iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Kasami @kasami.bsky.social · 16/10/2026

After episode two nothing like that yet but we'll see. Did get a bit of a pointing wojak pose or whatever this is called though.

Ushio from Tetsuryou! meet with Tetsudou Musume is pointing at a train with her arm outstretched behind her while facing the viewer.

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Kasami @kasami.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

It's fun to look around old MC world downloads and find stuff like this and wonder about the people who built them

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Kasami @kasami.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Chrome did this entirely unprompted last night so I finally switched to firefox after putting that off for Way Too Long

Omnibox suggestions in Google Chrome while on a pixiv art page:

Ask Google about this page - pixiv.net
- Analyze the artwork's style and themes
- Describe the characters' relationships
- Identify the artwork's visual elements

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Kasami @kasami.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Heheh yeah now we're talking. I don't have something with a different color backlight that I can test with right now but this looks pretty good all things considered.

A small LCD screen with the original rear polarizer removed and a new reflective polarizer inserted at an angle. The text on the screen is dark, over a bright silver background.

The same screen and polarizer arrangement as the first image, but with a blue backlight activated. The text appears illuminated blue, on a silver background that is now relatively dark.

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Kasami @kasami.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Here's the 25 degree one installed, I messed up the outline a bit but it came out great imo. LCD voltage is a bit low but I have a trimpot for that so I can just turn it up lol

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Kasami @kasami.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

FSTN polarizer from AliExpress works like a charm on a cybiko. A bit annoying that I have to cut it at 45 degrees but I'll take it.

Holding a replacement polarizer sheet partially over a LCD screen that had its original front polarizer removed.

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Kasami @kasami.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Well alright then, guess I didn't need that (I absolutely do need that)

A previously glued connector on a circuit board has ripped away with a cable still attached. Both the solder and glue joints have sheared off.

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Kasami @kasami.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Oh yes and all of this has to fit somewhere inside uh... I'm not sure exactly but this is the exploded view of the main unit. Amplifier bolted to the power transformer I guess?

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Kasami @kasami.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

But by the end, if we ignore the half cooked polarizer, I got another working unit and can finally use my other one to chat with myself or whatever (purple unit is my older one). Bit more work to do before I can reassemble the case and give it batteries but it's coming along nicely.

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Kasami @kasami.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

(More flicker warning) This is what it was doing shortly before it got all glitchy like that. Just scanning normally but suuuper slow until it stopped and almost burned in a line.

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Kasami @kasami.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

(Flicker warning) Cybiko got a little unhappy last night. I think it was due to a bit of moisture from cleaning that found its way to the LCD driver ribbon, because it came good again once it was fully dry. But damn this is one of the spookiest failure modes I've witnessed on anything.

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Kasami @kasami.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

reposted cause I got the year wrong and then forgot the damn image, I'm doing great

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Kasami @kasami.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

Forgot to post this, the LED thing works. I've been fighting with math trying to stop the gamma and white balance making a mess of lower levels and I think I'm getting somewhere. This isn't in the laptop yet, just shoved under the bezel sitting on my desk.

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Kasami @kasami.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

Well that wasn't a complete disaster, should be good for testing tomorrow.

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Kasami @kasami.bsky.social · 08/08/2026

Oh dear I didn't plan this one super well, I totally thought I had more room for connectors here and already built all the other stuff that is meant to plug in here... Well it's for a specific machine and I know I don't need all that space for the mounting hardware so I could just cheat

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Kasami @kasami.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

In other news, AliExpress appears to be trialling time travel

AliExpress package tracking status:

Package leaving origin country/region
Fri | Aug. 07 03:29
...
Your package is estimated to arrive on Aug. 06

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Kasami @kasami.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

Holy, they left a whole debug menu in. Enabled with a single flag. It seems like just camera controls and a second toggle for the FPS unlock. Not sure what all the "Sync" lines in the top left are for, they never change. Also seems to reenable auto tracking when a scripted camera change happens.

