Notices by Graham Sutherland / Polynomial (gsuberland@chaos.social), page 3

Paint Shop Pro

opening the CD tray with sub7

putting polyphonic ringtones on your phone via IRDA

ZoneAlarm firewall alert popups

@ryanc oh right yeah you get weird floating shit in old house wires

@ryanc ????

my NAS died a couple of days ago with zero sign of life. no lights at all on the board, not even standby LEDs. it's going to my UPS, so I checked that I was seeing 230V at the cable, and I did. so I figured the PSU is dead, because the motherboard would need to be ultrafucked for it to show literally no signs of life.

ordered a new PSU. it arrives. swap it in, aaaaand... nothing. ugh. so is the board dead? maybe a hard short over +5VSB or something?

so I start digging further.

first: gotta verify that the new PSU works. I measure +5VSB on the ATX24 and get 0V. so I bridge PS_ON and GND, and check the other rails. nothing. I see the briefest flicker of a few mV, maybe, but it doesn't power up. I'm starting to think the new PSU is DOA and I just got super unlucky.

I verify mains again. 230V on the dot. just to be sure, I go check that my multimeter is reading DC correctly. yup, it's fine.

at this point I'm really thinking I just got a dead PSU, or the board killed it.

so I go downstairs with it and I'm about to file an RMA, and I think "hmm, maybe it just doesn't like the UPS? better check before I RMA it".

so I plug it into an IEC cable downstairs, bridge PS_ON, and bam! works.

so is it the UPS????

I go back upstairs, try again, yup still dead. and I'm still seeing 230V.

I grab a new IEC-IEC lead to test another port on the UPS, and it works! so what, one of the UPS ports is somehow presenting 230V but... not good enough 230V to work? wtf

I was fumbling around a bit trying to plug stuff in 'cos it's pretty cramped back there, and when I look in with my phone light I notice that the new cable is actually plugged into the *exact same port* the old cable was. the port is fine.

plug the old cable back in and try it. doesn't work. plug the new cable in. it works.

what the actual fuck

this is a straight IEC-IEC, no fuse, it's just regular copper wire. and I read 230VAC just fine over it. but the PSU won't power up with that cable.

I've tested continuity and resistance. the cable is fine. L-L, N-N, G-G, no continuity between the lines, resistance reads good (within 10% of other IECs I have). it's been powering my NAS for *years* without issue. I get 230V on the output when I plug it in. but *neither* my old PSU or new PSU will power on when plugged into it.

I am *SO* confused

the only thing I can think of is if the cable somehow thermal cycled in a weird way and the contacts are *only just* making contact so when plugged in it's showing 230V when unloaded but the contact resistance is high enough to tank the mains voltage as soon as it tries to power on? but then you'd think the PSU would hiccup rather than just not powering on (I guess maybe mains UVLO protection could prevent that or something? idk)

this is one of the weirdest failure cases I've ever had

wiggling the connector around does nothing though. I see no fluctuation on the multimeter at all and, no matter how I apply pressure to either end, the old PSU (which works fine, so sadly I bought a new PSU for £120 for no reason) will not power on with this cable. extremely bizarre.

wait it gets EVEN MORE CURSED

I grabbed a BS1363 (UK plug) to IEC cable. I plugged the problematic IEC-IEC cable into it. then I grabbed another known-good IEC-IEC and plugged it into that. so I have a chain of BS1363-IEC, IEC-IEC (bad), IEC-IEC (good).

I get 230V at the output.

I plug it into the old PSU.

it will not power on.

CABLE'S HAUNTED

nvidia should be forced to change their company motto to "make hot chip that lie"

just finished watching this lecture and holy crap I actually understand the fundamentals of Galois field arithmetic now, at least sufficiently for most cryptographic use. such a fantastic presentation that doesn't really expect any maths knowledge beyond fundamental algebra and integer modulo arithmetic.

if you choose to watch this, I highly recommend keeping a set of notes along the way - I found that it really aided my comprehension and retention of the details.

https://youtu.be/x1v2tX4_dkQ

if tenable was so good why did they never make an elevenable

@ryanc lol yeah it is laden with stuff about war atrocities, xenophobia, genocide, fascism, religious extremism, etc. so I'm not sure it's super age appropriate for a 7 year old. there is more age appropriate stuff that treats it more like a strategy game with factions that just fight because that's how the game works (similar to D&D) but the detailed lore is pretty heavy stuff.

@ryanc it's gotten really popular with the young'uns again, especially off the back of D&D's resurgence. the new WH video game being such a huge hit hyped a ton of folks up for trying the physical stuff, and there's a ton of 40k stuff at events like PAX these days.