Welcome to Arcana Labs
The best puzzles are those not intended to be solved. – Unknown
Providing Security Utilities, Tooling, and other Amusements, Arcana Labs is a small, independant technology exploration and development concern operating out of Atlantic Canada. Our past work has focused on security and disaster recovery, with present work focusing on monitoring tooling and developing puzzles and challenges intended for entrants into the “hackish” fields. Our ultimate goal is to improve our own overall understanding of computing to as deep a level of understanding as practical. We’ve organized our projects into a few categories: hardware, software, and a blog.
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Latest News
Mah! My Assumptions Were Invalid! Again!
2023-09-08 08:00:00 -0500
I set an incredibly light and easy goal for myself going into the first month or two of fall 2023: fix the power management problem that is reducing battery life to about 10% of what my back-of-the-napkin math had me expecting it to be. The culpret seemed immediately obvious: clearly, we are writing to the display too often.
Now Available: PETI Development Kit... Kits!
2023-08-18 08:32:00 -0500
This announcement here, on my own site, is actually a couple weeks late, but I finally got around to finishing the service manuals for the PETI development kit and making the development kits available on Tindie as DIY assembly kits! In part due to the through-hole design making assembly easy (though a tad prohibitively time-expensive when doing large numbers of them) and TI’s licensing around what I can and cannot do with the development hardware they themselves designed that make up part of the kit, I decided to opt for the route of selling the Development Kits as Do It Yourself kits consising of the PCBs for the Controller Board and the Rear Expansion Board.
Combined Lab Updates Headed Into Summer 2023
2023-05-23 08:30:00 -0500
Today we’ll talk about something changing around the lab, dive fairly deep in to the state of our currently-flagship project, PETI, and drill down into some side projects for the back half of the year. We start in with bad news and then it just gets better and better as you go, so tear the proverbial bandage off under the cut.
Rest Full-Stop, And What It Isn't.
2023-02-27 06:30:00 -0600
Last time I wrote a fair bit on the idea of productivity. I think I even took some time to explain that I was counting the winter out from actively pushing on technical projects - which hasn’t been entirely true - and focusing instead on “Rest and Preparation”. For better or worse, I’ve ultimately done far more of the latter than the former, so I find myself walking into a spring meant to “Spring Forth” but feeling instead like what I really need is a “spring break”. Why? Rest is more than it seems.
Refining Toxic Wellness and Productivity
2023-02-04 06:30:00 -0600
As I mentioned in the last post, I’ve been taking the winter season as a general period of rest and relaxation. Part of that has been putting a lot of thought into the ideas of “wellness” and “productivity”, which are both pretty loaded terms in common parlance, much to my annoyance.