Notices by Elia :verifiedtrans: (elia@fedi.quiescent.nexus), page 2

re1 to magdeburg status: just did not arrive. not delayed, not cancelled, announcements said it would be there two minutes before arrival - then nothing. just did not appear at the station.

@oldladyplays the irony is that half of your polish trans friends probably have non-polish chosen names.

OH: “if france is spinning, is it doing a revolution?”

for a place literally full of mirrors, the mirror section of local ikea was surprisingly comfortable.

for a place full of people on a saturday afternoon, the entire ikea was surprisingly comfortable, too.

today was quite literally the first time I completely dropped any pretense of boymoding in public, immediately went for a busy, crowded and inherently overwhelming place with a rather long public transport commute–

and it was fine.

I don’t think it would be possible for me alone to do that so easily, but eileen co-fronted for most of the day and pretty much took over, first deciding to go to the flea market, then doing a completely unplanned “let’s go to ikea and buy some plants” on the way back.

Plants!

so I went back to fixing an old shelving unit that needs some shelves moved up or down to fit different items, and some mangled/bent sheet metal parts replaced.

halfway through, the thing still:

• feels unstable,
• refuses to be straight,
• leans to the left,
• has a few kinks in it.

damn. I feel called out.

self-OH: “now consider: a snake with a comically long neck.”

netherlands:

• everyone speaks english.
• “card only” signs everywhere.
• “sorry, we’re forbidden from accepting cash”.
• employees even at big grocery chains visibly confused by cash and struggling to count coins.

germany:

• “was?”
• “cash only” signs everywhere.
• “sorry, card payments from 10eur only”.
• “easy online payments, just provide your online banking login and password to sofort, it’s completely safe and totally does not blatantly violate the terms of agreement you signed with your bank”.

@thomasfuchs @molly0xfff yeah, well, about that: https://eightpoint.app/@daisy/111927187025676223 (that’s just popped up on my timeline right now, more shows up constantly).

not saying there’s no bigots on fedi, but they’re relatively easy to defederate, whole instances at a time, and they’re not even trying to go for a narrative that frames them as “the” network. or maybe they do, I wouldn’t know, it doesn’t federate over here.

not saying that bsky is all bigots either, but they’re effectively centralized and with that comes some, y’know, responsibility for proper moderation. as long as it’s not an actual network with effective large-scale moderation tools available for the users themselves, it’s on them. and they’re fucking it up.

no, this is not “them just wanting to enjoy their platform the way they like”, for whatever definition of “them”, as long as it includes bigots.

no, “just spend your time and energy blocking bigots one by one” is not the answer, it’s the same sort of shit as twitter after musk.

there’s a few more proposed “solutions” like this, or very perplexed “why don’t you just” questions in this thread already that are likewise not well thought-out to say it lightly, but this will have to suffice as an answer to them:

sometimes there’s a little bit more nuance and reason behind things like this “hate”. such as fundamental differences between the motives of “hate” either side has. try looking for it instead of trivializing and equating them.

I’m truly puzzled to see that coming from someone who just had the entire substack experience.

OH: “no more bongs or dongs at the hackerspace.”

so what’s up with that vxworks?

this is what happens:

• windows loads the vxworks “driver” which is actually a vxworks bootloader.
• vxworks kernel starts booting, preempts win95 kernel and takes over.
• vxworks kernel installs its own interrupt service routines.
• vxworks finishes booting, then turns windows into its subprocess.
• win95 is allowed to finish booting, unaware that it’s no longer really controlling the machine.

from that point on, win95 is handling gui and some pheripherals (disk, network, etc.) and runs the non-realtime parts of control software.

vxworks, meanwhile, runs some of the realtime part of the entire thing, on the same 400mhz celeron. those include motion planning and axis position feedback loops.

the final part of the puzzle is the texas instruments tms320c32 digital signal processor that runs the hard realtime tasks including servo phase waveform generation.

this is not entirely unlike other industrial realtime control systems, but it is admittedly a bit wacky and unique. to the best of my knowledge, this vxworks port was not used by anyone beyond kuka.

ok, let’s give this robot one more try at getting it to work well and be useful.

tl;dr it was originally deployed at a volkswagen factory and came with a customized, volkswagen-specific control cabinet (on the right, the one with “broken robot” poster) which is absolute hell to get to work right standalone, without an external plc controlling it over interbus. hardware is different enough that it can’t be easily converted, software that works with this hardware is heavily stripped down and lacks critical features.

so I finally managed to track down a stock version of the control cabinet. it’s incomplete, but I can do some part swaps to get it to work and it was cheap.

there is, in fact, a relatively regular pc inside of those.

soyo sy-5vd motherboard in one of them, sy-7izb+ in the other.

what’s irregular about it is the expansion cards in it.

on the photo:

• a kuka mfc (“multi-function card”) v1.08, essentially a dsp card with some extras.
• a kuka kvga graphics card, that includes a digital rgb serial video output handled by amd taxichip and wired to the 8p8c socket.
• a phoenix contact interbus host with some funny warning labels.

second photo - mfc card with daughterboard taken off.

this is the fanciest energystar sticker I’ve ever seen.

photo: a soyo sy-5vd motherboard.

ok, which energy star logo is better?

photo: a soyo sy-7izb+ motherboard.

soyo sy-7izb+ swapped over into the new control cabinet.

it’s a newer board, socket 370 instead of socket 7, supports more memory, no reason to stick with the sy-5vd that came with this thing.

time to plug everything back in.

everything wired back in:

• mfc 1.08.
• cabling connecting mfc to the servo drives, safety circuits, field i/o and pendant.
• kvga.
• connection between kvga and pendant display.
• serial port breakout.
• serial and paraller ports on the front.
• ps/2 breakout.
• floppy drive.
• optical drive.
• ide-to-sd adapter that pretends to be the original hard drive.