iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Yet every office I’ve ever been in chooses bright, white lights. 🤦‍♂️ I love me some floor lamps with 2700k bulbs. 💡

My time doing tech support at HP early in my career scarred me in a few ways, but in particular: bright white lights. 50+ hours a week under fluorescent lights broke me, somehow. All these years later, I struggle to work under bright white office conditions.

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Joel Crane @potatofi.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Too bad Ginfull doesn’t sell the orange sensors and carriers separately. I don’t like having to throw every other analog stick module away (or in reality, keep them in my parts bin).

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Joel Crane @potatofi.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

I’m… kinda impressed with the Liquid Glass icon. It’s not terrible.

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Joel Crane @potatofi.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Last night’s project: replacing Original Xbox Controller S analog stick modules with Hall effect Xbox 360 replacements from Ginfull. The orange ones have the right pinout and magnet direction, so I swapped in all orange parts. So far, so good but I want to compare with OEM modules side-by-side.

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Joel Crane @potatofi.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Something I don't get: How do normal people remember things? I'm always amazed at how people can keep track of 1,000 different things down to the tiniest details, and accurately recall them instantly without any notes. I have to meticulously write every single thing down to even have a chance.

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Joel Crane @potatofi.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

I caught a tiny bit of aurora over Helsinki last night.

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Joel Crane @potatofi.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

This is so stupid. ... I love it.

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Joel Crane @potatofi.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Ok, I totally get the "many guests prefer less clutter". In almost all cases I prefer speed, but walking down any sidewalk continuously reminds me that most people do not care about speed. As for the dishes: that's great insight. I certainly had not considered that. Thank you!

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Joel Crane @potatofi.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Small table service annoyance: "We'll take the check." "Ok!" *proceeds to clear table* Why not wait and clear the table after we leave?

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Joel Crane @potatofi.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Missing piece of the puzzle for my Finnish Retro Con showcase: a USB 56k modem. The supply of them online seems to have dried up. There are some random AliExpress ones, but they'll barely arrive in time and it's a total dice roll if they'll work. Not looking good.

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Joel Crane @potatofi.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

I just had a moment where someone demonstrated that a manual process I was doing could 100 percent be done with AI. I don't know how I feel. Embarrassed that I didn't think to try it? Depressed that AI is the "answer to everything"? Why don't I feel happy that AI has taken something off my plate?

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Joel Crane @potatofi.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

The skeuomorphism in my UI makes no sense, here. What are the drop-shadows on my buttons and tab bar landing on? The canvas is a 3D field, with depth!

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Joel Crane @potatofi.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

A PCAP on the WAN side revealed that my firewall is a Symmetrical NAT, which randomizes the port number on the outside on a per-destination and per-session basis. So, port 3074 becomes port whatever. Insignia can talk back to me on port whatever, but other hosts can't.

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Joel Crane @potatofi.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

When it was Twitter (pre-Musk), the Wi-Fi community was located there and was super healthy. As soon as it became X, I stopped paying attention. I think I've probably lost about 1,000 followers there, probably for a couple of reasons: 1. I stopped posting or interacting in any way 2. People left

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Joel Crane @potatofi.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

No idea on the person/bot distribution, because I stopped paying attention as soon as it was renamed to "X". I think that on the years leading up to that, most of my following were real people. But idk.

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Joel Crane @potatofi.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

I just checked, and have just over 5,000 followers on what used to be Twitter. I think it used to be 6,000 or so, but I could be misremembering. It was hard to walk away from that, but I just couldn't stomach being there. Unfortunately, we're all spread out between Mastadon, Bsky, and Threads now.

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Joel Crane @potatofi.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

When I do a PCAP, I see outgoing UDP packets on 3074 get answered from servers, also on 3074. But what I don't see are any unsolicited packets coming through on 3074. That worries me. I don't know how to get a PCAP on the WAN side, either. I suck at firewalls.

