geekismes inside
A robot vacuum that Xiaomi abandoned: rooted through a 0.4 second USB window, cloud removed with Valetudo, and 144 French voice messages made with AI agents. It still cannot find its dock.
A 3D-printed Peltier mini fridge for one can, with AI agents for the maths, the design, the mistakes and a 3D assembly manual. 60 hours of PETG. Alpha of a prototype.
A cheap Chinese action cam with a hidden Android, a bad flash that bricked it, a 40-byte loader that brought it back, and a software finger that presses OK at boot.
Wake-on-LAN on the RN102 was « a hardware limit ». It was one PHY register: the Linux driver turns the wake pin into a link LED. One device-tree line, and the NAS now sleeps for real.
A Pi Zero W with aa-proxy-rs replaces a dead Android Auto dongle. Then Waze says 0 km/h: the bug was in the proxy config. Plus trip logging and a crash recorder for a car with no internet.
A 2007 Saitek wheel on Linux: one kernel crash, the I-Force protocol, and three proofs that some effects were never in the hardware.
Every forum says the Ethernet port of a 2009 Pioneer receiver is useless. It was just waiting for an IP address, with telnet and a web remote behind it.
A Lunii story box found in the trash, a new regulator, and a home-made bedtime story about our village, with my voice.
A cheap netbook limited to 6 W, two hidden registers and one lock bit: now 10 W and 61 % more fps in OpenArena.
An old Netgear NAS with no more updates, a dead disk, and Debian: now twice as fast, and the disks finally sleep.