Notes for 2025-07-14

Text Adventures

Nick shared some PunyInform work he did with the CS department at University of Minnesota Duluth. Their cybersecurity programme uses a text adventure written by postgraduates to test undergraduates' ability to exploit physical security vulnerabilities.

• Live playable game
• source code

Cameras

Nick gave Margot a spare Cisco/NXP digital camera from circa 2012 to play with, in case it was useful. It has a glorious flip-out USB 2.0 plug, and a dastardly mini-HDMI socket. It also runs off AA batteries (packaged separately, so the alkaline crust was contained in the shrinkwrap!). It doesn't expose live video through the USB port, but perhaps the HDMI port could be a way to get a video stream.

Printer

Dan brought the printer back out, and we learned that it was possibly running some sort of embedded Linux inside. There are hopes of an exploit to get into the thing, but also there are approaches to defeat the self-disabling features of the cartridges themselves:

The printer hosts its own WiFi network in the hall, which you need to switch to in order to poke at the submission port. It runs its own service called "HP GGW", which was easily crashed in fuzz testing.

We talked about various vegetable pigments to make custom inks (as inkcap mushrooms are too toxic to work with casually just yet).

CMS

Ana looked into alternatives that were more distributed, but the project seems to be in a suspicious state regarding licensing and governance. This group would likely find raw git and markdown comfortable, but it presents an accessibility barrier to incoming participants.

Nick mentioned his friend's Tai-Chi site, which is generated from markdown. Cici (the Tai-Chi instructor) edits the markdown from github's Web-based editor, and when he saves it the site is automatically refreshed. The clip art all comes from a single OTF font, so he can pick relevant illustrations of the forms he's teaching that session. It's an interesting midpoint in the accessibility and technical resilience sense.

Chat

We all talked about the #permacomputing channel on Libera IRC, which hosts some of the luminaries who coined the term "permacomputing". Clients are a mess, and nobody remembers how they set theirs up, but wyrl and Devine Lu Linvega are on there.

We exchanged Signal IDs (and those who have whatsapp), and Nick got gurk working on his pinebook pro for TUI access to Signal.

Notes for Permacomputing Club - 07.07.25

Changes to Website

• Potentially changing web host to leaflet.pub
• Ana wants to redesign site to be more grid based
• Nick suggested side notes (looking for link)

Liberating a Printer

• HP Deskjet 3055a - manual(s)
• Daniel brought in a printer and oscilloscope, so we could have a look at capturing and modifying signals sent by the printer
• Ana talked to someone about 'inkcap mushrooms' which we could try to grow
• Nick also suggested iron gall ink, but it burns the paper
• There is an option on the webserver settings to disable cartridge protection
• We're in!
• Printers fingerprint every page you print with yellow dots, that can be used to track every page back to the printer it came from
• Yellow ink comes from 'gamboge' - a sap collected from the killing fields of Cambodia

Nick - Show and Tell - OLPC

• Nick has 4 'One Laptop per Child' laptops!
• One of them still works
• OS runs in a virtual machine
• OLPC website

• Decided to take minutes!
• Discussion of the content of Margo's upcoming screening: she would like to fill the extra time with other submissions from the group / historical works.
• Updates on Joe's screaming computer project: running a local LLM screams the loudest so far.
• (Obligatory Algorave/Algorythms chat)
• Tom explained his work with housing campaigns: aggregating data from (laborious) FOI requests, the potential for "useful art" in combating housing crises.
• (Obligatory grep jokes)
• Nick explained his capstone project as part of the UCL Public History Master's, and shared his highlights from the history of the LINC project. Stay tuned for his exhibition this September!
• Updates on the printer hacking project: everyone seems keen to try making our own inks...
• Retro-computing chat. Mat picked up a Macintosh SE to refurbish, but doesn't have access to his tools for the foreseeable future.
• The National Museum of Computing vs. The Centre for Computing History: fight.