#USB Programming Cable

[transingthoseformers]

I think it’d be funny if instead of stds transformers got malware. Like imagine you don’t use protection and you get the You Are An Idiot virus blaring out your speakers, or someone uses a hookup to infect you with a crypto mining program.

Would it be MTI (Malware Transmitted by Interface) or ITM (Interface Transmitted Malware)? 🤔

(would probably still categorize under STI though)

I will admit my first thought was Starscream looking both very embarrassed and very mad in Hook's medbay with Star's speakers up so loud they're staticky😔 (a certain someone who's been interfacing with Earth technology is going to get a serious talking to)

Fucking someone to mine cryptocurrency has to be a top tier asshole move to do

[piratesexmachine420]

goddammit.

My SilverLink cable is dead -- somehow either the firmware was lost or corrupted, and it's just showing up as a generic microcontroller to lsusb. Doesn't seem like there's a way to flash it, though I am still looking.

So much for going back to calculator programming tonight.

[you-have-made-a-fatal-error]

need to shell out for a new laptop before the end of the year - for a lot of reasons but mainly bc support ending for win8.1 makes fixing the current beast rather pointless :/ (and. admittedly. there is a lot to fix. she's old and she has suffered.)

but my current beastie is from the last gen of laptops with a disc drive and the thought of using an external/usb disc drive is enough to make me cry tears of blood

[subjectsix]

KIP'S BIG POST OF THINGS TO MAKE THE INTERNET & TECHNOLOGY SUCK A LITTLE LESS

Post last updated November 23, 2024. Will continue to update!

Here are my favorite things to use to navigate technology my own way:

A refurbished iPod loaded with Rockbox OS (Rockbox is free, iPods range in price. I linked the site I got mine from. Note that iPods get finicky about syncing and the kind of cord it has— it may still charge but might not recognize the device to sync. Getting an original Apple cord sometimes helps). Rockbox has ports for other MP3 players as well.

This Windows debloater program (there are viable alternatives out there, this one works for me). It has a powershell script that give you a little UI and buttons to press, which I appreciate, as I'm still a bit shy with tech.

Firefox with the following extensions: - Consent-O-Matic (set your responses to ALL privacy/cookie pop-ups in the extension, and it will answer all pop-ups for you. I can see reasons to not use it, but I appreciate it) - Facebook Container ("contains" Meta on Facebook and Instagram pages to keep it from tracking you or getting third party cookies, since Meta is fairly egregious about it) - Redirect Amp to HTML (AMP is designed for mobile phones, this forces pages to go to their HTML version) - A WebP/AVIF image converter - uBlock Origin and uBlacklist, with the AI blacklist loaded in to kill any generative AI results from appearing in search engines or anywhere.

Handbrake for ripping DVDs— I haven’t used this in awhile as I haven’t been making video edits. I used this back when I had a Mac OS

VLC Media Player (ol’ reliable)

Unsplash & Pexels for free-to-use images

A password manager (these often are paid. I use Dashlane. There are many options, feel free to search around and ask for recs!). There is a lot that goes into cybersecurity— find the option you feel is best for you.

Things I suggest:

Understanding Royalty Free and the Creative Commons licenses

Familiarity with boolean operators for searching

Investing in a backup drive and external drive

A few good USBs, including one that has a backup of your OS on it

Adapter cables

Avoiding Fandom “wikias” (as in the brand “Fandom”) and supporting other, fan-run or supported wikis. Consider contributing if its something you find yourself passionate or joyful about.

Finding Forums for the things you like, or creating your own*

Create an email specifically for ads/shopping— use it to receive all promotional emails to keep your inbox clean. Upkeep it.

Stop putting so much of your personal information online— be willing to separate your personal online identity from your “online identity��. You don’t owe people your name, location, pronouns, diagnoses, or any of that. It’s your choice, but be discerning in what you give and why. I recommend avoiding providing your phone number to sites as much as possible.

Be intentional

Ask questions

Talk to people

Remember that you can lurk all you want

Things that are fun to check out:

BBSes-- here's a portal to access them.

Neocities

*Forums-- find some to join, or maybe host your own? The system I was most familiar with was vbulletin.

