IRCB S73-7 Satellite Found After Going Untracked For 25 Years

May 12, 2024 by Maya Posch 26 Comments

When the United States launched the KH-9 Hexagon spy satellite into orbit atop a Titan IIID rocket in 1974, it brought a calibration target along for the ride: the Infra-Red Calibration Balloon (IRCB) S73-7. This 66 cm (26 inch) diameter inflatable satellite was ejected by the KH-9, but failed to inflate into its intended configuration and became yet another piece of space junk. Initially it was being tracked in the 1970s, but vanished until briefly reappearing in the 1990s. Now it’s popped up again, twenty-five years later.

As noted by [Jonathan McDowell] who tripped over S73-7 in recent debris tracking data, it’s quite possible that it had been tracked before, but hidden in the noise as it is not an easy target to track. Since it’s not a big metallic object with a large radar cross-section, it’s among the more difficult signals to reliably pick out of the noise. As can be seen in [Jonathan]’s debris tracking table, this is hardly a unique situation, with many lost (XO) entries. This always raises the exciting question of whether a piece of debris has had its orbit decayed to where it burned up, ended up colliding with other debris/working satellite or simply has gone dark.

For now we know where S73-7 is, and as long as its orbit remains stable we can predict where it’ll be, but it highlights the difficulty of keeping track of the around 20,000 objects in Earth orbit, with disastrous consequences if we get it wrong.

The Minimalistic Dillo Web Browser Is Back

May 11, 2024 by Maya Posch 21 Comments

Over the decades web browsers have changed from the fairly lightweight and nimble HTML document viewers of the 1990s to today’s top-heavy browsers that struggle to run on a system with less than a quad-core, multi-GHz CPU and gigabytes of RAM. All but a few, that is.

Dillo is one of a small number of browsers that requires only a minimum of system resources and will happily run on an Intel 486 or thereabouts. Sadly, the project more or less ended back in 2016 when the rendering engine’s developer passed away, but with the recent 3.10 release the project seems to be back on track, courtesy of efforts by [Rodrigo Arias Mallo].

Although a number of forks were started after the Dillo project ground to a halt, of these only Dillo+ appears to be active at this point in time, making this project revival a welcome boost, as is its porting to Atari systems. As for Dillo’s feature set, it boasts support for a range of protocols, including Gopher, HTTP(S), Gemini, and FTP via extensions. It supports HTML 4.01 and some HTML 5, along with CSS 2.1 and some CSS 3 features, and of course no JavaScript.

On today’s JS-crazed web this means access can be somewhat limited, but maybe it will promote websites to have a no-JS fallback for the Dillo users. The source code and releases can be obtained from the GitHub project page, with contributions to the project gracefully accepted.

Thanks to [Prof. Dr. Feinfinger] for the tip.

The Moondrop MIAD 01: A Smartphone With Balanced Audio Output

May 9, 2024 by Maya Posch 21 Comments

Over the past several years we have seen smartphones regrettably lose features which were once standard, such as FM radios, IR blasters, status LEDs, physical buttons, micro SD card slots, and of course headphone jacks. An interesting counterpoint here regarding the latter is the newly released Moondrop MIAD 01 smartphone.

As a relatively well-known manufacturer of audio equipment including in-ear monitors (IEMs), the announcement of a smartphone came out of left field, but the specifications make sense. Of particular interest are the dual audio jacks: one 3.5 mm TRRS and one 4.4 mm balanced TRRS, making it a good match for high-end headphones that support balanced audio.

While the smartphone hardware is your average mid-range selection, featuring a MediaTek Dimensity 7050 SoC — its main selling point are the dual Cirrus Logic MasterHiFi DACs, that power the dual audio jacks. It’s also the reason behind the name: Mobile Internet Audio Device, or MIAD for short.

Given Moondrop’s audio enthusiast market, this tracks. These are people for whom the mere mentioning of ‘Bluetooth Audio’ or ‘USB-C-to-audio jack dongle’ is likely to evoke a less than favorable response.

In terms of software, Moondrop says the phone will offer a “native” Android 13 experience, which hopefully means it will be free from manufacturer-specific changes and bloatware. You’ll need to manually install Google Mobile Services though, as is often the case with Android devices that aren’t from the major players in the industry.

As reported by Android Authority, the MIAD 01 is available via select outlets for $399. Details like software updates remain to be clarified, but this might be the most over the top audio-centric smartphone we have seen so far. It definitely gives Sony’s current range of Android-based Walkmans a run for their money, while even having phone functionality in the package.

Remembering Dick Rutan And His Non-Stop Flight Around The World

May 8, 2024 by Maya Posch 5 Comments

On December 23, 1986, an airplane landed at Edwards AFB. This by itself wouldn’t mean much, but this particular airplane had just written history. Piloted by Dick Rutan and Jeana Yeager, the Rutan Model 76 Voyager had just completed its non-stop flight around the world after taking off from that very same runway just over nine days prior. Designed by Dick’s younger brother Burt Rutan, this airplane and this one flight will forever speak to the world’s imagination, even as we say farewell to Dick “Killer” Rutan.

