iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

alex! @atctwo.net · 22/09/2026

I've got a bunch of CDs recently but I forgot to put them on this thread :p I want to try to listen to them more often so I might try posting them as I listen to them! today's record is the mountain goats' latest album. the themes are pretty fitting for the stuff I've been feeling recently!

Days by the Mountain Goats sitting on a green cutting board. The album artwork shows 12 times of the day, represented as the sun at different points in the sky

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alex! @atctwo.net · 19/08/2026

spent tonight playing on my silly scope

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alex! @atctwo.net · 17/08/2026

yesterday was a pretty yucky day for me but it's all ok since i got to see Camp Miasma at my uni's film theature. very good film, like any jane schoenbrun work i feel like i've had my emotions reduced into a fine and delicious paste. would recommend!

an embroidered patch on a wooden table. it reads "I Survived Camp Miasma at QFT", and shows the sun rising over mountains behind some trees. the patch has a yellow border

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alex! @atctwo.net · 01/08/2026

got a new thermal receipt printer? don't know what to do with it? try printing a live feed of the atproto firehose! you certainly won't regret printing a live feed of the atproto firehose

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alex! @atctwo.net · 20/07/2026

goodbye #emfcamp! this has been one of the most surreal and incredible experiences of my life, and hopefully i'll be there next year! (photo gallery coming soon !)

a picture of the EMF sign at night. it's glowing blue and a little red, illuminating the grass below it

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alex! @atctwo.net · 14/07/2026

packing stuff for my first emf camp!! i have totally no idea how much to bring... this is enough equipment, right?

a large equipment bag sitting on a bed. it contains multiple sections that contain (among other things): multiple extension reels, a power bank, an analog telephone, a USB modem, a DECT cordless phone, a mikrotik router, a small network switch, one million ethernet cables, a HackRF One, and some (unassembled) mesh nodes.

to the bag's left are two cisco 2960 series switches, and to its top are two 8x8 VGA matrix switches, and a blahaj. a second smaller bag sits in the top left

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alex! @atctwo.net · 30/06/2026

I've been working on my battlebots today. I think my desk gets really visually interesting when it's this busy so I'm sharing it!

picture of my desk, its a wooden bench with a deltarune chapter 2 deskmat. there is a lot of stuff sitting on it, including
my laptop
a lithium battery charger
a large screwdriver set
many screwdrivers
multiple disassembled small robots
a flight controller
an arduino uno
a soldering iron
a small vice
countless untracable wires going everywhere
two monitors are visible in the background

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alex! @atctwo.net · 30/05/2026

today's new CDs! Blood Orange's Essex Honey, which i've been listening to a lot (but very out-of-order) for the past half a year Boards of Canada's new album Inferno. I've never actually owned a BOC album before and this seems like a good place to start!

two CDs sitting on a blue cutting board.
the left one is Essex Honey by Blood Orange. the artwork shows a schoolboy walking down a street holding a basket ball
the right one is Inferno by Boards of Canada. the artwork shows a group of people in a forest-type area. the image seems very faded

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alex! @atctwo.net · 18/05/2026

last bandcamp friday i got Weyes Blood's Titanic Rising on CD! is the type of music i really like getting lost in while taking the train and staring out the window. listening to it feels kinda like floating

a digipak CD case sits on a cluttered desk, sandwiched between a blue and pink and white mechanical keyboard, a green flask, and a red tin. my laptop's sitting in the background.

the cd artwork features Weyes Blood in a blue bedroom which appears to be underwater. light is pouring through the curtains.

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alex! @atctwo.net · 01/05/2026

it looks like my PDS migration worked

screenshot of a bluesky notification, with the title "Chiitan🌈ちぃたん☆ liked your post (5m)". the referenced post simply says "test" and has attached an image of a plush Kasane Teto on a white background

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alex! @atctwo.net · 29/04/2026

next is arlo parks' new album! i really enjoyed the singles from this one, and i was able to get a bundle that came with the album on cassette as well as a live CD

Several items sitting on a blue cutting board.

