Ford Maverick 2026 Upgrades

It’s white. It’s got steel rims. It looks like a utility locator company truck. And I love it. Here’s a running list of upgrades I’ve added or rejected from my base model Ford Maverick XL Hybrid:

• Mabett Bed Storage Cubbies. The biggest upgrade was filling the spots in the bed with these two plastic cubbies. They fit just enough bungee and tie downs to do “truck stuff”. They come with 4 screws each, so be sure to get some M6 screws to fill all the holes.
• Jump Starter. Hasn’t arrived yet, but the USB-C plug I installed kept draining the battery to nothing. Had to jump it. Humiliating. Get one of these instead.
• Mabett cup holders and trash can. Tiny but mighty, this center console fills the gap below the charger block. The can stays centered in the Flexbed bracket, and I have an extra spot for empties on a road trip.
• Mabett Mud Flaps. I had zero road grime after a trip to Seattle and back in the rain. Couldn’t have a better endorsement. Install by removing and replacing the stock clips.
• Mabett Under Front Seat Storage. Just a bit of extra room for a first aid kit and other stuff I want but won’t need all the time. Keeps me from having to fill up the backseat storage so much.
• 12V bed plug; particularly useful for running pumps for the stand up paddle boards. Just pop off the electrical cover and connect it up. You will need the key on to run the hybrid motor, most likely.
• Mobile antenna for my Baofeng. Helped me get mobile and use my Ham license.
• Tailgate Molding Rivets, Plastic. The ones on the tailgate keep breaking. I keep the pack in the truck. These are much sturdier.
• Tailgate hole cover; mostly for paranoia factor of getting sand or rocks stuck inside the tailgate.
• Hitch Hole Cover. Just plain vanity. The tail end looks chopped up without it.
• Adeptus Mechanicus sticker. Heralding its arrival as a hybrid being, my steel steed gets an emblem of the machine god. Some day, when my flesh disgusts me enough (or my knees give out), I will join her in communion with the Omnissiah.
• Snarky Plate Surround — BOUGHT A TRUCK — FOR THE GAS MILEAGE. My family is going to disown me when they see it, but I bet I’ll get fist bumps in the Fred Meyer parking lot.

It’s not all Xibit-style customization up in here. The Flexbed stuff is nice, but it needs to go further. The attachment bracket used for the trash can was supposed to be a Ford thing used across their line. Not sure it took off. I want it on the dash for a phone holder. I want it on the bumper for tailgating, add more cup holders or something. Make it sturdier. Make it universal.

Rejected Upgrades — these ones failed due to practicality, functionality, or budget reality:

• Rough Country Tonneau Cover. As a former Ranger owner that had a fiberglass flat top installed, I love the idea of the latest covers, but I don’t find myself using the bed for anything but hauling right now. Since the bed is so small, removing it every time to store it in the garage seems like a pain. Check Reddit for the best recommendations. People really like the 3-piece ones. Hard Cover is better if you get snow.
• USB-C in the bed. I couldn’t find one that didn’t stay active all the time and drain my battery. When I left town, I had to jump it when I got back. Since I uninstalled it, no issues.
• Inverter in the bed. A 12v inverter is going to last longer inside the truck than wired into an open bed. Just plug it in when you need it into the 12v outlet. Get one near the tailgate with the 12V connectors..
• Wired motion detecting lights. Just get a few magnetized LED handhelds from Harbor Freight and attach them in the cubbies. Mischief managed.
• Under seat storage dividers. I’ve got the hybrid, so space is at a premium here. Just put a blanket under there to stop your secret stash from rolling around.
• Rain guards for the window. Almost pulled the trigger on these after one too many drips in the drive thru. The in-channel ones were recommended. Instead, I keep a cloth in the door now. Helps wipe the dust from the Fischer Price interior too, lol.

Wyse 3040 Thin Client as a CUPS Print Server

 I bought a HP LaserJet Pro M405dn via surplus from a previous company, and it has become the most reliable printer I've ever owned. It’s compact, quiet, and the refills are cheap to this day. The only problem was it didn’t come with a wireless card.

When we had a reclaimed desktop as a Plex server, I plugged it in there on USB and shared it on the network. Windows 10 made that doable, but not easy. WSD issues, permissions for Work and surplused laptops running business versions of Windows. The problems piled up, and I got fed up. I went searching for a print server.

