iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Aaron @aaron.chirp.zadzmo.org.ap.brid.gy · 18/10/2026

Bike shop around the corner is closed - but, fortunately, I have a basement of Infinite Forgotten ADHD Whims: seriously had no idea I had these, nor when I got them or why. Anyway replacement cable is on deck.

A ziplock plastic bag containing a pair of Sunrace shift levers and two unused derailleur cables.

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Aaron @aaron.chirp.zadzmo.org.ap.brid.gy · 18/10/2026

Oh THAT is why it's getting hard to shift gears.

Close up view of a bicycle, just above the crankset, where the shift cable connects to the front derailleur. Said cable is badly frayed with only a few strands still connected.

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Aaron @aaron.chirp.zadzmo.org.ap.brid.gy · 13/08/2026

Today I learned about tiago.zip. This justification for being opt-out is .... dubious, to be honest. I just figured out how to make nginx choose differing back ends via User Agent. I'm going to make them opt-out FROM ME.

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Aaron @aaron.chirp.zadzmo.org.ap.brid.gy · 08/07/2026

As I was saying in that blog post: No, I will NOT. Fuck all of this until the end of time. ( This was the "noai.duckduckgo.com" interface BTW ... oh, right, it's really just laundered Bing. )

A screenshot of searching for the word "dealt" on DuckDuckGo, and getting a dictionary card that's nothing except the word "deal" defined in terms of units of lumber.

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Aaron @aaron.chirp.zadzmo.org.ap.brid.gy · 07/07/2026

Welp. Know what that means? Lol probably not what you expect.

Four panel Anakin and Padame meme.

1. Anakin: "Looks like that rusted thorough"

2. Padame, excited: "We need to go shopping for more right?"

3. Anakin staring intensly

4. Pademen, upset: "You haven't had more laying around unused for years right?"

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Aaron @aaron.chirp.zadzmo.org.ap.brid.gy · 07/07/2026

WHY DOES THIS GFI KEEP TRIPPING ... Oh, that can't be good

A metal power strip in front of a workshop pegboard. There's an odd white powder before one of the outlets.

Zoomed in detail of the strip, moved slightly to show the powder in detail. It looks white and very crystalline.

The bottom of the power strip, where it was contacting the powder. Corrosion has completely eaten through the aluminum casing.

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Aaron @aaron.chirp.zadzmo.org.ap.brid.gy · 04/07/2026

This is flaming hot bullshit. Signed, a happy US hatchback owner that has driven thousands of miles cross country in it. An F-150 or Jeep is like driving a bar stool mounted on a pogo stick attached to a go cart: You're way the fuck up there, it's bouncy […] [Original post on chirp.zadzmo.org]

Screenshot of an intensely agitating article.

"“We tend to buy cars more suited for longer distance highway travel too. Very small hatchback type cars popular in the UK and other European countries are generally terrible for that. They get tons of road noise and vibration and are super fatiguing to drive long distances. Our best selling vehicle, the Ford F150 is a road trip champion.“ "

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Aaron @aaron.chirp.zadzmo.org.ap.brid.gy · 25/06/2026

One of these weirdos, Pellaea atropurpurea. A lot of buildings near them have been demolished recently. Yes this is the exact wall of the exact building I grabbed a few from.

Photo of a weathered old brick wall that's been painted vivid red. An indentation is shaped into the layout of the brick, I assume to allow a downspout or similar conduit; the bricks inside that indentation are a dull-purple or gray color, as they have not been painted.

And it's obvious why - the unpainted brick is barely visible under the lush green fronds of a large mass of green ferns growing in the joints where mortar should be.

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Aaron @aaron.chirp.zadzmo.org.ap.brid.gy · 12/06/2026

This is why you shouldn't make a habit out of playing Kingdom Of Loathing on acid. The police eventually catch up.

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Aaron @aaron.chirp.zadzmo.org.ap.brid.gy · 11/06/2026

Watching a friend's cats. I am NOT allowed to pet him. But if I move my hand away there's violence.

Tabby cat in a dark green couch. My hand is right in front of his paws, and he's staring at it with fatigued looking eyes.

Same scene as previous image, except my hand is only slightly further away, and kitty's paw is blurred as he's swiping at it claws out.

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Aaron @aaron.chirp.zadzmo.org.ap.brid.gy · 10/06/2026

This is important IT'S FINALLY NOT LEAKING. For the first time in maybe five years, the water level stayed at the top more than 24 hours.

Photo of a large lawn pond, zoomed in. It's deep water that appears black in this photo because the liner is black, and the water is clear. There's some lilypads floating on the surface, and hints of bright orange goldfish blurry from being submerged. And a bright white starburst, a reflection of the sun, in the center foreground.