Top left is a CD of Arlo Parks' album Ambiguous Desire. The artwork shows Parks sitting in a car, looking at the camera. The picture is taken from the back passenger seat, and the outside of the car is blurry.

In the middle is a cassette tape of Ambiguous Desire. It features a white cover with a drawing of a heart with an arrow going through it.

Top right is a CD of Live in London (live recordings of Parks' music from across her career). The cover shows Parks performing on a blue-lit stage in a dark room.

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alex! @atctwo.net · 29/04/2026

starting with a pile of unsorted CDs i have on my desk. i found this norah jones record at a charity shop for 50p. i don't know any of the songs on this CD but i like her other stuff so why not?

CD of Norah Jones' album Feel Like Home sitting on a blue cutting mat. The album artwork is mostly a pale orange, with Jones pictured looking downwards to the right of the artwork

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alex! @atctwo.net · 17/04/2026

so i got the new tomodachi life. i'm about two hours in and it's Very Good

screenshot from tomodachi life showing my Mii in her room. she has glasses, brown wavy hair and crudely drawn cat ears. she's wearing a green sweater, dark floral skirt and black leg warmers.

the room's floor and walls are made from blue wood panels, and there's a little kitchenette in the left and a mirror, umbrella, and a roomba-type thing in the right

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alex! @atctwo.net · 13/04/2026

went to my local ikea last week and made a new friend!

part of the ikea towel section. on the left are blue towels and on the right are green. right in the middle, on the green side is a little hedgehog plush wrapped up in a towel

an ikea set with a comfy outdoor chair, a nice table, some lamps and some fake plants on a grey carpet in a cubicle with grey walls. sitting cozily on the chair is the little tiny hedgehog plush

in the lower right of the image, the hedgehog plush sits on a shelf. the rest of the image shows the display of string lights (mostly colourful and spherical) sitting behind the hedgehog on a grey wall

another ikea set, this time showing off some outdoor furniture. there's a black table with some chairs. on the table is laid out four place mats with sets of dishes and glasses, as well as a fake plant on a silver dish in the middle of the table. in the background are shelves of brown ikea flat pack boxes.

the hedgehog is sitting on one of the chairs, waiting for its yummy food!

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alex! @atctwo.net · 12/03/2026

so it turns out that this VGA matrix switcher doesn't mind if the RGB video channels happen to contain audio signals and not video signals

the VGA switcher (a large 1U navy box with lots of white buttons and eight 7-segment displays) sitting on a blue cutting board on a wooden desk.

my phone, sitting on top of the switcher, is playing music. it's connected to a USB-C to 3.5mm jack adapter, with a cable going to some wires going to the back of the switcher.

behind the switcher is a little black box with some audio jacks and knobs. one of the jacks has a short cable leading to the back of the switcher. the box has a (USB) cable coming out of the side going offscreen to my computer

the back of the switcher, showing an array of VGA video connectors. the ones on the left are labeled "Inputs", and input 7 and 8 are visible. on the right of the inputs are the outputs, of which all 8 are visible.

the cables the phone is connected to are going directly into the connector labelled Input 8. the wires going to the black USB box are coming from Output 4.

for both connectors, the right audio channel is passed through the red video channel, and the left audio is being passed through the green video channel.

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alex! @atctwo.net · 22/02/2026

I'm repairing some portable electronic scales with USB charging. it has this big supercapacitor for holding charge but nope! it's really a capacitor-shaped li-ion battery!

a capacitor-shaped battery taped to a plastic enclosude with a bundle of red, green, and white wires. the markings on the battery read "QL Li-ion 3.7V". the battery is white with a black strip with plus signs to indicate the positive terminal

the battery sitting on its own on a blue cutting board. It's red and black wires run to the right side of the image. the markings on the battery read "QL Li-ion 3.7V". the battery is white with a black strip with plus signs to indicate the positive terminal

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alex! @atctwo.net · 02/02/2026

it's been exactly one year since I made my first post on bluesky! i still don't post as often as i would like but it's a start! i made this thing around this time last year, and now seems like a good time to share it!

