iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Gus @projectgus.aus.social.ap.brid.gy · 15/10/2026

What I think semiconductor company is for: Sell chip, help customers make products with chip. What NXP thinks semiconductor company is for:

Screenshot of an email inbox showing 9 emails from "NXP Community" sent on the same day. Each one is variant of "You earned the (X) badge on NXP Community".

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Gus @projectgus.aus.social.ap.brid.gy · 09/10/2026

Oh, me? Not much, just getting pumped about Triangle Computing. It's almost ready to break through into the mainstream.

Triangle shaped Mini PC, with aluminium at tje front and rear and woodgrain on the rest. Chinese language overlay describes it having an N3450 CPU, USB 3.0, WiFi, HDMI and 8GB of RAM. Support for "win10 11 linux nas".

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Gus @projectgus.aus.social.ap.brid.gy · 08/09/2026

[Home appliance repair, hubris, long post] And it looks like I bought the last one from the Taobao vendor, it's now showing as out of stock... The other parts are here. So now seems that I've paid the price of a cheap new oven for a broken oven... 3/

Screenshot of Taobao app showing a fan part. The description at the bottom says "This product has been taken down from the shelf", i.e. no longer in stock

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Gus @projectgus.aus.social.ap.brid.gy · 08/09/2026

[Home appliance repair, hubris, long post] Then the package with the cheap oven Taobao part disappears shortly after landing in Melbourne... First time that's happened to me. :pakidge: 2/

From CAINIAO WAIDAN
Label created by sender
Tue 25 Aug 6:33am

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Gus @projectgus.aus.social.ap.brid.gy · 08/09/2026

[Home appliance repair, hubris, long post] The oven our house came with has been a bit unreliable since we've had it, which is eight years now. Not broken exactly, but doesn't hold temperature well even with a new thermostat. Rather than buying a new oven, I […] [Original post on aus.social]

A bosch oven unplugged on someone's living room floor

Under the top of an oven with the electronics and cooling fan visible

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Gus @projectgus.aus.social.ap.brid.gy · 25/08/2026

AutoCAD release 13 (1994), the first version to include a solid modeller. This was the optional "documentation pack", a quite fancy boxed set of the manuals. Imagine it cost quite a bit! Despite the quite fetching box design, the software manuals are still plain old manuals!

Pulling the manuals out of the documentation pack

The back of the documentation pack is a fancy city scene

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Gus @projectgus.aus.social.ap.brid.gy · 25/08/2026

Also some charming old hard disks to dispose of. 420MB from (I think) 1994. Look at the precision green wire fix on the bottom left corner of the PCB!

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Gus @projectgus.aus.social.ap.brid.gy · 25/08/2026

Australian retrocomputing(ish) nerds, I've been helping my dad clean out some stuff and have stumbled into a trove of 90s and 2000s PC software... I don't know all of what is here, but we have some boxed software including Windows 98 & ME, and a stack of PC […] [Original post on aus.social]

Australian Personal Computer Magazine CDs from 2001

An Australian National Phone Directory on CD from 1996

Windows 98 install guide and boot floppy

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Gus @projectgus.aus.social.ap.brid.gy · 11/08/2026

[Slop marketing] LOL at this vendor who has generated slop stock photos for their product use cases, then followed up with the world's laziest photoshop job to insert the product

Four AI-generated scenes each including a small electronic device with a screen. The pictures are clearly slop, but even so the device looks jarringly out of place

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Gus @projectgus.aus.social.ap.brid.gy · 03/08/2026

You know, for a Dabao (大宝) board, I thought it would be bigger. #badchinesepunattempts #electronics

A small development board in packaging, sitting on a bench

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Gus @projectgus.aus.social.ap.brid.gy · 08/07/2026

[Linux Homelab VM care and feeding] This morning I noticed that my little home server's Home Assistant OS VM was configured with libvirt domain type="qemu" instead of type="kvm". (As one does, I suppose?) That four letter change makes quite the difference to […] [Original post on aus.social]

Screenshot of Grafana showing 12 hours "power_package_watt" metric. At one point the usage suddenly drops from consistently 5-6W to consistently less than 3W.

