2025-01-20 08:00:52
This week, we witnessed a couple of space oopsies as both Starship and New Glenn suffered in-flight mishaps on the same day. SpaceX’s Starship was the more spectacular, with the upper stage of the seventh test flight of the full stack experiencing a “rapid unscheduled disassembly” thanks to a fire developing in the aft section of the stage somewhere over the Turks and Caicos islands, about eight and a half minutes after takeoff from Boca Chica. The good news is that the RUD happened after first-stage separation, and that the Super Heavy booster was not only able to safely return to the pad but also made another successful “chopsticks” landing on the tower. Sorry, that’s just never going to get old.
On the Bezos side of the billionaire rocket club, the maiden flight of Blue Origin’s New Glenn ended with the opposite problem. The upper stage reached orbit, but the reusable booster didn’t make it back to the landing barge parked off the Bahamas. What exactly happened isn’t clear yet, but judging by the telemetry the booster was coming in mighty fast, which may indicate that the engines didn’t restart fully and the thing just broke up when it got into the denser part of the atmosphere.
While we’re not huge fans of doorbell cameras, mainly on privacy grounds but also because paying a monthly fee for service just seems silly, we might reconsider our position after one captured video of a meteorite strike. The impact, which occurred at the Prince Edward Island home of Joe Velaidum, happened back in July but the video was only just released; presumably the delay was for confirmation that the object was indeed a meteorite. Joe’s Ring camera captured video of something yeeting out of the sky and crashing into the sidewalk next to the driveway, in the exact spot he’d been standing only moments before. It’s hard to say if he would have been killed by the impact, but it sure wouldn’t have been fun.
While we’re on space-adjacent topics, we saw an interesting story about a satellite that was knocked out of service for a couple of days thanks to 2024 being a leap year. The Eutelsat OneWeb communications satellite went offline on the last day of the year, apparently because some software wasn’t prepared for the fact that 2024 had 366 days. It’s not clear if this caused any problems with the satellite itself, although the company said the problem was with the “ground segment” so it likely wasn’t. Engineers were able to work through the problem and get it back online within 48 hours, but we’re left wondering how something like this could happen with so many standard libraries out there that specifically deal with leap day calculations.
It’s that time of year again — HOPE_16 is gearing up, and tickets for the August 15-17 conference at St. John’s University in Queens are already on sale. It looks like the Call for Proposals is active now too, so if you’ve got a talk you’d like to give, get going.
And finally, sad news for a hapless early adopter of Bitcoin, whose eleven-year effort to locate a hard drive with 8,000 Bitcoin on it has reached a legal end. Back in 2013, a hard drive owned by James Howells containing the Bitcoin wallet was accidentally disposed of, ending up in a landfill in Newport, Wales. Howells immediately asked for permission to search for the missing fortune, which at the time was worth about $7.5 million. This seems to us like his first mistake; in light of the potential payout, we’d probably have risked a trespassing charge. Howells spent the next couple of years trying to get access while assembling a recovery team, with the effort driven by the ever-increasing price of Bitcoin. Howells also brought suit against the council to get access, an effort that a High Court judge brought to an end last week. So Howells is out of luck, and the hard drive, now worth $765 million, still lies in the landfill.
2025-01-20 05:00:40
The chances are overwhelming, that you are reading this article on a web browser powered by some form of the Blink or WebKit browser engines as used by Google, Apple, and many open source projects, or perhaps the Gecko engine as used by Firefox. At the top end of the web browser world there are now depressingly few maintained browser engines — we think to the detriment of web standards evolution.
Moving away from the big players though, there are several small browser projects which eschew bells and whistles for speed and compactness, and we’re pleased to see that one of the perennial players has released a new version as it passes its quarter century.
Dillo describes itself as ” a fast and small graphical web browser”, and it provides a basic window on the web with a tiny download and the ability to run on very low-end hardware. Without JavaScript and other luxuries it sometimes doesn’t render a site as you’d see it in Chrome or Firefox, but we’re guessing many users would relish some escape from the web’s cycle-sucking garbage. The new version 3.2.0 brings bug fixes, as well as math formula rendering, and navigation improvements.
The special thing about Dillo is that this is a project which came back from the dead. We reported last year how a developer resurrected it after a previous release back in 2015, and it seems that for now at least it has a healthy future. So put it on your retro PC, your original Raspberry Pi, or your Atari if you have one, and try it on your modern desktop if you need reminding just how fast web browsing can be.
This isn’t the only interesting browser project on the block, we’re also keeping an eye on Ladybird, which is aiming for those big players rather than simplicity like Dillo.
Thanks [Feinfinger] for the tip.
2025-01-20 02:00:52
Hot on the heels of Bambu Lab’s announcement that it would be locking down all network access to its X1-series 3D printers with new firmware, the X.509 certificate and private key from the Bambu Connect application have now been extracted by [hWuxH]. This application was intended to be the sole way for third-party software to send print jobs to Bambu Lab hardware as we previously reported.
The Bambu Connect app is a fairly low-effort Electron-based affair, with some attempt at obfuscation and encryption, but not enough to keep prying eyes out. The de-obfuscated main.js file can be found here, with the certificate and private key clearly visible. These are used to encrypt HTTP traffic with the printer, and is the sole thing standing in the way of tools like OrcaSlicer talking with authentication-enabled Bambu Lab printers.
