I have a standing desk, but I’ve always wanted a way to automate it, so that I could set up a schedule for “standing” vs “sitting". The controller box itself contains absolutely no smarts, and has no obvious external control mechanism, so I wasn’t really sure how I’d achieve this. This post documents my experience building a system that allows me to do this. It is not intended entirely as a build guide, but more an exploration of what hardware hacking is like for somebody with very little previous experience.
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Sometimes I find myself spending lots of time on personal hobby projects that appear to have very little real world purpose to others. Those I share the project with ask me why I bothered. Either that or they nervously smile and change the topic. As to the question of why, I understand the impulse to ask it. I too have heard about projects that lead me to ask the same question.
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This post is the second part in a series I am working on. See the first part here: Home Lab Upgrades: Why This Mutant Motherboard/CPU Combo Could Be the Perfect Solution)
The biggest most exciting use case for me with my new home server was a virtualised gaming environment. I’ve always wanted a living room gaming PC, but didn’t want to have a PC just for that purpose. I’ve had a home server of some sort for the last couple years, usually running some Docker containers, and I always wondered if one day, I could run Windows in a VM, with a graphics card.
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I’ve always liked strange hardware. Odd prototype mobile phones, weirdo computer parts that only exist because of Bitcoin mining etc. You name it, I enjoy looking at it and imagining the possibilities. Recently, thanks to CraftComputing on Youtube, I became aware of a strange sort of motherboard/CPU combo that features an Engineering Sample CPU that purports to be an Intel 11800h. The retail version of this chip would have originally been destined to go into a laptop.
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I was bored, and was curious to know what the charging behaviour of my Pixel 6 Pro looked like. I decided to use a Ugreen Nexode 100w USB-C charging brick with a Macbook charging cable as the power supply, and left my phone in its case. I note this because I will in the future perform this same test with the phone artificially cooled to see how much of a difference temperature makes to charging rate.
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As a 16-year-old, I made the decision to leave the UK due to my dislike of the politics and direction of Great Britain under the Conservative party, particularly under the leadership of Theresa May as Home Secretary. This decision was further solidified by the Brexit referendum and the actions of subsequent leaders such as Boris Johnson and Priti Patel. Over the past decade, my views have only been reinforced by the events and developments in British politics.
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According to 419eater.com, scambaiting is “enter[ing] into a dialogue with scammers, simply to waste their time and resources. Whilst you are doing this, you will be helping to keep the scammers away from real potential victims and screwing around with the minds of deserving thieves”. These scammers aim to take advantage of the elderly, people with disabilities, and others. I occasionally engage in scambaiting, but particularly enjoyed the encounter I document here.
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RSS, or RDF Site Summary, Rich Site Summary and most recently Really Simple Syndication, is a standard that allows readers to aggregate multiple blogs into one ‘reader’ interface, which displays these blogs posts in a standardised way. It’s an old standard, developed in 1999 at Netscape for use on their my.netscape.com portal. It allowed users to import RSS feeds from other websites and have their content appear on Netscapes feed syndicator.
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Just a quick note to say kn100.me was fully rebuilt. I’ve done my best to keep all links the same, but it’s possible I’ve missed something. If you notice something broken or missing, let me know.
Thanks!
The battery problem Unfortunately old, long term unused Cybiko Classics suffer from exploded batteries. Worse, the residue will eat away at the original battery contacts, and will even begin to damage the motherboard if left in for long enough.
Get the batteries that are in there out as soon as possible, and clean the battery contacts as well as the Cybikos own contacts as best you can. You may also consider disassembling the Cybiko to clean any residue that may have gotten to the motherboard.
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