Cursed Adapters
twitter.com
twitter.com
Basically, when developing applets for SIM cards, it's a lot easier to deal with plugging in a full sized SIM card in a large slot than dealing with a tiny modern size SIM card, especially when dealing with multiple handsets.
The testing process with a handset is simply to write the applet on the card using a full sized smart card reader, then take the card, put it in the handset and boot it. With the adapter, the steps of putting the card in the handset and taking it out are much easier, since there's no need to move a tiny card and extract it using a tool.
That and nobody ever advertises how many times you can swap a sim and the socket pins won't break.
Kinda makes you wonder how many times you can swap a sim before the socket suffers failure of some form, from wear and tear. I've certainly had a fair few break over my lifetime and that's from light usage.
Though getting full sized sim cards is becoming harder these days I have noticed - even the precut multi sim that you push out the sim for the size and the aspect that the last phone I saw that would take a full sized (credit card sized) sim form factor was two decades ago.
For example, I can settle doctor's appointments etc with what looks like a perfectly ordinary card terminal; I swipe my healthcare card and after a long sequence of button-presses by the (very patient) receptionist I get a receipt with the Medicare logo etc on it (this is in Australia). I've always wondered if all the logic to do this is hiding in the SIM card or if the card terminal is also running specialized firmware.
The only bit of related anecdata I can remember was... wait, I don't believe it but I found it, probably one of the more interesting bits of applet development out there: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18140208 (the entire thread is a bit of a rabbithole too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18138328)
SIM card applications can talk with the handset through messages, asking the handset to display menus, send SMS messages, open a browser, and more [0]. The handset also forwards certain messages to the SIM card, such as certain special SMS messages. The SIM card can actually be reprogrammed over the air (slowly) using signed SMS messages.
The applications that run on the SIM card can include certain banking applications (those were popular in countries with less robust banking infrastructure and wide deployments of feature phones) or multi-carrier SIMs.
With regards to your card, if it gets swiped, it probably doesn't use a chip. For the chip to work, it has to be powered, which entails either being physically inserted in a slot or being powered through induction.
I should probably write a blog post about all of this stuff, it's pretty interesting. Thanks for reminding me of it!
[0] https://www.etsi.org/deliver/etsi_ts/101200_101299/101267/08...
I stumbled on some PCMCIA-slot card readers at one point, which led me on a fun adventure discovering that I can list recent transactions out of my bank card. (Then after losing my wallet (annoying but not tragic) I discovered (to my initial confusion) that the latest model doesn't include this nice "feature". Hmph.) Learning how bankcards worked was very interesting.
And - facepalm - of course the terminals I referred to are running their own firmware: Medicare cards do indeed use magnetic stripes.
I'm currently headscratching over how authentication/access cards work, and the associated various industry thrashings (standardization, PGP crypto, cloneability, etc).
If you go far enough down the rabbit hole of weird embedded system component makers, and system integrators (mostly Taiwan based) you'll find all sorts of weird stuff. The sort of pieces you'd use to build a x86 system running a complicated thing in a factory or industrial process, or a kiosk... Armored stainless steel keyboards, fanless systems with big heatsinks built into the chassis, and so forth.
> although if you really want to live the Real Life, you might want to consider... m.2 CANBUS!
> Have you ever wanted to interface with the network running your car from an m.2 slot? if so, go to jail. but not before buying this!
CAN bus is used everywhere in industrial and embedded systems, not just cars. Lots of PLCs, servo cards, networked sensors use it, you need low latency to get the task done, and you usually prefer a small-form-factor fanless DIN-rail mount PC in a control cabinet, so full-size PCIe cards or USB adapters are no-go. M.2 it is! Likewise with the industrial USB-C and waterproof HDMI down thread; positive locking connectors don't usually go with modern touchscreens.
I think you'd see a lot of these connectors and adapters if you worked maintenance in (or just got a tour through) a local manufacturing facility.
