Gus

Big ol' nerd. Interested in electronics, reverse engineering, open source, repairing things, cooperatives, bikes.

Variously part-time as: MicroPython maintainer, embedded systems consultant, EV reverse engineer, patter of good dogs.

Pronouns: He/Him
Living On: Djaara Country (Castlemaine, Australia)
Blogs At: https://www.projectgus.com/
Hire Me At: https://www.redyak.com.au/

Public Key

npub1e4dux9y69fj7pxwaxd2jsxnuek2stl8kapg89x4vr2neueymu38sphgw2l

NIP-05 Address

[email protected]

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsv6k7rzjdz5e0qn8wnx4fgrf7vm9g9lnmws5rjn2kp4fu7vjd7gncprpmhxue69uhhyetvv9ujumt0d4hhxarj9ecxjmntdjtq5d

Publishing to

relay.momostr.pink

Author Public Key

npub1e4dux9y69fj7pxwaxd2jsxnuek2stl8kapg89x4vr2neueymu38sphgw2l

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Last Notes

2026-09-16 07:26:33 GMT

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_switch
Not sure about adjusting it, sorry!

2026-08-26 00:37:20 GMT

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Sounds completely believable. It is surprising that the industry doesn't seem to ever learn from this. 😐

2026-08-26 00:29:12 GMT

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yes, fully agree.
Also if your business model is to sell to five customers who will each buy ten million units then it's far more cost effective to send your FAEs to them (which they'd expect anyway) than to hire technical writers.
(EDIT: FWIW I think this is all short-sighted thinking, especially these days. But it's been mainstream industry thinking for a long time.)

2026-08-25 23:32:04 GMT

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One of my pet theories (that I've never had confirmed) is lawyers freaking out about the possibility of patent lawsuits.
The more details of the implementation that you publish, the less work someone needs to bring a patent lawsuit (even a frivolous one).
As I said, I've not seen any confirmation, but I suspect it's part of the risk/reward analysis in these cases.

2026-08-25 04:12:36 GMT

Australian retrocomputing(ish) nerds, I've been helping my dad clean out some stuff and have stumbled into a trove of 90s and 2000s PC software...
I don't know all of what is here, but we have some boxed software including Windows 98 & ME, and a stack of PC magazine cover CDs from the 90s and early 2000s. Also about a billion versions of AutoCAD (my dad is a retired architect.)
Does anyone collect or archive any of this stuff? Will send to good homes within Australia for cost of postage.
https://mediacdn.aus.social/media_attachments/files/117/154/189/729/000/173/original/c96983d19de74b35.jpg
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2026-07-16 22:09:59 GMT

Any fellow Aussies have a quality home weather station recommendation?
My parents gave us a Jaycar one when we moved in over eight years ago. It's been limping along for several years now, intermittently works.
I keep thinking about designing and making something, but realistically I don't think I'll ever put that time in. (Although if there was a solid existing open source design then I'd consider building one.)

2026-07-11 05:44:34 GMT

Someone knowledgeable has probably analysed this properly already, but guessing it's no coincidence that the Telstra GPS time server rolled back to Nov 2006 and there are 1024 weeks between 22 Nov 2006 and 8 Jul 2026...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPS_week_number_rollover
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/jul/10/2006-throwback-took-down-telstra-national-phone-networ

2026-06-27 21:27:23 GMT

Didn't have "most trusted VPN co-owned by Nazi, company unapologetic" on my bingo card for 2026. FFS. #mullvad

2026-03-24 21:44:07 GMT

RE: https://aus.social/@joe/116286277267951212
I hadn't been following this, but here's a BBC article about what the ABC workers are striking over:
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c248597nqn8o
No ABC today!
#note1emu…x08c

2026-02-18 21:42:41 GMT

Finally remembered to set up some recurring donations for @npub1ncy…3x0q and @npub1fh7…ee83 this morning!
This stuff doesn't develop or host itself, so I'm glad I finally got around to it.

