Ryan Finnie

Behold, a simple box with a hole in it. I'm looking forward to the 3 to 4 iterations to make this actually work with the thing it's meant to contain.

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First try! I may go into the story behind what this is someday, but long story short, it’s a homemade RGB strip light controller from about 10 years ago.

The simple snap-in cover did actually work first try, though I should have done a top ironing layer to clean it up.

Behold, a simple box with a hole in it. I'm looking forward to the 3 to 4 iterations to make this actually work with the thing it's meant to contain.

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14h

Number 3 in progress. I had assumed the hole needed for the device was centered to the device, but it's actually offset by 4mm. I also added registration pins for the corner holes of the device, which almost certainly will need to be adjusted in number 4.

12h

Round 4! The registration pins ended up working perfectly, amazingly. Unfortunately, the front riser pads were a problem. See, the device is inserted by angling it down so its DC barrel jack pivots through the hole, then the whole thing pivots onto the back pins. But […] [Original post on m29.us]

15h

Does the legalization of plug-in residential solar extend to grid-tied standalone batteries? I always assumed the fact that you can't get them (prove me wrong) was a legal issue, not a technical issue. For context, I have grid-tied rooftop solar with no battery backup. It's a co-dependent part […]

Behold, a simple box with a hole in it. I'm looking forward to the 3 to 4 iterations to make this actually work with the thing it's meant to contain.

Iteration number 2. Didn't even finish two layers before I noticed the walls weren't even.

Just a reminder that it will no longer be on Poob after the end of the month, due to Poob's parent company being acquired by Dynex Global Petrochemicals, which has their own service, Pheedy Max. Expect to pay 20% more for Pheedy Max.

Any Mastodon API experts around? How do you load a remote instance's status via your own instance's API, the equivalent of pasting a status URL into the Mastodon search field so that your local instance then knows about it? Ultimately the goal is to boost an arbitrary status, but the […]

This year's McRib has been consumed. It's a "bit" but I really do like the taste of it, especially the McRib sauce. However, I find it amusing that I have a dietary restriction which makes the McRib notably worse. I can't eat onions, and without a big bed of slivered onions, the McRib is a […]

Ryan Finnie reposted

11 Nov 2025

Did you know? The infamous scene in The Lord of the Rings - The Two Towers was originally written slightly differently. Unfortunately, the producers were unable to secure a licensing deal, necessitating a last-minute script rewrite.

I was about to make a joke about "I don't know why people are suddenly talking about time going backwards this weekend; it's in the spec but has never happened before". But then I looked up leap seconds and discovered that they were effectively discontinued 10 days ago […]

Hi, me Ryan! Nice to meet you, 5c CTRV! I will recycle you!

All the doors in Star Trek: The Next Generation (and broadly in Star Trek as a whole) are futuristic *beep-boop* "enter" *whoosh* sliding doors... except for Starfleet Academy, where the cadet quarters have standard doors and handles where you must knock. But yet they somehow still make slightly […]

And I can't find an example quickly (I thought one was in Treachery, Faith and the Great Riven since half of that episode took place on a runabout), but the Deep Space Nine runabouts have ADA-compliant brushed aluminum grab handles, secured with phillips screws. This is the most […]

Ah, the DS9 episode I was thinking of was Improbable Cause. Hold on for safety!

Okay, so we all know that before you bake a frozen pizza, you need to rearrange the pepperoni slices which have become dislodged. When you're done, you will be left with two spots where there should be pepperoni, but are missing. One of those is from when you ate one frozen, and one just never […]

Dinner: Disappointing and left me feeling bloated YouTube: Gives me a video about the politics of Kim Jong Un's obesity Me: Okay fiiiiine, I'm going for a jog

"Jog" is overselling it a bit; 2 mile walk with a pace of just under 15 minutes per mile. A girlfriend once told me "you look like you're walking with a purpose, and that purpose looks like it's to go punch someone".

