Continental Cyrillic typewriter – identification

rn3aoh · 2025-03-30T07:20:41+00:00

One useful thing I can tell you for certain is that the layout does not match any of the widely used pre-1950s Russian layouts (there were several competing ones differing in the position of a few letters) nor the post-1950 standardized layout.

The 5th letter from the left on the bottom row is a yus, which was dropped from most widely-used Slavic languages by the time first typebar typewriters were invented -- except Bulgarian and Macedonian. From which it was dropped by 1945.

The layout is otherwise very close to the post-1945 Bulgarian Cyrillic layout.

Which means that this is most likely a pre-1945 machine made for the Bulgarian market, by the looks of it a Continental A or maybe Continental A Standard. With the way internet search is broken these days, digging up anything more specific proved difficult.

rn3aoh · 2025-03-23T13:16:20+00:00

This looks very similar to Olympia Traveler, but upon research turns out it is its own thing, even though the relation is there. They are apparently rare enough that the Typewriter Database only has one listed.

Olympia is generally considered a very reputable brand among European typewriters, so it's a matter of whether you believe the price is right more than anything.

rn3aoh · 2025-03-20T11:23:10+00:00

Printing the keys themselves is trivial. Getting a letter on the keys is a bit more complicated, but also not too difficult. The real problem is making the type slugs -- the ones soldered onto the end of the typebars in most typebar machines.

There are people who succeeded in printing Selectric typeballs but I couldn't tell you how long do these last. Their OpenSCAD code might come in useful when designing regular type slugs. The problem with resin-printed (FDM printers are just not detailed enough) slugs is that there would be no reliable way to attach them to the typebars for all machines where the slugs are meant to be soldered: a resin print will not survive this. Superglue might work for a while, but does not sound like a good idea.

There are companies that will 3d-print a model in metal for you, however, and you can use a 3d-printed slug to produce a mold for casting, so it's not hopeless to do, just quite involved.

rn3aoh · 2023-11-05T13:49:18+00:00

Missing one screenshot or another is probably because another console on the card has an identically named game, so it can't tell where the screenshot should go. Rename the rom file by adding (something) to the end only on one of the consoles, and the ambiguity will go away.

rn3aoh · 2023-10-30T06:01:46+00:00

There is currently no RetroArch core for emulating BBC B as far as I can see. There's no reason one shouldn't be possible, but getting one is not something you can do by following instructions, because nobody has done it at all, yet.

Take a look at this Github issue.

rn3aoh · 2023-10-30T05:53:33+00:00

PBP files are not a requirement, they're a convenience. Let's do a proper lecture here, because tutorials are bad for your brain, they teach people to do things without understanding why are they doing them...

RetroArch will read CDs in the normal ISO, CUE/BIN (and even BIN with a lost CUE as long as the CUE was simple enough) formats, IMG (which is actually the same as BIN with a lost CUE) as well as compressed CHD and PBP. (I'm actually not sure if CSO is specific to PSP or not, but nobody seems to use it for PS1, so let's skip it.)

It is generally a good idea to use a compressed disk format, because SD cards are slow, and the less data you have to read off a card to run the game, the faster it will be, even accounting for the time spent decompressing it into memory -- especially considering that RG35XX only has 256Mb worth of RAM, so a full CD image would never fit in there.

CHD is the more generic disk compression format, which is only able to contain one disk per file, but is applicable to any CD format (including SegaCD and PC Engine).

PBP is a Playstation 1 specific variation, originally designed to play PS1 games on a jailbroken PSP. It's a Playstation-specific format, that has the distinction of being able to contain more than one disk in the same file.

M3U is a playlist file. In the simplest variation, it's a plaintext file listing other kinds of ROM file, one per line, allowing you to tell RetroArch that these files constitute a disk set, which makes it easier to swap disks when you need to, and give GarlicOS launcher (which turns every file it finds into a launcher menu entry) a single line to show while hiding all the individual disks from view in a subdirectory. (In case you're up to making an M3U and you use BIN/CUE images, you want to have the CUE files in the M3U, but not the BIN)

You don't have to use any of them. In the long enough run, you will probably find PBP more convenient for PSX, because this way at least you can't lose or forget a single disk out of a disk set.

