iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Catherine

qualia @qualia.floofy.tech.ap.brid.gy · 11h

TIL active lightning rods are a thing. look at this angry bastard. it tries to, faster than Zeus himself, fire its own lightning (early streamer emission innit) back at the sky to beckon a strike to hit it instead of something more important. long live the fantastical hubris of NF C 17-102

brochure ad for the Indelec Prevectron 3 Connect IOT connected lightning rod. it is a cone-shaped metal thing with several pointy things at the tip aimed at a center upwards spike, a large metal band just beneath that, and several sharp looking triangular spikes aimed downwards in a cone. a bit beneath it is a small solar panel.

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Catherine @whitequark.org · 23/09/2026

thanks to Elen's extraordinary effort over the last several months, #GlasgowInterfaceExplorer revD1 design files have been sent to JLC. we hope this will also be the production revision (or if we do have a revD2, it happens with minimal changes)

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Reposted by Catherine

Rosemary Mosco @rosemarymosco.com · 22/09/2026

Happy mushroom season!

A comic titled "Types of mushrooms" with 12 mushroom species. A wrinkly-looking morel is labeled "creepy but tasty". A brownish deadly galerina is labeled "boring but deadly". A witch's butter on a branch is labeled "jiggles if you poke it". A large puffball is labeled "egg". A creepy red-dripping bleeding tooth fungus is labeled "deeply disconcerting". A fly agaric with a green treefrog sitting under it is labeled "frog umbrella". A black chanterelle is labeled "chalice for forbidden elixers". Three straight-stemmed entolomas are labeled "haha, nipples". A bright purple viscid violet cort is labeled "purple is nice". A birch polypore sticking out of a birch trunk is labeled "tree nose". A complex yellow-tpped coral fungus is labeled "cursed citadel where dwells a fairy queen". A Ravenel's stinkhorn is pixellated at the top for your safety, and labeled "NSFW".

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triple cheeseburger @triplchii.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

The metafungus produces a kind of mycelium which spreads not through soil but through the events and narratives of history

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eliza🌻 @elizas.website · 20/09/2026

“NVMe form factors are second nature to us, but it’s easy to forget the average person probably only knows about M.2, U.2, and U.3. And PCIe CEM add-in cards, of course.”

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tef @tef.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

finding out the uk air traffic outage (on the 8th September) was caused by a race condition www.nats.aero/wp-content/u...

nats.aero

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Reposted by Catherine

Ian Hanschen @furan.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Switching contexts - the assembled ISA-to-HSMC bridge boards arrived from JLCPCB. This will allow an Altera FPGA kit's HSMC port to talk to the bus using an over-spec'd cable for rapid prototyping. Previously I did this for PCI, hopefully this will offer the same flexibility.

assembled ISA to HSMC bridge card in an ISA slot with a power led (very green power led)

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Catherine @whitequark.org · 17/09/2026

honestly by embedded device standards this is practically fresh bsky.app/profile/mica...

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Dan Luu @danluu.com · 16/09/2026

Yes, more than one DC was blown up, but of course DCs being blown up aren't uncorrelated events. We already know that hardware failures like disk failures, CPU failures, etc., are highly correlated events, and those aren't even adversarial failures!

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Dan Luu @danluu.com · 16/09/2026

Amazon exec: "you wouldn't notice [if someone blew up a datacenter]. I mean, we might be a bit upset, but you wouldn't notice! [laughs]" Amazon after DCs blown up: "After a thorough assessment, we have determined that we are unable to restore access to the resources and data hosted ...."

But hold on a second: If we're concentrating all of our data into data centers, and concentrating most of the data centers in one county, doesn't that make a very tempting target for terrorists?

Amazon's Matt Wood isn't worried: "If something does happen or we have a power event or there's a flood in one specific location, that data is held redundantly in other locations as well."

Pogue asked, "I don't mean to give anyone ideas, but let's say I figured out that one of these unmarked buildings was an AWS data center, and I blew it up. Are you saying that it's so backed up and redundant that you probably wouldn't notice?"

"Yeah, you wouldn't notice. I mean, we might be a bit upset, but you wouldn't notice!" Wood laughed.