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Joel Crane @potatofi.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

I like my Meraki MX75 firewall, but since it doesn't support UPnP, but I haven't been able to get it to work with my Original Xbox and Insignia (Xbox Live replacement). It should just be a matter of creating a DHCP reservation for the Xbox and forwarding UDP on port 3074, right? Wrong... strict NAT.

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Joel Crane @potatofi.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

🐛 Pathfinder landing site. We literally have photos of it, and it doesn't look like that. To me, this is the most egregious error of the entire movie. Tricky for Mark to drive up to, though. Also no sand dune for it to get buried under. But c'mon! en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Pa...

en.wikipedia.org

Mars Pathfinder - Wikipedia

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Joel Crane @potatofi.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

⏸️ That's all I can think of for now. To be clear, I love this movie, so did my kids. Ridley Scott kept Andy Weir on speed dial, which is unusual and awesome. The movie resonated well with audiences, and paved the way for more great hard-ish sci-fi like The Expanse and Project Hail Mary. Love it.

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Joel Crane @potatofi.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

🐛 Literal scanlines and analog video artifacts on video playback. These aren't CRT monitors. None of this is going through analog, anywhere. Hollywood is really terrible about getting this right, and we haven't used analog video at all in what, 20 years now? Why is this style hanging on?

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Joel Crane @potatofi.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

✨ The Cisco videoconferencing systems. They are almost that good, and they basically look like that! No special stupid graphics, just a good ol' videoconference. This was one of the most believable parts of the entire movie.

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Joel Crane @potatofi.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

🐛 Basically all of the video screens and computer monitors. All kinds of fancy Hollywood graphics everywhere that would be horrible to actually use. Remember how The Bourne movies just had like... Windows NT? That was great. Also, circular progress indicators for things like oxygen...?

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Joel Crane @potatofi.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

🐛 Look/feel of the Pathfinder/Sojourner systems. CRT monitors, perfect, but they should have stuck with plaintext terminals. The way the images slide around to assume one image drove me nuts, too. No old system looks like that.

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Joel Crane @potatofi.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

🐛 Watney flying around like Iron Man. Actually, I thought this was a great feature, like an inside joke for those of us who read the book. Dismissed as a stupid idea in the book, "let's actually do it in the movie, for fun". Ridiculous, but fun. I'm all for it.

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Joel Crane @potatofi.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

🐛 Having the commander go out after Watney. What? No. Another crewmember had trained and drilled for that, and was the EVA specialist. This change was just dumb.

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Joel Crane @potatofi.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

🐛 Vogel's bomb. In the book, it was triggered by a lighting panel. In the movie, it did a countdown and blink, as if it had and internal firing circuit? Plus, it plugged into a USB-A port. Lol. Although the sequence where he made it was great. Fast and jerry-rigged, just like the book.

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Joel Crane @potatofi.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

🐛 The Hermes rec room. It was just too big, ornate, and clean. A ship like that would take advantage of every nook and cranny of space for equipment and functions. Also, blinkenlights everywhere. Nah.

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Joel Crane @potatofi.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

🐛 Lack of pressure against the jerry-rigged airlock seal. That's holding in 1 ATM on Mars, but it's flapping gently in the breeze? No.

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Joel Crane @potatofi.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

🐛 Equipment in the Hab. There's just way too much of it, and it's all way too heavy and permanent. The bookshelf speakers on one of the desks was way over the line; no way they would have hauled that sort of thing to Mars. And the cheap AOC monitors, nope. Panasonic Toughbooks were right, though.

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Joel Crane @potatofi.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

🐛 The Hab canvas. In the book, it's an extremely sturdy material that can hold 1 ATM on the surface of Mars, and also blocks RF and radiation. In the movie, it looks like plastic from Home Depot.

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Joel Crane @potatofi.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

One of the kids is watching The Martian at school this week, so we did a speed-run of the book and movie last night. I loved the movie when it came out, but consuming them back-to-back made me realize how many problems the movie has. Spoilers ahead.