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alex! @atctwo.net · 23/12/2025

my thermal label printer glitched and produced this

a thermal label printer on a wooden table, with its tape door open. a roll of small narrow labels sits in front of it, with the first few inches of tape unrolled from the roll. on every visible label is printed a monochrome dithered image of hugh laurie as doctor gregory house staring directly at you

a closer look at the printed labels, still on the tape. on each label is printed a dithered image of hugh laurie as doctor house from the hit tv series house

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alex! @atctwo.net · 03/12/2025

I'm doing some debugging on my cat battlebot and i think it looks pretty cool when its hooked up to an oscilloscope like this!

A cat-shaped combat battlebot. The top lid is removed showing the insides of the bot - wheels, battery connectors, motor and drivers, and lots of wires. Connecting everything together is a small microcontroller board, to which three oscilloscope probes and a USB cable are attached.

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alex! @atctwo.net · 29/11/2025

finally got round to modding my 3DS with a usb-c port! my work doesn't look very clean but it does work pretty well! (except the right shoulder button which no longer works 🙃)

the insides of my disassembled 3ds scattered across a wooden table. in the centre is the mainboard, to the left are parts of the blue shell and the lower screen, and to the right is a screw tray full of screws and 3ds parts

close up of the USB port on the reassembled 3ds. the hole in the shell has very clear filing marks, and the usb port itself is slightly wonky

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alex! @atctwo.net · 22/10/2025

i don't need sleep, i need to make fun animations in OpenSCAD

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alex! @atctwo.net · 17/10/2025

snilicone (silicone snail)

a small snail cast from pure silicone, chilling in the leaves of a small fake eucalyptus plant. in the background are the tops of several real plants, against a wooden fence

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alex! @atctwo.net · 30/09/2025

i've been playing with tiling window managers for linux recently. i haven't really done much custom theming but i made some modifications to the "Spotlight Dark" theme for rofi by Newman Sanchez, and i really like how it looks!

an application launcher dialog on top of a pretty desktop wallpaper. the wallpaper features art of a tree in front of a small coastal village.

at the top of the application launcher is a search box - the search prompt is a cat icon followed by "nya". below this are a row of five buttons representing different launcher tabs - in order, these are applications, visual studio code history, run command, window list, and calculator. the rest of the dialog contains a list of available applications, along with their application icons.

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alex! @atctwo.net · 04/09/2025

my cat bot had a fun time at my local battlebots meetup last night!

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alex! @atctwo.net · 05/08/2025

these are cat-shaped battlebots i made for my local battlebots competition!!! so far in testing, they seem to be able to tank damage pretty well, mostly due to their flexible TPU plating. so i redesigned it a little so that the whole thing was made from TPU. now its soft and squishy!

picture of the new version of the robot, with a pink lid and a black chassis, and a pink spinner weapon. the chassis has curved sides so it can't get stuck on its side

the new design sitting on top of the old design. you can see the difference in shape of the chassis given the new design has curved sides. the old design looks a lot more blocky. other than that, both robots look mostly the same

top-down view of the two bots, facing opposite directions. the new one is on the left, pink side facing up, and the old one on the right has its blue side facing up. if you look closely at the old design, you can see the seam between the outer TPU shell and the inner PETG chassis. the new design has no such seam

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alex! @atctwo.net · 05/08/2025

didn't get much done today but at least I found One East Caribbean Dollar!