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Aaron @aaron.chirp.zadzmo.org.ap.brid.gy · 10/06/2026

What happens when the overloads that pay rent demand a night owl participate in a release and said night owl gets invited for another drink.

Screenshot of an Android phone with three alarms set tomorrow:

5:20 AM, titled "RELEASE"

5:50 AM, titled "RELEASE!!!!"

6:10 AM, titled "JFC ALLLAAAARM YOU'VE A RELEASE!!!!"

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Aaron @aaron.chirp.zadzmo.org.ap.brid.gy · 05/06/2026

If this isn't about CEOs, CTOs, or members of the board I don't want to hear about it.

Screenshot of news aggregator:

"The Tech Sector's AI Firing Spree : Evening Briefing Americas
Bloomberg News - Thursday Jun 04 21:22"

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Aaron @aaron.chirp.zadzmo.org.ap.brid.gy · 03/06/2026

When I say "even more wildly obsolete construction" ... who remembers Wire Wrap? I'm in my 40's and I absolutely do not.

Electronics protoboard on a hands free work stand. There's a grid of long gold plated pins with a square cross section sticking through. Small blue wires are attached to some of the pins, connecting them; the wires are tightly wrapped around the pins to connect them.

A blue cylindrical tool is hanging off one of the pins, it's what performs the wrap, and is just finishing one.

Other side of the prototype board: four ordinary looking 14 pin DIP sockets are all that's visible. Their pins are on the opposite side and what wires are being wrapped onto.

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Aaron @aaron.chirp.zadzmo.org.ap.brid.gy · 03/06/2026

I got the bugs ironed out of this old boat anchor long ago. Fires up perfectly every time, then restart XDM and off I go.

Old beige Hewlett Packard X terminal connected to a small LCD monitor and a very weathered AT keyboard.

The screen shows a PDF render of a mildly complicated digital logic schematic.

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Aaron @aaron.chirp.zadzmo.org.ap.brid.gy · 03/06/2026

The 7475a has a built in test demo plot that works out all the features, great test run. ... not the serial port. 😭

My hand holding a freshly printed 7475a demo plot. It's mostly green and black - there should be more colors but it couldn't grab all the pens - and the stacked bar graph's components aren't properly rectangular, nor aligned.

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Aaron @aaron.chirp.zadzmo.org.ap.brid.gy · 03/06/2026

Hmmm let's check the flow control on the terminal server perhaps.

My hand holding the "finished" schematic. It's thick black lines everywhere in no order, no recognizable pattern, like some kind of Jackson Pollock painting.

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Aaron @aaron.chirp.zadzmo.org.ap.brid.gy · 03/06/2026

Oh dear, something is very wrong. My schematic is bad but not nearly _this_ bad

HP7475a plotter trying to render my KiCAD schematic.

The paper is a huge mess of black lines going everywhere and NOT a schematic.

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Aaron @aaron.chirp.zadzmo.org.ap.brid.gy · 22/05/2026

Look at this psychedelic mayhem. Just .. loooook. It's like Transport Tycoon got forced down a rabbit hole by the Large Hadron Collider.

Screenshot of OpenTTD in the "Toyland" terrain. There's a loop of railroad track connecting a roll-on-roll-off station that looks fairly normal, but everything else is super weird. There's a small forest of vertical yellow pipes belching bubbles into the atmosphere ( A "Bubble Generator" industry ), the grass is all checkerboard patterns of green and red, instead of trees there's psychedelic looking mushrooms, vivid multicolored cones - some upside down - and puffs of cotton candy floating in the air on strings. It's an Alice In Wonderlandian Nightmare.

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Aaron @aaron.chirp.zadzmo.org.ap.brid.gy · 20/05/2026

I know not what kind of Hoya this is, I assumed some cultivar of Carnosa as it's leaves are unremarkable, but it blooms differently. Same shape but the flowers are vivid dark purple-ish red and not pale pink, and the scent is intense. Despite being several […] [Original post on chirp.zadzmo.org]

A Hoya blossom in my hand. It's a ball-shaped cluster about 5 inches in diameter, made of small five pointed flowers, all deep burgundy red, with tiny white spots on the tips. Green leaves set on a white window frame in a red painted wall in are all out of focus in the background.

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Aaron @aaron.chirp.zadzmo.org.ap.brid.gy · 16/05/2026

I, uh, hope this person is satisfied with their life.