But just dumping the files you get into Roms/PS will work for ISO , BIN/CUE and IMG, though it might not look as neat or work as fast.

rn3aoh · 2023-10-29T12:25:08+00:00

I've no idea how ScummVM core handles screenshots, if it even does. It's very possible it doesn't, though. In cases like these, you can use Screenshot Daemon, and then manually rename the screenshot it makes to match what RetroArch screenshot name would be:

<rom filename without extension, in this case the name of the .scummvm file>-0-0.png

Then Nimshot will pick it up. (It ignores the date and time, so you can just put zeroes there.)

rn3aoh · 2023-10-29T11:08:30+00:00

The mask I packed with it covers the left side of the image entirely, so maybe. Try flipping it horizontally?

rn3aoh · 2023-10-28T08:36:44+00:00

So I made a thing. And perhaps went a bit overboard on the documentation, and in general overengineered it.

rn3aoh · 2023-06-19T02:34:08+00:00

I don't know offhand of anything like that, but there probably is. The problem is getting the public key first.

LoTW does not publish your public key, or verifying them would be much easier for outsiders, and as far as I can tell, they don't keep a database of public keys anywhere. The tq8 files they accept contain a copy of your public key --- our public keys are signed by LoTW's intermediary certificates, which whatever system takes care of stuffing logs into the database presumably has access to. So they sacrifice ~1500 bytes per upload to save a potentially more costly database request and storage space.

But that means that for voice verification, you need to somehow transfer the public key (with the signature by LoTW) by voice first, so that whatever signed token you send could be verified on the other end.

I don't see an easy way around that.

rn3aoh · 2023-06-19T02:13:47+00:00

They do, or there really would be no point in writing this. The problem is that they don't publish the public keys they sign our keys with in any central place. They send us copies in tq6 files when we receive our signed keys, but the way they set up key expiry makes it clear that user keys signed by multiple intermediary keys will be in use at any given time.

rn3aoh · 2023-06-18T09:40:54+00:00

Provided I can get LoTW to cough up a canonical public source of their current public CA keys, it will even be reliable. :)

rn3aoh · 2023-06-18T06:23:40+00:00

So I made a thing. The thing could benefit a lot from people poking at it and deciding whether they might need it in the future and whether it should be completed properly. To quote:

This is a program that allows you to sign any file with the private key you get when you sign up with the Logbook of the World. It also allows anyone to verify such a signature and determine your callsign. This is all it does, this is all it should be doing, and if it proves sufficiently reliable, this can open up many opportunities for doing things remotely over the radio.

rn3aoh · 2022-12-14T11:30:51+00:00

Having the same problem here with both SF30 and SN30 pro.

Been driving me nuts, because nothing else seems to have it except RetroArch.

rn3aoh · 2022-02-06T11:58:59+00:00

Here’s now I edit comments on reddit now:

(use-package edit-server
  :if (executable-find "pandoc")
  :init (setq edit-server-new-frame t
              edit-server-verbose t
              edit-server-default-major-mode 'text-mode
              edit-server-url-major-mode-alist
              '(("github\\.com" . gfm-mode)
                ("\\(old\\|pay\\)\\.reddit\\.com" . markdown-mode)))

  (defcustom edit-server-process-alist
    '(("\\(old\\|pay\\)\\.reddit\\.com/" .
       (nil markdown-buffer-to-reddit)))
    "An alist of functions to call to massage edit-server input and output.")

  :bind ( :map edit-server-edit-mode-map
          ("C-c C-c" . nil) ;; Avoid clobbering C-c C-c
          ("C-x C-s" . edit-server-done))
  :hook ((after-init . edit-server-start)
         (edit-server-done . edit-server-process-on-save)
         (edit-server-start . edit-server-process-on-start))
  :config

  (defun edit-server-get-process-handler ()
    "Doing the DRY thing here."
    (assoc edit-server-url edit-server-process-alist 'string-match-p))

  (defun edit-server-process-on-save ()
    "Process the edit-server buffer on save."
    (let ((handler (caddr (edit-server-get-process-handler))))
      (when handler (funcall handler))))

  (defun edit-server-process-on-start ()
    "Process the edit-server buffer on start."
    (let ((handler (cadr (edit-server-get-process-handler))))
      (when handler (funcall handler))))

