Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-09-03:/2412311] "The worst possible antitrust outcome"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-09-03:/2412267] "Mis-issued certificates for 1.1.1.1 DNS service pose a threat to the Internet"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-09-02:/2412032] "Judge: Google can keep Chrome, must share search data with “qualified competitors”"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-09-02:/2411957] "This ultra-rare ’90s LaserDisc game console can finally be emulated on a PC"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-09-02:/2411847] "Imgur's community was in revolt"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-09-01:/2411633] "Intel Patents 'Software Defined Supercore'"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-08-26:/2410252] "Doge uploaded live copy of Social Security database to 'vulnerable' cloud server"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-08-26:/2410211] "We regret but have to temporary suspend the shipments to USA"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-08-26:/2410193] "Troubled USB Device? This Tool Can Help"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-08-26:/2410135] "The size of Adobe Reader installers through the years"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-08-25:/2409944] "Google will allow only apps from verified developers to be installed on Android"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-08-24:/2409578] "Picking an Old Operating System"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-08-22:/2409290] "US government takes 10 percent stake in Intel in exchange for money it was already on the hook for"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-08-22:/2409328] "Nitro: A tiny but flexible init system and process supervisor"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-08-21:/2408908] "James Dobson, Influential Leader of the Religious Right, Dies at 89"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-08-20:/2408610] "FDA warns public to throw out potentially radioactive shrimp"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-08-15:/2407469] "HTTP/1.1 must die: the desync endgame"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-08-15:/2407392] "Open hardware desktop 3D printing is dead – you just don’t know it yet"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-08-15:/2407386] "What kids told us about how to get them off their phones"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-08-14:/2407170] ""Privacy preserving age verification" is bullshit"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-08-12:/2406472] "Firefox’ new “AI” features cause CPU spikes and battery drain"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-08-11:/2406239] "Reddit will block the Internet Archive"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-08-11:/2406191] "GitHub is no longer independent at Microsoft after CEO resignation"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-08-11:/2406033] "Vanishing from Hyundai’s data network"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-08-13:/2406677] "QNX: The Incredible 1.44M Demo"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-08-08:/2405403] "New executive order puts all grants under political control"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-08-06:/2404914] "The Real Origin of Cisco Systems (1999)"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-08-01:/2403752] "Tesla loses Autopilot wrongful death case in $329 million verdict"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-08-01:/2403745] "Tested: Microsoft Recall can still capture credit cards and passwords, a treasure trove for crooks"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-07-31:/2403404] "Epic just won its Google lawsuit again, and Android may never be the same"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-07-29:/2402644] "RP2350 A4, RP2354, and a New Hacking Challenge"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-07-28:/2402376] "Windows 11 is a minefield of micro-aggressions in the shipping lane of progressl"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-07-24:/2401424] "Efficient Computer's Electron E1 CPU"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-07-22:/2400766] "A Professor’s Search for the MingKwai, a Lost Chinese Typewriter"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-07-21:/2400386] "Vibe coding service Replit deleted user’s production database, faked data, told fibs galore"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-07-21:/2400437] "NIH limits scientists to six applications per year"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-07-21:/2400421] "An artificially complex XML schema as a lock-in tool"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-07-22:/2400779] "MakeShift: Security Analysis of Shimano Di2 Wireless Gear Shifting in Bicycles"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-07-18:/2399996] "Replication of Quantum Factorisation Records with a VIC-20, an Abacus, and a Dog"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-07-15:/2399026] "Marc Andreessen Is a Traitor"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-07-08:/2397262] "GlobalFoundries to Acquire MIPS"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-07-04:/2396489] "Nvidia won, we all lost"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-07-04:/2396473] "Ubuntu 25.10 to drop support for effectively all existing RISC-V hardware, focuses on future RISC-V hardware instead"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-07-03:/2396128] "AI note takers are flooding Zoom calls as workers opt to skip meetings"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-07-03:/2396110] "Surveillance Used by a Drug Cartel"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-07-02:/2395852] "Why The Latest Linux Kernel Won’t Run On Your 486 And 586 Anymore"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-07-01:/2395685] "Donkey Kong Country 2 and open bus"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-06-29:/2395064] "Wayback: experimental layer to run X desktop environments on Wayland"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-06-29:/2395059] "“I want a good parallel computer”"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-06-27:/2394461] "Apple Just Patented an Image Sensor with 20 Stops of Dynamic Range"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-06-26:/2394371] "Microsoft is moving antivirus providers out of the Windows kernel"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-06-26:/2394230] "Snow - Classic Macintosh emulator"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-06-25:/2394054] "Games run faster on SteamOS than Windows 11, Ars testing finds"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-06-24:/2393676] "Microsoft extends free Windows 10 security updates into 2026"
Diag| Considering item [tag:pappp.net,2025-06-24:/2393476] "Magic Lantern Software for Canon Cameras Is Back"
Article note: We need more of this kind of thing in at least CompE curricula, and I'd assert CS curricula as well even though it would make the theoreticians cry. I always inject some history when I can and get a chorus of "Oh, that makes sense now"s.
