iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

I emailed keychron's UK support last week and they finally got back to me... from the not-UK support saying they noticed my order was in the UK so they're forwarding my support request to UK support??? That's a little odd but alright as long as we get there in the end... fingers crossed

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Kasami @kasami.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

I should add that I have no idea if the cybiko even sets it to maximum power in both regional models (chip is adjustable) so maybe the comparison is seriously flawed, but I would imagine they'd set it to the max if they could.

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Kasami @kasami.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

I don't think it's a regulatory limitation either. Unless things have changed massively since that chip was designed, I think the allowable transmit power on 915 in the US is way way higher. It's most likely a technical limitation.

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Kasami @kasami.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Interestingly the RF chip in the Cybiko limits it to like 7mW in the 433MHz band but only 2mW in the 915MHz band (if I'm reading correctly), so I think even without those bands being so crowded by modern technology it was always just worse in the US.

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Kasami @kasami.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

The backward reflective polarizer is to increase backlight efficiency and I believe the quarter waveplate (making a circular polarizer) is somehow related to this as it appears on some other reflective polarizer sheets you can buy for iphone screens etc.

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Kasami @kasami.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

The full stackup from front to back seems to be - linear front polarizer - LCD glass - black screenprint - linear back pol - diffusing gel/glue? maybe silicone-based - aligned ref-pol (forward) - aligned ref-pol (backward / combined with above?) - quarter waveplate (not important?) - protective film

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Kasami @kasami.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Went and bought one of the cheapo aliexpress watches that does the same thing with an RGB backlight to see how they did it. It's basically the same thing, except their reflective polarizer is double-sided and has a few extra layers which don't really functionally change anything.

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Kasami @kasami.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Maybe it's not even a new take from them, maybe they're just saying the already-loud part even louder. But at the same time it feels like they've managed to reach a new low

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Kasami @kasami.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

AI bros are really coming out with phrases like "human slop" in response to human-made art that mocks AI "art" now huh. Human slop. What a time to be alive.

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Kasami @kasami.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

scrape the entire fediverse?? I can't even begin to imagine what any part of that plan looked like other than insane in every way

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

...and that was by buying them on ebay and getting a sketchy tracking link which turns out was just a cover for "we literally dropship it from amazon", so it probably would've been even cheaper on amazon but I do try to avoid using it

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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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Reposted by Kasami

therun.gg @therun.gg · 02/10/2026

SRC changed their terms of use yesterday, and released a news post with an FAQ. They make it sound like not a big deal. It's a big deal. The Creative Commons licence is gone. They claim ownership over the data now. Thread about what this means, and what we can do about it 🧵

Comparison of the old src terms and the new src terms

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Kasami @kasami.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Now the next thing is there's also a couple "featured playlist" things and I don't know if they might also contain additional video IDs, so I have to add a whole featured list downloader to run through that too.

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

Weird that the cheapest way to buy "cereal box" containers for 3D printer filament (online) right now seems to be buying ones that are specifically sold as filament boxes rather than just... buying the ones sold for cereal.

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

A month and a half later I think I've got the majority of it. 4993 items, 63GB archived. It's SO much more than short promo videos, there are also longer audio things in here. The only things I haven't got now are about 300 items that immediately return a 403 error on the player manifest.

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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 · 29/09/2026

It is unfortunately mirror-reflective as most are, so not quite suited to what I want to do, but I might have a diffuser somewhere that won't mess up the polarization. Also it arrived slightly bent but I'm hoping a half hour on the 3D printer bed with a book on it will fix that.

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Kasami @kasami.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Random cheap reflective polarizer I got from aliexpress was the good kind this time, where the reflective side is actually linear. This will be fun to experiment with.

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Reposted by Kasami

downchasm @downchasm.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

one aspect regarding retro gaming scenes that genAI has been blazingly efficient at is in trust erosion whether it’s fan TLs, FPGA cores, or recomp scenes, within the past year so much optimism and excitement regarding new projects has been swiftly replaced with doubt and suspicion thank you genAI

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Kasami @kasami.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

The SDK is a bit of a mess though and doesn't have a windowing system so you definitely can't just say "draw me a 16x16 window in front of everything else", it's not that easy... But I'm sure with a bit of fiddling with the draw functions it *does* have, you could achieve basically the same thing.

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Kasami @kasami.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Stupid idea that just came to me: desktop pet for cybiko. It seems like the kind of thing that might just barely be possible with its arguably very over-engineered OS. The default background processes are at least able to draw dialog boxes over other stuff with correct repainting so... I wonder.

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Reposted by Kasami

The Cutting Room Floor @tcrf.net · 24/09/2026

Howdy folks! Here's our writeup on the DDoS from last month: blog.xkeeper.net/the-cutting-... Thanks for your patience while we worked to get this out!

a chart from the linked post, showing our server's traffic stats over the last 30 days, annotated with various details. see linked post for full details

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Kasami @kasami.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Sure, I probably won't have much to talk about but I don't mind chatting for a few minutes if that's enough. DM and we can discuss a bit before I commit to it.

