Wanda

a girl afraid of herself

Public Key

npub1rkzdyqa7zalzp886xk6qkml99xrv2q3au9judg46qdj9ayjqr57q89086m

NIP-05 Address

mwk@donotsta-re.mostr.pub

Profile Code

nprofile1qqspmpxjqwlpwl3qnnartdqtdljjnpk9qg77zewx52aqxez7jfqp60qpz4mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujumt0wd68ytnsw43qxfamer

Publishing to

relay.mostr.pub

Author Public Key

npub1rkzdyqa7zalzp886xk6qkml99xrv2q3au9judg46qdj9ayjqr57q89086m

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Last Notes

2025-04-16 14:48:27

holy shit I apparently feel OK enough these days to actually … clean my desk?
what sorcery is this

2025-04-12 17:18:17

no, you misunderstand. this is actually my SoC drawer.
throws an ARM at you

2025-04-07 17:51:11

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@nprofile…tslx oh, it was about making a competitive software tool, not a competition-competition.

2025-04-07 17:20:54

current status: a girlthing tried to explain to me that “aiming to compete with something” and “aiming to win and completely obliterate the competition” are two distinct things
I am still having trouble processing this

2025-04-01 15:06:51

none of us will reach heaven
https://asdf.donotsta.re/media/168bc93e132cf1418a16a8d0b8a3adfa4ddaa5ad65c6ce5158513b254ecb717a.png

2025-03-18 11:42:52

it’s really funny how “serialize a floating-point number to text and then deserialize it back to the same thing” is an unsolved problem. not possible to do. defies human comprehension.

2025-03-16 14:04:57

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@nprofile…tslx and tmux! (the thing that just tripped me up in a rather bad way, leading up to this post)

2025-03-16 13:59:57

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@nprofile…tslx … actually now I wonder if there’s even a widely supported input event kind I could hook up to this thing even if I managed to figure out the eye tracking hardware itself; there isn’t really anything in X11/wayland/… for “just focus whatever is under these coordinates but don’t do anything else with it”, is there?

2025-03-16 13:58:09

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@nprofile…tslx yeahh
I’ve been using focus-follows-mouse since forever, but it’s a poor imitation (and only works on window level, not on, say, individual editors in an IDE)

2025-03-16 13:51:14

you’ve heard of “click to focus” and “focus follows mouse” but what I really want is “focus is wherever I am actually looking”
… I wonder if it’s at all feasible to set up an eye tracking device and hack something up, how do eye tracking devices work anyway
gets lost in a rabbit hole

2025-02-27 16:47:11

current status: having had a look through the available Rust bit vector crates, I am currently considering either writing my own or just using a Vec<bool> out of frustration
bitvec. sigh. so much careful work done, so many cool features, and then I get completely fucked over by its serialization support being absolutely batshit.
fun fact: if you #[derive(Serialize, Deserialize)] struct Meow(BitVec);, your stuff won’t deserialize on a machine with a different pointer width. also, if you look at the resulting binary, you’ll see an incredible amount of "bitvec::order::Lsb0" as ASCII, because apparently it serializes its bit order for no good reason (it cannot actually use it on deserialization).

2025-02-25 09:09:41

me: talks about IC manufacturing, wire bonding, and packaging
my roommate: “mmmm, I wonder if there’s hentai of it”

2025-02-24 12:04:27

when you and the other company you’re co-designing a devboard with cannot agree on which one of you gets to put their JTAG programmer on it and you decide to compromise
https://asdf.donotsta.re/media/f1f787d677ab19a8e309c63cf67c9c89f0ade46170c63081d382aaeae6d4ace5.png

2025-02-24 09:15:35

it should be forbidden by law to make a devboard involving both FX2 (the EZ-USB cypress IC) and Hirose FX2 connector.
fucking unreadable schematic

2025-02-17 21:47:16

reminder: always put the “NFC” in your commit message when breaking the build on main

2025-02-12 18:08:13

catgirl pro tip: when designing a GPIO controller, make sure it has a way to set a pin to output without having it immediately drive a (non-negotiable) 0 on it.
I particularly like how, on the board I am looking at, they connected this GPIO to an (active-high) voltage regulator enable pin.

2025-02-12 14:32:44

today I am reversing advanced cryptography.
https://asdf.donotsta.re/media/4425c74751cb084cfe8b4f82fc9d5c0d96e74b8d2fd7b3b2fe14d321b886bca6.png

2025-02-07 17:14:01

people tell me I have trust issues
but after dealing with vendor toolchains for a while, I can only conclude I don't have enough trust issues yet

