Guess what’ll be wrapping up in just two weeks? The Midwest RepRap Festival, the largest con for open source 3D printing in the world. MRRF is going down in Goshen, Indiana on March 23rd through March 25th. Tickets are free! If you’re looking for a hotel, I can speak from experience that the Best Western is good and close to the con, and I haven’t heard anything bad about the Holiday Inn Express.
Want to go to a convention with even weirder people? Somehow or another, a press release for Contact In The Desert, the largest UFO conference in the world, ended up in my inbox. It’s on the first weekend in June near Cochilla. Why is this significant? Because the greatest people-watching experience you’ll ever see, AlienCon 2018, is happening in Pasadena just two weeks later. The guy with the hair from Ancient Aliens will be at both events. Why are they having a UFO conference where military planes fly all the time? Wouldn’t it be better to rule out false positives?
The entirety of Silicon Valley tech culture is based upon the principle of flouting laws and regulations. We have reached a new high water mark. Swarm Technologies, a ‘stealth startup’ working on ‘Internet of Things’ satellites recently sent up four 0.25U cubesats on an ISRO flight. The satellites were deployed and are currently in orbit. This is somewhat remarkable, because the FCC, the government body responsible for regulating commercial satellites, dismissed Swarm’s application for launch on safety grounds. As reported by IEEE Spectrum, this is the first ever unauthorized launch of commercial satellites.
The TRS-80 Model 100 was one of the first, best examples of a ‘notebook’ computer. It had a QWERTY keyboard, an LCD, and ran off a few AA batteries for 20 hours. It’s the perfect platform for a Raspberry Pi casemod, and now someone has finally done it. [thecodeman] stuffed a Pi into a broken model M100 and replaced the old LCD with a 7.8″ 400×1280 pixel display. The display is the interesting part here, and it comes from EarthLCD, part number earthlcd-7-4001280.
The Flite Test crew is famous for their foam board RC airplanes, but they have historically had some significantly more interesting builds. Can you fly a cinder block? Yep. Can you fly a microwave and have it pop popcorn? Yep. Their latest crazy project is a flying Little Tikes Cozy Coupe, the ubiquitous red and yellow toy car meant to fit a toddler. The wings are made out of cardboard, the motors — both of them — generate thirty pounds of thrust each, and you can weld with the batteries. Does it fly? Yes, until the wings collapsed and the Cozy Coupe plummeted to the ground. Watch the video, it’s a great demonstration of designing a plane to rotate off the ground.
“The TRS-80 Model 100 was one of the first, best examples of a ‘notebook’ computer. It had a QWERTY keyboard, an LCD, and ran off a few AA batteries for 20 hours. It’s the perfect platform for a Raspberry Pi casemod, and now someone has finally done it. [thecodeman] stuffed a Pi into a broken model M100 and replaced the old LCD with a 7.8″ 400×1280 pixel display. The display is the interesting part here, and it comes from EarthLCD, part number earthlcd-7-4001280.”
The fun of imitating the feel of software from that era.
The TRS-80 wished it had a color screen. All it had was a 4 line (maybe six) monochrome text only display. It was an interesting package for its time.
If I could make my sons cozy coupe fly !!!
The TRS-80 Model 100 had a 40 column by 8 lines display.
on a 240×64 bitmapped display, using a 6×8 font.
Wikipedia tells me some people figured out how to get it to use a 4×6 font for just a few more characters on-screen.
fun(?) fact: the first BOFH stories were written on a TRS80-100
Another fun fact: the BASIC ROM for the TRS-80 Model 100 was reputedly Bill Gates’ last hands-on coding project for Microsoft.
Boring fact: Kyocera was the company that manufactured it for RadioShack.
they invite known aliens to the events
Also how long until home rocketry launches its first working satellite?
As for “known aliens”, “the guy with the hair” is a Centauri as evidenced by the photo here…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Londo_Mollari
The amount of resources that would require stretches the concept of “home.” Billion dollar mansion rocketry maybe
Hopefully Swarm gets fined out of existence. Space safety regs aren’t just for fun, they’re designed so your cute CubeSat IoT buzzword generator doesn’t shred the ISS.
Since this was launched on an Indian rocket I think it might fall outside the purview of the FCC, even when the company is registered in California.
Although I’m sure there are international agreements that do cover the safe use of (near-earth) space too.
I wonder if they did add the proposed RADAR reflectors at least, then the US/world can update their RADAR tracking system to adapt to the reality of people shooting those things into space.
What the hell is an internet of things satellite anyway? A fridge in space that sends you a push notification when your eggs have gone bad? What the hell are we doing with ourselves
Just a buzz word named remote sensor data relay service.
It’s neat how finding the linked bits of text is an easter-egg hunt. If only there were some standard to let browsers draw linked text using visually different attributes in an accessible fashion. That would be cool.
i think you might need to look at your settings on the browser or monitor. all the links are bright orange text for me.
Hackaday meetuo during MRRF?