One East Caribbean Dollar. A small silver coin sitting on a black table. There's an illustration of a sailboat on the coin, above which lies text reading "East Caribbean States 2012"

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alex! @atctwo.net · 11/07/2025

i think that's it for now! that's most of the interesting things about this server that i wanted to talk about. if i find anything else interesting i'll add them to this thread later but for now i need to put all of this back together lol

picture of all the parts i took out of the server, all laid out on a wooden table. the open server is sitting in the top right. the parts surrounding it are: one power supply module, the motherboard and its IO shield, the RAID card, the network card, the two sticks of RAM, the CPU and its cooler, a few SATA cables, the two internal harddrives, one of the hotswappable fans, the slim drive top cover, and the internal drive mount panel. my screwdriver set is also sitting in the lower right

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alex! @atctwo.net · 11/07/2025

here's the front panel IO board. it's got leds for disk activity, warnings, lan activity, buttons for reset and mute and power, and two USB 2.0 ports. it's got a 6-way DIP switch in the middle to control the chassis fans

a green PCB mounted to the top of the chassis, with many side-mount buttons and LEDs, two USB connectors, and a series of 2.54mm pitch headers for connecting to the server motherboard. there is a black chip in the middle beside a buzzer, and a blue DIP switch to the left

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alex! @atctwo.net · 11/07/2025

taking the rest of the top panel off, above the drive bays are two bays for slim drives. i think one's intended for an optical drive and the other for a floppy drive! which i would absolutely install if i had one. also, in the middle is the front IO board

picture of the top of the server with the top panel removed. it's split into two sections; the left one has a small floppy drive adapter board in it labeled JM215A VER:1.0, while the right section is empty. The middle section has a small green board toward the front of the chassis, which will be shown in more detail in the next post.

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alex! @atctwo.net · 11/07/2025

here's the best picture of the SAS backplane i could get without taking the fan panel out. there are four mini SAS HD connectors (each carry signals for four of the drive bays), and four molex power connectors plugged into the PSU backplane

picture of the left half of the sas backplane. on the left are four molex connectors plugged into the backplane. there are holes in the PCB to allow air to flow through the drives. there are two connectors at the top of the board with wires running to underneath a metal panel

picture of the right half of the sas backplane. on the right are four mini SAS HD connectors (SFF-8087) plugged into the backplane. there are a few thick cables running from the bottom of the chassis to the top, obscuring part of the image.

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alex! @atctwo.net · 11/07/2025

next are the fans. these are 80mm fans which are housed in these caddy thingies, which allow them to be hotswapped! i will probably replace them with noctua fans at some point but they're 32mm deep which i don't think noctua make?

picture of the fan caddy. it's made of blue plastic and has holes in the back for air to flow. the fan cable comes out the top and down to the centre of the back, where the connector is held pointing downwards

picture of the front of the fan caddy, showing the fan itself. it's a FFB0812EHE by Delta Electronics

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alex! @atctwo.net · 11/07/2025

the three PSUs mount into a backplane which provides several common power connectors: a 24 pin atx, a 4 pin CPU power, an 8 pin pcie power connector, and a few 4 pin molex con connectors. it's not modular but it's really cool that it "combines" the three PSUs into one set of common cables!

picture of the inside of the chassis. at the back there is a large shiny box which houses the power supplies. coming out of it are several bundles of cables, which each terminate in different ATX-standard power connectors

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alex! @atctwo.net · 11/07/2025

I think I'm done with the computer, so on to the chassis! it came with three 380W power supplies in really good condition. they're YM-7381C supplies and I'm really glad it came with them because the cost of 3 of these is more than what I paid for the whole server...

picture of the three power supplies mounted into the back of the chassis. they each have a C14 power socket, a small fan, and a steel handle for pulling them out of the server.

the top of a power supply. its very long, and you can sees the fan and handle at the left of the supply. there's a white label on top, showing product info, rail voltages, and safety info

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alex! @atctwo.net · 11/07/2025

it came with this windows COA for Windows Unified Data Store Server 2003, an obscure Server 2003 variant that was only released to Dell (according to this archive.org item: archive.org/details/WUDS...). anyway here's a product key for windows unified data store server 2003!