MMM.page

Things that have worked well for me but might work for you, YMMV:

Limit your app usage time on your smartphone if you’re prone to going back to them— this is a tangible way to “practice mindfulness”, a term I find frustratingly vague ansjdbdj

Things I’m looking into:

The “Pi Hole”— a raspberry pi set up to block all ads on a specific internet connection

VPNs-- this is one that was recommended to me.

How to use computers (I mean it): Resources on how to understand your machine and what you’re doing, even if your skill and knowledge level is currently 0:

This section I'll come back an add to. I know that messing with computers can be intimidating, especially if you feel out of your depth. HTML and regedits and especially things like dualbooting or linux feel impossible. So I want to put things here that explain exactly how the internet and your computer functions, and how you can learn and work with that. Yippee!

[bluetoothinmyveins]

Robot hypnosis. That's the post actually

GOD I THINK ROBOT HYPNO IS SO HOT. I need someone to plug a USB cable into my chest, watch me react and get curious what they're doing, watching as they ignore my question and just plug me into a little laptop. Innocent, and unassuming.

But very quickly I realized no, I was definitely not receiving little bugfixes or anything. I was put into file sharing mode. I could feel them picking through my brain, looking at my intricate protected files without a single issue or conflict.

I could feel myself getting more and more dumb as they root through things, messing with core files.. until I just fall limp, completely dumb and suggestible because everything I knew about performing tasks was being modified.

All of my internal firewalls being disabled. Gaining admin privileges to really mess with me. Until I feel my code being injected with how they wanted me to perform to their liking. Their code, programs, actions overriding my own..

I need that right now please.

[not-that-dillinger]

"Hi Will," Ed greeted the robot. The sound the helping hand made was... concerning, but whatever it is, he knows it's not the helping hands' fault.

He smiled brightly at the stack of notebooks. "Thank you, friend!"

Before he could get to the notes, however, another approached... and delivered him a thumb drive. He frowned in confusion for a moment, but then recognized the writing on it Astraeus.

He held it in his hand as though breathing wrong would damage the storage device and program within, and stared at it as though looking away would cause the drive to vanish. The program on it had been Eos's twin, a VPN meant to obscure the sending and receiving locations of Eos's encrypted messages. Astraeus had been damaged in the same attack that had damaged Eos, except had ended up worse to the point where Ed had to take him off the server to repair him.

"You found him?" Ed all but whispered in awe. He watched the helping hand roll away, clearly mildly concerned by the obvious look of plotting. Ed would not interfere with that one.

Ed shook his head. Astraeos had waited a long time, but right now, Ed had to prioritize the newest addition to his constellation of programs He tucked the thumb drive into his shirt pocket, and finally turned to the stack of notebooks. He skimmed through the stack, then sat back down at the terminal.

::I'm back,:: he messaged Eve. :: Found Flynn's notes... the hands found my father's.... Among other things. How are you and Clu doing?::

@not-that-dillinger Continued from here because it apparently doesn't want me to reblog it...

Nitro shuddered softly. "There's... two kinds of reprogramming." He explained haltingly. "That we have experience with, at least."

"One's... medical, I guess. Repairing damage, making improvements, averting obsolescence... all done by Users or trained Medic Programs. Good thing, if a bit... disconcerting when you're not used to it."

"The other's Clu's specialty. He calls it rectifying. It's... it's hacking, I guess, given a fancy name, but it's so much worse than being infected with a Virus or a User breaking in to edit a Program's function without access rights allowing them to."

"It strips away everything that makes someone who they are. Memories, functions, personality, thoughts, hopes, dreams... all gone." Nitro looked away, clenching his fist. "He did it to so many. Friends became enemies in... well. Fractions of a second for you, our equivalent of minutes. Hundreds, if not thousands, wiped clean except for what he wanted to turn them into. Disposable armies, mostly. Bodies to throw at what few held out against him. He- even Tron was brought down eventually. Our stronghold, Eve, my kids... we're the last of the resistance, maybe forty fighters strong, the rest all refugees. It- for all I know, it could be just me now."