2026-01-28 22:42:06 GMT

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It's miserable how much work it takes now to tell the difference between receiving "high effort" and "low effort" communications.
(And I know it's hard if, for example, someone is writing in a language they don't know well - but I'll take someone's earnest but difficult-to-parse foreign language English over pristine-but-kinda-wrong slop any day.)
It'd be better if you could trust the LLM output was correct. I don't think we'll be living in that world any time soon.

2026-01-28 22:34:53 GMT

TFW you make a careful code review of someone's PR submission and you're pretty sure they've replied back with LLM slop. :bunnesad:
(Very confident, lots of mostly-relevant dot points, much of it sounds technically plausible but not fully correct.)

2026-01-25 06:14:35 GMT

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Any different if you flip the USB-C plug over?

2026-01-01 06:31:35 GMT

Thoroughly enjoyed the Hacking Washing Machines talk video from #39C3. Expected it'd be about IoT stuff, but it mostly wasn't! Some great reversing efforts.
https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-hacking-washing-machines
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1S-PVo3GlA
It did dawn on me that if we had good Right to Repair and vendor interoperability laws then pretty much all of the demonstrated hacks would have been redundant (even the joke one). 😒 (cc @npub1fdr…lvhs)

2025-12-21 04:15:37 GMT

Suddenly reminded of an e-waste story: about 13 years ago I spotted a high end gaming PC at the tip. Less than two years old, pretty expensive component choices for the era.
Took home, powered up. The CPU fan immediately ran 100%, and it froze mid-boot. OK, we know why it was treated as e-waste...
Opened the case: Packed with thick dense lint and dust, especially in the CPU cooler fins. I can't imagine where it lived to ingest this much dust in only a couple of years, it looked like a clothes dryer filter in there.
Carefully vacuumed it out, and it immediately worked. Literally nothing else wrong with it.
#repair

2025-11-22 01:06:27 GMT

Re: last boost https://chaos.social/@dpk/115589097803252590
That OCaml PR is textbook open source in the era of vibe coding...
It's got everything:
- PR submitted without the author acknowledging they didn't write it and don't understand it.
- Copyright laundering.
- "I just wanted to get it done!" versus maintainers who know they have to live with code contributions for years.
- Zero-effort pasting LLM output as reply to real people's thoughtful questions. (At least the author acknowledged what they were doing that time.)
- It doesn't matter that it's hard to review because "AI has a very deep understanding of how this code works."
- "Beats me. AI decided to do so and I didn't question it."
If this is our new world then it's going to turbocharge maintainer burnout. :dumpster_fire:
(If you don't want to read a quite long often depressing thread, would still recommend reading this well reasoned comment by one of the maintainers:
https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/pull/14369#issuecomment-3556593972 )

2025-11-04 22:14:27 GMT

Love this mini documentary about the Pedal People rubbish collection and general bike haulage co-operative in Massachusetts
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JahXgey1sK4
https://pedalpeople.coop/
#cooperatives #bikes
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2025-09-13 06:59:40 GMT

Saw "But Also John Clarke" in local theatre this week. Heartfelt and very funny, thoroughly recommend if you're thinking of seeing it.
https://youtu.be/aqpU6qRXmYo

2025-07-21 07:26:41 GMT

Love this project from mikeselectricstuff to replace barrel jack sockets with an all-in-one USB-C socket and PD trigger
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BElU9LPbaA8
#electronics

2025-04-27 21:45:40 GMT

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Appreciate the technical clarification, thanks. I've run into similar fwupd races when trying to script interactions with other USB devices. Am glad they've added Pixels to the ignore list now (although, as you say, it'll take a while to make it downstream.)

