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.
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.