joshua stein

joshua stein

@jcs.org

Hello, cyberpals. I make @pushover.net and old Macintosh stuff and @deskto.ps and sometimes OpenBSD stuff for you and me. Oak Park, Illinois

1.4K followers152 following496 posts

joshua stein
@jcs.org

whoa i just discovered that after you bookmark webpages it's possible to go back and look at them again!

joshua stein
@jcs.org

i think you're all being unfair to 4. it just has much right to be chosen as 3498237410237598234.

joshua stein
@jcs.org

maybe we should have heeded the warning of usenet that trying to assemble large communities of disparate people and hoping to keep them focused on discussing very specific topics, just doesn't work out very well

Filippo Valsorda@filippo.abyssdomain.expert

After 10 years, I disabled my lobste.rs account. I think it's clear I am not a culture fit anymore with whatever it is they have going on there. I feel more and more like I don't belong in almost any tech community because I believe LLM agents are real, passkeys are good, and fascism is bad.

joshua stein
@jcs.org

A minimal client running on the Pico 2W connects to the Deskflow server on my ThinkPad to access its mouse and keyboard, and translates the input into mouse and keyboard protocols the Plus expects through its DE-9 and 4P4C connectors. \

joshua stein
@jcs.org

I thought about doing the Deskflow client directly in MacTCP running on the Plus, but I so frequently need working input when the system is misbehaving or under heavy load that relying on MacTCP for input would be unreliable.

joshua stein
@jcs.org

I'm surprised it took this long to find such a thing in the wild

joshua stein@jcs.org

## Build Instructions Run `claude "compile this"` and let it figure out what to do on your system.

joshua stein reposted

Benn Jordan
@bennjordan.bsky.social

It would've been easy to bash Flock in Senate today, but the reality is that this crisis would've not happened had there been any form of regulation or guard rails. So, let's demand them. And let's vote with the same ferocity we post with.

joshua stein
@jcs.org

Does anyone happen to know who owns rt\.fm now? Looks like it's just parked at a Hetzner IP but not hosting anything.

joshua stein
@jcs.org

In case your DM250 ran OpenBSD too fast, I made armv7 able to boot from a softraid disk so you can have a fully encrypted eMMC root.

joshua stein
@jcs.org

Initially it looked like it was hanging after entering the passphrase but after much debugging I realized it was just taking a ridiculous amount of time (like 30 seconds) doing bcrypt hashing, which turned out to be because u-boot was running with CPU caches disabled on the RK3128, so I fixed that.

joshua stein
@jcs.org

So even if you aren't using crypto softraid, if you update u-boot you'll get a faster boot since efiboot will load a little faster and that will load and start the kernel boot faster.

joshua stein
@jcs.org

I will be at Vintage Computer Festival Midwest this weekend with a table (B114) of Dolch stuff, because there are too many Macs there vcfmw.org #computersshouldhavehandles #vcfmw

joshua stein reposted

Matthew Sparby
@cloudscout.com

For the first time in 7 years, I have booted the CPT Phoenix Jr. A couple hours of experimentation and investigation with a Greaseweazle last night finally allowed me to recover the only known copy of its software! #VintageComputing #RetroComputing

joshua stein
@jcs.org

A small board sits between the ADB trackball and the logic board which has a USB port that houses a Logitech wireless receiver (but could support any USB mouse). It translates USB mouse HID input to ADB mouse packets. For the mouse scroll wheel, it sends ADB keyboard Page Up and Page Down keys.

joshua stein
@jcs.org

I ported enough of NetBSD's armv7 MP code to OpenBSD to do a 'make -j4 build' on my DM250X. It brings a full system compilation from ~5.1 days to ~3.5. Compiling LLVM is still multiple days :(

joshua stein
@jcs.org

Case in point, I saw these today: github.com/mplsllc/macs... A modern web browser for Mac OS 9 with CSS, ES5 JavaScript, and TLS redd.it/1tph8w3 A 3D printer monitoring app for System 7 with video A year ago either would have sounded awesome but now I scroll past because I assume AI wrote it all

joshua stein@jcs.org

I have lost all enthusiasm for reading about new software projects, especially dealing with vintage computing. What would have sounded amazing a year or two ago and made me want to engage with the author, I now just assume was something AI spit out and feels hollow and boring so I skim past it.

joshua stein
@jcs.org

I have lost all enthusiasm for reading about new software projects, especially dealing with vintage computing. What would have sounded amazing a year or two ago and made me want to engage with the author, I now just assume was something AI spit out and feels hollow and boring so I skim past it.

joshua stein
@jcs.org

And writing software feels like being Marge in that go-kart race. Work slow and steady for a year writing something neat that had never been brought to a platform before, but someone can hear about it and use Claude to whiz by you in a week and make something with 10 times the functionality.

joshua stein reposted

Wenting
@wenting.bsky.social

Sorry for not posting for so long... I have been extremely busy working on my new project: The Enchanter (also called Modos Flow): a 300-ppi Eink portable monitor with 60Hz refresh rate and touch screen. It's fully open-source: gitlab.com/zephray/ench....

joshua stein
@jcs.org

My backup strategy is restic to rsync.net hourly/daily/weekly depending on the system, retaining a bunch of snapshots Once a month, I manually run a script that fetches the latest backups from rsync.net to a portable disk, imports database dumps to a fresh mariadbd and runs some stored queries

Sean Eric Fagan@kithrup.bsky.social

Have at least THREE copies of your data: the live one on your computer, and at least two backups. Use at least TWO different storage media, eg, your computer's drive and another drive. Ideally you'd use different *types* -- hard drive, network storage drive, tape/optical.

joshua stein
@jcs.org

This does a few things: - ensures restoring from restic/rsync.net works - ensures plaintext database dumps are usable if I need to re-import everything rather than restoring the raw binary SQL files - creates the third copy of my data on that portable disk that I store in a safe place

joshua stein
@jcs.org

If you need a convenient place to store your offline encrypted backups, a 1TB microSD card can be hidden anywhere

joshua stein reposted

Ian Scott
@polpo.org

Dimming the screen for the screen saver on #PicoIDE was boring so I added flying toasters as an option. Sprites borrowed from the PicoPOST project