I do, actually! I thought I was alone in that.
I have my PC with the back facing the front. I actually flipped it to stop it from overheating from having the vents be against the walls, but I really like the easy access to the ports. It also makes opening the side panel easier, since they tend to be made to slide towards the back.
I don't see the quote you provided anywhere on the linked page. What I see is this.
> so I was looking for a MicroSD to M.2 adapter (shut up, it exists, and I have reasons to want it) and I found something way more cursed: M.2 (SDIO) to SD card slot!
It sounds like a reply to something, but I can't tell what, and then below it are a bunch of replies, none of which seem to be related to each other. I think I have a twitter learning disability.
What do you see when you open the link ? (no sarcasm or offence intended)
If this is truly a source of friction, why bother with the case? Why not go au naturale?
http://i.imgur.com/rnEHOTD.jpg
...oh, it's not your ceiling, either? Well then I'm out of ideas:)
Bravo:)
The cheap-o original fans were quiet at low speed but hardly moved any air, and at high speed they made tons of wind noise; I think the airfoils were stalling or something.
The Gentle Typhoons were reasonably wind-noise quiet even at high speed, but made a high-pitched hissing from the bearings at all speeds, and a groaning rumble from the motors at low speed.
The Noctuas are much quieter at 1000 rpm, almost inaudible relative to the 4 hard drives, and make fairly innocuous white noise at high speed.
I also currently have my home server in a closet with the seeds I’m starting so the soil stays around 80 degrees (f).
I lived for years with a desktop with a broken power button. Didn't miss it.
Why couldn't you replace it?
>Didn't miss it.
Initially, I didn't replace it because I had no time to go buy another on that day. Then, because of that.
Thanks HN!!!
There are PCI slot brackets with power and reset buttons.
https://www.highspeedpc.com/ATX_Power_Bracket_p/atxbracket.h...
> Also great for isolating problem case switches!
... Which implies that that's not the primary use they envisioned.
Their main product appears to be an open-air ATX "case", which basically amounts to a motherboard mount, a fan mount, a rail to support PCI cards, and a mount point or two for hard drives, without side walls and without a power button. So they also sell a power button mounted onto a PCI bracket, to slot into an open slot on the case's PCI rail.
i.e. after press it returns to its previous state (momentary), and on press it 'makes' (as opposed to 'breaks') the circuit, or 'bridge' between pins as you said.
Which is why my screwdriver works - I momentarily hold it across the pins, making a connection between them.
But, y'know, it's not hard enough to pick up the screwdriver and poke (I do keep it right there, solely for that purpose) that I've bothered.
Of course, you can buy a USB hub, you can buy a USB ethernet NIC (though it still probably won't go as fast as the back one), but you can also just flip the box.
...the back of my computer is ugly.
It matters! My computer is a pretty large fixture in my apartment, and I want my home to look nice.
https://www.homedepot.com/s/Spray%2520paint?searchtype=text&...
If I had a bunch of time I could probably find 'em on Archive.org or something. Their logo was very distinctive, a 3d-head sort of thing which I remember resembling the middle of the "little brain / big brain / universe brain" meme.
https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1224220403821764608
These sort of adapters are used a lot by people like myself who muck around with retro hardware. No need to rely on hardrives that are 20-30 years old. Just plug in an adapter in and then swap out SD / CF cards.
There are even CF to ISA card adapters that you can buy in kit form:
https://www.lo-tech.co.uk/tag/xt-ide/
However the market is obviously very niche.
https://www.reactivemicro.com/product/reactivemicro-drivetur...
15 years and it still working without trouble. Because CF was booting into ramdisk and isn't used anymore after boot.
Here’s a water-to-HDMI one: https://imgur.com/FHSFM9o
I know that an average user won't buy many of these adapters, but for a person doing that kind of research, is it really that weird? I mean, the author is a "Hardware / software necromancer, collector of Weird Stuff, maker of Death Generators."
