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| desudesu |
Posted on 22-06-22, 17:16
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Post: #39 of 62
Since: 01-29-22 Last post: 866 days Last view: 866 days |
Kinda strange thread title but this mainly applies to PCs, and especially dealing with things like TLS, not having necessary hardware, operating system being 'too old', not having a phone for verification/logging in/recovery/whatever the hell something increasingly requires your phone for these days, some feature in a piece of software breaking, basically anything like that. Mine has to be that one time I wrote a plugin for ABXD that allowed you to execute an SQL query directly from a page in the admin panel, accessible only to 'root' users. Thing is, I literally wrote the entire fucking thing (and tested it) using a DualShock 3 on a PS3, in a web FTP interface... trust me, given the way the PS3 browser is prone to just randomly deleting the entire content of the text box for no reason from time to time I can't say it wasn't hell... (It didn't properly handle errors/successful commands, and was probably susceptible to token-based exploitation, if I remember correctly, but it did work for what purpose it served: I mainly wrote it so that I could moderate the aforementioned board in question while I didn't have a PC. Pretty useful in all consideration.) |
| Kawaoneechan |
Posted on 22-06-22, 18:53
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Would you care for a chocolate milk of glass?
 Post: #579 of 599 Since: 10-29-18 Last post: 197 days Last view: 8 hours |
Not exactly a weird limitation I overcame, but certainly a weird completely the opposite of a limitation: When I got my first Pentium computer, I got it in parts. I'd built and upgraded my own 286 back when I got my first PC (yes I'm old), and I certainly could build my own Pentium, floating point division bug included. By getting a single cable connection wrong, I discovered exactly how backward-compatible a PC can get.  |
| tomman |
Posted on 22-06-22, 20:39
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Dinosaur
 Post: #1130 of 1317 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 1 day Last view: 5 hours |
Oh, the "absurd hacks you have to do to get shit working" thread~! - I blew the USB VCC trace on the (now defunct) motherboard of Saki (a PCCHIPS M535/8, for those new here), circa 2006. This was because back then I wanted to test the USB ports but I didn't had a proper USB header, so instead I just jammed in an USB plug from an extension cord. While the contacts inside the USB plug had essentially the same pitch as the motherboard pin header connector (so the whole thing actually WORKED for a few seconds!), I neglected to isolate the metal shielding on the plug. What happens when you short VCC to GND? Things burn and melt, of course! Boom~ no more USB ports. Except that the only thing that went boom was the (fat) VCC trace. A precariously twisted short length of cable between the VCC pins on the header and a nearby diode (?) were enough to bring back the USB ports to life. But since I couldn't solder back then (and can't really do it that well now), the cable would get a bit loose every now and then. A small strip of cardboard shoehorned between the PSU and the bodge cable (enough to push things back in place) took care of that :P Aamzingly that setup hold reasonably well for nearly fifteen years! - Most old motherboards don't recognize large IDE/PATA drives (where their meaning of "large" varies according to whoever wrote the firmware for those). I got used to several strategies for that, none of those involving Ontrack DiskMangler™, thankfully. One was the 32GB clip jumper, which had had interesting effects: while on most drives it effectively became a hard cap (rendering the rest of the drive space inaccessible and unusable), Samsungs and Maxtors cheated a bit: with the jumper set, these drives would become "32GB" drives, but the rest of the space would be hidden in a HPA. This is enough to fool both firmwares and Windows, but Linux isn't stupid: all you needed was to create a partition that extended into the (fake) HPA, and boot. Presto, no more size limits! Of course your boot partition had to be under 32GB, but that was all. And if bootability was not of concern (say, for a secondary drive), just disable that IDE channel on BIOS and let the Linux kernel probe things on its own! Ever wanted 320GB PATA drives on a Socket 7 motherboard? (or even well into the terabyte world with a suitable SATA-to-PATA bridge) Now you can~! (and yes, that means that unofficially chipsets as old as the Intel 430VX/PIIX3 could do LBA48 on hardware - the barrier was