Just ordered a 16GB Raspberry Pi 5 + accoutrements for nearly $500. @spacehobo : Pepperidge Farm remembers

She's able to find a job, but it's a bit of a commute. Just under 30 miles.

m29.usm29.us

I’ve been doing home automation renovations at home, including replacing light switches with Matter switches. I replaced these oddities in the main bedroom, and had never seen red-backed Decora-style switches. Turns out they are “Specification” grade 20A switches […] [Original post on m29.us]

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There is exactly one exception: the side yard has a motion floodlight mounted where a patio light would be, so it should always be on. Ideally I’d just cap off the switch in the garage and replace it with a flat plate, but the light freaks out and needs to be reset […] [Original post on m29.us]

Now, there is exactly one special light switch in the house, actually a switched outlet, in the family room. For this one, they cheaped out and only ran standard 14/2 Romex to the switch for the loop, instead of 14/3 which would have allowed for a common Neutral. No […] [Original post on m29.us]

Here are the Matter switches I’m using everywhere. I had some Z-Wave switches in the past but they were never very reliable, so I ended up standardizing on Matter and Zigbee where I can. Most of the early replacements were for automations I care about (turning on the […] [Original post on m29.us]

I just realized I've been hearing incorrect lyrics for the Mystery Science Theater 3000 theme for decades now. What it's actually: > He'll have to sit and watch them all > And we'll monitor his mind (la la la!) And what I thought it was: > He'll have to sit and watch them all > And the […]

My QBASIC-backed CMS is affected by neither of today's security announcements.

Honestly, if you're still using PHP 4, that's on you.

In hindsight, OOM handler shenanigans was an obvious explanation for what could be a remote RCE for all PHP versions going back nearly 25 years.

Okay, so memes are fun, but what does "the private key was 4" actually mean? The key length is part of the key exchange, so does this mean the private key was, say, a 4096-bit key and the value was 0x0000 0x0000 0x0000 0x0000 [...] 0x0000 0x0004?

Video I'm watching: Bob Odenkirk is of course best known as Saul in Better Call Saul Me: Oh, is he Saul? To me he's known for Mr. Show, a sketch comedy on HBO from the late 90s. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTJ3LIA5LmA (We're earthlings! Let's blow up earth things!)

I've never seen Better Call Saul, but I've seen a few clips of Mike Ehrmantraut, and he is my spirit animal. In one scene, he stealths his way into a warehouse, steals a hi-viz vest and motorized cart, and drives around and yells at people, to remain inconspicuous. In another, he avoids […]

Ryan Finnie reposted

@eythian.teh.entar.net.ap.brid.gy

My arcade cabinet has been getting crowded.

Ryan Finnie reposted

Robin

Did Queen Elizabeth ever donate blood? If so, did she see the IV and think "oh hey, the royal blood line"?

My arcade cabinet has been getting crowded.

There are only two companies on my resume which still exist, and they are both private companies owned by billionaires who have just completely gone off the deep end. Now, I'm not saying this is 100% because of me, but it can't be discounted.

Today is my first day on Ozempic. Not a big deal, as I've been on Rybelsus for diabetes management for several years, and yesterday just happened to be the day when I ran out of Rybelsus and needed to switch to the Ozempic prescription. So what is the difference between the old, discontinued […]

YOU WON FOOD

I already redeemed it to my account so I didn’t obfuscate the code, but their app is so poorly made that I wouldn’t be surprised if it allows for double redeems. Go for it. It was for a small ice cream cone, which is apparently up to $2.59 now.

I had to enter the code manually because this is what it looks like when you try to line it up. Pulling out farther does not work either. It crashed shortly after I took this screenshot.

In 2020, @foosel released plans for a dial/push button using an ESP8266 and a rotary encoder, with some MicroPython firmware. I built one, modified the firmware to be generic (sending events to the network’s broadcast address over UDP), played with it for awhile, but […] [Original post on m29.us]

Since I only vaguely remembered getting it to send to the network, and had not (at the time) found the source I wrote back in 2020, I actually had to reverse engineer my own engineering. Jogging the dial would send 36 bytes of binary data to port 12123 on the network's broadcast address. This […]

From trolling the California DMV, the following (non-exhaustive) vehicles are classified as commercial and taxed at a higher rate: Pickups Vans Concrete Mixers Hearses Taxis Tanks Toyota Celica Liftbacks (though I think this may actually be all Toyota Liftbacks, not just Celica Liftbacks) 1966 […]

Americans will do anything to avoid measuring linear cheese in metric.

Note to self; disabling temporary / privacy IPv6 addresses on a default-ish Ubuntu desktop: nmcli connection modify "Network Name" ipv6.addr-gen-mode eui64 ipv6.ip6-privacy 0 I got sick of getting disconnected from remote IPv6 SSH connections several times per day. Now in theory this now means […]

A few months ago, Apple raised the price of the entry level Apple TV device from $129 to $199. At the time, this made perfect sense to me from their perspective. Raise the price of a years-old model ahead of a new model refresh which was rumored to be a modest upgrade at best, so you can […]

Apparently this alert doesn’t go away unless you explicitly action it. I wonder how long I can go without doing that.