We're retrofitting 18K devices with SSDs through a M2-to-USB converter (we have reasons to do it that way). Someone is selling my company 18K of those boards. So, not bad at all. And that's just us.
Edit: I mean they love old and weird hardware, not that they themselves are old and weird.
I use one of these nearly every day, since my truck doesn't have an aux-in jack, but it did come with a factory cassette tape player.
I find it a bit obnoxious,personally, but whatever. No tone in text.
I would recommend everyone spend enough time on 4chan's more interesting boards (or similar) that they get inoculated to most text. Makes the internet into a pretty calm place, like how meditating in a storm might train you to be unfazed by smaller distractions.
I can think of plenty of reasons, but they pretty much all boil down to, "Because that gets you bigger numbers next to the little heart icons."
The joke is that these manufacturers are just trying all permutations of adapters like some kind of unhinged mad scientist disregarding if anyone actually needs them or not. This is obviously not true, but it's an absurd idea that the intended audience can relate to, so it makes for a funny joke.
Now a RAM disk is when you use some RAM like a disk, but this isn't on the motherboard, so... how is it RAM? how does it connect?
see when they call this a RAM disk, they really mean it on the "DISK" part. It's SATA! It's a SATA drive you use like any other drive, it's just fast as hell because it's backed by RAM!
but doesn't RAM lose its contents when turned off?
YEP! that's why it has that big honking battery there, it keeps the RAM active when the PC is turned off.
I wonder how long that battery lasts for, also I guess wiping your data is easy... just unplug the battery, no way anyones gonna get at your data then.
Heavy industrial models were the ancestors of today's all-flash SAN arrays, later common in hybrid ram+flash. RAMsan was one of the major vendors.
The contents were persistent, through battery storage + UPSes etc.
The other mini PCI-E is just a 1x PCI-E channel... or a USB connection, when you look for items to connect to mini PCI-E you find Wifi and 3g/4g cards and something like this: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07BJ45JXD. Now one day in my searches I did find some Intel Flash drives that were used for ReadyBoost duties on some Windows laptops, but they lack a flash controller and you need a special Linux kernel module to even use it which breaks my want to boot from the mini PCI-E device.
Since the industry went the m.2 route the mini PCI-E slot is dead and dying. You can even get m.2 adapters for Wifi(https://www.newegg.com/fenvi-fv-ax200h-m-2/p/0XM-00JK-00063) or FPGA(https://numato.com/product/aller-artix-7-m-2-fpga-module) because it's more universal than a standard PCI-E slot now.
This ramble is to nominate mini PCI-E as a cursed connector.
The closest thing I found was something claiming to do something like SD slot raid-0. But the board does all the work, and raid-0 is terrible. And the whole point for me is that SD cards have terrible failure rates, so I figure zfs adds redundancy.
Will no one ever think of all the wolves?
;)
If you really want it, get a USB hub and full each port with an SD card reader.
You are right though in this "overarching" point that it is very niche and you can probably have a decent solution with USB. I would think that might get a little more clumsy and consume more power than a single board exposing all slots though.
Add that too a good USB hub and you have what you want.
Sometimes to connect my laptop to a device required a series of three or four adapters.
We also had kits in the office to make your own serial adapters, where you had to figure out the pinouts on each side and then build the adapter one pin at a time.
I think that when plugging an usb-c into an usb-c, we can assume it won't explode, but that's pretty much it. And I wouldn't totally bet on it.
Just this weekend we did a cleanup of our office and thrown away everything that looked like RS232 cable with the rationale that it is faster and cheaper to make/buy new one than trying to figure out which of the myriad variants this one is.
Eventually I just bought a different GPU that had mini-Displayport.
You gotta go:
FireWire 400 -> FireWire 800 -> Thunderbolt 2 -> Thunderbolt 3 (USB-C).
Madness.