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Gus @projectgus.aus.social.ap.brid.gy · 16/06/2026

The nap debate is heating up again on Mastodon... @mike @jpm

Screenshot of two toots:

Mike says "I too will require a nap today"

jpm says "NAPSTER BAD!"

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Gus @projectgus.aus.social.ap.brid.gy · 14/06/2026

Done cleaning off silicone and was just about to order some new relays when I spotted ol' cracky McCrackerson here, on one leg of the bad relay's coil. Surprisingly the rest of this PCB has pretty good solder joints, there are videos of later model Samsung […] [Original post on aus.social]

Microscope photo of a circuit board. The solder joint on one leg of the board has cracked.

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Gus @projectgus.aus.social.ap.brid.gy · 14/06/2026

Wishing an enjoyable and relaxing weekend to everyone who doesn't design the electronics for washing machine manufacturers... #repair

A plastic enclosure on a bench with a dremel cut around the edges. An old bread knife is sticking out of it as i'm trying to separate what's inside from the edge, like a stuck cake.

A washing machine controller circuit board sitting upside down with yellowish silicone coating the PCB surface.

Top side of the washing machine circuit board, with more electronics (and more yellow silicone)

Back of the washing machine circuit board now exposed. Sitting next to the board is a small pile of chunky silicone scraps.

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Gus @projectgus.aus.social.ap.brid.gy · 20/05/2026

When hardware vendors write their custom MicroPython bring-up guides from lockdown... #MicroPython

Screenshot of a document "Building Micropython with KEIL and Programming with Python on i.MX RT1050/1060". The description of garbage collection has a highlighted sentence "This is to filtering COVID-19 infected people and their close contacts, and close contacts of close contacts recursively."

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Gus @projectgus.aus.social.ap.brid.gy · 11/05/2026

The best aspect of crowdfunding things is forgetting about them until a nice present turns up! Thanks @s0 for arranging this little group buy of PocketPD USB-C to variable power supply! www.crowdsupply.com/centylab/pocket… Seems good so far, the […] [Original post on aus.social]

PocketPD powered up on a bench, showing 13460mV set and 13.20V output

PocketPD stuck to the bottom edge of a whiteboard

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Gus @projectgus.aus.social.ap.brid.gy · 12/04/2026

Well this sucks. www.theguardian.com/environment/202… The Hyundai Kona battery pack I have in my shed needs a BMS software update or the cells might catch fire. This is on a battery pack that […] [Original post on aus.social]

Screenshot showing part of a Hyundai Australia web site's recall check service. It shows an Active recall pending for a BMS upgrade, and another active service bulletin.

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Gus @projectgus.aus.social.ap.brid.gy · 09/04/2026

[Aliexpress shipping shenanigans] Experienced Aliexpress-ers, have you seen this before? Do you reckon I need to do anything or is it likely to resolve itself after a while? ("Check the courier website" advice is nonsense from what I can tell - the tracking […] [Original post on aus.social]

Screenshot of Aliexpress tracking with "Delivery unsuccessful"

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Gus @projectgus.aus.social.ap.brid.gy · 29/03/2026

[VFD electronics internals] The control board sits at the top and is pretty densely populated. Connects to the power broad through an IDC cable, and I think everything up here is isolated by circuitry down there. Input and output protection on the screw […] [Original post on aus.social]

Control board from the VFD, sitting in the upper part of the housing

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Gus @projectgus.aus.social.ap.brid.gy · 29/03/2026

[VFD electronics internals, theorising] My hot take theory on how this VFD exists so cheaply is that it's the dividend of cheap solar tech and cheap brushless motor driver tech. There's a lot of products converting DC to AC sine waves these days, and despite […] [Original post on aus.social]

VFD unit with face plate and cover removed

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Gus @projectgus.aus.social.ap.brid.gy · 29/03/2026

[VFD electronics internals] The heatsink has a big rectifier package bolted to the bottom, and three IGBTs bolted to each side. The IGBTs are DXG15N120HN models, made by a company daxin semi. Although they're not listed on the company website they seem to be […] [Original post on aus.social]

Peeking under the heatsink and you can just see the bridge rectifier package on the back of it.

