I was sort of hoping to control multiple switches via serial, but I imagine I can work around this. I'm part way through trying to hack the firmware for the MX42-HS to put in my own EDID. It's already been done by other people manually for Dolby Atmos, I just want to automate it, & learn more C.

CeX isn't just games, always worth checking if they stock something, & you get a guarantee! What was advertised was an EZ-MX42HS (HDMI 4x2 matrix with serial & USB control). What arrived is an EZ-MX42PRO-HAS (HDMI 4x2 matrix, USB control only, SPDIF audio extraction) - so mostly better.

A reminder to people that @cexofficial.bsky.social exists in the UK. Just had a delivery. Fantastic, environmentally friendly packaging. Downside is that it wasn't exactly what was advertised, some model number confusion, but it's still 90 quid of HDMI matrix switch (new) for under 40 quid used!

Sadly I wasn't quite correct about HIDMan now being fine with USB mice and my PS/2 KVM. It's much better, sure, but half way through a call at work the mouse freaked out, so I went straight back to PS/2 mode. Fortunately I'd put in an extension cable so this was literally a 20 second job.

1/4 After looking at proposals for a 'better' tax system, which included the lunacy of regular reassessment of council tax bands I decided to check if I would actually be impacted & if I'm being treated advantageously. I bought my 3 bed semi new in 2001 for 89K

HIDMan (github.com/rasteri/HIDman) firmware was updated a few months ago, & now my old (MX518) & modern (Makulu 67) mice are working fine in USB mode to my PS/2 KVM, instead of needing a direct PS/2 connection previously. It's nice to have the option of a modern mouse, 67g is a bit light though.

Need to investigate if NUSSpli can be used to just patch, rather than 'obtain' games. I have legit EU games, I just want to see if I can patch them on a Japanese Wii U. Only the ones I want to play on Pretendo are probably relevant, which is likely to mean Super Mario Maker

Little bit of Wii U gaming tonight; confirmed Aroma makes a Japanese Wii U region free. Unfortunately games can't be patched when running under Aroma; either patch outside Aroma or use USBHelper (Windows). I wonder if USBHelper's patch downloading could be replicated under Aroma?

As far as I can see it's only the Wii U homebrew that's embarrassing. It's not the development environment. That exists, and there appears to be a (mostly functional?) SDL/ SDL2 port. Programs can integrate directly into a jailbroken boot, it's a decent user experience once the homebrew exists!

Homebrew on Dreamcast is incredible - looking to get DOOM64 compiled to a CD for it. Homebrew on a Wii U is.. embarrassing :(. Hoping to correct that a bit. Homebrew on the Wii side of the Wii U is much better, even with a lot of the software being old, and Drama existing.

Shortened version of my stream of consciousness on Mastodon. It's odd which consoles stick with you. Wii U, and Dreamcast. Both flawed. Both lacking some third party support. Both still have great games, peripherals, and innovations. Have lots of games for them both, but not PS2, SNES, Gamecube.

It pragmatically means : you may get different results from some drivers, & it may be necessary to fiddle with resolutions, refresh rates, & colour depths. Or say use something like recent MST USB-C hubs that have multiple DisplayPort 1.4 out ports or DisplayPort & HDMI Or it may not work at all.

For work's Dell Pro laptop I get three monitors working with 8 bit colour if the internal display's resolution and refresh rate are reduced, otherwise it only works if one of the monitors is on 6 bit colour Doesn't make sense because the port on the laptop is DisplayPort 2.1, 77Gb/s!

Which is a nerdy way of saying 'when I connect two other monitors to my main monitor through an MST hub it doesn't work in some configurations & it's a pain to diagnose because there's no monitoring'. Works : 3 monitors at 8 bit. Doesn't work : 10 bit turned on to high res monitors

Main monitor? DisplayPort 1.4 input : 25.9Gb/s. DisplayPort output is 1.2 = 17.28Gb/s. 1440p Monitor supports 10 bit colour @ 75Hz = 8.86Gb/s, if running at full chat. DisplayPort 1.2 is sufficient for remaining bandwidth. Running at 8 bit/60Hz? 5.63Gb/s - DP1.2 output is depriving you of 3Gb/s

Downsides? Driver support. If you're running a Mac, no Displayport MST support because fuck you it's Apple, that's why. Windows/Unix you may be OK, ideally use Nvidia or Intel chipsets rather than AMD because AMD drivers suck. Bandwidth. Different DisplayPort standards have different limits.