If this were 2010, I’d buy a raspberry pi and be done. But the tariffs and RAM crisis have made even the stock models as rare, and I was fed up. Enter the Wyse 3040, a refurbished line of thin clients from Dell. Small but mighty, this thin client was an Intel Atom SBC with soldered ram coming in at 2GB and 8GB storage.

For an OS, I tried a few distros, including the Dell  but could never get them to be compact enough. Debian 13 was my savior. A headless, compact build out of the box took up less than 4GB on install, and the installer boot disk came with non-free drivers that saved the day:

1. Plug in a mouse and keyboard and DisplayPort monitor.
2. Unlock UEFI
3. Unlock the BIOS with the default password, Fireport,  if needed (mine came unlocked from the reseller linked above)
4. Plug in your boot disk to USB. There’s a USB 3.0 blue port on the front which felt faster on the third install. Grumble grumble…
5. You want the advanced install options so you can survival select a pared down set of options and install the non-free drivers.
6. During install, be sure to select xfce for your GUI instead of the heavier Gnome ones. You can even go headless, but I did not.
7. You will need to enable some kernel modules to see the eMMC after launch  the installer can see your storage just fine, but the OS can’t boot without them. This thread on Reddit was awesome. After install, enable the modules as the OP says, but then make them load every boot by following this comment. The UEFI trick is also necessary.
8. You might need to do similar kernel module shenanigans for your WiFi card. I did not, as you will see later.

After that, I was able to boot, enable SSH to get into my print server headless, and the rest could be done remotely. CUPS was the next challenge. My Xfinity (Comcast) router had their crappy hotspot turned on. This blocked devices from finding each other on the network. 24hrs later, it was off and I was running headless. I installed the printer via USB and configured CUPS in a browser. The test page was a sweet victory.

I had a memory of printers with expansion slots for WiFi back in the dark days of the 2000s, so I googled my printer. It turns out the dn in the model number means direct networking. Under a panel, I found an Ethernet port. An office move meant the router was sitting right next to the printer, and I could have just plugged it directly in all along. Oh well. What’s a bit of trouble in GRUB for old times sake?

For reference:

• A good walkthrough, but the info is dated: https://qubitsandbytes.co.uk/install-a-new-os-on-a-dell-wyse-3040/

GettingOut Messaging and Video Visits Refunds

Update: the below did not work, in the end! They wanted the inmate number which I did not have access to anymore. It is not readily available on my account screens either. I took this information and contacted my Attorney General for the state of Washington with the below information. I had a refund through their scam handling department in 10 days. Getting Out still denied all wrongdoing.

Second Update: I have had more than one person reach out about this with a similar experience. Let me know if you have, and if something else worked for you.

Getting Out is a predatory company that handles inmate communications. Their system is designed to take your money, charge bogus fees, and never let you get any stored value back out.

It is next to impossible to find out how to get refunds online, so I’ve documented it here for everyone stuck in this nightmare of having a relative in jail and not being able to get their money back once they’re out.

Call their Customer Service Line https://www.gettingout.com/contact-us/

Press 1 for English or select a different language as necessary.

Listen to a minutes-long disclaimer and give your rights to take your stored value away after 180 days.

Press 1 to accept.

Press 1 to go into the deposits message.

Press 0 to be transferred to a hold queue.

When you ask for a refund, you will be told you need your contact information and the inmate number. That number should be in the app for GettingOut Messaging under your contacts, but it was not for me.

Once they discover this, you will need to send a note to the parent company ViaPath to get a refund.

Send To: customerservice@viapath.com

Phone number of your account

Name on the account

Facility name

Inmate name

PIN (4-8 digits)

This is how refunds are done in 2026. Email. To a third party. I’ll let you know if it actually works. (spoiler: it did not  I contacted the AG)

If you try pressing zero at the big menu before deposits, you will be presented with “That option is disabled” message because they know the easiest way to frustrate people is to remove it and hide it in a sub menu. No matter how deep.

Regardless of what you think about people in jail, the families of these people are being taken advantage of by this company, and they are keeping money they are not entitled to if they built a better system.

The disclaimer ensures ViaPath can keep your money after that time of you can’t get it back within the time frame which is not allowed for other stored value like gift cards.

