abrugsch

Not even photoshop. Literal cut and paste of physical photos :D

looks like every kebab shop menu near me. All offerings crudely cut/pasted/mashed together. 5 near me literally have the same menu with different prices and a colour theme to match their (usually terrible, 3-D font effect from 90's era Corel Draw) Logo. And they were like that BEFORE GenAI got popular!

Reminds me of the scene in The Fifth Element where Tricky is piloting a spy cockroach with a hilariously huge transmitter on it's back... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJxMpTeEf8Q

Good to know. I've never spent more than a few hours on NYC transit and I didn't notice many differences on the trains I went on, so was largely going by found media and assumption (terrible thing to do, I know!)

Ah thanks. I had thought there would be some consolidation by now. It's been a few years since I regularly went to London and haven't been following it closely.

Doesn't NYC mostly (mostly) use the same trains across the network? on the tube, each line was (historically) operated by a different train company, so most lines have a (somewhat) different profile but dedicated rolling stock to each line, along with different aged stock dependent on the procurement cycle or even age of the line itself.

Boston T would be a better one as each of the colour lines are significantly different from each other, especially concerning green line trolleys. Even having not lived there for a number of decades I could probably still pick out at least red and green line. I might struggle to pick apart orange and blue line from each other as they are pretty similar trains, but I never spent significant time on that line... (My dad was a complete train nut and spent much of his spare time audio recording train rides around the world and when we lived in Boston, the local subway got the bulk of his attention. Here in the UK his hobby even got picked up by various TV companies and he got brought onto various talk shows to demonstrate his "Blind trainspotting" prowess by identifying various trains from their sound. All a ruse of course but it was a fun gimmick for a couple of years.)

Looks pretty well maintained[0]:

v3.24.1 Latest

@Neamar released this Dec 4, 2025

[0] https://github.com/Neamar/KISS/releases

Up and down intermittently (mostly down) just browsing repos for me. I get the unicorn "No Server Available" page.

Git status says everything is fine and downdetector says otherwise...

Doing a commandline git clone seems to be OK though (albeit on a very small project)

Can you not use the "free for hobbyists" license? Autodesk make it unreasonably hard to renew it, instead dark-patterning you into upgrading to the paid tier. (Unless of course you need paid tier features) I agree on the easy to use front though. I'm trying to move to freecad but it hasn't had its blender moment yet.

getting the hardware is only half the battle. Hard agree with going for a MiSTer setup however it's quite an expense for someone dipping a toe in.

ultimately it's hard to prescribe the "definitive" amiga experience in 2025 to a total newbie. At a surface level, for many people, amiga ownership was simply a console like experience -> Buy an amiga 500, and shovel game disks into it, play game, turn it off. Replicating that is super easy with either just a raspberry pi and the PiMiga distro (see the Chris Edwards youtube channel for details) or even retropie comes with support for amiga OOTB however it comes with the caveat of having a little background knowledge of the hardware combinations available. The ABSOLUTE easiest way of getting a taste of amiga is to get hold of a "The A500" mini console which comes with pre-packaged games (but also lets you run your own once you've got to the end of enjoying the 30 or so pack-ins).

There is the WinUAE emulator for windows that's excellent (so good, you can use it to prep real-world Hard drives for actual physical amigas) but it's complicated without prior knowledge of the OG hardware combinations.

The most common setup back in the day (for UKers playing games at least) was an OG Amiga 500 with OCS (Original Chip Set) with 0.5MB RAM(ChipRAM - essentially shared system and graphics memory) and maybe an optional extra 0.5 MB upgrade (FastRAM - CPU only memory, though often known now as SlowRAM because it was directly accessable by the CPU only but had to share the bus with the chip RAM) and 1.3 Kickstart ROM.

This was later upgraded by the A500+ which came with ECS (Enhanced Chip Set) which gave a few added graphical modes, 1MB of Chip RAM (typically upgradable to +1MB fast RAM) and kickstart 2.0. it broke compatibility with some games and was a min spec for others.

This was replaced directly by the A1200 which came with an upgraded CPU (68020ec at 14 MHz) AGA chipset (16.7 mil colour palette, 256 on screen), internal IDE interface and kickstart 3.0 with 2MB ChipRAM out of the box.

The A500+ was also indirectly replaced with the A600. Essentially a A500+ mini - they updated the manuafcturing to surface mount, reduced the PCB size significantly and removed the numberpad from the keyboard and added the IDE interface from the A1200. it was supposed to be a cost reduced version but initially cost more to make than the outgoing A500+. It was hated at the time because it cost more at retail and had less features (lack of keypad broke a lot of software, IDE interface wasn't seen as beneficial at the time and the side expansion port was replaced by a PCMCIA port which again only had much more expensive peripherals at the time) The rest are the "Big Box" amigas - computers with a separate keyboard from the main box case: A1000 (the OG or just "Amiga" when it launched)

A2000 - The workhorse version of thw A500 with expansion, processor,video upgrade slots.