AWS says wartime damage means some Middle East cloud resources are gone for good

Iranian strikes overwhelmed regional redundancy in Bahrain and left one UAE Availability Zone inaccessible
Dan Robinson
IT INFRASTRUCTURE REPORTER
25
Published Wed 16 Sept 2026 // 12:11 UTC
READ MORE

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now
Your AI agents' reports and questions have a new inbox, courtesy of AWS
1 day ago
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2 days ago
Nvidia's Groq acquihire is on the DOJ's radar, but it's already too late
4 days ago

Amazon Web Services (AWS) says it is unable to restore access to resources and data in some of its Availability Zones in the Middle East after datacenters were damaged during the US war with Iran.

In an update to its AWS Health Dashboard, the cloud giant confirmed that anything hosted exclusively in its Bahrain Region (me-south-1) remains inaccessible.

"The damage to our infrastructure spanned multiple Availability Zones and exceeded what our regional and multi-AZ services are designed to withstand," the update says.

"After a thorough assessment, we have determined that we are unable to restore access to the resources and data hosted exclusively in this Region."

After the first Bahrain Availability Zone was damaged in March, AWS advised customers to migrate their workloads to other Regions. The company said most did so before further attacks disrupted a second Availability Zone in April and rendered the entire Region unavailable.

AWS has reached a similar conclusion about one Availability Zone in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), saying it cannot re-establish access to the resources and data hosted there.

The affected Zone, mec1-az2, is one of three in AWS's UAE Region. Two AWS facilities in the country were hit by drones back in March as Iran retaliated against US…

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Reposted by Catherine

Tube🍂Time @tubetime.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

if we zoom in very close you can see that the pole pieces have laminations just like a transformer. you can also see the copper windings.

super closeup view showing the tiny metal pole pieces, the gap where the magnetic field concentrates, and some of the magnet wire windings.

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Reposted by Catherine

LOWρUFO 🇺🇦🇵🇸🌍 @lowrhoufo.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

I think westerners tend to underestimate just how oppressive copyright is and how much worse it would be if it were possible to enforce globally. Enabling textbook and academic piracy is one of the more liberatory impacts of the internet. Money is too cheap for us to fully understand how vital it is

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Rachel Hollis @rachelhollisart.bsky.social · 18/11/2024

A bit disconcerting when one of the world's largest moth species is attracted to your headlamp! Found this beautiful Hercules Moth in far north Queensland. #wildoz #wildlife #nature #biodiversity #insects

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triple cheeseburger @triplchii.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

an unusual planet populated entirely by a single species of autotrophic coral-like life #art

Drawing depicting a woman standing atop rocks surrounding by strange bright-red life. The sky is deep blue and cloudless.

Text to the right reads:
Survey of Mora-P. September 5th, 149013 CE, Natanya Lytle

Then beneath this there is a large block of text which reads:
The red corals of Mora-P have long since puzzled exobiologists
and anthropologists. They are, as far as we can tell, the only
species present across the entire planet. They are certainly not
natural, but nobody really knows who put them there or why.

Deep history of the local system provides some clues:
Geological surveys tell us that Mora-P was terraformed
between 110000 and 121000 CE (Luttrell et al., 149001), and
radioisotopes have been found dating back to around and a bit
beyond this time. People used to live here.

The red corals are full of cerebral tissue.
Why? What does an autotroph need such an expansive brain
for? In our survey we managed to analyse a section of coral
and map out its connectome. After further qualia modelling
(see technical appendix) we have arrived at a surprising
conclusion: The corals are in a constant state of bliss. The
whole planet is blanketed in sessile creatures experiencing
nothing but pure pleasure for thousands and thousands of
years. It's not the kind of pleasure you could get bored of
either, their brains are wired such that they are psychologically
incapable of experiencing negative emotions.

After further analysis of a segment of coral-brain, another far
more harrowing discovery was made: The corals are likely to
be a very, very heavily modified clade of humans.

In this text, I present the theory that the inhabitants of Mora-P
(tentatively called the "Coral-builder culture") are in fact still
alive and present in the forms of the sprawling coral lifeforms
blanketing the planet. This text covers geological data,
historical data mentioning inhabitants of Mora-P, and the
existential implications of their personhood and psychology.