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Kasami @kasami.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

Turns out Lucky Star no Mori has a turbo button built in already, it's just normally disabled. Enabling it just requires changing one byte. Then you just hold ctrl to go fast I guess. Ignore the whole resolution and texture quality thing I'm still working on it

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Kasami @kasami.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

Oops she lives in the void now

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Kasami @kasami.bsky.social · 21/07/2026

So uh. It runs. The main cause of yesterday's crashing was that it seems to randomly call the blitter over unintended areas of memory (maybe with a program that isn't meant to emit any pixels? my debug render just fills them all) and trashes it. I hardcoded it here to not write over the CPU area.

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Kasami @kasami.bsky.social · 20/07/2026

If you ignore the fact I don't have the shader/blitter stuff implemented yet and that it eventually crashes... this is awesome. Waaay more progress than I thought I'd make today.

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Kasami @kasami.bsky.social · 19/07/2026

I'd call that a success.

A terminal window running a python script reads:

"... Parallelogram reverse
$ python encode_for_serial.py COM12 102A 4088 F850 1062 408C F850 1092 408F F850 1022 408C F850 9FFF receive
Receiving, press Ctrl C to exit
0x4548 H E
0x4C4C L L
0x524F O R
0x444C L D"

The last few lines spell out "HELLORLD", an intentional misspelling of the common test string "hello world".

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Kasami @kasami.bsky.social · 18/07/2026

Had some ALU issues because I'm doing this in Java and signed-only types are a pain, also forgot to implement the write-back part of the write-back cache. With those fixed it's looking waaaay better but I don't think the unpacked data is correct. Illegal opcode as soon as it tries to jump to it.

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Kasami @kasami.bsky.social · 18/07/2026

That's code running! It's doing it very wrong, but it is running.

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Kasami @kasami.bsky.social · 17/07/2026

Those auction photos of the one I bought are way overexposed, here's one that's more representative of the color but might be a slightly different model. I'm starting to really like white+pink colorways, and that one was pretty cheap and in good condition.

Photo of a Sony VAIO PCG-71311M laptop or similar model in pink.

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Kasami @kasami.bsky.social · 17/07/2026

They used to be real computers

Front view of a pink Sony VAIO PCG-71311N laptop. The photo is slightly overexposed. The majority of the laptop is pink, while the keyboard and surrounding area is white. The screen is showing the desktop of a factory-restored Windows 7 install.

Left edge of the laptop viewed from a low angle. It shows a charge port, an ethernet port, a large fan vent, VGA and HDMI ports, a combined eSATA USB 2.0 port, and a blanked slot for an SD card or similar.

Right edge of the laptop viewed from a low angle. It shows three more USB 2.0 ports and an optical drive.

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Kasami @kasami.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

Sir? Excuse me??? You can't park there.

A small grey squirrel perched in the gap above an open window, in between the frame and an attached fly screen.

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Kasami @kasami.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

Noticed some weird glitching on the title text on Lag Train on youtube. I didn't notice this before and it isn't like this in the source video, so a recent reencode has corrupted it I guess. Oh yeah and it just hit 100 million views, yay

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Kasami @kasami.bsky.social · 02/07/2026

No need to add solder to the new batteries for the cybiko classic. Just shove a piece of paper or similar behind that contact at the top. All others seem fine as-is. I did a bump test and it didn't lose power even once.

A battery contact in a Cybiko Classic, with a small piece of folded paper wedged between the metal contact plate and the plastic casing behind it. The contact plate is bending outward slightly as a result.

Another view of the battery contact plate with paper behind it to bend it out. A replacement battery is installed. The positive tip of the battery doesn't stick out as far as the original, but it is touching the contact thanks to the paper wedge.

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Kasami @kasami.bsky.social · 29/06/2026

Hey so uh, this cap was meant to be 5pF and they put in a 100nF. That's off by a factor of 20,000. Removing it makes the dark LCD issue just go away. If anything it's a tiny bit too light now but within a sensible range to fix it with the normal settings menu.

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Kasami @kasami.bsky.social · 26/06/2026

Two adjacent scanlines from an old raw waveform capture, looks alternated here

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Kasami @kasami.bsky.social · 24/06/2026

This is the RS232 interface circuit in the cybiko. TXDS/RXDS are TTL level. TXDL, RXDL (unlabelled) and RTS are RS232 level. See where RTS goes? Through a reverse diode to C5. When RTS is negative, C5 charges negative. That provides the negative rail for TXDL via R85. RTS does nothing else!

