Notices by q3k :blobcatcoffee: (q3k@social.hackerspace.pl)

@whitequark

So what I'd be looking for is closer to one of these Digilent boards (pictured), modernized (eg. with a screen for a modern equivalent of VGA out, maybe HDMI output connected to transceivers) but still super hackable.

What I think doesn't work at all is a super tiny tightly integrated stamp-like board (like the ICEbreaker-bitsy, pictured) or even worse, a fomu (pictured).

The ULX3S comes very close, but it has too much stuff around powersaving and the ESP32, and is missing an LCD.

@whitequark I'd have to see more :).

Curious about:

1. How simple it is for a beginner to understand (should be closer to an arduino than to a modern laptop motherboard)?

2. How much I/O does it have to go beyond the board itself (like ~16 3.3V pins on a 2.54" header or worst case PMOD)?

3. Does it have some other fun little thingamajigs on board to play with (buttons, LEDs, an audio DAC, a WS2812B LED, …)?

@whitequark Back when I was learning digital logic myself (when the best resource you had was fpga4fun or a few books) I really liked being able to make a VGA pong in a handful of lines in Verilog and with trivial hardware. It's a shame VGA is dead, because that was such a great starter project that could be implemented on nearly anything.

It would show you the power of an FPGA vs. a microcontroller, how to meet timing via pipelining, how different writing logic feels… Oh and it was super fun.

@whitequark Not sure what a 2025 equivalent is - one where you also get such a visceral experience with 'fast' (for a microcontroller) protocols. Maybe something with an included LCD that has a trivial parallel protocol?

@whitequark

You can teach yourself the basics in 30 minutes by just mucking around with the tutorial and reference.

Typst is internally consistent and thus you can quickly go from zero, through basic syntax to knowing how to read the reference manual.

And this isn't some unusual flow either - the official docs guide you to do that. They start you with the tutorial, and then you just happen to land in the reference manual that lays out syntax, styling, programmability and then functionality.

@whitequark See https://typst.app/docs/tutorial/writing-in-typst/ .

And if you don't want to use the web app just run `typst watch foo.typ foo.pdf` in a terminal and point your PDF viewer to foo.pdf (they teach you that in the repo README).

typst [1] left such a good impression on me a few days ago that today I had a dream I got to rewrite some LaTeX documents into it. If that's not a product endorsement then I don't know what is.

[1] - https://github.com/typst/typst

@whitequark I'm not convinced this wouldn't be immediately abused. But I'm intrigued.

It's been zero days since I lost time on a GH repo before realizing 'oh wait, this is slop, that's why none of this makes any sense' after 15 minutes.

Is there some nice community list/plugin that I could use to give me a big red border around repository pages of vibe coded garbeoleum?

I know about open-slopware, but that's not what I'm looking for - I want a baseline filter for obvious useless slop, not one where well established projects might fall into just because someone used an LLM once.

> Scott Abraham – skiing enthusiast banned by court order in 1999 from posting on the Usenet discussion group "rec.skiing.alpine", after engaging in a flame war with other online posters.

in awe at this level of posting hard

@rahix @whitequark @ignaloidas Holy shit I missed this. What the fuck.

@gsuberland @rahix Don't ask Rahix about that time I sent a few too many kilobytes of data to our brand new Modbus RTU/TCP bridge...

@whitequark @ignaloidas Hey, at least the SIMATIC people are forward-thinking! There's also a JSON variant, too.

AccursedUnutterableXmlDeserialize

Looks like the second BAR is just some kind of journal? Log entries with a bunch of zeroes, I assume padded (can't be arsed to look at an actual hex dump yet).

🤔

Region 0: Memory at fb000000 (64-bit, prefetchable) [size=16M]
Region 2: Memory at fa000000 (64-bit, prefetchable) [size=16M]

I wonder what happens if I just... let me mmap /dev/mem real quick.

I've never blackbox-reverse a PCIe device before... But I guess there's a first time for everything.

This is one of those mystery 'Razorback' PCIe 'SSD' things that appeared on eBay a while back. It has a Flashtec/Microsemi/Microchip 'NVMe2016' controller on board, and that of course has no public docs.

Apparently no-one has really tried to figure out how to get them to work... Can't say I wanted another project, but oh well.

@whitequark @fafo winamp is there to blast files from The_Magic_of_MIDI.7z over the front case speaker of the optiplex that this thing runs on, while we're waiting for acquisitions to finish