A1500 - a UK specific cut down version of the A2000 just launched to inflict trademark damage to a sole trader startup making aftermarket cases for the A500.

A3000 - the first fully 32-bit platform - ECS and 32-bit 680x0 CPUs available (IIRC both 68020 and 68030 though might be wrong about the '020)

A4000 - a big box equivalent to the A1200 - AGA and expansion

A4000T - towerized version of A4000 - the holy grail for collectors and rare as hens teeth.

However in 2025 getting involved with the amiga scene is a huge rabbit hole as the community is so large there are always wonderful projects (such as PiStorm) for enhancing and extending the life of these now very aged machines.

Sorry, this ended up a bit of an essay on what was only supposed to be a quick note...

My workaround for multiple PCB's for one schematic is to have the schematic as a top level sheet which can then be imported into sub-level projects. so each PCB becomes it's own project but use the common schematic sheet

My personal experience with a modern microwave (they mostly seem to be the same design internally, coming from the same chassis with the same electronics just a different button panel) was that the internal light bulb blowing generated a surge (it was a mains voltage bulb) that wasn't fused so the next nearest thing in the mains circuit was a trace on the motherboard that vaporized.

There is no way of easily changing this bulb (inside the main casing with no access panel for the bulb) so for want of a single in-line fuse, the entire microwave was rendered scrap[0] by the lifetime of a light bulb.

[0] - Except for the fact that I care not for electrical safety "DO NOT OPEN" warnings of doom due to being actually competent with handling high voltage equipment and being able to do a board level repair on the burned out trace without touching the very large capacitors associated with the very high voltage side controlling the magnetron...

Just saying "Pixar movies" was probably not a great example. They can be deliberately location ambiguous (Monsters Inc., Toy Story - though it's clearly _somewhere_ in America, The Incredibles - a generic "metropolis"/50's futuristic city, lightyear, Elemental) or very specifically somewhere (cars - mashup of Route 66 towns, Finding Nemo - Sydney when on land, Ratatouille - Paris, etc...)

It makes sense to "translate" locale cultural indicators in say Wall·E which was very location agnostic but not so much for say Turning red which is very culturally specific.

They've been horrifying since about 2020. I could sell up and put my kids through a good college!

I updated my A500 to kickstart 2.0 but I never did the 1mb chip RAM Agnus mod

It's not a repackaged A500 but it IS a repackaged (and enhanced with the IDE/PCMCIA interface) A500+ which was also already shipping with ECS, 1Mb Chip RAM and Kickstart 2.0 The stupid thing was it was designed to be cheaper to produce and sell than the outgoing A500+ and was supposed to be branded the A300 (early revisions even have A300 printed in the top copper layer on the motherboard) Long term it was cheaper to produce and had fewer warranty returns however at launch the production cost was higher than expected so they had to sell it for MORE than the outgoing A500+ (for what was perceived at the time as no real improvement to the end user and a lack of numberpad meant breaking functionality for programs and games that relied on the numpad) and changed the name up to A600 to reflect that. The biggest problem IMHO is that the 600 was launched before the A1200 was announced so the whole product just seemed like a slap in the face for what we were expecting. Basically at the time it just felt like a massive let down so out anger was directed as hatred of the product, but in hindsight it's easier to see the tangible benefits.

Unfortunately I'm not only not in the BOS area, I'm not even in the US anymore. Though the RSGB probably has a similar listing... If I get my license I might even find out directly :)

I used to live in the Boston area as a kid and dad used to take me to loads of ham radio swap meets in the city. I loved rummaging around the stuff and finding cool things to try to use with my Commodore 64 (even in the 80s, ham swap fest's had a lot of computer gear proliferating) I really miss the format but I just haven't seen them around for years (decades?) at least in my part of the world...

Congrats on the hot sauce results! I made my own last summer too (first time making a sauce, I previously made Chilli Jams from my home grown peppers) and last summer I had a very productive Wraith chilli plant which produce pods far too hot to do much else with so I found a recipe I wanted to try.

I didn't lacto-ferment them but I did make one similar to your mango one (I used a fresh pineapple and fresh mango plus some honey and IIRC cumin) and like yourself, found it one of the most amazing sauces I've ever had.

It was sweet and tangy, super flavourful and HOT AS HELL! I put it on everything and because of the "chilli high" I was getting from it decided to nickname it Pineapple Express.

I was hoping to make another batch this season but the plant, despite over-wintering well, has barely grown and is only just now producing flowers which I'm pretty sure will produce very small pods if they are even successful...