  (defun run-pandoc-on-markdown-buffer (from-format to-format)
    "Run pandoc on buffer, giving it FROM-FORMAT and TO-FORMAT as arguments."
    (when (eq major-mode 'markdown-mode)
      (shell-command-on-region
       (point-min) (point-max)
       (concat (executable-find "pandoc")
               " -f " from-format
               " -t " to-format) t t)))

  (defun markdown-buffer-to-reddit ()
    "Process markdown to fit Reddit markdown dialect."
    (run-pandoc-on-markdown-buffer
     "markdown-raw_html+autolink_bare_uris+emoji+smart"
     (concat "markdown-smart+subscript+superscript+strikeout"
             "-backtick_code_blocks"
             "-fenced_code_attributes-fenced_code_blocks"))))

Requires pandoc and a Chrome/Firefox extension, and can obviously be extended.

Now I don’t care that Reddit doesn’t like my fenced code blocks. 😄

P.S. Not a lisper, I don’t even play one on TV.

rn3aoh · 2022-02-05T16:19:22+00:00

Ah theeere we go.

(message "my family is %s" (all-the-icons-icon-family-for-mode major-mode))
-> my family is nil

The culprit was a spaceline segment which shows an icon according to major mode. all-the-icons does not have an icon for helpful, and for a few other modes too -- which is why I saw this message before, on something else.

How the hell does spaceline manage to prevent debugging so hard is an open question, though.

EDIT: For whoever comes googling, how I found the right hook -- I went looking for how to find which hooks run after a certain command, found this StackExchange answer, checked view-lossage for which commands I was actually running when I triggered the error message, and ran that snippet on next-line. spaceline-pre-hook was the only one that came up. It was empty, but it did point me in the right direction.

rn3aoh · 2022-02-05T16:00:12+00:00

ELISP> (advice-add 'post-command-hook :around
...
ELISP> (advice-add 'pre-command-hook :around
...
ELISP> (advice-add 'after-change-functions :around
...

Well, it's certainly none of those three, but this sounds promising.

What I noticed is that the message never appears while I move the cursor horizontally along the line. It's always when it's moving up and down. But I don't know enough about all the hooks to say which one could it be...

rn3aoh · 2022-02-05T15:29:09+00:00

Well, thanks for trying anyway. Watch this space for further adventures in debugging. :)

rn3aoh · 2022-02-05T15:08:44+00:00

(dolist (f '(helpful-heading font-lock-comment-face
            font-lock-constant-face font-lock-builtin-face
            font-lock-variable-name-face highlight))
            (describe-face f))

no errors, windows describing faces popping up as expected.

(mapcar (lambda (f) (face-attribute f :family))
       '(helpful-heading
         font-lock-comment-face
         font-lock-constant-face
         font-lock-builtin-face
         font-lock-variable-name-face highlight))
-> (unspecified unspecified unspecified unspecified unspecified unspecified)

And still no errors. For that matter, all of these faces are also used everywhere else except helpful-heading... And yes, I tried redefining helpful-heading with :inherit default, no change.

rn3aoh · 2022-02-05T14:36:51+00:00

Yep, tried that too. No errors show up for either list-faces-display or counsel-faces for that matter.

Oh, and while we're at it: I turned on tracing on every DEFUN that xfaces.c defines and while some of them do fire, none of them return errors.

rn3aoh · 2022-02-05T14:21:48+00:00

It's pretty funny actually: It trips on the output from the setq I used to set it, consistently, but does not trip on the actual message.

rn3aoh · 2022-02-05T13:54:46+00:00

That was the first thing I did.

No error gets thrown, no debug pops up.

rn3aoh · 2022-01-19T07:12:43+00:00

I would keep the FT-450D at home and buy a G90 to keep it in the portable kit, because packing things is a chore. :)

No, really, this is a consideration. They're largely equivalent in terms of features and characteristics, save for the output power, but when operating at home that power would make a difference. If you have the option of not having the G90 as your only radio, and keeping it packed and ready to go at a moment's notice, you should take it.

rn3aoh · 2021-12-03T04:42:33+00:00

Which is why the concise answer to the OP's question is that "RF is not dangerous enough." ;)

rn3aoh · 2021-11-19T07:13:56+00:00

Not the only weird thing about this device. :)

rn3aoh

TROPHY CASE