The queue staff are unhelpful as a rule. You should encourage them to unionize to improve conditions so they will not be yelled at by frustrated families.

Everyone on this line is trained to send your concerns with the system not being operational or easy to their tech support department to be looked at. They know they are hard to contact, so this statement is bullshit.

Everyone is trained to say that your concerns about the usability of the system will be sent to their supervisor. This is bullshit. It is hard on purpose.

Everyone on the line has the same regional accent, so the call center is not in the US. That jurisdiction has laws for consumer protection. If you figure out where, I will work with you to ensure the company pays.

Ender 3 v2 + Cura + Professional Firmware - Setup

For my future reference, here are the things I had to do to get an Ender 3 v2 tuned and ready after an extensive rebuild. Thanks past-me! Future-me appreciates you writing it down somewhere that you’ll be able to find.

After a spate of nozzle replacements and struggling with adhesion, I added a runout sensor, a new hot end, and a CRTouch. This sent me down a rabbit hole of software upgrades, and it is MUCH easier to use as a result.

I installed the Professional Firmware by mriscoc on GitHub. The features he collects are impossible to find in a better package.

I upgraded my screen firmware for which I needed to track down an 8GB SD Card formatted in a specific way. They’re becoming super rare locally, but photo stores should have them if you’re Amazon-averse. The firmware is in the source zip for the mriscoc firmware above for multiple different models. Use the test GCode included in the how-to before you move on. You want to make sure you have it right as the slicer setup is cumbersome.

Follow the recalibration steps to tune the hot end and bed PIDs. Then do the extruder steps calibration and maybe even zsteps. Then set your bed mesh and do Bed Tramming calibrations to get the perfectly level bed. This should resolve most calibration issues with your prints.

Now you're ready to work on your slicer.

The CRTouch requires gcode to be added to the beginning of the printer profile right after G28, auto home. Add “G29 L0 J” to test the bed level just before starting a print.

Was also able to get thumbnails on the new firmware and screen combo. This takes a script for your slicer to be placed in a specific spot, and your pc must have Python installed (on Windows, in a terminal, type “python3 -v” to see if it is installed; then follow instructions) along with supporting libraries (“pip3 install Pillow” if needed; I think this might only be needed for Prusa Slicer). The final step to view thumbnail jpgs is to change your filament color in Cura! If it is black (like the Pro PLA I was using from 3D Fuel) it will look like it is not rendering anything!

While I still am struggling with elephant foot and getting my calibration cubes to be strictly dimensional, this Professional Firmware got me printing fewer leveling passes with fewer problems overall. I level once a session now instead of after every print. I'll update if I get those last few issues handled. Wish me luck!

A Milestone in London

Work took me across the sea to London in 2014. I had lived in big Asian cities and driven through American metropolises. But this was my first Old World capital. I had a whole week of wandering around Shoreditch with Pokémon Go as my only tour guide where I took in the Calvinist Chapel and Kings Cross Station. I ate hand pies for breakfast and doner at midnight. I had a new job and a new relationship. London was a clean break. The last day was set aside for sightseeing, so I took the Tube to Trafalgar Square, the National Gallery and finished at the British Museum. One stone among the many pilfered artifacts yanked me back to the past. A solitary stela about the same height as me was covered with three different scripts: Greek, Demotic, and Hieroglyphic. I had found myself in front of the Rosetta Stone, and I began to cry.

Despite repeated efforts from societies ancient and modern, scholars could not translate the scripts that were common on documents stuffed into sarcophagi or painted on temple walls. Adventurers traveling to Egypt brought mummies back home where some were ground up for pigment. Some were ground up for ingestion in quack medicine. And some survived to go on display. One of these came through Nauvoo, Illinois in 1839, and Joseph Smith, the frontier prophet of the growing Mormon church, bought them and the funerary documents that were found alongside for display in his hotel cum manor. These he claimed he could translate by the gift and power of God, and he pulled a tale of Abraham in Egypt from the papyrus like a rabbit out of a hat.

Growing up Mormon means you already have a complicated relationship with the word "translation". Joseph Smith claimed The Book of Mormon was revealed to him in glowing script using a rock in a hat in a remote-viewing style dictation. He corrected the King James version of the Bible for his Joseph Smith Translation. And now he translated his Egyptian papers into a tale of stars and planets and the throne of God. Of course it was all bunk.