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Kasami @kasami.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Did the one thing I was meant to avoid. Put my PC to sleep while it still had about 4 hours left. It was able to resume but it now has 8-9 hours left. Never trust me with anything I guess

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Kasami @kasami.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

I'm aware of the command line uploader but haven't used it before, but if this upload fails I will take the opportunity to learn how to use that.

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Kasami @kasami.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Forgot how slow archive.‍org uploads are and started uploading 31GB through the normal web UI like an idiot

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Reposted by Kasami

Aura/Moom @moomanibe.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

the most depressing person to argue with about AI is the doomer types who're like "AI is bad and ruining everything but also it's never going away so there's no point in getting upset when ppl use it". Like.... you have pre-emptively chosen to be a person who will not fight for a better world

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Kasami @kasami.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Now that the screens have good polarizers on both units I rechecked the best voltages and they both came out to 15.75v at least with my imperfect test image. If I can come up with a better test I'll report on that later.

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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 · 22/09/2026

Ehh now that I measured three times and cut one out at 30 degrees it looks like it should be 25 actually, at least for this specific polarizer sheet. I hate wasting sheet materials like this but I might just cut another one.

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

I don't believe I had the grid connected at that point, I was elsewhere on the board, so at the time of failure it had anode at +30V above filament, and grid floating. I say "failure" but nothing burned and it seemed to work after, but I put the project down and was scared to touch it after that.

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

The only things I can think of are I somehow made it conduct way too much current and it was the grid glowing, or there was a loose end of the filament that brushed against anode voltage when I bumped it. Seemed mostly at the bottom of the tube but I didn't get a good look before pulling power.

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

Trying to figure out a weird fault condition I saw with a DM160 VFD tube once. Was messing with like 50 on a board, all filaments in parallel, roughly applying the right voltages to light them as expected. Suddenly one lit up white-hot like the filament got overvolted? I can't possibly see how.

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

It's slightly higher contrast and closer to the original greenish tint at 30 degrees actually (15 counterclockwise from how I held it there), with 45 looking more neutral. Not sure which I prefer. My other unit has a good polarizer still so if I want them to match I should probably just go with 30.

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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 · 17/09/2026

Continuing to fight with computers, I just found out that when I updated and rebooted a server VM earlier and walked away from it, turns out it decided to make the mounted ISO the default boot, which it has never done before. So my main server was sitting on a gparted boot screen for idk how long :)

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Kasami @kasami.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

I know the system won't boot if one of the cards isn't receiving a clock but I never tried removing the clock while it's running, I wonder if it did something that crashed the clockgen and that hung the bus?

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Kasami @kasami.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

I don't even need to try make any arguments here. I just left it running showing a waveform for a few minutes and then the whole system suddenly locked up, something that has never happened with the command line tools. How did it even manage that when I wasn't messing with anything.

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Kasami @kasami.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

"now they're coming for our stove-touching rights too!"

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Kasami @kasami.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

I don't trust vibe-coded software at the best of times, but when it comes to media archival I *definitely* don't trust it, especially not when I only found that out because of a broken "feature". God dammit. Can we have nothing nice

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Kasami @kasami.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Well shit. I saw that misrc-gui now supports cxadc so started testing it out, seems cool. Tried to use the client-server thing it can do and it just outright doesn't work. Went to the repo hoping to find out why... Turns out that feature (and possibly everything else) was vibe-coded.

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Kasami @kasami.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

FSTN polarizers also just generally suck to remove and clean up, especially ones that have degraded in the middle and turned into some hard crystalline mess, so that took a while to deal with. Guess I have to order in a sheet of it from aliexpress and hope it's the correct thing.

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Kasami @kasami.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Can't win with cybikos today. A resistor wasn't measuring right but seemed okay after I took it off, so I spent ages trying/failing to put it back on but ultimately lost it. Finally bodged a fix, then decided to peel off the bad polarizer on the same unit... It's FSTN. I don't have a replacement.

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

I saw the cable pulling away from the board, grabbed it in a panic but it was too late... but for once I can be thankful for crappy dry solder joints because it just came off and didn't damage the pads at all. Guessing the white glue was the only thing holding it on, until that gave up too.

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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 · 12/09/2026

... aaaand the heavily AI-assisted loopy game translation has made it to VCFMW. Of course it has. Idk why I'm still worrying myself over all this mess. idk man.

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Kasami @kasami.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

Standby power is apparently pretty low so could have it on permanently instead of the original 12VSB transformer. Repurpose the relay to switch the 12V side (or a FET, but a tactile switch triggering a relay click is cool). May let me yeet the entire top PCB save for a few board-to-board connectors.

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Kasami @kasami.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

I realized if I do a modern class D amp I can probably get away with running it from 12V instead of 20 for the same power target. Need testing but that would simplify things. AliExpress has some nice 100/150W GaN bricks that would fit in the transformer space so 12V one of those straight to the amp?

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