only software/firmware) - Case fans secured with adhesive tape or cable ties, power connections poorly spliced, and even handmade adapters with no solder. Yes, I risked frying things in the quest to keep my hardware cool because this is Soviet Venezuela and our computer stores were poorly stocked/too expensive and buying online wasn't an option for college students/the unemployed. - I'm pretty sure I've done a couple The Daily WTF-frontpage quality routines in my professional career codebases. For example, messing with session beans on J2EE webapps from other sessions, relying on nearly undocumented APIs, Reflection shit, StackOverflow copypasta, and the silly "noone would use anything but Weld for CDI, right?" assumption (which for now has held true, and only because we get to define the application server base platform AKA "only WildFly is supported, which we'll gladly setup for you"). - The very reason I started cracking open laptops for fun and (sometimes) profit: because bsnes was throttling down my Dell Inspiron 6400! No, "dust sponges" are NOT OEM parts! Remove those, and you'll get your FPS back :) Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™ |
| Arisotura |
Posted on 22-07-02, 11:40 (revision 1)
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Post: #1 of 1
Since: 07-02-22 Last post: 874 days Last view: 853 days |
In this series... what do you do when you ordered a SOIC replacement chip but you receive a PLCC one and you're impatient? this despite what one might think, it works fine |
| tomman |
Posted on 22-07-10, 20:44 (revision 1)
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Dinosaur
Post: #1152 of 1317 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 1 day Last view: 5 hours |
A few blackouts later, I've had my first fan failure on my Compaq "Fine, time for some lube"... except that this is a Sunon MagLev from 20 years ago (Compaq/HP OEM part, even!), there is no obvious points to oil since this isn't your El-Cheapo™ junk-bearing crapola. After destroying some plastic, it was evident that I had no choice but to swap fans. My only replacement was a crappy 8x8cm Foxconn (the Sunon is 7x7, while the standard gutless wonder PSU fan is 6x6), so no way to properly fit on the Compaq case fan screw holes (which are made for 7x7 fans). "Well, a single screw will have to do"... except that after plugging things again, the replacement fan wouldn't spin either! Hmmm, this replacement IS known good, and not seized. Something weird is happening. On a hunch, I decided to try the case fan on the CPU fan header on the mobo, and lo and behold - it spins! So apparently the case fan header is now dead. Yay Compaq. This shitty supermarket special motherboard which is beyond picky with RAM sticks and whose USB ports are on border between life and death has now lost a fan header too, in which is a first to me. Even better: after unseizing it by hand, the Sunon fan was also spinning full jet blast when powered from the CPU fan header! Apparently the chassis fan header has been acting flaky, as I had clearly noticed irregular spinup/spindown sounds since I had installed the fan a month ago. Nope, this mobo doesn't have any kind of fan speed control whatsoever (nothing on the BIOS, and while there IS a sensor chip, it's one of those unsupported forever by lm-sensors), so I guess fans here aren't simply getting enough juice. Once again, yay Compaq. OK, so I guess I'll have to power this fan directly from the PSU. But instead of splicing cables with no soldering and garbage adhesive tape, I found a rather uncommon 3-pin to Molex fan adapter on my pile of cables. But I wanted to use the Sunon in the meanwhile: it simply sucks harder (no pun intended!) than the puny Foxconn, it's a perfect fit for the Compaq case, and I don't mind unseizing it every now and then. Except that this one has a 4-pin fan connector, which fits nicely on 3-pin headers but not on my adapter cable! Splicing time? Oh hell no. Take a sewing needle, take note of the pinouts (yellow-red-black), carefully push the pins through the openings on the plastic connector, swap connectors, insert pins, call it FUCKING DONE. (I had to tape the extra 4th pin to not short out things inside). This is Soviet Venezuela - you can't simply go outside and buy a new computer fan (unless of the craptacular 6x6cm variety), and MercadoLibre is a fucking ripoff so ghetto way it is~ And unlike that long gone PCChips M535/8, I don't envision this Compaq PoS lasting another 15 years (despite having less than two thousand hours on the clock) - quality is simply nowhere to be found :/ Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™ |
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