Scholars were beginning to demystify the ancient world for real. Discovered in 1799, the Rosetta Stone was assisting in the deciphering of Demotic and Heiroglyphics by Champollion in 1822. So before Joseph Smith spun his tales of a Abraham placed on the seat of Pharaoh, we had workable translations of every Egyptian document in his possession, and a clear picture of actual Egyptian culture. Academia would classify the Joseph Smith papyri as common funerary documents guaranteeing the resident of the sarcophagus or tomb an audience in heaven. But to Joseph, the hieroglyphs were full of mysterious multi-layered glyphs that we could only properly understand through his divine inspiration. He even worked in American racism, claiming figures drawn all in black were slaves of the court and not their real identity: gods attendant to Pharaoh and the deceased.

Joseph Smith died at the hands of a mob after it was revealed he assaulted the wives and teenage daughters of his followers. It should have been widely known by then that he just made it all up. His banner of fraud was taken up and moved to Salt Lake City under the guidance of Brigham Young. It persisted in my family even after one of my great-great-great-grandparents kicked her husband out when he brought home an additional wife. And it resurfaced even after my grandparents moved to Las Vegas in the 1960s to work at the Nevada Test Site. As the city expanded, they hosted cocktail parties and took up smoking. It seems this belief was a hard habit to break.

By the time I stood in front of the Rosetta Stone, I was still a few years away from formally cutting ties with the church through resignation. I was still mourning a loss of community that many Exmormons feel. My upbringing provided no solace in that moment, and a cult is a group you cannot leave with your dignity intact. I felt cheated. The worst part of extricating yourself from a church you've been in since birth is that you are trained not to blame the leadership or the people in the past that lead you to that point. You are taught to be blind to faults in the institution. And you have to fight to even want to see the truth.

Standing there, I reflected on the past of the stone and myself. Incomplete information let bad men exploit my ancestors. Any of Joseph Smith's translations are a transparent fraud under even the most passing scrutiny. But someone on the inside is taught not to see, and they extract faith-saving salt from the sea of doubt, so the fraud continues. I am of the mind that you need to be ready to leave or all outside efforts to make you do so will only result in retrenchment. For this reason, I will ask friends and family that are still in the church and ask me why I left, "If the church was not true [to its Word], would you want to know?" Because there are no magic words that can undo the conditioning.

It was a slow drip of water that wore down my barriers. I had experiences in childhood of an abusive mom and step-mom enabled by their partners and ignored by clergy when we asked for help. I saw friends and family abused by the church for missionary work which turned out to be a tool of personal indoctrination at the expense of others health and safety. And my time at BYU was further damaging to my faith in the church looking out for the well-being of members. There was no epiphany on the road to Damascus. I stayed home from church to help deal with newborn child care, and my first week back after 6 months away was a revelation. The people making excuses for Joseph Smith were aliens. I was done, and I couldn't get back in the grooves of the wagon trail anymore.

You see the issues more clearly once you step away, but you are automatically suspect by those still inside if they speak to you at all. You are treated as a Cassandra at best and a Judas at worst. You lose your community of built in friends. You lose family closeness if your parents or siblings are church members. And the self doubt that drove you to question the church turns toward you. Leaving doesn't magically make everything OK. Knowing the truth doesn't make your life perfect.

So I stood there in front of that ancient stone and felt.  What was on it was of little import these days. Old laws and decrees. But what it meant was loss and waste, and also rebirth and truth. It represented every could-have-been stretching back through time to people who were not ready to listen. Every choice that pulled me further in took another equally protracted period to step out. The stone waited after being written as the languages on it died. It chilled in the field waiting for Napoleon's troops. And it waited for the secrets of its inscriptions to unlock an ancient world. And a modern life like mine.

In The Message, Ta Nehisi Coates recalls his visit to Goree Island and being moved by it even though he knows its true significance is wildly overstated. I know the the Rosetta Stone is not a religious object, but, as I stood in front of it, it embodied my journey. I hold it as a symbol of healing and informing and freeing. And so I cried in the old city around stolen artifacts and portraits and empire. I cried and knew that I had deciphered this piece of my history. I mourned what I could no longer change while celebrating the life that I would now live.

