Erin
@erincandescent@queer.af
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Joined Jul 2018
(the cause of the breaker for these sockets tripping is almost certainly but not definitively a halogen lamp blowing)
there are three mystery breakers which are turned off
there are two previously working sockets which no longer have power
these have absolutely no relation to each other whatsoever
*even longer sigh*
This house's main electrical panel has *27* circuit breakers and zero labels
*exasperated sigh*
The Raspberry Pi RP2040 looks like such a *fun* bit of hardware and I'm excited to play with one
I love the quirky, slightly oddball nature of it
TIL: http://legislation.gov.uk has per-year Atom feeds which not only cover every law published in modern times, but also cover every law still in force somewhere in the UK
There's an 1267 feed containing the oldest statue still in effect:
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/1267/data.feed?sort=published
Firmware is everywhere, and it's surprising how much compute power you find in places where you aren't looking
The original IBM PC keyboard controller is a micro-controller, and there's also one inside the keyboard that plugs into it
If you look at minicomputers, it's a similar story. And one step further back: offloading things is the whole point of mainframe "channel IO"
Some models contain two of them! The Commodore 4040 floppy drive has twice as much CPU power as the computer it's designed to plug into!
(But a lot less RAM)
This might sound like modern complexity, but it's pretty much always been this way
The floppy drives for the Commodore home computers? Pretty much all of them contained a 6502 CPU, same as the PC they were connected to.
The SSD installed in the M.2 slot is a multi-core computer with a sizable quantity of its' own SDRAM.
There's probably another small CPU inside the DRAM controller inside the SSD controller.
It's fractal.
The motherboard has a Cortex-M. There's an eMMC onboard; as of 7 years ago, SD cards and similar typically contained an 8051 or ARM7, they've probably upgraded to Cortex-M or R by now
https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=3554
There are possibly more I haven't dug out yet. These are just the ones where you have to load the firmware as part of the boot process; there may be others hiding, particularly if their firmware is embedded in ROMs
I know that there are at least *three* different CPU architectures present inside the LX2160A SoC in our new home server:
* The main CPUs are AArch64
* The NIC contains at least one PowerPC CPU
* The DDR4 controller(!) contains an ARCompact
Computers are made up of other computers.
You prod a bit of hardware and it's like "Surprise! I'm actually another computer in a trench coat!". Nesting isn't uncommon; they're fractal
We bought a PC case which came with fans pre-installed and didn't bother to check the directions of them and
Both the front and back fans are intakes. They're blowing at each other. This is probably at least one reason why the CPU is running warm.
Discovering this commit message has made me feel a bit better about the time I spent today tracking down where all these IOMMU faults are coming from...
(I'm fairly sure we just called it "Orange Juice with bits" when I was a kid and "Juicy Bits" is some marketer's more recent invention. To be fair, "juicy bits" is more appealing)
In German instead of "Orange Juice with Juicy Bits" they say "Orange Juice with Fruit Meat" ("mit fruitfleisch") and I think that's beautiful
(I know "fleisch" is more directly "flesh", in general it's used much more like "meat" would be in English)
I keep on being like "I can't remember when I last topped up the dishwasher salt tank, it must be empty", opening the tank and discovering it's 3/4ths full.
Oh yeah, I live somewhere that the water isn't 75% rock now. Though those of you that do: remember the dishwasher salt 😅
Watching an actual DVD (on a PS2!) in 2021 is weird. You forget that standard definition video can look so good - almost uncanny valley
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Joined Jul 2018