a Microsoft certificate of authority for "Win Unified DataStorSvr2003 x64 1-4 CPU Std". The product key is KT2JM-K37JG-YMV9M-RWT7M-XWP6J"

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alex! @atctwo.net · 11/07/2025

there aren't any drives in the front bays, but there are two Fujitsu MHY2080BH 80GB (?) SATA drives. I'm guessing they're RAIDed but I'll check what's on them later.

two identical drives attached to the metal plate that was attached to the top of the chassis. they are 2.5" drives, and have a large white label almost covering the metal lid of the drive. the label has lots of writing (mostly product codes in regulatory info) and a large barcode in the middle

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alex! @atctwo.net · 11/07/2025

the CPU is an Intel Core 2 Duo E6420, which doesn't seem do be intended for server use.

close up of the CPU. its a small green square with a large metal lid attached to it. the lid is inscribed with the CPU's model number but it's difficult to make out

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alex! @atctwo.net · 11/07/2025

the motherboard has been freed! it's a Tyan Toledo I965r S5180, which does seem to be designed for use in servers. here's a review from phoronix: www.phoronix.com/review/668

a top-down picture of the motherboard from inside the chassis. all the expansion cards and ram have been removed, but the heatsinks are still attached

close up of the silkscreen markings on the board showing the model number, and the text "Designed in the USA, Tested to comply with FCC standard"

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alex! @atctwo.net · 11/07/2025

next is this ARC1280ML pcie sata-II raid controller. it uses mini SAS connectors but I think it only supports the SATA-II protocol. so I'm probably going to get a much more modern SAS HBA at a later point (also this thing uses a ddr2 stick for cache!)

a larger green board. it also has gold edge connectors at the bottom but they're a lot denser than the last card. there's a huge black heatsink to the left, and a few black chips scattered around. there are four mini SAS connectors on the right edge, a RJ45 connector on the left edge, and a DDR2 ram slot at the top.

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alex! @atctwo.net · 11/07/2025

here are the two expansion cards the server came with. this is an Intel pro/1000 mt dual port (PWLA8492MT), which is a 1Gbit PCI (not pcie) network card.

a green PCI expansion card, with a row of gold edge connectors at the bottom edge.

there are two Ethernet jacks on the left side, and several black chips dotted across the board.

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alex! @atctwo.net · 11/07/2025

I got this on ebay, mostly for the chassis, but the listing was actually for a whole server! there's a core 2 duo board with 2GB DDR2 RAM, so I guess it's not a very useful server these days. but I bought it for the chassis, which is perfect! I'm going to look at this board anyway (for fun)!

top-down view of the inside of the server. the left half is where the motherboard and other computer parts live, which are obscured by a large metal panel. a shiny box can be seen at the top of the left half; this is the power supply enclosure. in the middle of the chassis is a metal divider. to the right are four blue boxes; these are hotswappable 80mm fans. on the right of the chassis is a large metal panel, which the drives live under.

close-up of the motherboard. it's a green board. of note on the board are a small metal heatsink (for the chipset), and a larger round heatsink with a fan attached (for the CPU). two green RAM sticks are inserted, and two expansion cards are inserted. there are wires grouped using cable ties going all over the inside of the case.

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alex! @atctwo.net · 11/07/2025

I'm mostly interested in using this chassis for its 16 SAS drive bays, so I can (finally) add storage to my server.

closer image of the front panel. there are 16 drive slots, 10 have drive caddies in them while the other 6 are empty. at the top are 2 USB ports, some status LEDs, and the power switch. the left and right sides of the panel have handles, and under the left panel is a badge saying "Westek Technologies"

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alex! @atctwo.net · 11/07/2025

I made an impulse buy... this is a 3U server (chassis)! I got it to upgrade my current server into this new chassis. there's a lot of interesting stuff in here so I'm going to make a wee thread!

a 3U server on a wooden table. its a long steel box with a black front panel that has 16 drive bays (6 are empty). a rail is attached to the side and there's a bag of screws taped on top

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