2025-01-20 08:06:43

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@nprofile…tslx ikr

2025-01-20 06:15:58

so I have just made a long rant at my roommate prompted by some random discussion and I'm actually annoyed enough about that shit that I'm going to re-rant on fedi.
so. lego. lego technic, even. you know, the fancy toys that involve a bunch of pieces you can build stuff out of. you can just take the instructions that came with the set if you don't particularly feel like thinking today, or you can pour out all the bricks you have on the floor and get creative.
I've always particularly liked lego technic. you know, you get to build something that moves and learn a thing or two about actual, honest-to-gods mechanics while doing so (differential gears! ackermann steering! what cool ideas!).
and lego technic always came with motors. you know, stuff an electric motor into your crane or whatever, connect a 9V battery box, and it literally goes brrr. excellent stuff.
at some point (2007) they invented something even better: the power functions with IR-based remote control. if you're feeling like it, you can connect a remote IR receiver brick between your battery box and your motor, and you can control the going brrrr thing from a distance using the IR transmitter. you get to control two motors per IR brick, and it lets you select one out of 4 channels so you can stack them for up to 8 motors, which is an insane amount of control to have over a model and you can do ridiculously cool shit with it (you can check out this fan-made example I really like: https://rebrickable.com/mocs/MOC-72302/JurgenKrooshoop/ultimate-42009-rc-motorized-mobile-crane/#details)
oh, by the way, the IR transmitter is *also* a lego brick and you can actually apply *mechanics* to the remote controller itself, and I've seen some cool shit based on that idea too.
and then 2019 came and they fucked it up so completely, it hurts to look at.
see, the newest generation of lego technic + motors (called "Powered Up") is based on bluetooth (or maybe BLE? I don't give a fuck tbh). and on Android.
like before, you get a battery box that you stuff 6×AA batteries into. like before, you get motors you connect to the battery box (several kinds of). and like before, you get to control it remotely.
except, the battery box is now also a bluetooth device and will refuse to do anything until you connect to it. and the remote control is now your Android phone. there is still an old-style battery box with a manual control, but it only comes in 1 (one) lego technic set released since this shit started (as opposed to the dozen or two with the bluetooth thing).
now, this is already kinda bad. see, touchscreens kinda suck for manipulating physical devices with any precision. particularly when, by nature, you really want to be looking at your model, not at the fucking touchscreen. so your paw just keeps slipping off the virtual throttle on the screen because hey turns out tactile feedback is a useful thing that you no longer have at all.
but this wouldn't be *completely* horrible if they just literally ported the old idea to Android. they did worse.
see, when you start up the "CONTROL+" app that lego ships for controlling your creation, you're presented with a list of supported lego sets, and you're asked to select which one you want to pilot right now. once you choose, the controller will talk to the battery box, enumerate the connected motors (you can have 4 motors per battery box; some really large sets have two separate battery boxes for extra motors), and verify you have connected the correct amount and types of motors for the given model. there's a mismatch? fuck off until you fix it.
then it will start the calibration process. for every motor that controls a function which has some sort of min/max position, it will move it to both ends until it meets resistance (turns out all motors are also servos and have some sensors) and keep track of its position. if the calibration process doesn't work out the way it should for the model (for example, because it has been modified in any significant way), it will tell you your model is wrong and you should fuck off.
and then you will finally get to control your model, built exactly to lego's exact specifi- okay I lied there's also a fucking per-model bullshit tutorial you have to go through before it'll let you do that.
now. can you guess what happens if you actually want to like... explore all this cool motorized mechanics stuff on your own and design something? that's correct, fuck you.
I mean. not quite. the protocol it uses is documented. I'm sure any child that wants to mess around with some motors and gears can just sit down with the protocol specs, some BLE library, some toolchain, and just create a custom control UI, right?
fuck all of that.
I mean. don't get me wrong. some of the models involving this stuff are really *cool*, and some of them use the capabilities of this system in ways that completely wouldn't be possible without complex logic running on the controller side. I enjoyed building this shit and looking at how it works.
just. for fuck's sake. let a child control a fucking motor without all that bullshit.
it's really sad how garbage it got.

2025-01-16 06:33:28

okay. that's it. I need to obtain a BT820, figure out how the firmware works and what ISA it runs on, pwn it, then run doom on it

2025-01-13 23:17:35

I have made one (1) OH-post with a funny CW combination
results:
- I have accidentally spawned a hellthread
- there is a followers-only subbranch of the hellthread where apparently someone's gender came under discussion
- I have no idea what exactly is going on in that branch because some of the critical posts didn't federate or something
- there are now at least two distinct meta threads regarding the hellthread and the gender discussion incident within
- I am currently reading the USB 3.2 specification while wearing a diaper
I am terrified

2025-01-12 15:29:35

so my favorite feature of the thing I'm currently reversing is that it has a numeric co-processor.
the base MCU is a custom 8-bit thing, not very far removed from the likes of 8051 or 6502. 256-byte memory space (actually 4kiB of RAM, since the second half of the space is bank-switched), 256 I/O ports, no registers at all (every normal operand is either absolute memory, or memory-indirect memory), and the only thing larger than 8 bits that this thing understands is code ROM addresses, which are 16-bit. no multiply opcode either, btw.
and then, since this is incredibly painful to do any math with, they just stapled a full 32-bit ALU to the side and attached it via the I/O port range.
behold this beautiful code snippet that multiplies a 32-bit number by 10 (it's part of the "convert from decimal" function):
https://asdf.donotsta.re/media/15e8209a402a7c9d6bc59bfbd6f655c7a42c30095e48b51ac4ac5f7ade4f9fda.png

2025-01-12 15:00:24

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@nprofile…tslx I mean, I do have the spec documents open to the side. just, I've never actually read them before (I definitely never read the mass storage specs; I think I must have read the base USB spec before because I have my notes from that, but I have absolutely no memory of it ever happening)

2024-12-31 18:26:26

tfw you ask a robogirl "how are you" and it replies in beep codes

2024-12-21 22:22:41

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@nprofile…tslx I'm surprised there isn't a `h4x.py` in there

2024-12-21 22:17:43

for some reason my roommate laughed its ass off at the list of untracked files in my FPGA reversing repo and told me to post it on fedi.
https://asdf.donotsta.re/media/23bf325d732730554735917fd403cf4fff02ee570daeb56ffaba3ecd85da8a1b.png

2024-12-17 18:15:19

current status: had a dream in which there was a gardening store that had digital ground/soil* and analog ground/soil for sale, and a large infographic explaining which one to use for growing various species of plants
I think I may have looked at too many datasheets recently.
* same word in pl

2024-12-14 02:48:18

wtf why did I just have a dream where I was cuddling a few columns of `SB_MAC16` tiles in bed
what is *wrong* with this brain