Daily driver: Xiaomi 17 Pro, HyperOS, 16GB RAM, rooted, 140 third-party apps. Quick audit: adb shell su -c 'dumpsys activity processes | grep -c "cached=true"' 100+ cached processes at any time....
My MiTV-MOSR4 (Android 11, Google TV) shipped with 140 packages, and a solid chunk of that was Xiaomi telemetry, an India-region cast app, and a retail demo mode. I cleaned it down to 112 over WiFi...
I stayed at a hotel in Jakarta recently, and the room had the usual Samsung Smart TV lockdown: a welcome screen, a fixed channel list, and no obvious way to use the TV as an actual TV. No source me...
I installed OpenCode on a Raspberry Pi 3 B+. The binary installs, the version prints, and then it silently hangs forever. Here is what actually happened. What I tried 1. Downloaded the ARM64 rele...
My *arr media stack lived in a single Docker container on the Synology NAS for years. One day the container vanished — recreated by the NAS, wiped clean. The good news: all the persistent data (con...
When I got the LS486 running again, it was running bare. No heatsink, nothing on the processor at all. It POSTed, it sat in the BIOS quite happily, and it was easy to forget that a 100 MHz 486 actu...
The LS486 is back from the dead. When I left off last time, the board was stone dead. No beeps, no POST codes, no 3.3V rail. The prime suspect was a TIP110A transistor, the linear regulator respon...
I’ve had this JK Micro mechanical keyboard sitting around since I bought it back in 1992 (I’ve completely forgotten the exact model number at this point, sorry). It’s got genuine Cherry MX switches...
I was at a local junk shop last week and spotted something that immediately caught my eye: a 486 motherboard with a CPU still in the socket. For the uninitiated, these are getting pretty hard to fi...
I installed my PicoMem on my 486 machine, and by default it comes configured to use IRQ 5. Everything seemed fine at first, but I started running into weird issues once I had my Sound Blaster 16 in...