"I need a robot girl so I can infect her with malware and pour dr pepper in her circuitry "

finally home 12+ hours AFTER I was due back home to begin with...

I would of actually managed a turn and burn in a day but... airplane said no

Exhausted, tired & sore but happy to be home

finally back in sydney
can't wait to go and hold my boy and tell him how much I love him 💜

onwards to home

what a fucking cluster fuck 😑

im so fuvking tired.. but tonight ended up with a random hookup, damn worth it..

its way too early in the morning for this shit .

empty terminal be like...

so im in the mantra tonight thanks to jetstar
Flight is at 6:45am

fuvk..

waiting to find out what the fuvk is happening..

fully disembarked ... fuck

girl who is grounded (flight wont make curfew so shes stuck in Melbourne)

looks like we arent making it tonight
fuvk so like .. what do I do now
I hope jetstar put us up for the night..

staring at the sydney curfew like..

Something HAD to go wrong... Didn't it...
There are currently 3 engineers in the flight deck trying to diagnose why the pilots air conditioning / pressurisation isn’t working

VH-VQH Airbus A320-200

Flight for tonight

last leg boarded and ready for departure
Turn and Burn success
Thank you for dinner and the help getting the last of our things to the storage unit @xssfox & @DropTableFoxes I couldn't of pulled this off without yall

Much love to the both of you 💜

i have never screamed a more satisfying fuck-youuuu to a computer than 5 minutes ago, when i finally fixed a dead OLPC XO-1 that i've been trying to fix, unsuccessfully, for FIVE YEARS

the XO-1's, especially the early models, all suffer from a showstopper firmware bug: if the internal clock battery dies, the laptop cannot boot. it won't even make it to POST. changing the battery makes no difference, because the PROM has the wrong clock date burned into it.

the workaround is reprogramming the internal clock with the correct date via an onboard serial port which *does* function when the laptop is powered on. unfortunately, it uses an incredibly frustratingly tiny 3mm blade-type socket that isn't easy to find.

my solution was to solder tiny wires directly to the board. take a look at the picture and decide for yourself if you ever want me near your electronics. (the plastic connector melted when i tried to desolder it using a hot air rework gun)

the worst part of the process, aside from soldering 0.2mm pins, was figuring out which-pins-did-what on the motherboard's J4 connector. experimentation taught me that:

Pin 1 (bottom): +3.3v. Do not connect this to the USB-TTL.
Pin 2: Transmit (TX). Connect to RX on the USB-TTL.
Pin 3: Receive (RX). Connect to TX on the USB-TTL.
Pin 4 (top): Ground. Connect to GND on the USB-TTL.

now let your terminal session capture output from the USB-TTL. on macOS, the terminal command for my particular usb-ttl stick is:
> screen /dev/tty.usbserial-1410 115200

once you've connected those wires to the USB-TTL, plug in the laptop and power it on. You'll immediately see text flow into the terminal session.

once you've got a prompt, type in:
> select /rtc decimal 57 34 21 21 08 2026 set-time
> bye

and you're done. the laptop will reboot, and suddenly it will POST with a chime and boot into the operating system.

sources:
https://web.archive.org/web/20191031213812/http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Fix_Clock#If_the_screen_does_not_turn_on

#olpc #diyRepair #permaComputing