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Reposted by Catherine

Tube🍂Time @tubetime.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

me: so i name all my cats after numbers! them: oh? me: cat3, cat5 them: you skipped four-- me (ignoring them): cat5e them: but 'e' is not a number me (continuing to ignore them): cat6, cat6a, cat7, cat8

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Reposted by Catherine

Ian Hanschen @furan.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

The core I’ve been working on for the Graphics Gremlin HDMI now supports the following: - Full VGA feature set (includes CGA and EGA) - VESA support for 8-bpp bank-switched modes: 320x200, 320x240, 320x400, 400x300, 640x400, 640x480, 800x600 - MDA as a configurable secondary adapter on 4-bpp HDMI

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eevee @eev.ee · 05/09/2026

i think it's good if people care about what they're doing

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Reposted by Catherine

Chise @sailorrooscout.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

Published in The New England Journal of Medicine. Peer-reviewed. Large sample size. Sound methodology. An antiviral pill has, for the FIRST time, been shown to PREVENT COVID-19 in individuals exposed to SARS-CoV-2. Ensitrelvir blocks the enzyme coronaviruses need to make new copies of themselves.

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Mentha Nolana @mentha.fun · 03/09/2026

Everyday until you like it

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Catherine @whitequark.org · 03/09/2026

cool fact: the new analog measurement chip on #GlasgowInterfaceExplorer can directly read the voltage from a type-K thermocouple, without an amplifier! it's sensitive enough to detect changes on the order of 10 uV, and accurate enough that there isn't too much noise

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Catherine @whitequark.org · 03/09/2026

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James Munns @jamesmunns.com · 02/09/2026

> "Target triple" has been renamed to "target tuple" across the project Oh shiiiiiiit

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Catherine @whitequark.org · 02/09/2026

look! check out what you can do with the new #GlasgowInterfaceExplorer streaming logic analyzer tap into D+/D- lines on a, for example, keyboard, and watch keys get pressed and released in real time in the USB packets

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Reposted by Catherine

The Onion @theonion.com · 01/09/2026

Inside Of Light Fixture Everything Moth Dreamed And More theonion.com/inside-of-light-fixtur…

Inside Of Light Fixture Everything Moth Dreamed And More
Local Porch Lamp Source Of Incandescent Bliss

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Catherine @whitequark.org · 02/09/2026

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Catherine @whitequark.org · 01/09/2026

despite the ongoing work on #GlasgowInterfaceExplorer revD, we haven't forgotten our loyal revC users: I've just added a prototype for a RAM expansion board for revC that 1bitSquared has designed a few years ago

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Reposted by Catherine

ionchy @ionchy.ca · 23/05/2026

start doing computer science <3

START DOING COMPUTER SCIENCE

* VARIABLES WERE SUPPOSED TO BE GIVEN NAMES
* YEARS OF PROGRAMMING yet STILL MORE TO CREATE
* Don't want to write code anyway? We have a field for you: It's called THEORY
* "Well typed programs don't go wrong." "Boolean satisfiability is NP-complete." "Every effectively calculable function is computable." — Statements dreamed up by the utterly inspired

LOOK at what computer scientists deserve your Respect for all this time, with all the circuits and computers we built for them
(This is REAL computer science, done by REAL computer scientists):

[graph of the ARPANET] the Internet
[photo of an FPGA] FPGAs
[screenshot of RocqIDE] proof assistants

They have given us beautiful tools

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Catherine @whitequark.org · 01/09/2026

happy mailing list membership reminder day!

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Peek @peek.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

You have been visited by the BEAN OF PROSPERITY. This powerful blessing will bring you GREAT FORTUNE

My late cat Bean looking very cute and sweet in front of a pile of money

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Catherine @whitequark.org · 31/08/2026

the #GlasgowInterfaceExplorer revD logic analyzer applet is almost done; we're putting finishing touches on the Sigrok driver and optimizing the bitstream a bit. all of the basic functions work and the capture is very reliable even in adverse bandwidth conditions.

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Catherine @whitequark.org · 31/08/2026