Day: January 19, 2026

Tolerating Delay With DTN

January 19, 2026 by 21 Comments

The Internet has spoiled us. You assume network packets either show up pretty quickly or they are never going to show up. Even if you are using WiFi in a crowded sports stadium or LTE on the side of a deserted highway, you probably either have no connection or a fairly robust, although perhaps intermittent, network. But it hasn’t always been that way. Radio networks, especially, used to be very hit or miss and, in some cases, still are.

Perhaps the least reliable network today is one connecting things in deep space. That’s why NASA has a keen interest in Delay Tolerant Networking (DTN). Note that this is the name of a protocol, not just a wish for a certain quality in your network. DTN has been around a while, seen real use, and is available for you to use, too.

Think about it. On Earth, a long ping time might be 400 ms, and most of that is in equipment, not physical distance. Add a geostationary orbital relay, and you get 600 ms to 800 ms. The moon? The delay is 1.3 sec. Mars? Somewhere between 3 min and 22 min, depending on how far away it is at the moment. Voyager 1? Nearly a two-day round trip. That’s latency!

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Washington State Bill Seeks To Add Firearms Detection To 3D Printers

January 19, 2026 by 181 Comments

Washington State’s House Bill 2321 is currently causing a bit of an uproar, as it seeks to add blocking technologies to 3D printers, in order to prevent them from printing “a firearm or illegal firearm parts”, as per the full text. Sponsored by a sizeable number of House members, it’s currently in committee, so the likelihood of it being put to a floor vote in the House is still remote, never mind it passing the Senate. Regardless, it is another chapter in the story of homemade firearms, which increasingly focuses on private 3D printers.

Also called ‘ghost guns‘ in the US, these can be assembled from spare parts, from kits, from home-made components, or a combination of these. While the most important parts of a firearm, like the barrel, have to be made out of something like metal, the rest can feature significant amounts of plastic parts, though the exact amount varies wildly among current 3D-printed weapons.

Since legally the receiver and frame are considered to be ‘firearms’, these are the focus of this proposed bill, which covers both additive and subtractive technology. The proposal is that a special firearms detection algorithm has to give the okay for the design files to be passed on to the machine.

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TV Remote Uses Floppy Disks

January 19, 2026 by 9 Comments

Famously, the save icon on most computer user interfaces references a fairly obsolete piece of technology: the venerable floppy disk. It’s likely that most people below the age of about 30 have never interacted with one of these once-ubiquitous storage devices, so much so that many don’t recognize the object within the save icon itself anymore. [Mads Chr. Olesen]’s kids might be an exception here, though, as he’s built a remote control for them that uses real floppy disks to select the programming on the TV.

This project partially began as a way to keep the children from turning into zombies as a result of the modern auto-play brainrot-based economies common in modern media. He wanted his kids to be able to make meaningful choices and then not get sucked into these types of systems. The floppy disk presents a perfect solution here. They’re tangible media and can actually store data, so he got to work interfacing a real floppy disk drive with a microcontroller. When a disk is inserted the microcontroller wakes up, reads the data, and then sends out a command to stream the relevant media to the Chromecast on the TV. When the disk is removed, the microcontroller stops play.

Like any remote, this one is battery powered as well, but running a microcontroller and floppy disk drive came with a few challenges. This one is powered by 18650 lithium cells to help with current peaks from the drive, and after working out a few kinks it works perfectly for [Mads] children. We’ve seen a few other floppy disk-based remote controls like this one which replaces the data stored on the magnetic disc with an RFID tag instead.