Hacker News: rts_cts

New comment by rts_cts in "Copy Fail"

rts_cts — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 21:04:42 +0000

I started to take the exploit script apart and reformat it to be something readable. At about 1041 bytes it's actually readable. The heart of it also includes an encoded zlib compressed blob that's 180 bytes long ('78daab77...'). This is decompressed (zlib.decompress(d(BLOB)) to a 160 byte ELF header.

New comment by rts_cts in "An Interesting Find: STM32 RDP1 Decryptor"

rts_cts — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 18:17:18 +0000

What sort of sound machine is it? Not sure how this would help with an encrypted flash drive.

New comment by rts_cts in "URL in C (2011)"

rts_cts — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 18:01:56 +0000

That's exactly how we found an accidental copy/paste of an internal URL in our source code.

New comment by rts_cts in "Advent of Code 2025"

rts_cts — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 00:43:07 +0000

I have a EE background not CS and haven't had too much trouble the last few years. I'm not aiming to be on the global leader board though. I think that with good problem solving skill, you should be able to push through the first 10 days most years. Some years were more front loaded though.

New comment by rts_cts in "An Homage to 90s –/Public_HTML Hosting"

rts_cts — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 20:09:47 +0000

> Last updated: Monday, September 11761, 1993

Very, very nice.

New comment by rts_cts in "Show HN: F32 – An Extremely Small ESP32 Board"

rts_cts — Fri, 21 Nov 2025 01:55:48 +0000

And that's how I ended up with half a reel of 01005 resistors...

New comment by rts_cts in "Strix Halo's Memory Subsystem: Tackling iGPU Challenges"

rts_cts — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 22:30:05 +0000

Ironically, I'm not keeping my Windows machine around for gaming but rather very specific CAD tools that, despite the developers best efforts, will probably only ever be windows tools.

That said, I'm super close to pulling the trigger on the FW desktop and just installing a second drive for windows.

New comment by rts_cts in "Why do some radio towers blink?"

rts_cts — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 22:08:09 +0000

Driving through a massive wind farm at night is a trip since they all blink in unison. Having them all independently would look interesting but could rapidly descend into madness:

https://archive.org/details/bigclive_20230516

New comment by rts_cts in "TigerBeetle and Synadia pledge $512k to the Zig Software Foundation"

rts_cts — Sat, 25 Oct 2025 17:50:12 +0000

This is great news! I do wish that they had push a little bit harder to get $524288 though

New comment by rts_cts in "Trump pardons convicted Binance founder"

rts_cts — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 21:16:38 +0000

I'm not sure it will be a problem for Changpeng Zhao but let's say I was convicted of a felony in the US, served time in prison and then was pardoned by the president. What would my employment prospects be in comparison to someone who didn't receive a pardon?

New comment by rts_cts in "How bad can a $2.97 ADC be?"

rts_cts — Tue, 14 Oct 2025 18:25:36 +0000

We buy low end STM32s in 10-100k quantities and pay shockingly low prices as you noted and that's through official channels. One of our other suppliers offered us some "compatible" parts that he "might be able to find" for about a quarter of the cost, but we declined.

New comment by rts_cts in "A CT scanner reveals surprises inside the 386 processor's ceramic package"

rts_cts — Sat, 09 Aug 2025 23:00:01 +0000

With a good scope we could inspect 0.35um chips just fine. I honestly didn't look at die photos much after that until we started getting SEM images of 32nm and smaller chips

New comment by rts_cts in "Finding Shawn Mendes (2019)"

rts_cts — Mon, 09 Jun 2025 17:50:53 +0000

If Where in the World is Carman Sandiego on the Apple ][ taught me anything, it's that there is always a hotel and it is the best place to check on arrival.

New comment by rts_cts in "History of rat control in Alberta"

rts_cts — Thu, 05 Dec 2024 01:19:27 +0000

I grew up in Alberta, too. Intellectually, I knew what a rat was but I'd never seen one in my life. After school, I moved down to California and was leaving work late one night (Sunnyvale, CA) and saw this crazy thing walking along the curb near my car. It was like a really small cat, or a huge mouse, or a short weasel with a long tail. There I was, all alone in the parking lot in the middle of the night shouting at this rat, "Hey! You're a RAT!"

The rat was not concerned by this.

New comment by rts_cts in "This Is Knuth 3:16 (2002)"

rts_cts — Wed, 06 Mar 2024 00:58:02 +0000

Love it. This has a strong Emperor Kennedy Legend feeling to it.

New comment by rts_cts in "Windows 11 calls a zip file a 'postcode file' in UK English"

rts_cts — Wed, 07 Jun 2023 18:55:15 +0000

Next level Clbuttic [1] mistake

[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/clbuttic

New comment by rts_cts in "Why I'm done with Mouser Electronics"

rts_cts — Wed, 10 May 2023 21:25:52 +0000

I've been building some prototype boards for work with JLCPCB recently. There used to be an option to bundle parts from LCSC but that kind of went away. However, if you have a PCB order open you can get super cheap shipping if logged into the same account on LCSC.

I've been using JLCPCB's Global Sourcing service a lot recently. I can get DigiKey/Mouser parts sent to JLCPCB's inventory for assembly. The shipping is a bit slow but it beats having to manually assemble a few components not available at JLCPCB.

New comment by rts_cts in "Welcome to Your Airbnb, the Cleaning Fees Are $143 and You’ll Still Have"

rts_cts — Sat, 17 Sep 2022 18:46:06 +0000

I'm used to hearing Province of X but X province just sounds weird. Province of Alberta sounds right but Saskatchewan Province is just odd.