Screenshot of a news aggregator:

"I spent 28 years climbing the ranks at The Cheesecake Factory, from line cook to senior VP, by asking my bosses these 3 questions
Business Insider - Saturday May 16 19:38"

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Aaron @aaron.chirp.zadzmo.org.ap.brid.gy · 22/04/2026

Me after working twenty of the past 48 hours.

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Aaron @aaron.chirp.zadzmo.org.ap.brid.gy · 22/04/2026

I could have told them that before they even started.

News aggregator screenshot:

"Exclusive: SpaceX says unproven AI space data centers may not be commercially viable, filing shows

CNA - Tuesday Apr 21 21:21"

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Aaron @aaron.chirp.zadzmo.org.ap.brid.gy · 20/04/2026

Returning upstairs to bed down for the night: what's that lovely smell? Oh yeah. That's what a Hoya that just opened smells like. Fills entire rooms in the house for a day. #bloomscrolling

A freshly opened Hoya Carnosa blossom in my hand. It looks like half a geodesic dome, each "panel" being a light pink five petaled flower with a dark red center. Leaves of the Hoya visible in the background hanging in front of the bedroom window.

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Aaron @aaron.chirp.zadzmo.org.ap.brid.gy · 20/04/2026

Immediate quick wins with just the multimeter continuity test.: VDD, VSS, SClock, and DATA pins on the Micrel chio go directly to the header. Having a sizeable, stable monitor to view a datasheet helps a lot, thanks Envizex!

HP X terminal in the background, with xpdf showing the pinout of the controller IC on it's screen. The display module is in front if the keyboard, beyond a sketchpad of graph paper where I'm drawing a pinout, on which my multimeter is also laying. Huge mess of lose screws and electronic parts are everywhere; I need to clean yet this is after I cleaned.

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Aaron @aaron.chirp.zadzmo.org.ap.brid.gy · 20/04/2026

Time to reverse engineer this thing. Datasheets for all the ICs, and that VFD, were trivially easy to find. The datasheet for that Micrel chip makes me believe it'll be trivial to get a standard microcontroller ( like an Arduino knockoff ) talking to this […] [Original post on chirp.zadzmo.org]

Display board from a vending machine. Not huge; fits in my hand. It has a vacuum fluorescent display tube with 10 characters in a single row, each a 14 segment layout - the kind with an X shape that can show letters, not just numbers - with a period next to each.

Back side of board. There's a Micrel 10937P-50 VFD controller, a large integrated circuit in a plastic DIP-40 package. There's also a 4000 series quad NOR gate and a TLC274 quad opamp, both plastic DIP-14.

Numerous passive parts as well: diodes, resistors, small ceramic capacitors, a couple of TO-92 transistors.

Very noticeable on the right hand side is a 12 pin connector to some kind of cable, with only 11 pins installed, presumably to prevent connecting a cable backwards.

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Aaron @aaron.chirp.zadzmo.org.ap.brid.gy · 16/04/2026

As a sysadmin twenty years into my career, I spent a lot of time in datacenters. But it's also been a long time since I stepped foot in one, nearly five years now. I've a level of seniority that racking and cabling is below my pay grade. Combine that with […] [Original post on chirp.zadzmo.org]

A very dark photograph with a handful of points of light:

Some are clearly monitor screens, at haphazard angles. The rest are power or activity indicators. Some of those indicators illuminate a box around them.

If the lights were on, what you would see is a server rack loaded with a bunch of old computer hardware, much of which is turned on.

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Aaron @aaron.chirp.zadzmo.org.ap.brid.gy · 16/04/2026

Me, a long time NetBSD user, working a Redhat sysadmin gig to pay rent.

Iconic "this is fine" meme, modified. The original showed a dog sipping coffee in a room where everything is on fire, and saying "this is fine."

This version has the BSD mascot, a cute red cartoon daemon holding a trident, instead of a dog. Everything is still on fire.

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Aaron @aaron.chirp.zadzmo.org.ap.brid.gy · 03/04/2026

"The technology works, Clearly you're just prompting it wrong" www.forbes.com/councils/forbesbusin…

Screenshot of linked article:

"This is the great paradox of the AI era. Companies are spending billions on a technology that, for most, delivers disappointing results. The problem, however, is not the technology. It is the flawed assumption that AI is a plug-and-play solution for efficiency. The reason most AI investments are failing is that companies are trying to automate a broken process. They are using a revolutionary tool to get to the wrong answer faster."

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Aaron @aaron.chirp.zadzmo.org.ap.brid.gy · 16/03/2026

TWO 'A's?!?! he loudly complained when I told him how to spell my name.

