Picked up a very obsolete Symmetricom TimeSource 2700 on eBay, solely to harvest the PRS10 Rubidium Frequency Standard inside (which go for more than double what I paid for the donor). Now I can proudly report that I have an atomic clock! Preliminary tests […] [Original post on nonexistent.ca]

I've been banging on this general "allowing strong technical locks which lock out the ostensible owner are a serious problem" drum for a long time now. As usual @pluralistic offers a poignant analysis […]

How chrony interprets the performance of local PPS vs. PTP. Green trace is the offset of the local clock and GPSDO PPS, captured locally using the BeagleBone timer capture hardware (see my previous posts on that platform). Yellow is the offset between the […] [Original post on nonexistent.ca]

Been binge watching #39c3 talks (https://media.ccc.de) the last couple days. This con is amazing, it's got it all. I hope to go some day. Thank you for generously providing the high quality online versions.

Anyone aware of an affordable 5-12 port switch with proper management & PTP transparent and/or boundary clock support? Primary or secondary market is fine. < $300 CAD, GigE+, PoE would be nice. My survey so far: * Arista - 710P series seems to have good support, but not remotely affordable […]

Finally back to #timenuts stuff! GNSS distribution amplifier seems to be working as designed. S11 seems much higher than expected at only around -5 to -10dB. The filter is meant to be internally matched, as is the amplifier stage so not sure what is going on […] [Original post on nonexistent.ca]

#adventofcode day 5 report Why is Rust's `Bound` and `RangeBounds` API the way it is?! Tried to build a templated `RangeSet` based on `RangeBounds`, but determining overlap and merging ranges was so ugly due to having to handle the 3 types of `Bound` everywhere. It was impossible to sort out […]

#adventofcode day 4 report Today was an exercise in remembering how my custom Grid helper class works. And thinking it already had the necessary methods to solve today's problem, but ending up adding them.

[AoC Solution Discussion] #adventofcode day 3 report. Solved in under 30 min, but my solutions are slow. Just using a totally dumb recursive DFS with memoization. This problem would probably be better solved with BFS, then it is simple to cull the obviously worse paths (e.g. if we have […]

[AoC Solution Discussion] Hitting my self-imposed time limit for #adventofcode day 2. Performance progression: First attempt, string-based brute force: Part1 - 24ms Part2 - 239ms Second attempt, arithmetic based brute force: Part1 - 4.5ms Part2 - 13ms Third attempt, arithmetic based on […]

Redeemed myself a bit today, remembered to solve first and optimize later! Reasonably good solution in about 15 minutes, but there is plenty of room for obvious optimizations and style points. #adventofcode

[AoC Solution Discussion] Not a great start to #adventofcode this year, I completely forgot how my build setup was working last year, and the boilerplate I copied to start from did not work at all. Then, I could not quite work out the edge cases for the modular arithmetic after 90 minutes of […]

New (very minimal) Internet-Draft submitted: ASN Prefix-based Addressing for IPv6 "This document describes a method and policy for ASN prefix-based addressing for IPv6." If this goes anywhere I expect it will change, and grow, markedly […]

A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages James Iry; Thursday, May 7, 2009 1801 - Joseph Marie Jacquard uses punch cards to instruct a loom to weave "hello, world" into a tapestry. Redditers of the time are not impressed due to the lack of tail call recursion […]

After a couple of evenings I think I've mostly rebuilt all my compose manifests and lost volumes. Pretty painful error in time wasted setting things up again, but didn't really _lose_ anything. At least now I have Overseer up and running for all that effort. Learned my lesson. Now taking hourly […]

In more minor issues with Trixie migration, the `restic` package maintainer apparently decided to just silently remove Azure support because of packaging difficulties.

So that sucks, I upgraded my storage server to Debian Trixie. Sloppily, apparently, since I seem to have lost all my docker containers and volumes somehow. I guess some interaction between the Debian Docker package and the Docker CE package during the upgrade. Without backups since I never got […]

I am Jack's complete lack of surprise. RE: https://mastodon.cloud/@wakko/115572609162243537

While I wait for the distribution amp PCBs to arrive, let's talk about how we make use of the UTC-aligned PPS from GNSS to keep accurate time. In order to achieve network time synchronization on the order of nanoseconds, it's essential that timestamping […] [Original post on nonexistent.ca]

Now that I have two working platforms to run my timing experiments with, I'll need some tools to set that up. First on the block is a 4-way distribution amplifier for GNSS (GPS, etc.), so that I can use the same antenna to feed multiple receivers with an […] [Original post on nonexistent.ca]

So apparently when you write a MAC address to an Intel NIC, this is 'permanent'. The hardware protects those bytes once written. When you copy/paste the MAC address from another machine, intending to increment it by 1, but fail to do so, and it gets written to the NIC, it's a bit of a […]

I fixed the miniPCIe 3.3V supply on the Intel board. Took some doing to find the problem, I was expecting a fuse or a switching element of some sort. Instead it was a 0Ω resistor that gave up the ghost and became 500Ω. Probably intended to be 'fusible' to save […] [Original post on nonexistent.ca]

Time testing platform #2 - BananaPi F3. This one is intriguing for a few reasons. It's one of the few modern SBCs with miniPCIe, it's a desktop-tier RISC-V (8 cores! they're pretty slow, though) which I don't yet have in my stable, and it's considerably […] [Original post on nonexistent.ca]

