Notices by abrasive (abrasive@digipres.club)

Requesting tips on hunting old programs - I'm helping a friend with a bit of lock preservation and I'm trying to help them find the Knox "SentraSoft" DOS/win3x software (circa 1995-2004) for communicating with SentraLok I key storage units. I've exhausted all the places I know where to look: Wayback Machine on the makers' website, assorted FTP and torrent search engine tools... am I missing something obvious?
The package contains COLLECT.EXE and REPORTER.EXE, but that's most all I know.

@whitequark on reflection I think this wording is a bit harsh. I'm genuinely grateful that libreoffice exists and the people who work on it have a pretty thankless lot I think

I'm not sure how to square those feelings with the endless papercuts. eg the time I did a lot of work in a new file while the filepicker's last-used cwd was /some/*directory_with_asterisk/name - and then the save dialog wouldn't open because it interpreted the dirname as a filename filter and said hey you can't have a glob in the middle of a filter!

having to attach a debugger and read a bunch of code just to save a bunch of work is a pretty deep papercut

@whitequark this bit me the other week! it saved files with bloody UTF-7 escapes in them and broke everything downstream because of course.
libreoffice is like an exercise in reproducing office 97's functionality but combining it with the user hostility of all of MS' products since

@projectgus holy crap what a shitshow! thanks for boosting this~

This whole "revolution" is highlighting to me a lot of work that our culture labels an "overhead", implying a waste of time, and how much value is actually in that work.

The canonical example in software is developing and using a mental model of how software works, while lines of code are really a side-effect rather than the main show.

@projectgus But it's equally true in other fields! One I'm heavily exposed to is doctors' notes - there's this big push to do auto transcription, whatever, but then LLM summarisation for the doctor's records. Talking to the doctors I know well, they spend enormous amounts of time and energy writing notes after interacting with patients - viewed by many as overhead again, but in their view it's a critical part of, essentially, validating (or invalidating) their understanding of what's going on!

@whitequark @jpm I have never sold anything that useful

@whitequark running it off a battery?

(why would you not dip the fans tho goodness me)

today we are harassing a burglar alarm system: a Bosch Solution 6000. apparently this is a high end residential/commercial system here in ANZ. despite the Bosch branding, it's designed and made by an Australian mob. despite being their current flagship, and a rev date of 2017, the design has some fascinatingly dated points: f. ex. it has an SLA battery charger which depends on a PCB-mounted filament light bulb, perhaps as a negative resistance? (over on the left)

And the reason we're here: this shebang is driven by a Renesas M16C micro, which makes me wonder when that decision dates from. @whitequark has added M16C bootloader support to the Glasgow Interface Explorer, so I'm going to give it a burl.

Another dated bit is hiding under the plastic cover - a modem! The Australian PSTN is supposed to be retired this year but in most residential areas it's been gone for years.

This modem chipset is kind of cool, it's a Si2400 "ISOmodem". The idea is that this replaces the traditional big expensive isolation transformer with a pair of high-voltage capacitors, providing an isolated data (and possibly power) link to a second chip on the line side which handles the analog business. Neat!

Before I get into it though I want to have a big rant about one of their design choices. In order to program the system (or change settings later), you need the installer code. Traditionally whoever installs the alarm sets this, and does not give it to the owner. This locks the owner in to using that installer in the future.

You can reset the installer code on this board. But to do that, you have to buy an expensive ($150+) plug-in board - that turns itself into e-waste after a single use!

for anyone else silly enough to do this, the serial header is -

1: unregulated 12V !! careful
3: bootloader mode? tie this to gnd
4: Rx (input to the M16C)
5: Tx
6: CNVss (bootloader entry control)
9: /reset
10: gnd

It looks like I'm not the only person who thinks this is unconscionable; someone on the Austech forums posted this handy unlocker that just needs a 5V serial port (either the official "Bosch" DF266 programming cable, or whatever TTL adapter): https://pastebin.com/ujj2Q6Tg

It looks like a pretty simple challenge-response type thing, unsurprisingly.

Note that the M16C pins *need* a 5V input, a 3.3V UART won't hit Vih

@whitequark mate you absolutely smashed it

tested program-m16c with glasgow commit d7db593e8025406432dd963766c31c5660047be7

using the cnvss pin, as the target requires it

read, erase-block, erase, and program all had the expected effects
sync happily achieved at baud rates 9600, 19200, 38400, 57600 and 115200
target initially had a custom key; I appreciated the small smoothness of the default keys still being tried when --key is supplied, so no futzing after an erase

thank you!!

I don't know who asked for this, but you can get... a CD player... that pretends to be a USB stick full of WAV files, so you can play CDs in a car too new to have a CD player?? What a cursēd bargain at only 325 roobucks

@whitequark insult to injury, they even had a dead local named "bytes" just sitting there?

@whitequark yes!! a Bosch-labelled but Australian-engineered alarm system apparently

@whitequark @azonenberg @jpm I wish that were all

my model came with a newer graphical LCD remote with nice menus and such. how? it turns out it constantly sends button presses to scroll through the 7 segment display items and scrape the values. when you want to change something, it scrolls to the parameter and sends up and down presses. oh and presses randomly get dropped so it has to keep checking the display and sending more presses. it feels like a small, frustrated person is trapped inside

@whitequark @azonenberg @jpm special shout out to my house's German HRV system which uses 5 volt i2c for the bus from the ventilation unit to the wired remote, and the ventilator shoots raw 7-segment display data at general call while the remote(s) send button presses to... general call also