Rich Infante

code & startups, security. sometimes, arcane technology and fun hacks

[Rich Infante @richinfante]

https://t.co/qrs0tIMgaF

[Rich Infante @richinfante]

More progress!

[Rich Infante @richinfante]

mp3 player validation motherboard back and assembled. two bodge wires later & it's working! Next up: finalizing the input ux, making it more compact, and designing a case. V1 using all off the shelf modules for people to assemble easily. V2 - maybe with smt components + stencil?

[Rich Infante @richinfante]

New post about my Compaq restoration project: https://t.co/ImauoJ8y08

[Rich Infante @richinfante]

Semi terrifying retro computer repairs part 1 … time will tell if it still works after!

[Rich Infante @richinfante]

There's no way Claude would have gotten this far without help, but it's pretty interesting how easily given some raw bytes it can dis-assemble something the emulator is stuck on, and diagnose the cause (Sometimes)

[Rich Infante @richinfante]

Experiment successful - several cpu and bios/hardware fixes later, it boots. Some further BIOS work looks like it is needed to make the graphical programs work!

[Rich Infante @richinfante]

a new easter egg on my site ... given certain conditions, it goes into 'hacker mode':

[Rich Infante @richinfante]

As part of an "How far will Claude take this" test, I've had it working for a few days on a pure-rust x86 emulator from scratch with minimal dependencies. The initial version had some pretty major addressing, issues with interrupts. With help, it's now getting ... somewhere

[Rich Infante @richinfante]

Mini progress update on MP3 Player: now pre-processing metadata when syncing to the sd card. Have album artwork loading (pre-encoded into a flat db file), working on an API to allow screens to request data as you scroll. Blog Post in the works!

[Rich Infante @richinfante]

Love a nice circuit board. Hard drive from inside my compaq 286 laptop

[Rich Infante @richinfante]

Oh good, IPv6 adoption is >50% almost 30 years later. Now it's time for V8!
https://t.co/Hagbm9edhy

https://t.co/cLFF4eGT6J

[Rich Infante @richinfante]

Compaq SLT286. Power adapter’s long gone … but helpful internet people have found you can just Hotwire +12V across certain battery connector pins. Won’t boot with this version of DOS though, I think it has baked in cd rom drivers which this doesn’t like

[Rich Infante @richinfante]

Come on it’s 2026 - if you aren’t writing your own printer drivers, what’re you even doing?

[Rich Infante @richinfante]

Some additional progress on my @pebble firmware hacking project ... now my watchface settings app has color swatches for the color preference picker:

[Rich Infante @richinfante]

Current Code: https://t.co/VeClcVhe4C

[Rich Infante @richinfante]

Couldn't sleep, so some midnight @Pebble @PebbleDev firmware vibe hacking with the help of claude

I have always wanted to be able to change settings for my watchfaces without pulling out my phone. ~12 years later I have it working locally in an emulator!

cc @ericmigi

[Rich Infante @richinfante]

I'm going to spend some time with this - if someone besides me thinks this is cool, maybe it's worth putting the effort into production-izing this kind of thing. The biggest challenge is probably what on earth you call it in the menu, as there's not much real estate!