Published at: 08:04 pm - Wednesday April 25 2018
Apr. 26 update: This article is obsolete, the pill — was found; if you have this machine, scroll to the end. The Asus C101PA Chromebook is a very interesting device: it contains a Rockchip CPU, for which we already have a working deloused Gentoo; it also contains such marvels as a non-blobulous Marvell 802.11 card, […]
Published at: 05:04 pm - Monday April 23 2018
I have the pleasure of informing my readers that… Phuctor is back! It — exactly as it was, but with a few minor fix-ups for browsing speed — now lives on a very spiffy 32-core Opteron at Pizarro, the ISP. The WWW UI is already up; the factoring proper will resume later tonight.
Published at: 09:01 pm - Wednesday January 17 2018
The Seiko DPU414 is a small (110mm paper tape, ~90mm printable width) thermal printer, similar to the type used with cash registers everywhere, but slightly wider. It is quite unremarkable apart from the fact that no thermal printer of similar or greater width appears to be widely available; and also for the price (typically around […]
Published at: 06:11 pm - Sunday November 26 2017
Yes, that familiar little PC peripheral. The one that toggles a single keyboard/mouse/display ensemble between two or more connected machines. They’ve quietly vanished from the market. And the fact appears to be discussed nowhere on the Net, at all. So I have seen it fit to make a note of it here. What’s this, you […]
Published at: 01:05 pm - Sunday May 07 2017
What’s a Sage SmartProbe? The Sage SmartProbe was a very spiffy “Hard ICE” CPU debugger, one of the few ever manufactured for use with modern (2010s) AMD x86-64 processors, and – as far as I’m aware – the only one ever sold on the mass market, rather than strictly to moneyed organizations (as e.g. Intel’s […]
Published at: 08:01 pm - Tuesday January 31 2017
It so happens that AMD resisted the informal NSA ban on the manufacture of LinuxBIOS-capable x86 CPUs slightly longer than Intel did. Or perhaps they were simply slower to succumb to Microsoft’s Fritz chip decree. Whichever may be the case, vintage (pre-2011, with some caveats, inquire within) AMD Opteron motherboards are a precious and increasingly […]
Published at: 03:10 pm - Saturday October 01 2016
Note: Please read the FAQ!!! If you cured your Sage SmartProbe of its congenital disease as per the last article on the subject, you may now be wondering what to do with it. The vendor supplied a massive Java shitware with the thing, which does not merit any discussion whatsoever. Instead, we will use the […]
Published at: 10:09 pm - Monday September 19 2016
Note: Please read the FAQ!!! The Sage SmartProbe was a very spiffy “Hard ICE” debugger, one of the few ever manufactured for use with modern (2010s) AMD x86-64 processors, and – as far as I’m aware – the only one ever sold on the mass market, rather than as part of “favourite son” deals (as, […]
Published at: 11:06 am - Thursday June 02 2016
“MyCloud Mini” is a ~$50, dual-core ARM, 256M RAM, 256M Flash, dual SATA box, in various respects similar to the famous PogoPlug. Use a standard (e.g., CP1202) TTL converter. And you will get: Stage-1 Bootloader 1 28 10:36:29 CST 2011 Attempting to set PLLA to 750MHz … plla_ctrl0 : 0x0000000A plla_ctrl1 : 0x000F0000 plla_ctrl2 : […]
Published at: 12:12 am - Tuesday December 01 2015