2025-04-27 21:29:59 GMT

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I'm glad you deleted the post where you named him, but even this is a very serious insinution to make about an individual based on the information provided in the thread.
Isn't trying to support the janky vendor modem firmware update mechanism that you described a sufficient explanation for this issue?
(To be clear, I don't support anyone harassing your developers at all. I don't know any details of that harassment campaign but it sounds horrible and traumatising . However, I've had random unintended problems with USB hardware due to fwupd behaviour before. It's hard to account for all the different weird things that device implementations might do. If I understand the latest fix PR correctly then the fwupd behaviour doesn't break earlier Pixels' fastboot but it does break the Pixel 9 fastboot.)

2025-01-28 01:35:09 GMT

Is there anything more American than designing a beefy power-hungry rip-roaring world-cooking technology and then it turns out someone else can do almost the same thing far more efficiently?

2025-01-11 01:43:13 GMT

Probably a tired take, but Kaos (2024) is the best bit of TV I've seen for a good while. Well produced and written, solid cast and music choices. Good to see a modern big budget rehash of some properly old source material instead of more superhero minutiae!
When it came out two people at my local cafe recommended it unprompted, and they were both right. 😆
It is violent and gruesome in places, but so are the stories they are adapting. I think they handled that part pretty well.

2024-12-28 07:45:57 GMT

"Throughout the history of software development, employers have consistently preferred to fund tools that deskill and attempt to abstract expertise away over tools that genuinely improve productivity and the quality of the output, but also happen to require expertise and skill.
This has worked so far because the software industry is usually flooded with money."
- Catching up with @npub1hr7…jxyc's essay from earlier this year: *"React, Electron, and LLMs have a common purpose: the labour arbitrage theory of dev tool popularity"*
https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2024/react-electron-llms-labour-arbitrage/

2024-12-22 10:46:49 GMT

New post in my Hyundai Kona Electric reverse engineering series: introducing the Fakon project
https://www.projectgus.com/2024/12/fakon/
#badpuns #reverseengineering #KonaHacking #EVs
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2024-11-04 20:43:50 GMT

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Ah that's an insidiuous one! At least you've found it now

2024-10-11 22:42:44 GMT

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Totally agree, but where do we go from here?

2024-10-11 21:43:25 GMT

It's been a couple of years, but switched back to Firefox for Android from the Fennec FDroid fork after this latest CVE. It really shows the resource gap for alternative browsers: even a straightforward fork that can rapidly distribute patches for actively exploited vulns is significant effort.
https://www.theregister.com/2024/10/10/firefixed_mozilla_patches_critical_firefox/

2024-08-15 11:49:56 GMT

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Hmm, interesting. On rp2?

2024-08-15 08:05:01 GMT

"C++ Exceptions Reduce Firmware Code Size" talk by Khalil Estell is worth the time, explains in detail gcc's exception mechanism on ARM Cortex-M and challenged a few of my long held assumptions. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGmzMuSDt-Y
I still think the trickiest aspect of exceptions in C++ is not knowing what could throw what, because it's not in the function signature. Although the function-colouring side effect of declared exceptions (i.e. Java) brings its own problems.
On that, I reckon the most interesting idea was mentioned briefly at the end: a post-build analysis tool that tells you where your firmware might terminate due to uncaught exceptions. A tool like that could make exceptions much more ergonomic.
(Kind of similar to needing to analyse where Rust code might panic. I know there's some tooling for that, too.)
#embedded #cpp

2024-08-01 01:05:09 GMT

Got inspired/sniped by this 404 media article about AI scraper user agents to finally exclude them from my personal site: https://www.404media.co/websites-are-blocking-the-wrong-ai-scrapers-because-ai-companies-keep-making-new-ones/
Popped up the quick script I used here, in case it saves anyone some time: https://gist.github.com/projectgus/5a495c94f70ac3b3783e89c74a1fc07a

2024-07-30 23:13:43 GMT

Taobao store that sells tissue box covers modelled like shipping containers.
Most have major shipping brands on them, but one has the docker logo. 😄
Plus, inexplicably, one has the VSCode logo!
(Those two seem to be the most popular according to the reviews.)
So odd.
https://item.taobao.com/item.htm?id=752110369496
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