iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Joseph Hewitt @jhewitt.net · 21/12/2025

I got a 32x32 pixel board from Action and used the NS API to make a map of delayed/canceled trains in The Netherlands. I'm using the PyPixelColor library to send the data via Bluetooth to the panel. Red = at least one delayed train Blue = at least one canceled train

A 32x32 pixel board with a 3D printed diffuser placed on the face of the device. Multiple pixels are lit up with some resemblance to the shape of The Netherlands. 3 colors are in use on the pixels: green, red, and blue. The majority of the illuminated board is green with various red pixels and a small number of blue pixels dotted around. Many parts of the board are dark with unlit pixels showing the approximate border of The Netherlands.

An open box stating "B.K Light LED pixel board" resting on top of a laptop keyboard. The laptop display is partially visible showing a map of train lines in The Netherlands.

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Joseph Hewitt @jhewitt.net · 18/11/2025

Noticed quite a drop at the load balancer that handles my incoming traffic but it seems to be slightly improving again.

A line graph titled "requests by entrypoint" with "requests per second" as the value, and 3 different entrypoints are graphed. The exact numerical values are censored. A drop of traffic can be seen starting at slightly after 12:30 and seems to start improving slightly before 12:40.

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Joseph Hewitt @jhewitt.net · 06/10/2025

Obviously you should only do this to laptops you legally own and have the rights to modify. But if you happen to have an old-ish Thinkpad with a supervisor password which you have, uh, forgotten, then maybe just using a piece of wire connected to ground is all you need to fix it :)

A wire screwed into a grounded hole in a PCB

A lenovo BIOS prompt stating "Enter Password". This is shown before being able to access the BIOS.

A BIOS system prompt stating "Supervisor Password" with 2 boxes beneath stating "Enter New Password" and "Confirm New Password". This page is accessed from within the BIOS and allows the supervisor password to be changed.

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Joseph Hewitt @jhewitt.net · 06/10/2025

I'm looking at this area of a ThinkPad motherboard with illicit intent.

A small magnified section of a ThinkPad motherboard PCB. A large unpopulated connector labeled "JTAG1" is visible with a "Lenovo ThinkEngine 62D518FTG" IC chip below. The board also features a selection of resistors, capacitors, and other small components which are not the main focus of the image.

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Joseph Hewitt @jhewitt.net · 17/08/2025

Finished editing the photos from @why2025.bsky.social and really like the vibe of this shot from one of the foggy evenings.

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Joseph Hewitt @jhewitt.net · 19/02/2025

It works. Also running 3rd party firmware (Rockbox) now.

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Joseph Hewitt @jhewitt.net · 18/02/2025

Opened it up and removed the mechanical hard drive. I'm going to replace it with an iFlash Solo which lets me insert an SD card for storage instead of a spinning disk.

Disassembled iPod with the hard drive disconnected.

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Joseph Hewitt @jhewitt.net · 13/02/2025

I used photorec to extract the files since the iPod had been reset, then used ffprobe to pull out the metadata from media files. For each file synced with iTunes, you get something like this since iTunes often leaves quite some metadata. This makes it easy to see when syncs happened.

A block of JSON text, including entries such as "title", "artist", "album", "date", and "encoder" which includes the iTunes version which synced the file.

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Joseph Hewitt @jhewitt.net · 01/02/2025

Went for a walk recently and met this friendly cat :) This photo was taken on Kodak Vision 500T 35mm cine film which I developed at home.

Orange cat with small patches of white, stepping onto grass in the direction of the camera

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Joseph Hewitt @jhewitt.net · 24/01/2025

Deactivated my Twitter account today. Still being on that platform after recent events just feels dirty.

x.com page stating "Your account is deactivated. Sorry to see you go"

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Joseph Hewitt @jhewitt.net · 11/01/2025

The relative humidity in my apartment averages around 30% so I got a humidifier. I tried to avoid it, but the one I got was an ultrasonic version (the site didn't say that though 😑). This graph shows the particulate matter (PM) after running it, since it vaporizes all of the impurities in the water.

A line graph with particulate matter (PM) on the X axis and time on the Y axis (January 10th at 18:00 to January 11th at 15:00). The PM value is often at 0, but shows 2 periods where it exceeds 100, reaching as high as 175. The first period is around 19:30 until 22:30 on January 10th where the average is around 120. The second period is around 09:15 to around 15:00 on January 11th where the average is around 130.

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Joseph Hewitt @jhewitt.net · 15/11/2024

My Olympus OM-1 film camera jammed recently and I decided to look inside to see if I could find any obvious cause. I suspect the previous owner was a little rough with it because some plastic on this gear was snapped and the shard had jammed the mechanics. I removed the shard and now it works again.

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Joseph Hewitt @jhewitt.net · 26/10/2024

I put a bunch of these small E-ink grocery pricetag displays running OpenEPaperLink around my apartment. I'm running StableDiffusion on my home server to generate AI cat pictures and push them out to the tags.

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Joseph Hewitt @jhewitt.net · 03/12/2023

The hardware is nice but officially it only supports an outdated customized kernel. I spent this weekend determining exactly what changes their kernel has to reproduce it on other versions. Now I have a newer version and will soon work on fixing compatibility for kernel 6.1.

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Joseph Hewitt @jhewitt.net · 30/11/2023

I finally received and built my uConsole; a handheld Raspberry Pi based portable computer.

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Joseph Hewitt @jhewitt.net · 07/10/2023

I've now turned this into a smart fridge magnet showing the current fridge&freezer temps, a random cat photo, a QR code redirecting to the latest live temperatures, and the time the epaper was last refreshed. It updates every 5 minutes but that can be customized.

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Joseph Hewitt @jhewitt.net · 07/10/2023

I'm testing some wireless epaper displays. I now have them integrated into our home automation meaning I can display stats or random cat photos from an API.

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Joseph Hewitt @jhewitt.net · 06/10/2023

I got a used ThinkPad T480 today, happy to see it is configured to use an M.2 drive rather than SATA. I have spent the last few hours stress testing it and saw no stability issues. I have a new 1TB SSD and 2x16GB RAM sticks arriving tomorrow to upgrade it with.

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Joseph Hewitt @jhewitt.net · 01/10/2023

I started an open source (hardware & software) project for wardriving based on the ESP32. It captures GPS coordinates along with information about nearby WiFi, Bluetooth, and cell towers. The data can then be sent to WiGLE for analysis.

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Joseph Hewitt @jhewitt.net · 21/09/2023

It's really simple but I made this board which is part of my open-source wardriving project. It lets you connect 2 ESP32s, GPS, an LCD, a uSD card, and a SIM800L together to capture WiFi and GSM data to upload to WiGLE. There's no SMD on here to make it mostly beginner friendly to build.

2 identical black PCBs showing the front and back. Created by Joseph Hewitt as part of the open-source wardriver.uk project

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