Three DXG15N120HN IGBTs bolted to one side of the heatsink

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Gus @projectgus.aus.social.ap.brid.gy · 29/03/2026

[VFD electronics internals] @diver300 Few odd things I've noticed on this board. I'm not a power electronics expert so curious what you all make of it, as well. - There's a marked earth point that's not very accessible from outside the case. I was initially […] [Original post on aus.social]

Back side of VFD main power PCB. The neutral link is on the left, can see a trace through to the marked "earth" pad.

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Gus @projectgus.aus.social.ap.brid.gy · 29/03/2026

Here's the main power circuit board. There's a quite hard conformal coating. Bit messy: Flux residue and a few scraps of loose solder visible around the through hole parts, I'll try to clean off if it hasn't been coated onto the board. The DC rail storage is […] [Original post on aus.social]

Main board of the VFD side by side with the capacitor board (which is still installed in the chassis)

Peek under the insulation to see the back of the capacitor board.

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Gus @projectgus.aus.social.ap.brid.gy · 29/03/2026

After a bit of online window shopping I bought one of these "Suswe" brand VFDs for the drill press. This is another model with output voltage higher than the input. The bafflingly low price of CNY299 (about $60AUD or $43USD), plus international shipping... It […] [Original post on aus.social]

Marketing info for the Suswe SU800-2R2G1 VFD. 5.IA output power rating, 220V in and 380V out.

Side of a Suswe VFD. The warranty sticker on the case says "Tear up without warranty"

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Gus @projectgus.aus.social.ap.brid.gy · 13/03/2026

Pro tip: if you sit by yourself next to a nice dog at the cafe then you get to make friends with the dog, receive compliments on behalf of the dog, and deflect the criticism of people who don't appreciate the dog blocking their path.

A border collie standing next to an outdoor cafe table

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Gus @projectgus.aus.social.ap.brid.gy · 05/03/2026

[Streaming services, petty] Realise this qualifies as screaming into the void, but it feels a little rewarding. (Would feel bad about making some low-ranking employee's day worse if I believed a human will ever read this, but I reckon at most all of them will be […] [Original post on aus.social]

Screenshot of part of a cancellation form for Paramount+. The option "Other (provide feedback below)" is selected and the provided text input is:

Monopolies are bad, monopolies run by fascist nepobabies are worse.

Also, showing pre-rolls ads for consumer products on the "ad-free plan" is pretty low.

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Gus @projectgus.aus.social.ap.brid.gy · 01/03/2026

[Large spider (mostly harmless)] Stumbled across this photo from the other day, was setting up oscilloscope to help diagnose RS-485 issues at a friend's dairy farm. Straya!

A digital oscilloscope sitting on a cabinet in front of some conduits. The conduits have a lot of cobwebs on them, and a large Huntsman spider is sitting right next to the oscilloscope.

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Gus @projectgus.aus.social.ap.brid.gy · 01/03/2026

TFW Past You has cost Current You a lot of misery, and you don't even remember why

Screenshot of a textconfig file, with the lines "# TEMPORARY HACK" and "deny-interfaces=eth0"

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Gus @projectgus.aus.social.ap.brid.gy · 24/02/2026

So, was somewhat surprised to see this cheap model with an integrated boost converter. This seems to be the English language factory site: www.hars-vfd.com/vfd-290-1.5.html This boosty boy VFD is a little over $100AUD on Taobao, or $90USD on Alibaba. I […] [Original post on aus.social]

Screenshot of Chinese language ad for a 290-1.5G2 1.5kW VFD. Key spec is that it takes single phase input 220V-240V and outputs three phase 0-440V.

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Gus @projectgus.aus.social.ap.brid.gy · 24/02/2026

We have a new (to us) drill press with a 3 phase motor so I've been looking at VFDs (variable frequency drives) for smallish electric motors. The VFD market seems to bifurcate pretty hard into sub-$200 Chinese brands, and >$2,000 global industrial brands (also […] [Original post on aus.social]

A "Waldown drill machine" sitting on some mismatched rugs

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Gus @projectgus.aus.social.ap.brid.gy · 10/02/2026

My FAIR TRADING LEGAL PRODUCT BUILT BY AU STANDARD sign is raising a lot of questions already answered by my sign.