A section of the schematic of a Cybiko Classic showing the serial interface circuit.

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Kasami @kasami.bsky.social · 13/06/2026

Went to try clean/repair the headphone jack in my audio interface, noticed the back of it could unclip and was just gonna try poke something in there... Wtf do you mean you can just take the whole shell off. Rare behringer w? Excuse the shaky one-handed demonstration, wasn't planning to record this.

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Kasami @kasami.bsky.social · 09/06/2026

And here's the real output... those blocks are blank? The total blue area above plus the config block is 1584 blocks in the EP3 and equivalent to 1440 blocks in the EP4. 1584/1440 = exactly 1.1. I think they just arbitrarily divided it by 1.1 for marketing reasons, or maybe power/thermal budget.

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Kasami @kasami.bsky.social · 09/06/2026

Now that's interesting. This counts as 99% logic utilization but clearly isn't. The area on the left seems reserved, but I saw it putting stuff in that area earlier. It's some kind of reserved logic that is still dynamically fitted and just has to connect to the configuration block (black square) 🤔

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Kasami @kasami.bsky.social · 09/06/2026

EP3C25 vs EP4CE22. Only real difference I see is they removed an IO block (light brown) on the left edge (which they actually didn't, but the software dutifully lies about that). And yet, supposedly it has 144 fewer logic blocks (blue)? I see the same number here. 144 would be exactly 3 rows.

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Kasami @kasami.bsky.social · 03/06/2026

Heard this phrase somewhere before and decided to google it trying to figure out where it came from... and... what do you mean.

Google search query "do me a solid, snake".

Google's AI Overview responds as follows:

"Kept you waiting, huh? I copy. Tell me the mission—what exactly do you need a legendary operative for today? [Wikipedia link]

Whether you need to infiltrate a base, decode a complex codec frequency, or just figure out what the latest intel means, lay it on me. I'm listening."

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Kasami @kasami.bsky.social · 30/05/2026

People on twitter seem to be taking the Paint.NET news pretty well /s

A tweet from a techbro twitter account @wholyv in response to the creator of the Paint.NET image editor securing the paint.net web domain.

The response reads:
"I am crying hysterically thinking about this

when everyone is now using AI to edit their photos, a founder who built his photo editing software back in 2004 just bought a new, more premium domain.

knowing damn well his 22 years old legacy is finally coming to an end."

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Kasami @kasami.bsky.social · 30/05/2026

Alright if I set the sof data to all FF and concatenate the 6 frames in reverse and *then* split the bits into 8 rows I get this (scaled vertically so you can see it). The vertical lines are the first bit of each frame which are always 0. Bitmap frames do the same for the first bit or two though.

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Kasami @kasami.bsky.social · 29/05/2026

How to instantly double your RAM for free: put it in the fucking slot properly if you didn't do that the first time. Dumbass. (It's me I'm the dumbass here)

A RAM module is improperly inserted in an old laptop's secondary RAM slot.

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Kasami @kasami.bsky.social · 29/05/2026

Bit delayed getting to this (partly by the stupidity in my own code) but the result is... not all that enlightening. Shoved on the right edge all together it looks like a mess, but the top and bottom do look like IO block stuff in a way. I bet they should be distributed across the chip horizontally.

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Kasami @kasami.bsky.social · 25/05/2026

Here's what I mean about flipped memory and blank rows. Shown with SOF data FF 00 FF 00 etc. It's hard to tell but in this orientation the memory blocks are flipped left to right. (stripe pattern warning, contrast has been lowered a lot for the post)

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Kasami @kasami.bsky.social · 20/05/2026

Well fuck you too then. I visited a few times before (surely many months ago at this point) only because people linked to it. Today I go there again because someone linked to it, an article from 8 years ago even, and get hit with this. Idfk who's persuaded to give them money by this but it's not me.

A news article is cut off with a banner reading "You've read your last free article."

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