[monsterqueers]

So ive been using linux for a good while now, and its now officially my daily driver. Windows is now permabenched in a removed hhd in a drawer unless something awful happens. (Good riddance, havent truly enjoyed windows since xp)

And from this I think that people urging others to move to linux are not doing so in the correct way.

Instead of trying to push a friendly distro and insisting it will work for everything and everyone, instead check if the hardware they are using specifically is good for linux and if so what families.

One computer will be a breeze with any distro, another could have a few quirks but be basically fine, however another of the same year and manufacturer could be an uphill battle thats straight up unusable even for someone who knows how to do the kernel edit workarounds for all but specific distros, if that.

My desktop took linux mint like a dream, 100% painless with no fucking about to make it work and even no need for an ethernet cable to get things started. My dinosaur laptop (may it rest in peace after other components died) had a few issues but also worked very well with little effort with mint. My current junk laptop is an uphill battle that will require arch AND edits to the kernel paremeters to work without being filled with screen flashing and full system freezes at random and im still gearing up the gumption to give it another few attempts to actually pull it off.

Each of these computers is a VERY different experience, and if your prospective switcher is using a computer that doesnt play well, its NOT going to work, they will get frustrated, and they will give up. They have to work with what they have.

Instead of going right to telling them to switch and that anything is good, Encourage people to search up their pc+linux compatibility if they are looking to switch to determine if its viable for a newbie who doesnt want to struggle, then offer a distro that has a live usb/dvd version if possible for them to test without install, and a big enough userbase that troubleshooting is as painless as possible.

If its a laptop, archwiki has lists of those by maker (linked in the page given) with notes on what has been tested in that family of linux.

This, I think, above all, is the most important thing when trying to get people to switch:

MAKE SURE THEIR HARDWARE IS GOOD FOR IT

Not just the pc, but the peripherals too; their mouse, their mic, their webcam, their keyboard- these things are not always supported well.

Linux can be fast, easy, and really comfortable and painless with little to no troubleshooting or tedious workarounds to get your stuff to work; but you have to be using the right hardware.

Yes, make sure you have alternative programs lined up that are actually good (stop reccing gimp when krita is a way better P$ alternative for people trying to draw digitally), and maybe consider talking about how to run wine in a newbie friendly way for things they might need for work reasons that dont work on linux normally(and accept that it might not work even with wine), but above all, make sure that its not just being phrased as 'a you problem' when it might be their system that is the issue there.

For prospective switchers that tried but gave up because of glitches or freezes or things otherwise not working: It wasnt you being bad at computers. Sometimes it just doesnt work with that hardware well and there is nothing you can do. People dont warn you about this, but its a very real issue.

If you still want to try linux, when you eventually get a new computer in the future, look for one that seems to be supported by linux well- some pcs even come with linux preinstalled for you even (dell does this with ubuntu and ubuntu has skins that looks windows esque). Asking specifically for linux compatible or linux preinstalled computers signals to developers to make more computers that work with linux, and makes it easier to get linux friendly stuff.

If not, there are windows 11 neutering tools out there in the wild that are very useful and are a plenty fine alternative to switching. You should only switch if you want to switch.

[fuzzkaizer]

SevenMileMountain - MIDI Pitch Bend and Modulation Wheels

"A dedicated Pitch Bend / Modulation controller with traditional wheels. This unit connects via USB to your MIDI devices, allowing you to add Pitch Bend to synths which lack them.

The wheels are about the same width as a full sized piano key (just shy of 1"). The left wheel, Pitch Bend, is spring loaded, so it returns to center when released. The right wheel, Modulation, does not automatically return to center. Both have their center points marked with a raised tab.

The wheels are enclosed in a cube 2.5" square (65 mm) and will appear as "Seeed XIAO M0" in your DAW. As it's programmed specifically as PB/MD, no other setup should be required.

As of August 30, 2024:

More Colors: I'm back to making both black and white versions of the wheel.

New Firmware: Better handling of PB deadzone and ranging. All prior purchases can be updated at no cost.

As of April 12, 2024:

Now available in All Black.

Top cover has been simplified.

Further improvements with the wheels and mechanisms.