SOLIDWORKS PDM Database Server Errors in Event Logs

 Event Viewer is a great source of logs to show that something is wrong with your setup. Here is one esoteric error and how they were resolved:

Credentials are stored in multiple places and multiple tools. If an error appears in the Event Viewer every 10 seconds from SOLIDWORKS PDM Database Server with a message like Connect to server <ServerName>' Failed: (null) Unknown error 0x80040200 (null) or Login failed for user '<username>'. Reason: Could not find a login matching the name provided. [CLIENT: <local machine>], this means that the Database Archive Server connection is using the wrong account or the wrong password.

Launch the "Database Server Configuration" utility from the Start menu and correct the login to your SQL Admin user. The errors should stop.

The Internet at DEF CON 33 (and BOM to make your very own)

 And it came to pass that the Pope of the Church of Wi-fi, yeah, even Renderman, didst bless and consecrate The Internet in this the 2025th year of the common era (and 35 years after Tim Berners-Lee invented it) on August 8th, the second night of DEF CON 33.

And lo, DuncanYoudaho didst capture the consecration thereof in an image. In the self-same breath as the consecration, the Pope did also pronounce a holy quest upon him as a teacher doth chastise the student that readeth not the book but kind of fumbles through the book report anyway.

Yeah, he was admonished with much reproachment to not share the graven image of the consecration until such time as the quest was fulfilled. That all the world wouldst see and hear and follow in the path. And this was the quest:

"DuncanYoudaho, if ye be a loyal servant of The Internet, teach those who see the image of this blessing how they also might obtain an Internet of their very own. Yeah, promulgate and proclaim the BOM that thou didst fulfill when making The Internet."

And so if thou wisheth to make this Thine Internet, obtain the shards of circuitry, and resistors, and switches, and hookup wire, and make ye an earthly copy of what is now The Blessed Internet!

Instructables

I made The Internet thanks to a great Instructable. The parts list has atrophied a bit with time, so I’m reproducing a BOM here with more modern selections. When in doubt, they’ve probably got better step by step instructions, so head there. What I did not do (and wish I did) is take the advice to make curly LED hookups and stand-offs.  Making the wires as tight as they are has lead to almost every solder joint breaking. The Internet has required constant maintenance which various users have graciously done and received stickers in return, most recently, Chip from Aviation Hacking Village.

Parts List

• Hammond 1591XX Series enclosure in a chosen size (Mouser/Digikey) or a similar looking enclosure - The plastic enclosure of The Internet uses a Radio Shack ABS project box. As these are no longer available in large quantities, I found a similar project box in the Hammond 1591XX Series enclosures.  These come in black, have a detachable bottom with rounded exterior edges, and come with PCB mounting holes inside the case for easy attachment of the strip board components.
• Red LED inside chrome-plated enclosure (Mouser/Digikey) - Pay particular attention to the voltage. Higher voltage LEDs will need more batteries.
• NE555 Timer (Mouser/Digikey) - The through-hole TI model is linked here. This is the grand-daddy of them all. The IC that birthed all other blinky lights. Kneel and say thanks. And provide at least 4.5V to power it.
• Resistors: 330Ohm, 2x 1M Ohm - The 330Ohm resistor can be changed to tune the blink to your liking.
• Battery Holder(s) for at least 6V power. 
• Hook-up Wire, Solid Core.
• Strip Board sufficient for mounting the components and attaching inside the case.

Equipment

• Wire Strippers
• Soldering Iron and Solder
• Double-sided Tape
• Screw Driver for case and PCB Screws

Steps

• Get circuit working on Strip Board or Bread Board.
• Cut 8mm hole in case for light
• Cut hole in case for switch. I put mine on the side of the box 
• Make stand-offs and long curly q's for LED, switch, and batteries
• Make final solder joints to hook everything up
• TEST IT 
• Screw down the Strip board to the box
• Affix the batteries to the strip board (I had to wire the 4x AA holder down as it kept breaking loose)
• Close it all up and test it again
• Get it demagnetized by the Elders of the Internet, or find another Pope of the Church of Wi-fi to bless it for you. 

Pinout stolen from NE555P Datasheet

 

Circuit Design

 

Pictures of The Internet

 

And the Lord did grin...

Currently, The Internet was handed off to members of DC404 for an East Coast Adventure. If Flat Stanley returns to DEF CON 34, I'm sure it will come with plenty of stickers.