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Hello, magic printer that gave me a job and fed me in the early 2010s.

If you work in an environment where you have to constantly ship physical goods out the door. Hell, if you've even visited the post office and had a clerk print you a label. You've probably seen a thermal label printer in your life. During the 2010s the job market was certainly turbulent times with many phone jobs getting moved overseas. And field repair being sourced to the lowest bidder instead of asking the question if it's even the RIGHT company/technician that can do such a job. A lot of carelessness resulted in us having to rethink our careers.

For the first article, where we take you on a crash course in thermal printer repair, click here.
For the second article, where we teach you out to use common raster programs for these printers - Click here for Adobe or here for GIMP.

Read into my diatribes for the revisit of this topic!

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We're back at it again!

For those who witnessed our first sleeper PC blog, our second sleeper PC blog, and finally putting a stupid fan into said sleeper PC.. Thank you. Hardware hacking articles are super fun to write. This opens up opportunities again to hack modern technology into ancient gear. This time around, a Gigabyte Strix H370F into an IBM X205 E-Server.

Care to read more? Enter the diatribe!

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All the questions. All the time!

Although no one tagged me to answer the question challenge. It's something that we read in our RSS feed in which SizeOf(Cat) answered. It seems like a fun article to do. Thus, I don't need your tagging!:D

Read on if you would like to know more.

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LoRa is essentially an SMS-based CB Radio for nerds. Saved you the read.

Sometimes, you gotta get out. Touch grass. Walk around downtown. Hang out at your local coffeehouse while hipsters come up to you asking for money. Offer them your still-wrapped chocolate muffins if they publicly state that the B-52s are and always will be a terrible band, only for the profanities to fly as they storm out of the shop in a fit of rage. When in reality, they could've just complied, eaten the muffin, and resended his statement. But during all this, I've gotten into a cheap electronic hobby of LoRa, which is low (as in 900-915Mhz in the States) frequency radio hunting. For those who aren't feeling like getting into my diatribes. It's like a cross between Citizen-Band Radio mixed with instant messaging. Oh, and you can encrypt your messages, which somehow scares the shit out of universities, as it could promote "Anarchy" or some bullshit like that. Saved you a fuckload of time. Read on to continue downward the spiral.

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The little browser is back.

Although they are now on version 3.2.0, Version 3.1.0 of Dillo was brought back to life by a developer by the name of Rodrigo Arias Mallo in 2024, with the first release adding SSL support to this browser. Dillo was born in 1999, which is right at the Dot-com explosion of browsers and ways for people to access the internet. Dillo was ultra-lightweight and had minimalistic features that, at the time, were not required on the internet. In fact, back when we were playing with Red Hat Linux. Dillo was included in distros because we were loading it on old machines, like a 486, as an example. And for as limited as that may be to launch a browser on a 25MHz CPU. Dillo responded very well back in its day.

Want to check it out yourself? The actual website is here at https://dillo-browser.github.io/ . Would you like to know more?

Read onwards into the downward spiral!

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No, not dead.

For starters. Happy New Year out there. We didn't do anything extravagant like go to a garage filled with video games or go to Illinois to visit a group of people that resent me. Nah! We just stayed home and played a little bit of System Shock. Be told how we're terrible people by a fictional AI named "Shodan". The article was originally supposed to come out in October but kinda stopped mid-writing on this.

I'd find a picture with Lesbians holding Guns. But we think us just saying it is enough to freak out the AI content filters. Beyond this, a lot of background work has been happening throughout my site. For starters:

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We're unsure how we feel about the name "PINEcil." But sure let's review this!

This is for readers who want the TLDR version. It's a nice portable soldering iron, and so far, there have been no complaints. We'll update you as we use it.

Would you like to know more? Read onwards for my half-baked review!

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We may be a bit late to the party.

But we decided to investigate OpenNIC which appeared on Webrings early when I joined some of them in 2022. What is OpenNIC you ask? Well, regular top-level domain (TLD) names such as .COM/.NET/.ORG used to be run by the US government but eventually, ICANN took over. OpenNIC gives people the possibility of running their top-level domain and access to people wanting to get domains within those top-level domains. It's like a training/sandbox ground for people who want to try their hand at running a top-level domain without spending a shit-ton of money to go through the bureaucratic process of introducing it officially.

We have enough in our lives to NOT want to run a top-level domain. But out of interest in blogging about technology and USING that technology. I did make myself a domain on one of the primary openNIC TLDs.

HTTP://www.s-config.geek

Kindly note the link WILL NOT WORK work unless you use an OpenNIC DNS server which we will explain later in this article.

We feel like this is a good space to learn/understand how DNS works. But don't think it's really going to go much further than that.

Would you like to know more? Read on!

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If Google de-lists you. Why continue to 'Think' with Google?

First, there was Google's parent project which purchased "YouTube". This brought forth the word "Demonetization." Which was effectively telling content creators to play nice or else they make no money. Now, Google uses the "Don't be evil" Motto their developers once had and print it on the toilet paper in each bathroom stall. Alphabet/Google is not a search company anymore. They are an advertisement company (remember AOL? They were just an advertisement company too!).

This becomes more and more relevant as Google AI is deployed keeping you on the search engine instead of investigating the website itself. Or having calculative tools on Google's site instead of going to the person that made the calculator such as "millimeters to inches" as just one example. Or worse, having a Google side-project known as AMP just straight up content steal your entire site and stores it on one of their content distributed networks (CDN for short.) The next wave will affect the searchability of your favorite websites. Which is "de-listing" webmasters of low priority and content quality. Because either you're not important enough or you're not marketable enough. Or simply put. Google is panicking because the AI they used on others to perfect their search engine is being used on them by turning content into an endless array of smoke and mirrors.

Read on if you want to know more.

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