Weeknotes 201

I finished reading Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams this week about her time at FaceBook. I’ll save you the time – it’s as bad as you think.

Open Infrastructure Map – this is cool.

Open Infrastructure Map is a view of the world’s infrastructure mapped in the OpenStreetMap database.

Claude is not very good at HTML and CSS. I asked it to create a very straightforward prototype page and it just couldn’t do it. It constantly flip-flopped back and forth between the various versions it had produced.

I don’t know if this is an indictment of HTML and CSS or Claude. Why not both?

I was getting frustrated by it when it dawned on me how ridiculous that was given how impossible this was at all until the last year or so. And fair dos, it did point me in the right direction.

Game Boy rollercoaster 🎢 this week. I only went and fixed the button issue! This is the first time I’ve diagnosed and fixed a proper electrical issue, so I consider it somewhat of a milestone.

(I’ll try to explain what I did, but I’m missing a lot real know-how here, so please bear with).

When you press a button, the membrane underneath completes a circuit between two pads on the board, which sends a signal to the CPU. It seemed reasonable that since Select, Start, A, and B were not working, there was some problem with that signal. The D-pad was unaffected. So I needed to follow where the signal travelled to see if there was some break causing button presses to fail.

On the PCB there are various “vias” (a via is where the circuit travels to the other side of the board via a small hole) and test points (used for…testing) to allow following the traces around the board. I used a multimeter in continuity mode to follow the traces from the button pads up to the CPU.

Doing this revealed that we had continuity for traces going via a diode labelled DA1, but not DA2. Start, Select, A, and B all went via DA2, so this proved we had a broken trace somewhere between DA2 and the CPU. Eventually I narrowed it down between two points which ran under the cartridge slot. I had previously found some corrosion under the cartridge slot so my theory is that the corrosion goes further than you can see and that had disrupted the trace.

I bypassed the broken trace by soldering a small wire between two points on the board. This restored the buttons!

The only remaining issue then was the power switch. I had to replace the power switch to get this GBP to turn on. The power switch is a common power failure issue. I bought replacement switches which are easily soldered to the board, but the actual plastic tab that you move to turn the console on don’t fit inside the case button as well I would like creating an unreliable contact between the switch and the button. I decided to try adding a small bit of hot glue to fill the gap. This went looked to be a good solution at first, but when attempting to remove the switch from the shell it snapped off 😭

The only thing to do was replace the whole switch (again), which luckily I had to hand. However, I did a very bad job removing the old one, and ripped some pads from the board in the process. I did fix the pads with some copper tape and patience though, and soldered a new switch in-place.

Some more hot glue, and this is the result.

I’m not 100% happy with the switch, but I’m resisting the urge to mess with it again right now. Overall, this is a win ✅ My second completed Game Boy has been a long time coming.

The kerning on the pope’s tomb is a travesty

Cheryl Jacobsen, a calligrapher and adjunct assistant professor at the Center for the Book at the University of Iowa, calls the engraving “horrifically bad,” noting that “there is no historical reason for spacing that bad.

Tis bad.

You may have heard of Power over Ethernet (certainly if you’ve been following along here). PoE can supply 15.4 watts of power. Did you know PoE+ is a thing? It can supply up to 25.5 watts. This is where it starts getting silly. PoE++ increases to 60 watts, but there’s more, PoE+++ can do 90 watts!

PoE = 802.3bt Type 1 (15.4 watts max)
PoE+ = 802.3bt Type 2 (25.5 watts max)
PoE++ = 802.3bt Type 3 (60 watts max)
PoE+++ = 802.3bt Type 4 (90 watts max)

We may run out of pluses in a few years.

The Eternaut is very good so far. I’m on episode 4. Check it out.

Because I was supposed to be doing something else, I started looking at setting up gluetun this week.

VPN client in a thin Docker container for multiple VPN providers, written in Go, and using OpenVPN or Wireguard, DNS over TLS, with a few proxy servers built-in.

This allows you to route traffic for your other Docker containers via your VPN provider of choice. It took a bit of faffing but it seems to be working ok as far as I can tell. I want to play around with it some more, in particular testing how the kill switch functionality works.

I pulled a muscle in my back this week whilst standing completely still, head down looking at my phone, at the gym, before I’d started my workout.