Close up of an exhaust fan with block writing over the top: FAIR TRADING APPROVED LEGAL PRODUCT BUILT BY AU STANDARD 240V AU PLUG 12 MONTHS WARRANTY.

A label in the corner has been blacked out for some reason.

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Gus @projectgus.aus.social.ap.brid.gy · 10/02/2026

It's annoying when a product is clearly designed for repair, but there's no spare parts... This is a Clipsal bathroom exhaust fan. The fan assembly comes out with 7 screws total, the internal connections are all screw terminals, and aside from being filthy the […] [Original post on aus.social]

Small window with a partly disassembled exhaust fan mounted in it. The fan is pretty covered in grimy dust.

Motor out of the fan assembly, on a bench

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Gus @projectgus.aus.social.ap.brid.gy · 26/01/2026

Traced part of the schematic semi-correctly. It's a little baroque: The light generates a constant voltage from the rectified dynamo output. Then there's an LED used as a light sensor (neat to see in a product), and it switches a sequence of small transistors […] [Original post on aus.social]

Screenshot of a partial Kicad schematic of the bike light

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Gus @projectgus.aus.social.ap.brid.gy · 26/01/2026

Stripped it down and started tracing out the circuit. I was surprised at how complex it was, and characteristically Japanese with a "New Japan Radio Company" NJM2360 buck converter IC onboard.

Front view of a circular PCB from inside a bike light, still attached to the light housing. There's a surface mount LED in the centre of the board, and a range of chips around that.

Back view of circular PCB from bike light. There are some SMD components on the back side, and three large capacitors that have been bent upwards to show the rest of the board.

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Gus @projectgus.aus.social.ap.brid.gy · 26/01/2026

I've had this Sanyo dynamo-powered headlight on my bike for eight years, but it'd been disconnected for about five of them... Finally wired the hub dynamo back up over Christmas and light was dead! (Little #bike #electronics #repair🧵)

Partial close up of the front wheel of a vintage-style bike. There's a metal mudguard with a headlamp mounted on it.

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Gus @projectgus.aus.social.ap.brid.gy · 19/01/2026

[Victorian bushfires] My friend Tess runs a microdairy as part of the Harcourt Organic Farming Coop. She's written about their experience two Fridays ago, when the surrounding region went up in flames. sellardairy.com.au/2026/01/as-the-a…

Night view of an active bushfire on a hill

Map of the region around Harcourt, with a large burned area (black) around a small purple area (the Harcourt Organic Farming Coop)

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Gus @projectgus.aus.social.ap.brid.gy · 28/12/2025

The NSW Transport Regional bookings website is pretty close to the website you'd make if you didn't want anyone to take a train, ever.

A page in a booking system showing two possible bookings from Canberra to Yass.

The first option leaves at 09:37 and takes 6h43m for $39.

The second option also leaves at 09:37 but takes 1h8m for $6.55

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Gus @projectgus.aus.social.ap.brid.gy · 17/12/2025

The NXP experience: 1) Looking for chip reference manual 2) Have to sign in to see "secure content" and "additional documents" 3) Sign in process needs to verify my work email again for some reason. 4) Signed in! 5) LOL @ Lorem Ipsum placeholder on chip family […] [Original post on aus.social]

Screenshot showing part of an NXP product page. It's promoting a White Paper titled "The i.MX RT Series: The power of choice in a crossover MCU".

The summary text below the title is Lorem Ipsum.

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Gus @projectgus.aus.social.ap.brid.gy · 11/12/2025

Convenient to check if a paper published in 1978 has any recent updates. (Spoiler: no updates.)

Screenshot of the title section of a PDF black & white scan of "Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System" by Leslie Lamport.

The publisher has inserted a colour "Check for updates" link in the left margin.

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Gus @projectgus.aus.social.ap.brid.gy · 04/12/2025

Its a bit humbling to discover your White Whale is 2015-era Logitech webcams. When I drilled out the stuck screws on last week's one it apparently killed the focus drive. So I bought a replacement on ebay, ex-corporate. Surely, the last time was unusual - many […] [Original post on aus.social]

Close up of a workbench showing a webcam partially disassembled and some tools, including some fine tipped tweezers that have had the tips bent out of place

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Gus @projectgus.aus.social.ap.brid.gy · 29/11/2025

Clean room assembly, meet my dusty shed. Plan for today was to remove the bus bars and seal it up again, so next time I don't need as much PPE. But (unlike the last time I did this) the bus bars aren't readily accessible... #KonaHacking

Kona battery pack with cover removed, high voltage safety glove in foreground

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Gus @projectgus.aus.social.ap.brid.gy · 29/11/2025

Next job for the afternoon. Fingers crossed no more drilling out screws today.