My previous Surface setup went Surface laptop->USB-C->Monitor (USB-C port in)->Displayport out embedded in monitor (a one port MST hub)->two port MST hub (Startech)->two separate DisplayPort monitors attached by DisplayPort cables. Monitor provides USB-C power, USB ports for keyboard/mouse/webcam

This supports hubs, like USB. Displayport can be encoded in alt mode over Thunderbird/USB-C. Net effect - work's laptop can be driven by 1 cable. It provides power, takes video from the laptop, passes it to >1 monitors via an MST hub, & attaches devices via USB in the monitor including networking.

Anyway. Recent adventures in DisplayPort courtesy of tests & a work laptop. DisplayPort is great, it's not a video protocol, it's an information stream. It can support Multi Stream Transport (if you're not using a Mac) where video for several sinks (monitors) are encoded in one stream

A note - for more long winded and definitely more stream of consciousness notes from me, you need to follow me on Mastodon at @[email protected]

Looking at other compilers the advice seems to be 'you can write inline assembly, but we'd prefer that you didn't'. sigh. *Fine*. I suppose it ultimately means things are better segregated that way

oh bollocks to this! Trying to combine C & inline assembly in CP/M. Hi-Soft C needs opcodes specifying manually, but lets you directly refer to C variables provided they're globals. Hi-Tech C lets you freely write Z80 assembly, but there is no automatic method of referring to C variables. 1/2

In other news, CP/M is firmly an 'assembly first' OS, whereas Unix is fundamentally based on C I was hoping to program it in C in a compiler independent manner, but it'll need the assembly abstracting to a separate include file with different methods of using assembly depending on the compiler

You know you're dealing with an older system when the programming manual says C has 'recently been gaining popularity' and most of the examples are in BASIC, COBOL, Pascal, and ALGOL is mentioned.

If you thought ed under Unix was painful and limited, it has nothing under ed in CP/M! Just about got things working. Also, back in 1989/1990, the absence in directories in CP/M didn't seem so limiting. Now, trying to set up a C development environment & a virtual hard disk, it definitely does!

Fair enough, it *is* all free. Yet Another project to stick on the long, long *long* list, and the acknowledgement that to shift to FreeBSD I'm going to need some form of Windows emulation, VM, or compatibility just to get stuff done. Joyce also seems to miss keypresses at times. CP/M Box does not.

Tonight in 'shifting things to Unix' we have another epic fail. Been using the Joyce Amstrad PCW emulator and, well, it just can't read a lot of the disks out there. To be fair it's exactly the same under Windows. CP/M Box (Windows only) is fine, so running it in WINE under FreeBSD

The Titan keyboard is actually decent. Pity about the rest of the phone. Crap camera. Issues with keyboard software. Incompatibility with software in square aspect ratio. The worst wireless support I have ever seen. Their support don't care. It needs *proper* engineering resource for good wireless.

The last good keyboard phone I had was the Xperia Pro. Following that was a modded Photon Q (hardware failed), the Blackberry Priv (software updates stopped, hardware failed), the FXtec Pro 1 (hardware failed), & Unihertz Titan (software updates stopped, hardware is shit)

I say this because Unihertz are pushing a new phone. They have an 100% record on ending security patches early & not releasing code under the GPL. With this new phone they promise to support 'Android 17'. That's *one year of updates*. Don't reward mediocrity & deliberate contempt for consumers

Here is your regular reminder that boutique mobile phones (not from major manufacturers such as Apple, Samsung, or Google) are never a good idea. They'll skimp on engineering, they won't dedicate resource to software, & they'll end security patches early

Today in upgrading to FreeBSD 14.3. Kmods have been moved into a new repository to match releases instead of STABLE. This is in the release notes. What is not obvious is that a pkg upgrade won't work for them. drm-kmod & GPU firmware must be removed via a pkg delete, then installed again 1/2

Been transplanting a pentium 4 system using a P4PE motherboard (2002) into a new Antec VSK-4000B case (from an old case I'd cable strapped a 12" fan into when it only took 8") & remembering the joys of early adopter tech. USB 2, SATA, Firewire, HD audio. How much of it works? 1/3

Also, Bluesky, what's up with the ridiculously short limit on posts? I also use Mastodon, but hey, the public have decided *yet again* they would rather a venture capital backed company that will fail eventually but which handles things, is better than a not exactly ideal service you might pay for

Pondering updating my pentium 4 PC to a modern case. Currently it's in an old case that I've cable strapped a fan to to improve airflow; it only has space for an 8" extractor fan. Predictably there are fewer cases with external 5.25" bays these days. An Antec at fifty quid will likely do the job.

