J-Pilot USB sync didn't want to play with the bridge box (though the original problem was access to the USB devices, and it was at least able to start sync as root). but that machine has a 16550A on the motherboard and i have a serial sync cradle too, and that worked.

and then since it'd need a third-party conduit which doesn't exist on Linux, i did a full device backup and pulled the raw PDB out of the J-Pilot backup directory because i have no idea what i'm looking at. hex editor time

failing to find a JPEG SOI marker anywhere in the PDB, i realized that i was looking at raw raster data that was approx the length of the eyemodule2's small image size from the manual.

so i wrote a script to spit it out as a PGM. turns out macOS 15 Preview can open PGMs directly?

now i'm thinking i just got the thumbnails, but whatever, this is freestyle, idek what the PDB container file structure is yet.