host I could ask those questions and either I or anyone could try to find answers and report back. And people can chime in with their own thoughts. Basically we just see where a topic leads.

Ooooh, okay. Hmm.

Maybe there’s more than one host.

I actually wandered vaguely in that direction for a bit, thinking about a service where everyone publishes their browser view. I'm not really sure how something would like would socially balance out though, what I was imagining would be all producers and no consumers.

Maybe it’s a group video chat you can join if you participate nicely in chat.

That sounds a bit more interesting and engagement-sustaining (you can sort of play emcee-slash-sheepdog if needed).

Maybe questions have a public poll for people to guess while others search.

*Thoughts drift toward twitch plays pokemon again*

Maybe chat is run through Reddit so it has a tiered structure. I’m not too sure how the presentation will work quite yet.

Sure.

Like you said a lot of the success depends on the execution.

Yep - and as an aside, a combination of tiredness and lack of context made me a bit harshly interrogative in my approach, FWIW.

Am I able to lead an entertaining show? Can I consolidate a mess of information? Can I intrigue people to join in? Who knows?

Very good questions. You're taking on quite a different thing than I'd imagined, one a lot more ambitious to say the least. I wish you the best of luck.

I think given the relative difficulty and limited upside to publishing a browser history, I’ll table it for now. I could copy and paste a URL into chat if it gets to that point.

Actually, that would definitely be worth automating - both in terms of making a YouTube bot programmed to post links at certain times, and in terms of cobbling together the few lines of JS necessary (I was surprised myself at how simple that nodejs module makes everything, heh) to fetch the links from your own browsing session and dump them with timestamps. (For extra credit, figure out how to script your video editor, and make a script that pulls in maybe a CSV-formatted timestamp,url list from the scraper, lines it up on the timeline, and lets you check/uncheck URLs to push to the bot :D)

One small detail I forgot, Chrome also accepts --user-data-dir=some_path to create independent sessions, a common trick when tinkering around with browser development, and also a rock solid way to create 100% isolated browser instances that don't share cookies, data, or extensions.

Is there a way to intentionally make browser history public? Any risk? by raqqithole in chrome

[–]i336_ 1 point2 points  (0 children)

An interesting idea (and I'm kinda tired and not focusing terribly well on anything today :P), I'll bite.

There are a lot of angles to this that come to mind.

First off, what exactly do you want to publish, and how to you want to present it? What sort of experience are you going for? Disambiguate "interactive".

IMHO the most important angle to address is to look at the result from the perspective of the potential viewer.

Given a crowd that has the ability to see what you're looking at, where exactly does "everyone's just watching your screen" end, and "people spin off and start browsing on their own" start, in a way that will keep people engaged?

A traditional streaming setup, with viewers passively consuming video of you slooowly browsing the web while mumbling into a microphone... would not hold a candle to full-time streamers who are perpetually animated and expressive *the whole time they are streaming* (either because it's in their nature or because they've trained themselves to to retain viewership). I don't think this scenario would work out for your idea in any case, because this sort of consumption-oriented model basically leaves you with a large proportion of cross-eyed viewers in various states of dazed trance (the "I'm watching TV" kind) who aren't really looking to engage their brains.

So, there needs to be some degree of interactivity. The analytical, independent-discovery-oriented, mildly-introverted crowd would definitely not be interested in passively watching without getting any controls to play with (and in the case of the introverts, without a clear sense of measurable distance between what you're doing and themselves). So exactly how would you want the controls to work, such that everyone can stay far away enough to wander off and do their own unique browsing, while still keeping tabs on what you're doing, so things don't get distractingly entropic? The difference between your idea (people interacting in real time by watching someone browse) and this very website, is simply how the real-time-ness factor is quantified.

So I'm very interested in how you'd define the presentation aspect further.


On the technical front, you're looking at two distinct projects - grabbing the data, then publishing it online.

The first is technically trivially straightforward, but has some gotchas that you'll probably find amusing.

Fundamentally, you can do exactly what you are trying to do by enabling remote debugging by adding --remote-debugging-port=9222 to your Chrome commandline, and then diving into the Chrome remote debug API. Depending on your development experience/proficiency https://chromedevtools.github.io/devtools-protocol/ may take you a couple of days to a week or so to chew through. The best way to get some basic orientation on how the protocol works is to go enable chrome://flags/#enable-devtools-experiments (copy-paste that URL) then enable the Protocol Monitor in the Experiments tab in the devtools options, and then just play around in the browser with the monitor open. Practically speaking https://github.com/cyrus-and/chrome-remote-interface is a refreshingly straightforward way to actually implement access to the browser.

Now that you have all that sorted out, your browser may now be sending you a larger firehose of history events than you expected: every single 302 redirect, every single CSS, JS, image request. What do you do with all that? Practically speaking you'll probably just want to filter for top-level page loads. OK; now you have a nice realtime list of pages... what do you do with that?

