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Well, technically anywhere from 5 to 40, but I still have a nice chance to grow old before libreboot starts building. Also, still slower than dial-up.

While the whole exchange must've sucked for them, I've found their reaction extremely amusing at times, especially the carpet banning for life of everyone within a country/state to the offending party. But hey, that'll definitely show AMD how to hire those coreboot developers

Out of curiosity, I've been watching a few restorations of those spectrums, and I've noticed the keyboards having a rather peculiar construction, judging by today's standards. They have 2 springs, the small one, as far as I understand, presses the membrane layers together, and the larger one returns the key into neutral position once the key is released.

I personally haven't used any spectrums, yet I've encountered the very same construction on a keyboard of a Russian clone of said machines (namely, zx atas), and to this day I haven't touched anything worse... The only way I can describe it is like trying to type on a piece of raw meat.

So, if anyone here had a chance to type on the original spectrums, was it this bad? I suspect otherwise since I haven't heard of crowds of people requesting PTSD treatment, but the whole thing still somewhat bothers me 😅

Just thought I'd share. Probably nothing new or fancy, but may help some of you find a way to repurpose devices that aren't worth repairing into home servers or something: e.g. op5 I've used has better CPU compared to raspberry pi 4, can run linux (postmarketos, albeit with some caveats), and costs less if bought with broken display (or nothing if you have one lying around)

Decided to share an older "project" of mine - ms sculpt wireless to wired conversion (also, it runs qmk, so we get all its features). A sensible person would order a custom pcb (such projects exist on the web, take a look if you're interested), but I went with removing all the components except from the ribbon cable connector, sending the PCB smooth, gluing a piece of discount card to isolate the traces, gluing a Chinese rp2040 on top, and wiring all the necessary traces to it. No, it wasn't fun. Yes, it works.

Bonus: when I disassembled it now I found out the type-c wasn't soldered well and decided to separate from the board:

So, here we go: using phone as a poor man's microscope (note: also, still works)

The end result kinda doesn't give it out, so whatever (insert your frontend -- backend jokes here)

x-post from tg: https://t.me/theaftertimes/15396

So, a while ago I bought a cheapest oneplus 6 available in my area to subject it to a few experiments with running Linux. Among the other issues that came for that price, the power button was almost flush to the frame, hard to press, and had almost no feedback.

Today I finally got tired of it and decided to check what's wrong. The button itself turned out to be just fine, but the thingy that presses it looked weird:

After a few tries of gluing smth to extend the middle pin, I found out that I can just cut off a piece of plastic from the blister of my favorite headache pills and place it between the button and said thingy. Works wonders 🤣

Btw, the actual problem is that it was missing a few rubber spacers, as far as I understand, but whatever