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Joel Crane @potatofi.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

I'm seeing reports on Reddit that even for households with pure iOS 27, the new prompts just aren't appearing. This could just be a bug. Fingers crossed! www.reddit.com/r/ThatAppleG... www.reddit.com/r/iOS27/comm...

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Joel Crane @potatofi.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Apple’s parental controls are so, so close to being great, but miss a couple of tiny details that make it extremely difficult to use. “Ask to Browse” was going to solve one of the worst problems for us, but I can’t just throw perfectly functional devices away.

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Joel Crane @potatofi.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Hang on Apple, hang on. Are you telling me that I have to remove all non-iOS-27 devices from my family before I can get “Ask to Browse”? Because we have some iPod touches, and my 2018 iPad Pro kicking around that I really want to keep using. support.apple.com/guide/child-...

support.apple.com

Update your family devices to iOS 27, iPadOS 27, macOS 27, watchOS 27, and visionOS 27

Update your family’s devices to version 27 or later of iOS, iPadOS, macOS, or watchOS for the new parental controls experience and learn what to do if a device can’t be updated.

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Joel Crane @potatofi.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Wow, 56k modem prices have skyrocketed. Last time I did a DreamPi setup, the modem was like ten bucks. Now they're easily $50, and I can't even find one of the Dell ones I've used before. Of course, I have one. In storage in the US. 🤦‍♂️

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Joel Crane @potatofi.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Table secured! @jeffgeerling.com's NTP showcase inspired me, I think I'll do vintage Wi-Fi (BlueSCSI + PC cards) clients, connecting to an AirPort, going across 56k to get out to the internet. With my vintage gear in storage on another continent, I'm piecing together something with what I have. 👍

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Joel Crane @potatofi.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Inspecting the screenshot more closely, looks like an INDX upgrade kit? If we weren’t living in a small apartment, I’d immediately upgrade my Prusa MINI+ to a Core ONE+ with 8 INDX tool heads. It looks great. But, I need to live a little smaller for awhile.

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Joel Crane @potatofi.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

I love Haribo. My kids randomly bought me some last night. New printer?

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Joel Crane @potatofi.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

One observation, my fleet of iPhone 13 minis updated very quickly once one cached iOS 17. The iPhone 12 mini is taking a lot longer - likely a different update package.

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Joel Crane @potatofi.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Nothing. Pretty sure that Apple just does mDNS/Bonjour discovery to find the caching server on the network, and starts adding to/using the cache. It works for iCloud stuff, too. It's annoyingly opaque. Other than intuition and the Activity Monitor, you don't get to know much about what it's doing.

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Joel Crane @potatofi.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

You can probably haz! This is a 2012 Mac Mini running macOS 10.15 Catalina. Enable "Caching Server" in the Sharing menu and... you're done.

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Joel Crane @potatofi.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Pretty sure my old macOS Cache Server is working. iPadOS 27 update went from "40 minutes remaining" to "3 minutes remaining", and generated about 4 GB of served data (blue spike). I updated another iPad, saw another 4 GB, and a second spike. Neat. 📷

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Joel Crane @potatofi.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

I think Linear is now approaching the "too bloated to be good" phase. What made it great is that it didn't do a lot. Now it does everything, and I don't think that's good.

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Joel Crane @potatofi.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

I’m right there with you. I didn’t have videogames as a kid. All of my high school friends praised OOT but by the time I got to it, the graphics and controls felt super dated so it never landed with me. Maybe the remake will do the trick.

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Joel Crane @potatofi.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

I stay up a bit late on Sunday nights to play Halo 2 on Insignia, but had some problems tonight. My NAT was randomly strict today. Series S possibly stealing port 5074? Meraki MX75 not supporting UPnP complicates things a bit. I got into a handful of matches but it mostly just failed.

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