EV battery pack, removed from vehicle on a pallet. Foreground has an impact driver and sockets.

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Gus @projectgus.aus.social.ap.brid.gy · 29/11/2025

Thanks everyone for all the ideas. I tried most of them without much luck, so in the end drilled the screws out. They're just in plastic! I have no clue how they came to be so tight. They're also so tiny that despite going slowly they melted down into the lens […] [Original post on aus.social]

Wrecked screw heads that have slightly melted through the plastic under them

Cover off, can see the wrecked remains of the screws.

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Gus @projectgus.aus.social.ap.brid.gy · 28/11/2025

Help, internet brains trust! I have three small (M1.8) philips head screws tightly embedded in a Logitech webcam. They really don't want to come out. My usual methods don't apply at this scale. Anyone got a trick to suggest? Important detail: it needs to go back […] [Original post on aus.social]

Close up of left side of a consumer webcam. A cover has been removed, 3 of 4 visible screws are removed.

Close up of right side of a consumer webcam. A cover has been removed, 2 of 4 visible screws are removed.

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Gus @projectgus.aus.social.ap.brid.gy · 24/11/2025

Happy Voron news! I finally had some time to look at it again on the weekend and realised the print bed screws were all loose! 🤦‍♂️ Since tightening those it's been solid, and I just printed my first non-calibration print in ABS this morning. Hopefully smoother […] [Original post on aus.social]

Inside of a voron 3d printer showing the print head and two freshly printed parts on the print bed

The two parts from the first photo sitting on a workbench.

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Gus @projectgus.aus.social.ap.brid.gy · 18/11/2025

Finally visited the Jirrahlinga Dingo Conservation and Wildlife Centre yesterday, after living nearby for almost eight years. I patted a baby wombat, but the highlight of the visit was while a keeper was talking to us and his radio went off: "Uh... can Bettongs […] [Original post on aus.social]

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Gus @projectgus.aus.social.ap.brid.gy · 18/11/2025

Held our second Co-op AGM last night (and first since we raised member investment to buy The Hub). We were a little worried about getting 10% of 560 members for quorum, but over 90 showed up! Great night, and we've now opened our AGMs with a dance performance […] [Original post on aus.social]

A group of over 90 people standing up from their chairs in a town hall, facing the camera which is looking slightly down from an elevated position

A group of 85 people in the street in front of a building. A small sign says "The Hub / 233 Barker St". Some people in the front row are holding a large novelty key.

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Gus @projectgus.aus.social.ap.brid.gy · 18/10/2025

I 3d printed some things! By which I mean, I 3d printed some printer calibration objects! One day I will 3d print something useful, you just wait and see! #voron #3dprinting

Toolhead of a Voron 3d printer, part way through printing a Voron calibration cube

Print bed of a 3d printer with a set of flow rate calibration blocks printed out

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Gus @projectgus.aus.social.ap.brid.gy · 04/10/2025

Another laptop rescued from the Windows 10 shutdown and e-waste with Linux Mint! My friend only uses her generic 2014-era HP laptop for web browsing and LibreOffice. It struggled to boot to the desktop with 4GB of RAM under Windows. Popped an extra 4GB of RAM […] [Original post on aus.social]

Black HP laptop sitting on a workbench, showing the Linux Mint desktop and a Neofetch display. Some documents on the desktop have been blurred out.

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Gus @projectgus.aus.social.ap.brid.gy · 29/09/2025

🪿 "Wow, so many updated Arch packages today!" 🐐 "Many updated packages, or Haskell package churn again?" 🪿 "Haskell package churn... again"

Screenshot of a Linux terminal window showing "Sync Dependencies (207)" and the rest of the screenshot is a wall of package names, that nearly all start with "haskell-"

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