Ciro Santilli's hardware / Backpacks Updated 2025-07-16
2024-04: got two backpacks "for free" with the Lenovo reward points from buying the Lenovo ThinkPad P14s gen4 amd, not bad, that was already cheap and now I got some extra swag:The sport backpack has a fatal flaw: no strap to hold laptop in place, wo it just tumbles back and forth as you walk.
Neither of them have very good padding below the laptop, but at least the Elite one has a slightly elevated inner bag which woudl likely help a lot in case of a drop.
glmark2 -b build:duration=3:model=horse
~22K
~1TB.
Has a separate power cord, not USB powered. Unbelievable. Edit: actually high ends are still like that as of 2023, e.g. at that time, a the max non-cabled was 5 TB, but top of line was 20 TB.
Disk label: wd1t.
Ubuntu 20.04 gnome-disks benchmark, ext4 partition: 37MB/s.
Ciro's nc HTTP test server Updated 2025-07-16
As per stackoverflow.com/a/52351480/895245 our standard test setup is:
while true; do
  resp=$"$(date): hello\n"
  len="$(printf '%s' "$resp" | wc -c)"
  printf "HTTP/1.1 200 OK\r\nContent-Length: $len\r\n\r\n${resp}\n" | nc -Nl 8000
done
Ripples by ripples Updated 2025-07-16
A Baidu Baike page: baike.baidu.hk/item/層層水瀾/12386243 mentions that the score was published in 1970 by Tao Yimo (陶一陌) in a eponymous score book.
Video 1.
Ripples by ripples performed by Wu Li on the guzheng
. Source. Peformer's Chinese name: 吳莉.
Miner message Updated 2025-07-16
A "miner message" is an inscription message left by a miner on a blockchain.
This is opposed to messages that may be left by non miners during transactions.
Miner messages are therefore of course much harder to control on established blockchains, as they basically require consensus in a mining pool to set. Most of them are just ads for the mining pool itself.
tx 210000d1392bec2505d1289e5c39c2039204ff1ecf7eef55f973ccd3111003e1, block 360235 (2015-06-10) and the following transactions have transcripts of a very long developer chat starting with:
jgarzik: if you aren't near one of the consulates there are some companies that will charge you money to do it...
TODO purpose? The transcripts are interspersed with developers likely voting for project leadership, and commenting on Gavin.
TODO find original discussion location, these are almost certainly from one of the Bitcoin IRC channels.
Part of the goal of this dump is that the Bitcoin developers have a policy of not allowing logging on their talk channel, and this released it all to the blockchain forever where it cannot be deleted. These might just be more of protests against larger block sizes.
GitHub is for newbs.
  • 50002f38a40aeca96f7d03ceac1c62fc233b44207af99df8f1daddf03f6ef61c via cryptograffiti.info contains a Python script that starts with:
    #!/usr/bin/env python3
    #
    # This file is placed in the public domain.
    #
    # CryptoGraffiti tool
    #
    # Requires python-bitcoinlib-v0.2.1
    #
    # https://github.com/petertodd/python-bitcoinlib
    #
    # pip install python-bitcoinlib
  • 209c9106c7261582f5d0907819c6e10dea670c273133047d911be41f8a42d86f via cryptograffiti.info contains a Base64 encoded Python script starting in:
    #!/usr/bin/env python
    # brainwallet "base58"
    # v2015-05-18, fixed Tor DNS problem
    import binascii
    import hashlib
    Some related ones:
    • 25658f625c8f3964593b9e3c632040cb69aea9cf24403af33ab173d7cba7c42f
    • 7d188bd499137b5a0d68271ef8a4f3c4dc2f2b38bd03dfc913cb2b0be15b1e0d
This section is about ordinals that are interesting primarily due to technical reasons linked to edge cases of the protocol.
Interesting MIME types:
Different ord markers:
  • 71e85885522047240a9e70542145dbf2385e1bd468e6ac6002aa755422ea10f5 uses takingnames. Decode with:
    bitcoin-core.cli decodescript "$(bitcoin-core.cli getrawtransaction 71e85885522047240a9e70542145dbf2385e1bd468e6ac6002aa755422ea10f5 true | jq -r '.vin[0].txinwitness[1]')" | jq -r .asm | sed 's/.* 0 //;s/ OP_ENDIF//;s/ //g' | xxd -r -p > 71e85885522047240a9e70542145dbf2385e1bd468e6ac6002aa755422ea10f5.png
    gives the PNG of the wireframe draing of a washing machine with transparent background.
There's a bit of both sides in the 2016 race:
convert -size 256x256 gradient: out.png
convert -size 256x256 gradient:white-black out.png
convert -size 256x256 gradient:red-blue out.png
convert -size 256x256 radial-gradient: out.png
convert -size 256x256 radial-gradient:white-black out.png
Crystal detector Updated 2025-07-16
The first diodes. These were apparently incredibly unreliable, especially for portable radios, as you had to randomly search for the best contact point you could find in a random polycrystalline material!!
And also quality was highly dependant on where the material was sourced from as that affected the impurities present in the material. Later this was understood to be an issue of doping.
It was so unreliable that vacuum tube diodes overtook them in many applications, even though crystal detectors are actually semiconductor diodes, which eventually won over!
For a long time, before artificial semiconductors kicked in, people just didn't know the underlying physical working principle of these detectors. What I cannot create, I do not understand basically.

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