Today on adventures in precision time: * 🛠️ Fixed the DO/DI design error with some bodge wires * ✨ Amazingly to me, the `eeupdate64e` tool immediately worked to write both the flash image and the eeprom settings (mostly MAC address). `nvmupdate64e` didn't […] [Original post on nonexistent.ca]

Some tempering of my enthusiasm is warranted. On to the next problem... I knew that I was likely going to have to wrangle some 'pirated' docs and tools together to program the EEPROM correctly. Intel does not offer their real documentation and tools to plebs […] [Original post on nonexistent.ca]

On the bright side, after resolving a simple design flaw, THIS MIGHT ACTUALLY WORK FIRST SPIN 😁! After smoking the 3.3V supply on the motherboard, I attached an external supply and slowly cranked up the current - YOLO! It's not shorted to ground, and […] [Original post on nonexistent.ca]

So within the first 10 minutes with this test platform, I allowed some magic smoke to escape. USB to the GPS immediately came up 🥳, but no enumeration on PCIe. I had kinda anticipated this because checking over the board on the bench, I found that the 25MHz clock was not reaching the NIC, it […]

I wasn't sure if I'd regret attempting 0402 assembly at home. These parts are truly _tiny_. But with a paste stencil and a steady hand I think I got away with it. The 3D printed jig was a new idea to aid alignment between the stencil and PCB, and it helped a […] [Original post on nonexistent.ca]

New web pet peeve: TOTP/security code inputs which are implemented as independent input elements, so they don't support paste or backspace.

Now this is ridiculously catchy. And yes, I bow to my socialist vampire overlords 🙇‍♂️

I only follow the chess world very casually, but Danya always struck me as a kind, honourable, and precise person. His sudden passing is a shock, and I'll miss his presence in my occasional bouts of chess interest a great deal. @lichess https://mastodon.online/@lichess/115408340882438240

Going way back in time, for a long time I ran an ancient Atmel ATNGW100, circa 2008, with a 150MHz AVR32 processor, 32MB of RAM and 8MB of onboard flash. Information on this board is pretty much relegated to archive.org now. On this board, I'd stacked a Motorola Oncore UT+ timing GPS (ancient […]

My current time server implementation is based on the BeagleBone Black and a GPSDO module salvaged from a decommissioned cellular base station (by someone else, and put on eBay for me to buy). I designed a carrier board to hold the BeagleBone, route the […] [Original post on nonexistent.ca]

1/n on time server implementations First #electronics work in a long while. Started on this one back in May, finally bringing it to the next step. About to send off to PCB fab, this is a miniPCIe card with an Intel I226V NIC, u-blox GPS, and TCXO onboard […] [Original post on nonexistent.ca]

So I've always found the browser 'interpreting' what I type in the URL bar as anything other than a URI (implied HTTP) to be irritating, but today is a new low. I type, verbatim `http://host.internal.tld` and the browser 'helpfully' connects to HTTPS instead. When it fails to connect, it […]

On the bright side of Mastodon maintenance, I _finally_ , after a year of frustrating, tracked down what was causing a 60s timeout before a login page was presented. It turns out that before presenting the login page, it is requesting the OIDC issuer configuration - fine enough. However this […]

Turns out upgrading Mastodon but not the streaming or sidekiq components results in broken federation. Who'da guessed?

Ahh, the freedom of adjusting `MAX_TOOT_CHARS` 😌

"Somehow" my single-node k3s installation managed to put 1.2M records into its resource database before keeling over. That's about a factor of 6000x the number it's mean to have. Kind of impressive, but recovery was not fun. I was unable to successfully vacuum the database due to memory […]

> 8.8.8.8 is current getting a steady-state > 27Mpps (million packets/second) of ICMP ECHO_REQUEST. oof.

Fixed the crash on my little LED array project. Printed a little enclosure with clear PETG to make a sort of diffuser. I tried to print 'lightpipes' for each pixel to try to expand the dot and reduce light leakage between pixels, but that didn't work at all. The printed PETG causes too much […]

TFW you spend 3 days working on PCB layout for a miniPCIe card, only to realize miniPCIe is getting quite rare, and often no longer includes PCIe lanes. While its replacement (M.2 A+E key 2230) is too small, and the other commonly available slot (M.2 M-key) […] [Original post on nonexistent.ca]

Successfully migrated 23 years of e-mail to stalw.art . Wow what a breath of fresh air compared to Postfix+dovecot+amavis+spamassassin+...

Trump's official denouncement of former CISA director Chris Krebs (in the form of a "Presidential Memorandum") is chilling in substance and utterly Stalinesque in tone. By threatening anyone who hires him, it aims to render Krebs effectively unemployable. I said it then, and I will repeat it […]

What a fantastic summary of the situation and what needs to happen. We need more clear and direct repudiations like this.

This is a 16x16 LED display, driven by the host PC over USB. It is based on the very cheap CH32V203 RISC-V controller and MBI5043 display driver. Software in Rust using the Embassy framework. It's been a while since I've had the wherewithal to work on an […] [Original post on nonexistent.ca]

[Comments on AoC 2024 day 18] AoC 2024 log day 18. 4777/4374 8ms * Reached for Djikstra again because I had it handy. Worked on the example but not the input. Turned out I had ended up with a max-heap after copypastaing 🤦. * Part 2 was just brute force against the P1 solution, still 0.5s […]

[Comments on AoC 2024 day 17] AoC 2024 log day 17. 5884/3231 * P1 was a fun simulation. Went way overboard engineering it sensibly. I hope this computer returns. * P2 tripped me up. Brute force impossible. Noticed some patterns in the input and the octal nature of the code, but no ideas […]