hello

he/him, online also tim, around 30. i like maths, cryptography and some other stuff

[merklehellman]

Hello there

I am a man, around 30, and i'm into math, computer science, science in general, cryptography, electronics, computers in general, programming, IT in general, hardware, music, playing instruments, recording music, music hardware, video games, gamedev, yadda yadda.

Sometimes i might post about something else too, like when i finish a book every once in a while.

Name comes from the Merkle-Hellman Knapsack Cryptosystem which does not work but is cool nonetheless. I might change it in the future because after a year, using other people's last names as a blog name started feeling weird to me.

[cauchyfeelings]

My toxic trait is downloading yet another pdf that I will “get to soon”.

[astelor]

The cave adapted creature is not my dwarves, is me. I can feel how my dwarves think when they look at the sun and outside after they stay inside for a month. Ugh my eyes hurt.

[astelor]

got tired of being a headless fly in firmware land so I found another "Very Easy" hardware challenge, I opened it up and it's a circuit with BJTs. The components are not spec'd so I doubt it's asking me to solve circuit problems. It's just using those BJTs as switches. Solved it instantly with a Python script.

:Kappa:

So I guess on HTB the Very Easy is in terms of "if you know the field you know it's easy, if you don't know... good luck"

[torstherapy]

[torstherapy]

[astelor]

My second fort on my entertainment PC. It's far better and I have like 20 work orders set on conditional repeat, so the dwarves are kept busy and generally happy.

Except for this kid whose miserable.

So a dwarf died in a pool of vomit in the tavern on my food stockpile. It was out of no where. It was either alcohol poisoning or cave adaptation or something I didn't know.

Pretty much everyone saw the dead dwarf, including this kid that was scarred for life. Now all he does is stay in his room and play, occasionally go to the dining hall and eat, and go back to this room. :')

[astelor]

And apparently some dwarf can wear four crowns at once

[venomivyblog]

Trying to debug some issue at work and my coworker asked if the strange results of our testing could be because of weird error handling in my code. Unfortunately I had to tell him that my code has zero error handling

[wayfire-official]

So, this just popped up. Genuinely my first wild kernel panic and it was just because I was trying to use blender while recording it

[wayfire-official]

Turns out I just had waaaaay to many vertices on my leaf model. Like. Just so many. And I was duplicating those leaves to make a palm tree (no, I wasn't modeling individual leaves for a regular tree). So, after I did a decimate on it, it ran smoothly again, even while recording

[astelor]

my brain actively tries to mouse right click to leave any overlay window, dwarf fortress has been growing on me

[astelor]

opened up HackTheBox Challenge

picked a hardware challenge

the challenge is about ESP firmware

opened hex editor

*the heck am I looking at*

found docs about the firmware and bootloader

tried to load binary in Ghidra

*didn't work*

"what the heck am I looking at"

[merklehellman]

I have an old server (around 10-15 years old). Mobo, CPU and RAM are not great, especially now, but the chassis is pretty cool (server type, rack mounted with hot-swappable HDD trays).

I was planning on upgrading the PSU for one with a quieter fan and running it with older hardware until i feel like upgrading everything else.

The new PSU arrived a few days ago, the server did not boot, DIAG_CPU LED lit up. I assumed it's just the old thermal paste - sometimes CPUs overheat very quickly without it.

Today i replaced the thermal paste, tried booting but it still got stuck on the CPU. I followed by disconnecting all the peripherals one by one, removing second stick of RAM, yadda yadda. Eventually i ended up with mobo outside of the chassis, with nothing except 1 stick of RAM and CPU on it, plugged into the PSU and yet - nothing, DIAG_CPU.

As a sanity check i decided to plug in the original PSU and somehow, it booted up (well it went past DIAG_CPU and DIAG_DRAM. It got stuck on DIAG_HDD but there was no HDD plugged in so it makes sense).

At this point i did not know what to google so i just went with "old mobo sf 750 doesnt boot" and i was greeted with a single reddit thread. I haven't checked the standards but apparently either a newer revision of the ATX standard made one of the pins optional, or it just was unused for the past 10 years so manufacturers decided to omit it. Enough said that the PSU is lacking one specific pin (-12v to be exact) on the 24-pin connector and some older motherboards/CPUs needed it to work. I checked and indeed, my old PSU has the pin and new one does not.

What the fuck.

To say i am shocked is an understatement. Out of all the connector standards in a computer, fucking ATX was the last one i would expect to be backwards incompatible. With full confidence i declare that i SHOULD be able to plug a modern new PSU fresh off the shelf into a 20 year old motherboard and it should fucking WORK. The connectors should be extended to accomodate new features, or perhaps you can make new standards of connectors altogether, but an ATX PSU should work with every ATX mobo, period.

I googled a bit more, and found two more sources that confirm this to be an issue. Not many sources but then again - it is a very specific scenario that not many people are likely to run into (10 year gap between mobo and PSU combo).

All in all it's also a bit funny and an excellent learning experience. All that does is make me get rid of old electrojunk and upgrade the server faster. It is not a big deal on paper but still - i am pretty mad. You can't just make PSUs that ignore years of compatibility.

The cherry on top is that the physical connector still fits - the pin is just missing. Unbelievable.

[the-least-undefinable-ordinal]

I love when you read the early implementations of some algorithm and you're like "this makes sense, it seems like a reasonable way to extract truth from the universe". Then you keep reading and it goes "modern implementations represent a significant improvement over the Shit For Brains Method, whose usage is confined to computer scientists cooking eggs on their laptops. This one has the number 9801 as a load bearing part of the algorithm, the guy who came up with it claimed his god gave him the idea."

It really reinforces the theme that reality doesn't care all that much if it makes sense to us.

[garlend]

I like this quote that deals with the same kind of idea

[bagnificentmastard]

Profs love naming quantities "eta" or smth - at the bottom left margin of lecture 2's 17th slide and never clarifying it afterwards.

[entropy-game-dev]

This is my false wall feature, which behaves exactly how you'd expect. It looks like a wall both on the viewport and on the minimap but if you interact or step into it, it disappears!

It will definitely not be used for evil.

Speaking of evil though, it currently does not spawn in the random generated dungeons, but if I can think of a way to include them that isn't frustrating (i.e. they only would be used to make new connections between two paths, rather than replacing an existing floor tile) then I might add them into the generation.

As an aside, this is the second video I wanted to include with my previous post, but couldn't, which is why it's getting it's own post now!

[halothermocline]

✨Python Affirmations✨

• your dataset is a reasonable size to expect your laptop to handle

• it definitely won’t crash your kernel

• the programming gods do not hate you personally

• this is a normal temperature for your laptop to be

• your laptop is supposed to sound like it has asthma

[merklehellman]

I am very fond of Judy from Cyberpunk 2077