Btw, the FW->Thunderbolt conversion adds a noticeable amount of latency to my audio interface :(
Edit: I think I figured it out. I think it's supposed to make it easier to see replies to the linked/original tweet which you would otherwise have to scroll all the way down to the bottom of the page to see. The problem is that they implemented it backwards. It should show the thread by default and give you an option to see the non-thread replies to the current tweet instead.
Header adapters are not meant for PCs, they are there for specialized boards. There are plenty of those.
That USB to ISA adapter, why would anybody buy the reverse nowadays? There aren't many computers with an ISA bus, but there are plenty of old specialized ISA boards that would cost a fortune to replace.
About that DDR4 extender, I have a computer where the processor cooler inutilized a memory slot (stupid motherboard designers?). I just left it empty, but could have used one of those too.
And... Ethernet into M.2 is plenty of interesting. I wonder how useful can it be.
Some of these adaptors are useful for geeks like me!
And of course you'll still have to fiddle with the IRQs on the boards you plug and have a USB to ISA bridge(?) driver and I can't imagine how to make an ISA driver talk to a virtual bus over USB
Suffice to say if it was the other way around I think ISA wasn't fast enough for USB 2.0 so at least there's that
I knew this was going to be a foone thread before I saw that it linked to twitter. :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orhb7Njj3h8
TL;DR: wireless and wired gaming mice have the same response times, but normal wireless office mice have slower response times than their gaming counterparts.
This doesn't affect the touchpad, which I presume is running over a different protocol that has more real-time interrupts.
Plus, some wireless mice are actually faster than some wired mice.
Sure there is. I don't want a cable across my desk and a desk grommet just to duck keyboard-and-mouse cables looks bad.
The wireless dongle is plugged into a USB port on my monitor so it's only about a foot away, though not quite direct LOS. And if I wanted to fork over $100 for Logitech's wireless charging mousepad, I'd never have to plug it in again. I probably won't, but it's an option.
The only wire on my desk is for my keyboard.
Almost everyone using a full-size mouse.
There are very few actual Bluetooth mice offered by a major vendor in a full-size format. They're pretty popular in the "laptop mouse" market where the mouse is made uncomfortably small for people who care more about portability than usability, but the majority of full size wireless mice use proprietary RF protocols rather than Bluetooth.
A Logitech G rep once explained it to me, Bluetooth is technically capable of equaling USB mice but a lot of the Bluetooth adapters included in OEM PCs are hot garbage, so reliable performance is hard for them to achieve. That's why their last Bluetooth gaming mouse actually shipped with its own adapter built in to the charging base.
I have no devices using wireless protocols where a wired alternative is feasible. Why would I ever want to deal with the pain of wireless when cables are so easy to use?
99% of the time I get to use my mouse with no cord dragging around, and it's never died on me because I can just plug it in when necessary.
I currently own a Logitech Pro Gaming Mouse (the wired version, https://www.logitechg.com/en-us/products/gaming-mice/pro-her...) and I'm very happy with it. However, it has a USB-A connector, and so I'm forced to carry and use a small adapter whenever I want to connect it to any 2016+ MacBook Pro, since they only have USB-C ports.
If only there was an identical mouse but with a USB-C connector, I could stop having to carry a USB-C/A adapter with me. All my other peripherals have USB-C connectors, so the mouse is the only thing holding me back.
It's not a big deal, but I am looking forward to being able to have all devices be able to connect via USB-C and be able to carry/own one fewer thing. It'd be slightly simpler and bring me a little joy.
This is a real market for telecom stuff, and one of the reasons shallow depth 1U and 2U servers with all of their connections on the front panel exist. Including power, whether ac or DC, network, indicator lights, and all the common ports found on an atx motherboard.
> BECAUSE YOU COULD FIT A FUCK TON MORE ON THERE!
LTT did a video with this product a couple years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3frnBoqqI_Q
Lol
(around 8m15s) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMiubC6LdTA
Edit: they loaded in the end, it was just very slow