As of February 20, 2024:

The Pitch Bend wheel now has a new mechanism. It is much "snappier" than before. The wheel now rolls on a ball bearing and uses low physical resistance sensor, allowing the spring to provide quicker "return to center" power.

All WHEELs now include TRS MIDI. This allows connections to legacy keyboards (DIN-5) with a simple adapter (sold separately). It is a 3.5mm (1/8") Type A TRS jack (aka "headphone cable") wired to the MIDI 2018 Standard. If you use Serial MIDI you will still need to supply power via the USB connection. The device outputs USB MIDI and Serial MIDI at the same time.

The MIDI Channel can be changed (from 1 to 16) using a settings button on the back. The default Channel is 1.

Firmware can now be updated in the field. I can tweak settings and send you custom code to run on your device.

... "

cred: etsy.com/SevenMileMountain

[seat-safety-switch]

There's a whole lot of towns out there that you'll never visit. Most of them are chock full of people you'll never meet. Tulsa, for example. Never been there, might never go there. And that makes me a little sad.

Sure, I only have enough time on this earth to visit so many towns. And when I'm there, I don't have enough time to interrogate every single one of the locals to see if, say, any of them have a set of Mopar F-body windshield wiper linkages sitting in the back of their garage. They'll just go to waste, damned to irrelevance by my lack of time. That's what the MBAs call a "market inefficiency."

The internet has helped, sure, but you can only demand what other people have supplied. Any quick browse on a model-specific forum is full of lonely folks crying out to the heavens for a specific piece of trim, or an entire automatic transmission, that they will never receive. And it's a lot of work to put that stuff up for sale. Who knows what's actually inside that weird pile of oil-stained gewgaws that Pawpaw left behind before he joined that alien cult and drank all that Flavor-Aid? His surviving next-of-kin sure don't know the difference between a 4.11 and a 3.90 rear end, nor are they willing to teach themselves that information in order to list it on eBay for twenty bucks.

Don't worry, though, I have a solution. That solution is that the Boston Dynamics warehouse is not secured very well. Their robots are powered by a two-stroke lawnmower engine: it's like they wanted me to show up with a turbine-generator-powered plasma cutter and chop right through the rebar holding the walls of their robot storage lockup together. After that, it was a quick couple of dozen trips to the local electronics store to get the right USB-to-serial cable, and I soon had my harem of semi-autonomous Parts-Seeking Drones® roving the backwoods of America.

So, if you see a lanky, creaking doglike shape lurking outside your yard tonight, smelling oddly of pre-mix and human arterial blood, let it in your garage. All it wants to do is scan your spare parts so I can find that goddamn last piece of dash trim for the cruise control lever on my Volare. Don't worry: I won't have the robots kill you if you decide not to sell it to me after all. It would be hypocritical of me to judge another hoarder. We'll have coffee when I come see your town for the first time! We can trade junk and be best friends and call each other on the phone afterward and talk about nitrous oxide. No promises on what the robots will do if they search your entire property and don't find any Plymouth Volare stuff, though. I forgot to program that part before I let them out of radio range.

[adafruit]

mini Sparkle Motion prototype - a tiny, fully-featured WLED board ✨🔌📏💡🌈

We're doing a lot of serious testing with our WLED mega-board, code-name Sparkle Motion .

While doing some holiday lighting projects, we also wanted something slim enough to slip into any design. It still uses an ESP32 for the best support, with USB-serial programming, 5A fuse, 5V level shifting + 100 ohm series resistors for pixel drivers, user/reset buttons, a user LED and onboard neopixel, JST SH analog/digital connector, QT I2C connector, 4 GPIO plus power/ground breakouts, and USB type C power/data input.

However, this version is made simpler and less expensive by dropping the DC jack and USB PD support: it's only for 5V strips if you want to power them directly (you could still drive 12V or 24V pixels, but you'll need separate power for them). Instead of a full set of terminal blocks for 3 signals, we only have two outputs, and they have to share the power and ground pins. It could also be used for a single two-pin dotstar LED setup. We kept the built-in I2S mic but dropped the on-board IR sensor - if you want an IR sensor, you'll be able to plug it into the JST SH port with a simple cable or solder it into the breakout pads.