As for what will be the next steps by Bambu Lab, it’s now clear that security through obfuscation is not going to be very effective here. While playing whack-a-mole with (paying) users who are only interested in using their hardware in the way that they want is certainly an option, this might be a wake-up call for the company that being more forthcoming with their userbase would be in anyone’s best interest.
We await Bambu Lab’s response with bated breath.
2025-01-19 23:00:28
When the Game Boy Printer was released back in 1998, being able to produce a hard-copy of your Pokémon diploma or your latest Game Boy Camera snapshot at the touch of a button was was pretty slick indeed. But in our modern paperless society, the GB Printer somehow sticks out as even more archaic than the other add-on’s for Nintendo’s iconic handheld. Even among the folks who are still proudly playing the games that support the Printer, nobody actually wants to print anything out — although that doesn’t mean they don’t want to see the images.
The TinyGB Printer, developed by [Raphaël BOICHOT] and [Brian KHUU], could be considered something of a Game Boy Non-Printer. Powered by the RP2040 Zero development board, this open source hardware device plugs into your Game Boy and is picked up by all the games as a legitimate Printer. But instead of cranking out a little slip of thermal paper once you hit the button, the image is displayed in all its 240×240 glory on a 1.3 inch TFT display mounted to the top of the board.
Now, there’s a couple neat things going on here. First of all, because the whole process is digital, [Raphaël] and [Brian] have managed to pull out all the stops and believe they are reproducing these images in the highest fidelity possible. The images are also being simultaneously stored (as PNGs) to a micro SD card on the board, which given the file size of these images, essentially gives you unlimited storage capacity. The documentation says the code might start glitching once you’ve put tens of thousands of images on the card, but surely your sanity would give out before then.
The documentation looks fantastic on this project, and we love the different variations that are possible depending on how you want to build it. For example you can choose to power it with AA or AAA batteries (to match whatever your Game Boy uses), and there’s support for removing the display if you’re more interested in banking the images than viewing them on the go.
If this project seems a bit similar, it’s probably because the duo were involved in the NeoGB Printer we covered back in 2021. Between the two this new version is considerably more polished, and it’s interesting to see how the team has improved on the basic concept over the last few years.
2025-01-19 20:00:37
If you’re into handheld gaming, you’ve got a wide array of hardware options to choose from these days that are capable of running everything from console classics to full-fledged PC titles. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t enterprising gamers out there who are still building their own custom handhelds — like the Retro Lite CM5.
For this project, [StonedEdge], [GinKage], and [notime2d8] set out to create a powerful enough handheld that could emulate games spanning the PlayStation 2, GameCube, and 3DS eras. Using a Radxa Rk3588s compute module as a base, the build navigates the design and construction of things like the carrier board, custom controllers, and the enclosure.
The project’s build log takes the form of a set of forum entries that starts with emulating games on an OrangePi 5 and mapping out things like USB 3.0 support, Power Delivery and management, I2S audio, along with display options amongst other chores. But the project’s GitHub repo is packed with technical details for anyone looking for a more condensed version.
There are experiments with the MIPI OLED displays and the final revision uses an RP2040 as an HID to read button presses and data from the IMU. WiFi 6 and BLE 5.2 are handled by an M2 slot-mounted module that is interfaced using a PCI Express bus which is always tricky when designing your PCBs. The final product looks great and there are a couple of videos that show the device in action. Additionally, the design files and code are available for anyone who fancies building one themselves.
If you like handheld gaming consoles, then have a look at the Intel NUC based Handheld with Steam Deck vibes.
2025-01-19 17:00:58
When it comes to amateur radio, one size definitely does not fit all. That’s especially true with antennas, which need to be just the right size for the band you’re working, lest Very Bad Things happen to your expensive radio. That presents a problem for the ham who wants the option to work whichever band is active, and doubly so if portable operation is desired.
Of course, there are commercial solutions to this problem, but they tend to be expensive. Luckily [Øystein (LB8IJ)] seems to have found a way around that with this low-cost homebrew motorized antenna coil, which is compatible with the Yaesu Automatic Tuning Antenna System. ATAS is supported by several Yaesu transceivers, including the FT-891 which [Øystein] favors for field operations. ATAS sends signals up the feedline to a compatible antenna, which then moves a wiper along a coil to change the electrical length of the antenna, allowing it to resonate on the radio’s current frequency.
The video below details [Øystein]’s implementation of an ATAS-compatible tuning coil, mainly focusing on the mechanical and electrical aspects of the coil itself, which takes up most of the room inside a 50-mm diameter PVC tube. The bore of the air-core coil has a channel that guides a wiper, which moves along the length of the coil thanks to a motor-driven lead screw. [Øystein] put a lot of work into the wiper, to make it both mechanically and electrically robust. He also provides limit switches to make sure the mechanism isn’t over-driven.
There’s not much detail yet on how the control signals are detected, but a future video on that subject is promised. We’re looking forward to that, but in the meantime, the second video below shows [Øystein] using the tuner in the field, with great results.