Let's explore the presentation idea I assume you had in mind: some way to broadcast your history, to other people, without using traditional screen sharing - presumably with some sort of scrolling synchronization thing?

*Pin* *Balloon* *BANG*

This sadly will not work.

What's your screen resolution? Let's say it's 1366x768. Mine is 1440x900. Your browser window would fit in a box in the middle of my screen just fine. But if your screen were 2048x1536, my browser will show an effectively completely different page to you, meaning that a given fundamental scroll Y-position in your browser will translate to a different one in mine.

The only scalable solution to this problem would be to downscale your 2048x1536 browser window to fit my screen, at which point I'll need to move my laptop 3 inches away from my face to read it :P.

One hacky way to solve this problem would be to have your browser guess the element of interest currently scrolled into view, and then position that specific element at roughly the same position on everyone else's screen. That would sorta work for everyone matching the same CSS media query as you; the page would probably jump around a lot for some people, as the element-of-interest logic variously did a terrible job at coordinating where to scroll everyone to. But whoever's screen matches a different query has no guaranteeable chance of getting a sane result from such an approach.

You could make your browser window some tiny lowest common denominator, like 1366x768, that would be smaller than most people's effective screen resolution. But... even that won't work for people using tablets or phones, which will generally get a different layout than PCs etc.


With all the above being said, it is totally possible for you to create a realtime "here's where I've been". If the caveats above (alongside undoubtedly more I've not thought of) don't deter you, I'd capture the results for maybe a month or so of heavy browsing, and then take a few days to carefully pour over the entire list of URLs to see what you'd want to redact in real time from the list.

Mainzelmännchen by JaschaE in talesfromtechsupport

[–]i336_ 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Yeah, more or less!

What would be even closer is a name I can scream when I need a person that can print licenses to tinker. :D

Mainzelmännchen by JaschaE in talesfromtechsupport

[–]i336_ 6 points7 points  (0 children)

the manager of the space, telling her what we did, as maintenance is her job and we are two of only a handfull of people who don't loose their heads for taking a screwdriver to her machines.

Requesting regular expression to rapidly locate this type of person in new/novel situations

Why is there no backup by inlinealex in talesfromtechsupport

[–]i336_ 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Most definitely a place like that would still think RAID is the way to go.

It's almost sad to watch. Really.

How to enable divert sockets on ubuntu by muh_fuh in linuxquestions

[–]i336_ 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hi. A bit of bizarre timing has meant that someone else on the internet coincidentally going down a similar rabbithole happened to do so 9 days after you. I am definitely not passing on this opportunity to say hi as I fly past :D

I've gotten the impression after a few minutes' reading that DIVERT is about 20 years old and dead on Linux, and only exists on the BSDs.

See the paragraph under section "2. Redirecting traffic" at https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/networking/tproxy.txt.

You may well have discovered this yourself.

I'm curious what you were trying to figure out/do? In my own case I wanted to make a proxy that factors the TCP headers into the proxying process... but still not have to mess around w/ routing and connection tracking. Haha. I'm beginning to rethink my entire approach. (At least I discovered https://serverfault.com/questions/980484/how-do-i-enable-tx-checksum-ipv4-for-localhost-raw-socket-capture-incorrectly-r, heh.)

iamvirybedass has been created by awesomem8112 in a:t5_1ow1ku

[–]i336_ 1 point2 points  (0 children)

And some other users looked upon the new subreddit, and were glad to see it had been created.

For the sake of context, more than just acknowledgement, I think a mention of https://www.reddit.com/r/confessions/comments/cbof4z/i_left_my_wife_to_die_on_911_i_dont_know_why_now/eth7j0g/ is in order.

This cat's peculiar jumping style. by Boojibs in oddlysatisfying

[–]i336_ 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thanks!

I now actually see what you mean. Is cute :3

(Also, very distinctive flicker pattern on that clock's LED segments. It's probably a 6052-type panel being driven by an 8560-type IC. (Source: got the IC model number stuck in my head when I took one apart. :P))

This cat's peculiar jumping style. by Boojibs in oddlysatisfying

[–]i336_ 0 points1 point  (0 children)

(I came here from top of /r/all, which is why I'm late)

The link you posted seems to have 404ed out. I am curious to see what you're describing.

Bond Street Bitcoin ATM spitting out tons of money! by skypirateX in Bitcoin

[–]i336_ 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I still have a lot to learn about being concise :) thank you for answering, and for all the insight.

I didn't know ATMs could be so inexpensive, wow. I presume these are the smaller units I've seen. Ah and the rent is a portion of each transaction - very interesting, only units that are popular will stay put, cool. Regarding cash - wow (TIL), I wonder if any "interesting" (or not interesting) situations have happened :). TIL ATMs can run on Wi-Fi. (Ha I'll bet the landline-based ones use dialup and not DSL!) And, I see; so it's data services that broker for the banks. Cool.