Word, and how irritating it also is drawing diagrams, is the reason I started learning LaTeX vaguely properly. Going from a commercial product with forty years of development, to a free product that requires you to learn obtuse syntax & fight addons which conflict & are often out of date is a thing

Yes, you can get around it with sub table width, fiddling around & hoping Yes, it's not easy, as anyone who has tried to get LaTeX to do exactly what they want with various plugins will know. *I don't care*. It's a forty year old commercial product AND IT SHOULD FUCKING MAKE PEOPLE'S LIVES EASIER.

un-pigging-believable. Trying to sort a table in a document which is also composed of lots of table rows. Hey people online how do you stop Word fucking around with your column widths? 'oh that's easy, blah blah'. How do you do it when the table is inside another table? 'you don't, fuck you'

The joys of modern computers, & Windows. Been having issues with my WD Blue M.2 SATA SSD in my fanless browsing box. Firmware update required. *windows only*. Not actually a huge problem although Windows use is annoying. Buy Sabrent USB to M.2 adapter works easily. Now try with an NVMe drive 1/3

The joys of connecting consoles to the Internet, especially the PS4. As usual consoles expect every port to be opened & my network is very tied down. Port forwarding via NAT doesn't work. Solution is likely to be VLANs & a static NAT port mapping. I briefly had another idea on finding NAT64 1/2

For my existing Wyse 5070 & the issue I had with my M.2 SATA drive disconnecting, one solution is RAID. Except it only has a 2230 A+E key connector in addition to the M.2 SATA connector. Converter is available on Amazon for a tenner (tried elsewhere, nothing on ebay or other vendors) 1/2

Found an ebay auction with an Optiplex 3000 thin client, PSU (genuine? dunno, but it's the same price as another auction *without* PSU), *and* Windows 11 installed for 80 quid. If it works that has to be a bargain! Although I will need to either buy, or move an existing NVMe drive 1/2

Item I'm looking at on ebay doesn't have a PSU. Adapter from Dell direct is 40 quid. 'Genuine' adapter elsewhere is 20 quid. Why so cheap? 'IF AN EXACT ADAPTER PART NUMBER IS NOT AVAILABLE IN STOCK, WE WILL BE SUPPLYING A 100% COMPATIBLE PART NUMBER' I was not born yesterday.. no thank you

Had an issue with the SATA M.2 SSD in my Wyse 5070 - probably firmware related, bought a Sabrent M.2->USB adapter to update the firmware, worked well. Whilst I was looking, find that an Optiplex 3000 thin cilent with Pentium N6005 now exists. 30%+ faster! Also supports NVMe.

Well, that's me migrated from Hostgator to @mythic-beasts.com - let's see how it goes! Also moved an e-mail domain from historic Google Business hosting too. Hostgator took the piss with pricing a couple of years ago (sudden $10 increase), finally sorting it now. This'll save 20 quid a month. 1/3

*of course* I've gone down a rabbit hole of looking at resilient systems; whilst I could take the easy route of downloading an app (and I may do in the short term), the point of a lot of this is to learn things. e.g. instead of downloading an appliance, I'm implementing IPV6 & Samba from scratch.

urg. Looking up some modern open source apps after years of corporate work is making me feel all my years, but it still looks like Visual Basic apps from the mid nineties. What's it using? Node.js then it just pulls in 'stuff' from npm. So, web server built in. What's the back end? SQLite. 1/2

Shock for the day as I plug my Plantronics DECT headset adapter into FreeBSD and it Just Worked (TM) :O. OK, so I had to run pacmd even after changing the default device to modify the pulseaudio sink, but that's still practically seamless!

Aha! Turning off mouse switching in the KVM stops it consuming the middle button. Additionally the Aten UC-10KM PS/2 converter I've just plugged into this FreeBSD box now sees *all five buttons* Fanfare. Excellent!

Plugged my MX518 PS/2 mouse back directly into the KVM. Now it sees four of the five buttons - the middle button is not detected! The mouse itself is fine, if it's plugged in via USB it sees all the buttons, so it's a matter of KVM fiddling. Joy.