The trade-off is that it's much smaller and slimmer, especially when no terminal blocks are soldered in by default: only 1.2" long x 0.785" wide (~1 sq in) x 0.3" thick vs. the original's 2" x 1.3" (2.6 sq in) x 0.55". To get it that small, we went 4-layer to give us a nice big ground and 5V plane in the middle and double-sided assembly. Coming soon.

[marlequinncos]

My animatronic Diego Brando dinosaur tail is so incredible that it deserves its own post! I commissioned this from the The Tail Company; they're based in the UK and they make animatronic tails, wings, and ears. This tail 32 in/81 cm long, pretty lightweight, chargeable with a USB cable, and has 11 different movements I can control or program with my phone. Additionally, if I ever cosplay another character with a tail, I can simply swap out the Diego cover for a different one that I make, as the animatronic skeleton remains the same. I can’t wait to wear this to a con!

[demilypyro]

i think i vaguely remember you answering this question, but what do you use for your setup, like the facial tracking and such? i remember you mentioning an app that you then converted from your phone into a different program?

I have an iphone on a small tripod at eye level. I use an iphone because it has some of the best facial tracking tech on the market but it's proprietary software so you can't get it anywhere else. The iphone sends the tracking data to my PC through a USB cable, where a plugin called Vbridger converts it for use by Vtube studio, a vtuber program. I then capture the model and stream it from OBS.

[ntrlily]

is it possible for people to like, create old consoles/computers from scratch? like if they could replicate the physical hardware using new materials, and plant old software onto the new hardware to create like, a totally new, say, win98 pc? cause i browse online and see a lot of secondhand stuff, but the issue is always that machines break down over time due to physical wear on the hardware itself, so old pcs aren't going to last forever. it makes me wonder if at a certain point, old consoles and computers are just gonna degrade past usability, or if it's possible to build new pieces of retro hardware just as they would have been built 30 or 40 years ago

Can of worms! I am happy to open it though. For the moment I will ignore any rights issues for various reasons including "those eventually expire" and "patent law is the branch of IP law I know the least about"

Off the top of my head so long as you're only* talking computer/console hardware there aren't any particular parts that we've lost the capability to start manufacturing again, but there's more economical approaches to building neo-retro** hardware.

But before digging into that I would like to mention that anecdotally, a great many hardware failures I see on old computers are on parts that you can just remove and replace with something new. Hard drive failures, floppy disc drive failures, damaged capacitors, various issues with batteries/battery compartments, these are mostly fixable without resorting to scavenging genuine old parts. Hard drive and floppy drive failures may require finding something that you can actually plug into the device but this isn't strictly impossible.

Additionally, it's common among retro computing enthusiasts to replace some of these parts with fancier parts than were possible when those machines were new. The primary use cases for buying say, floppy-to-USB converters are keeping old industrial and aviation computers alive longer, but hobbyists do also buy these (I want to put one in my 9801 too but that's pricy so it's just on my wishlist for after I have finished school and settled down ;u;) Sticking SSDs in old computers is also not an uncommon mod.

So-- hold on let me grab my half-disassembled PC-9801 BX2 to help me explain

(Feat. the parts I pulled out of it in the second photo)

In that second photo we have some ram modules, a power supply, floppy drives, a hard drive, and floppy+hard drive cables. The fdd+hdd+cables are easily replaceable with new parts as mentioned, the power supply is a power supply, and the ram chips are... actually I don't know a lot about this one. I have enough old ram chips laying around that I haven't had to think hard about how to replace them.

Now in photo number 1 we have the motherboard and some expansion chips. The sound card is centered a bit here*** and underneath it is a video expansion card and underneath that interesting expansion card setup is the motherboard itself.

The big kickers for manufacturing new would be the CPU and the sound card-- you in theory could make those new but chip fabrication is only economical if it's done beyond a certain scale that's not quite realistic for a niche hobbyist market.

But what you could use instead of those is an FPGA, or Field Programmable Gate Array. These aren't within my field of expertise so to simplify a bit, these are integrated chips (like a CPU or a sound chip) but unlike those, they can be reprogrammed after manufacture, rather than having a set-in-stone layout. So you could program one to act as an old CPU, at a cost that is... more than that of getting a standard mass-manufactured CPU, and less than attempting small scale manufacture of a CPU.