My hand holding a CD case, for the album "No Sleep Daemon v2.0" by Seabound

Inside of said CD case, showing the CD with the intelligible signature of the front man of the band Seabound

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Aaron @aaron.chirp.zadzmo.org.ap.brid.gy · 16/03/2026

It's a real mess down here but improving.

A server rack in a cluttered basement with grey cinderblock walls. The rack has a purple "Digital PDP/11" over red "Digital Equipment Corporation - Maynard, Massachusetts" plastic placard decorating the top, as it's an actual PDP/11 rack missing the side trim.

Mounted, top to bottom, is:

- A powered off Sun Netra T1-AC200

- A powered off, and empty, HP MSA50 disk drive shelf

- A Perle IOLan+Rack terminal server

- A 16 port gigabit ethernet switch

- A cable organizer stuffed full of ethernet cables, plugged into the switch above

- A 3 rack unit subrack containing multiple Pi form factor single board computers

- An IBM RS/6000 model B50, powered off

- an HP J2700 disk shelf, mostly full of 2.5" drives

- Endure, the Sun T2000 mentioned earlier thus thread, she has a sleek but dusty silver faceplate

- A black 1U mini-ITX rack mount computer, which is Obscene, also mentioned previously

A 2 rack unit Tripp-Lite UPS

To the bottom right is another huge and ancient beige RS/6000 tower computer, also powered off.

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Aaron @aaron.chirp.zadzmo.org.ap.brid.gy · 06/03/2026

And this is all Firefox will do😭 It can't even render it's buttons or error message.

X terminal screen. Xeyes - a program with two eyes that follow your mouse pointer around - is in the top left corner. There's a blank window in the center that says "Close Firefox" on the title bar with no further information.

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Aaron @aaron.chirp.zadzmo.org.ap.brid.gy · 06/03/2026

XDM is putting up quite the fight, but in the meantime, I can set $DISPLAY and stuff... just works. Fluxbox threw some warnings about missing XRandr but chugged on. Here's Dillo at least. Firefox, as always the petulant little child that demands to be […] [Original post on chirp.zadzmo.org]

HP Envizex X terminal, powered up and running, with a standard Fluxbox based desktop in BlueNight theme. There's a white xterm process running, as well as the Dillo web browser showing a news aggregator website.

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Aaron @aaron.chirp.zadzmo.org.ap.brid.gy · 05/03/2026

There we go. Now to setup XDM somewhere. #retrocomputing

Envizex X terminal up and running, showing a blank X desktop with nothing but an X cursor.

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Aaron @aaron.chirp.zadzmo.org.ap.brid.gy · 05/03/2026

"If you have a 100Mbit network, then you might run into problems because the networksupport of the Envizex is somewhat old." Uhhhhh what about gigabit ... nevermind. Didn't expect to say "Glad I didn't recycle that ten megabit hub" at any point in my life but here we are.

Beige 16 port 1U D-Link ethernet hub. It's so old speed isn't mentioned anywhere in the labeling; there was only one speed at the time.

It has two blue ethernet wires connected and is powered on.

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Aaron @aaron.chirp.zadzmo.org.ap.brid.gy · 05/03/2026

.... and I will drag this machine kicking and screaming into the 21st Century regardless of it liking it or not. #retrocomputing

HP Envizex X terminal setup on a hardwood floor with a large black LCD monitor on top. It's a "pizzabox" form factor made for such layout. Authentic, but dirty, era appropriate HP breached branded keyboard and mouse up front.

The monitor is on showing a setup screen.

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Aaron @aaron.chirp.zadzmo.org.ap.brid.gy · 04/03/2026

A lot of my problems with this company come down to this. I have a problem I need to engage a vendor about? I have to go through the Engineering team. As they think I'm a software developer, they kid glove me about shit I've been doing my entire […] [Original post on chirp.zadzmo.org]

Animated GIF of Ron Swanson at a hardware store, telling an employee "I know more than you"

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Aaron @aaron.chirp.zadzmo.org.ap.brid.gy · 02/03/2026

Minute 40 of our ten minute daily standup

A large blue dumpster along a concrete wall, it's contents fully engulfed in flames.

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Aaron @aaron.chirp.zadzmo.org.ap.brid.gy · 01/03/2026

I missed a lot of the news cycle today because I was in the woods. It wasn't the prettiest hike - but this particular stream had a very lovely babbling sound.

View of a small stream of flowing water at the bottom of a forested valley.

There's exposed rock cliff to the right, stands of hardwood trees without leaves to the left. Water is flowing over a sharp but short ledge - far too short to call it a waterfall - into a calm pool that's reflecting the trees above. Brown rocks and a thick bed of downed leaves are visible submerged in the pool.

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