Talking about the history of things is talking about the how and why of current practices. Exposing students to that would go a long way to damp both hanging on to bad assumptions (hint: modern performance analysis has little to do with operation counts and a lot to do with memory access patterns) and design fads that have been oscillating between extremes for 60 years.
Liam Proven posted a good summary of the importance of the PDP and VAX series of computers on his blog.
Earlier today, I saw a link on the ClassicCmp.org mailing list to a project to re-implement the DEC VAX CPU on an FPGA. It’s entitled “First new vax in …30 years?”
Someone posted it on Hackernews. One of the comments said, roughly, that they didn’t see the significance and could someone “explain it like I’m a Computer Science undergrad.” This is my attempt to reply…
Um. Now I feel like I’m 106 instead of “just” 53.
OK, so, basically all modern mass-market OSes of any significance derive in some way from 2 historical minicomputer families… and both were from the same company.
I impulse bought a 5 pack of tiny stepper motors off Amazon for $3 to satisfy my curiosity. A colleague showed them to me and asked if I knew anything about them and …I didn’t, but they were too cheap and interesting not to try.
I couldn’t find any documentation on the internet from the identifying marks, so I burnt an afternoon figuring them out, and I’m posing my notes in case anyone else wants to make use of them.
The labeling on the motor itself is “SRG0808 003PLK5” which doesn’t turn up anything useful in a quick search, and the bag they came in is labeled “Fashion Worlds stepper motor 9496 x5” which is also not something googlable.
The motor comes attached to a flat flex cable with various adhesive pads built in, a boardlet, and a connector at one end. The output shaft is set in a brass gear roughly 2.75mm diameter with 12 involute profile teeth, about 3mm long – I don’t know small gears well enough to infer a ton from this, but it does seem like there is a lot of compatible gearing on the market.
Test setup for one of these steppers
To get around the lack of documentation, I probed one out with a DMM then built a test rig out of a dual L9110S H-Bridge board and a little STM32F103 dev board with the AccelStepper Arduino library to figure out the details.
They appear to be 20 steps per revolution motors, though they seem to work noticeably better with a half-step drive pattern. They work nicely at 3.3V, but get a little hotter than I’m comfortable with if energized for an extended period of time; I also tried 5V and it seems to tolerate that fine as well, gain a noticeable amount of extra torque, and get appreciably louder.
I don’t have the tools around to easily test the effective torque, but was way more than I expected based on my experiences with other small hobby motors. In my little taped-to-the-table test setup (pictured), if I jammed a fingernail into the rotor when it was already at speed at around at about 1000 steps/s on a 5V supply, the motor and/or nail deflected rather than missing steps.
Motor Diagram
If you look at the motor with the output shaft facing away from you and label the four pads A,B,C,D, the phases are A-D and B-C with about 9Ω across each phase.
FPC Connector Pinout
If you look at the attached flat flex cable with the end pointed toward you, it has 7 contacts. For reference, let’s refer to them numbered 1-7 left to right. The ribbon itself is 4mm wide, and the contacts appear to be 0.5mm pitch, so it would probably mate with any of the various “7Pin 0.5mm Pitch FFC FPC” connectors floating around on the market for cheap if you wanted to spin a driver board for it that used the included cable.
The last 4 cable pins correspond to the motor terminals 4-D, 5-C, 6-B, 7-A… but for experimentation it’s easier to just solder leads directly to the motor pads. I used two pairs out of some old stranded CAT5, visible in the top picture.
IR Reflective Object Sensor Breakout
There is a bonus component on a little arc-shaped boardlet built into the flat flex. It appears to be some manner of reflective infrared optical sensor, which I assume was used to establish a home position in whatever these were designed for use in – frankly since it has convenient mounting holes and wiring it would be pretty nice to use the same way in most applications I would want one of these in.
The first three ribbon pins are attached to this part, and none of these pins are shared with the motor itself. For discussion, let’s number the pins 1,2 left to right on the side toward the flex cable, and 3,4 right to left along the other in typical IC fashion. The pins are broken out Part 1 = Flex 1, Part 2 = Flex 2, Part 3 = also Flex 1, Part 4 = Flex 3.
Two of the pins (+ on 2, – on 3) appear to be a diode with a 1V forward voltage, and after I thought about it and checked with a camera with a bad IR filter, it is an infrared LED. The other pair seem to be a phototransistor or similar; it reads about 1.5MΩ from pin 4 to pin 1 in darkness and 1KΩ across the same with an IR LED pointed at it.
I’m not sure what I’m going to do with these, but they seem promising for small motion systems, especially since (if I bought bulk packs of each from China) you could get the motor and pair of H-bridges to drive it for under a dollar. Hopefully I’ll run into something to play with them in and/or my reversing work will enable someone else’s cool project.
Article note: Fack.
Precautions reducing faster than vaccination rate because of the large retard-American population.
The number of new COVID-19 cases and the statewide positivity rate are again on the rise in Kentucky after two months of consecutive decline, the public health commissioner said Thursday. … Click to Continue »