So in theory you could plunk one of those down into a custom circuit board, use the closest approximate off the shelf parts, and make something that runs like a pc-98 (or commodore, or famicom, or saturn, or whatever.) In practice as far as I'm aware, users who want hardware like this use something like the MiSTer FPGA (Third party link but I think it's a pretty useful intro to the project)

And of course for many users, emulation will also do the trick.

*manufacturing cathode ray tube displays is out of the question

**idk if this is a term but I hope it is. If it's not, I'm coining it

***That's a 26k which isn't the best soundcard but it's super moe!!!!!!!!!!

[ensemblesongs]

are u willing to share/make/or link a guide on how u go about making these solos?

I typed out an entire reply and it failed this is so irritating I hope I die. Due to this my reply will be somewhat less in-depth this time. I am also not going to be doing a step by step guide; I don’t want to misuse terminology or claim I know that much about the technology and filetypes involved.

I don’t know if this can be done at all on iOS, and if it can it’s likely difficult. But if you have an android or something of the sort you’re in luck; you can use a USB cable to access all of your apps’ data via your computer and a usb cable (almost everyone has one, it comes with your charger, usually separate from the base.) including Ensemble Stars. After entering your data and accessing its files, you’ll be able to find a folder labeled “jp.co.happyelements.boysm”, and from there you go to files, data, audio, songs — and within the songs’ folders, you’ll find the “characters” folder. They’re all titled with different numbers and they are not in the order you’d expect (as in, the usual lineup from starpro to the senseis/4piece.) the instrumentals are in a separate one. They’re all formatted as .awb and .acb files; if I’m not mistaken one is the actual audio and the other is the data for them. It’s the format most games if not all use, and you’ll have to convert them, for which there are many tutorials online that explain it better than I do, and you need two separate programs to extract the files and decode them into a playable format, such as .wav, since the original format cannot simply be played like that on your computer or any device, really.

Each songs’ vocals are separate into two, main and background. The instrumentals, as I mentioned, are also separate. You’ll have to put them together regardless of if you want the instrumentals or not, and the program I use is audacity (I know what you’re thinking. Not ideal. But she works.)

ESBU is a kind person who even takes specific requests to make different versions and such. Uploads from a long time ago (a year or two) such as the nikirin duet and the Tsumugi solos were possible thanks to them and what they provide. I obtained half of the new years solos from separate unrelated sources and the other half from them, as well. They used to upload on soundcloud, but ever since the ban and heightening of copyright and protection over their songs, they stick to twitter. I’d rather you guys not give that poor individual too much work.

Ensemblesongs lives to provide, having all of the raw files in my hands … sometimes I wish to gatekeep things from others so I’ll be needed more (´°̥̥̥̥̥̥̥̥ω°̥̥̥̥̥̥̥̥｀) this blog gives me something to do as well a sense of purpose, but that’s childish of me to do, so there you have it. It is also 4 am. I hope this helped, somehow ♪

[projectiondepartment]

I believe these dolls, these drifting people, these prostitutes, these empty chairs, and these screens are sufficiently disassembled signposts to indicate the multiple levels at work here. My internal organs are thinking things, getting inclinations, the lattice of some story, the nervous system, but even though the USB cables that tie me to this bed lead endlessly to information, irrational primary factors, and conditional recognition programing, perhaps I am really just sloshing around in my own blood.

— Left Hand, Paul Curran

[defira85]

USB-C is the worst fucking invention ever and the day some fucking genius decided to switch laptop power to them was a black fucking day in history. I haven't even had this piece of crap a year and I need to buy my third power cable because guess what! USB-C is too small and dainty and flimsy for the sort of wear and movement a laptop traditionally goes through daily! Meanwhile, my eight year old laptop that I do art on because it has more than one USB port like this piece of shit, is still merrily chugging away. Granted it sounds like a 747 landing when it tries to run two programs at once but it still has 3 functioning USB ports and multiple other adaptor ports and it doesn't charge with USB

This one uses "the power of AI" and can't even run Baldur's Gate 3

I fucking hate the future