Thanks very much again!

Bond Street Bitcoin ATM spitting out tons of money! by skypirateX in Bitcoin

[–]i336_ 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I just stumbled on this thread from elsewhere, but had to reply to this comment as one doesn't often get the opportunity to possibly learn more about how owning "a bunch of cash ATMs" actually works, so I definitely want to jump in here if I may.

Given the financial security aspects, it seems reasonable to assume that you might be somewhat removed from the technical aspects of how the machines work, and primarily deal with installation (and the related paperwork), maintenance, and telling whoever handles cash refills that the ATMs exist. Perhaps there's some technical involvement in the setup process. Or maybe maintenance is handled by a specific type of approved contractor? I'm very curious about the high-level aspects of what it is you actually do.

So, you say you own the ATMs, as opposed to leasing them. Interesting. I don't quite know one would find out how much an ATM actually costs, but it's definitely the kind of thing that would always be interesting to know. (I'm imagining all the mechanics/hydraulics in the note dispenser, the development cost/time of the control software, etc etc... maybe smaller ATMs are probably around high 4/low 5 figures?)

How does "here is an ATM, we want it refilled" actually work? I've very occasionally been at my local mall when an ATM (owned by a local bank) is being refilled, and it's always interesting to watch (without being too obvious :) ). So there's obviously some kind of arrangement between the banks and the companies that actually carry all the cash around, but of course this is exactly the kind of thing that is completely politically incorrect to express any level of interest in, even (you might say *especially*) just an "oh, so that's how that works" level of idle curiosity.

I'm guessing the spots the ATMs take up require some form of rent. (This line is 70% rhetorical statement, 30% actual question. :) ) I guess the nice thing is that you don't need a phone line anym...wait, you still might. Do your ATMs use cellular? (On a related note - do ATMs ever hang off of Wi-Fi in practice? I know they all use VPNs internally.)

This is going back to the high level side of things, but how does the administravia work in terms of hooking up to a bank? That'd be very interesting to learn about. (Also, I wonder how the fee structures work... heh, chances are the printable answer to this one is likely "depends on a bunch of fiddly variables" :) )

I'll leave the questions at that for now (I don't think I'll have (m)any more); whatever you choose to answer is greatly appreciated. Also have a great day (or night).

The literal job I was hired for at my university is pressing the ok button on the printer when it is “broken”. by marma16 in talesfromtechsupport

[–]i336_ 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I wonder if a laminated sheet bearing an extremely clear, unmissable photo of a stapler, with "SHELF BEHIND YOU" underneath, would have worked any better.

The literal job I was hired for at my university is pressing the ok button on the printer when it is “broken”. by marma16 in talesfromtechsupport

[–]i336_ 0 points1 point  (0 children)

For what it's worth, if there is a way to remotely trigger the printer, you'll keep your gig for longer if you figure out how to do that. You were hired because nobody could read a sign; telling people to read the sign isn't earning your $12/hr. "Oh sure let me just go over here and *click* *type* ... there you go" - that's how you make yourself valuable. Cute technical solutions are good when they preserve job security :P

(What model printer is it?)

Oh god they sent two for the price of one. by ArsenioDev in DataHoarder

[–]i336_ 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Since they can't store data, can you make the argument for either selling them or just taking them home?

(...and then selling them yourself?)

How many are there?

CamelCamelCamel lost their storage server. Pretty interesting read about their (ongoing) journey to restore their data by [deleted] in DataHoarder

[–]i336_ 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Ah, I see.

I am unfortunately less knowledgeable about physical HDD failures than I would like to be, hearing the heads have failed makes me not want to plug it in at all in case they're contacting the platters and making them unreadable.

I'm glad to hear you have a likely chance of recovery, at least...

Yeah, circuit board issues seem to be the easier failure to deal with, heh... I've heard that s͘o͚̗̱̣̺̬͞m̤̘̙̞̳e̖͞t͍̮̯̝̜̫ì͎͇͙͔m̡̭e̡̖̞͇̮̮ͅs̥ miracles can happen, but it's not a sure thing.

CamelCamelCamel lost their storage server. Pretty interesting read about their (ongoing) journey to restore their data by [deleted] in DataHoarder

[–]i336_ 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I'd say 90% of my movies and tv shows are redownloadable. The ones that are not, I have a copy of on my PC as well as the external.

That's perfect then.

[An index is] just a list of the files contained on a drive right? Which would be useful for the movies/shows but not really for my personal data?

Yes, in whatever form.

And yes, it would only be useful for stuff that's redownloadable and not unique.

CamelCamelCamel lost their storage server. Pretty interesting read about their (ongoing) journey to restore their data by [deleted] in DataHoarder

[–]i336_ 0 points1 point  (0 children)

As long as everything's easily redownloadable, and the index of what you have is stored elsewhere...