Also works on Windows, Firefox (labeled as "Take Snapshot" though)

@Princec was the owner of the puppygames discord server. He got pwned and lost control of his Discord account, discord server and epic games store. The new pwner of the princec account then managed to get control of the Valheim server and start funnelling people to the also compromised puppygames server (now hastily renamed Valheim) to further attempt to distribute their malware (apparently a pretty nasty rootkit if you follow the puppygames twitter - https://twitter.com/puppygames/status/1751999253713498484 )

I too have been using this trick for many years on many cars since first seeing it done by Clarkson on Top Gear (circa 2006 IIRC and linked in the PSE question). I still baffle people with the considerable amount of extra range it can achieve. Half a football pitch was probably the best example I got on a 2008 Nissan Qashqai.

this might help with the visualization aspect https://www.falstad.com/circuit/

TBH I didn't understand any of the concepts you mentioned, and that's with background knowledge. So I'd say you're definitely talking about way beyond the basics concepts that understanding of will only come after learning the basics and then targeting your learning at synth specific designs, which will take a lot more time and discipline than a HN post can cover. I don't have that knowledge or resources to point to unfortunately (any any book covering the topic is likely 2" thick in dead tree format...)

one starting point is to try and build one of the simplest synth components on the MFOS site (IIRC they are categorized by difficulty) as mentioned in my GP post, the MFOS explainers are incredible. But it does also help to have at least a little background in electronics. I started out by messing about with stuff as a kid (having a dad that was a ham helped) then eventually doing an EE degree at uni.

Fast forward 20 years and I didn't use the EE part of my degree in a career path except for the software eng part so I'd forgotten most of the theory. However the MFOS troubleshooting guide (for the WSG, and I assume most/all of their self build kits) is absolutely comprehensive, telling you exactly what points to probe and what you should see in a step-by-step logical progressive manner. You do definitely need a scope though.

For debugging analogue synths, you could probably even get away with a $25-40 STM32 based one from aliexpress as you're typically checking for DC voltage levels and human-audible waveforms ( < 20 KHz and probably realistically ~1-5 KHz) and the cheapest of cheap scopes can handle that.

so to recap:

tools:

reasonable to good multimeter - DC/AC voltage, current, resistance, continuity. (doesn't have to be a eevblog couple of hundred bucks one, but auto ranging would be useful, an audible continuity beep is a must though as is a diode check.)

Oscilloscope. for doing analogue synths, anything capable of displaying a waveform($). for anything else, the more you can budget the better. for debugging digital electronics you'll probably want multi-channel ($$) and/or MHz of range($$$). For doing RF, you'll want GHz ($$$$$)

Logic Analyzer - for digital electronics and reading the logic levels on multiple paths (bus lanes) at the same time.

Bus Pirate - for analyzing and debugging the content of various serial busses like I2C, SPI and CAN etc. not necessary but makes things easier than trying to do it with a scope or logic analyzer alone.

most importantly -

Curiosity! cannot overstate this enough, as most of the process would be very frustrating unless you have the innate curiosity to push you through.

Resources:

MFOS site in the OP. build guides with ELI5 level explainers and comprehensive troubleshooting guides

EEVblog youtube channel[0] (especially his older stuff) and forum [1]

Great Scott Youtube Channel[2]

BigClivedotcom youtube channel[3] for some hilarious teardowns and circuit explainers once you have a few videos of those in your watch history, you'll start getting plenty of relevant recommendations of other EE-tube creators

[0]https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLvOlSehNtuHsCTtj-T_vk... (just one of many suitable playlists) [1] https://www.eevblog.com/forum/ [2] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAROrg3NQn7cyu01HpOv5... [3] https://www.youtube.com/@bigclivedotcom

also as a regular audio podcast. When I did more car-commute hours this was on my playlist. He has a great style and (probably true) stories that sound like an excerpt from Mr Robot. definitely worth a listen

And dosimeters with a maximum reading that equates to "Not Great. Not Terrible"

I was recently watching "Back to life" which featured a sound mirror as a story focal point. Though the series was set in Hythe (which has a sound mirror), they suggested the mirror featured was in/near Hythe when it was in fact the Abbott's Cliff one (featured as the header image on the beyondthepoint link)

I still have a weird sound generator to fix up that a friend of mine bought off ebay that's not quite functional. The MFOS site has the most incredible in-depth instructions and explainers for all the synth components and an extensive troubleshooting guide for why my WSG isn't working. I just need to spend a bit more time with a scope to get to the bottom of it. (it wasn't wired up all too cleanly and de-cruftifying the soldering wasn't enough to spark it back into life. However the oscillators were all "working" correctly so none of the IC's had been blown in the process...)

not just the WL B-sides, but there are also a few snatches of audio glitching in WL itself[0] and most of his work from '99 or so leans heavily on these exact distortions.

There was even one album that the name escapes me right now (all the track names were named like, if not directly after, exploits) where every other track was more or less just a string of encoder glitches.

I suspect a lot of his sound from that period came from griefing MP3 encoder settings (I mean pretty much all his music features some form of audio sample/synth griefing.)

As soon as I heard those examples the first thing I thought of was Aphex twin (and actually also specifically windowlicker)

[0] https://youtu.be/FATTzbm78cc?t=152 - the "underwater" effect can be heard in this timestamp but there are definitely others layered in the background throughout the track