The Blog

Generating Vanity Onion Addresses with Shallot

Nix McRetro // 14th May 2016 // Guides, Hacks, Raspberry Pi

Generating Vanity Onion Addresses with Shallot

Back in 2016 I used Shallot 0.0.3-alpha to generate a vanity version 2 onion address for McRetro. My old address was mcretro35qepy5cy.onion. This is now historical documentation: Shallot generates the old 16-character v2 onion addresses, and Tor removed support for those services in 2021. Modern version 3 onion addresses are... Continue reading

eMachines E732 Laptop Disassembly

Nix McRetro // 23rd April 2016 // Guides, Repairs, YouTube

As I was pulling apart an eMachines E732 for a friend, I realised I should make a video for anybody else unfortunate enough to be doing the same thing. These machines are reasonably straightforward to disassemble, with accessible RAM, hard drive and wireless card. I originally said the CPU might... Continue reading

Dumping the Sega Dreamcast HKT-0120 Dev Kit SCSI Hard Drive with GNU ddrescue

Nix McRetro // 16th April 2016 // Hacks, Sega, YouTube

At the time I was still confusing ddrescue with the separate program dd_rescue. My original forum post names dd_rescue; the later update below records my GNU ddrescue preference. They are different programs, so the surviving notes do not establish that GNU ddrescue alone produced this dump. Despite the confusion, I... Continue reading

Dumping the Sega Dreamcast HKT-0120 Dev Kit SCSI Hard Drive via GUI and dd

Nix McRetro // 9th April 2016 // Sega, YouTube

Everyone loves WSB2K2! World Series Baseball 2K2! In this part I try imaging the HKT-0120 SCSI drive with R-Studio for Linux and ordinary dd. The results are not terrible, but there appears to be a small amount of unreadable data. A raw copy with dd is useful when a disk... Continue reading

Preparing to Dump the Sega Dreamcast HKT-0120 Dev Kit SCSI Hard Drive

Nix McRetro // 8th April 2016 // Devkit, Sega, YouTube

This is the preliminary setup for preserving the SCSI hard drive from the Sega Dreamcast HKT-0120 development box. Before making any changes to the development kit, I wanted a raw copy of the existing disk in case there were any goodies hiding on it. Or, to use slightly more archival... Continue reading