Dick Rutan (r) and Jeana Yeager (l) standing next to the Voyager aircraft in 1986. (Source: Ray Kamm collection)

Born Richard Glenn Rutan on July 1, 1938, he spent his military career in the United States Air Force, initially working with radar systems before beginning pilot training in the 1960s. He flew 325 sorties over Vietnam (ejecting once) and served for many more years while racking up many awards and reached the rank of Lieutenant Colonel before retiring in 1978.

After this he would fly as a test pilot for a range of aircraft, including a modified Rutan Long-EZ: the XCOR EZ-Rocket in 2001. Yet no flight would be as memorable as the record-breaking flight in the Rutan Voyager, which saw the world’s media following the aircraft’s journey around the globe, including with live feeds whenever the aircraft was within reach of national broadcasters. Despite nine days of strenuous flight and some mechanical breakdowns and damaged wingtips (from the fuel-burdened wings scraping over the runway), the flight went about as well as could have been hoped, thanks to Dick’s and Jeana’s piloting skills.

Dick Rutan died on May 3, 2024 at the age of 85 after a long struggle with the consequences of Long COVID. He will be sorely missed by the aviation community and countless others, but his achievements never forgotten.

Imperva Report Claims That 50% Of The World Wide Web Is Now Bots

May 7, 2024 by Maya Posch 50 Comments

Automation has been a part of the Internet since long before the appearance of the World Wide Web and the first web browsers, but it’s become a significantly larger part of total traffic the past decade. A recent report by cyber security services company Imperva pins the level of automated traffic (‘bots’) at roughly fifty percent of total traffic, with about 32% of all traffic attributed to ‘bad bots’, meaning automated traffic that crawls and scrapes content to e.g. train large language models (LLMs) and generate automated content as well as perform automated attacks on the countless APIs accessible on the internet.

According to Imperva, this is the fifth year of rising ‘bad bot’ traffic, with the 2023 report noting again a few percent increase. Meanwhile ‘good bot’ traffic also keeps increasing year over year, yet while these are not directly nefarious, many of these bots can throw off analytics and of course generate increased costs for especially smaller websites. Most worrisome are the automated attacks by the bad bots, which ranges from account takeover attempts to exploiting vulnerable web-based APIs. It’s not just Imperva who is making these claims, the idea that automated traffic will soon destroy the WWW has floated around since the late 2010s as the ‘Dead Internet theory‘.

Although the idea that the Internet will ‘die’ is probably overblown, the increase in automated traffic makes it increasingly harder to distinguish human-generated content and human commentators from fake content and accounts. This is worrisome due to how much of today’s opinions are formed and reinforced on e.g. ‘social media’ websites, while more and more comments, images and even videos are manipulated or machine-generated.

Tokyo Atacama Observatory Opens As World’s Highest Altitude Infrared Telescope

May 6, 2024 by Maya Posch 5 Comments

Although we have a gaggle of space telescopes floating around these days, there is still a lot of value in ground-based telescopes. These generally operate in the visible light spectrum, but infrared ground-based telescopes can also work on Earth, assuming that you put them somewhere high in an area where the atmosphere is short on infrared-radiation absorbing moisture. The newly opened Universe of Tokyo Atacama Observatory (TAO) with its 6.5 meter silver-coated primary mirror is therefore placed on the summit of Cerro Chajnantor at 5,640 meters, in the Atacama desert in Chile.

This puts it only a few kilometers away from the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA), but at a higher altitude by about 580 meters. As noted on the University of Tokyo project site (in Japanese), the project began in 1998, with a miniTAO 1 meter mirror version being constructed in 2009 to provide data for the 6.5 meter version. TAO features two instruments (SWIMS and MIMIZUKU), each with a specific mission profile, but both focused on deciphering the clues about the Universe’s early history, a task for which infrared is significantly more suitable due to redshift.

Upgrading A Cheap LX-2BUPS UPS Board To Fix Fatal Flaws

May 6, 2024 by Maya Posch 31 Comments

Cheap uninterruptable power supply (UPS) boards that take Li-ion cells of some description seem to have cropped up everywhere the past years. Finding use in applications such as keeping single-board computers ticking along in the case of a power failure, they would seem to be a panacea. Unfortunately most of these boards come with a series of fatal flaws, such as those that [MisterHW] found in an LX-2BUPS board obtained from AliExpress. Worst of all was the deep discharge of the Li-ion cells to below 2 V, which took some ingenuity and hard work to fix this and other problems.

The patched up XR2981 boost IC with MCP809 reset IC installed. (Credit: [MisterHW])

This particular board is rated for 5V at 3A, featuring the all too common TP4056 as charging IC and the XYSemi XR2981 boost converter. Since there is no off-switch or other protections on the board, the XR2981 will happily keep operating until around 2.6V, at a rather astoundingly high idle power consumption. Because of this the fixes mostly concentrated on optimizing the XR2981, by using better resistor values (R7, R8, R9), as well as adding a 3.15V MCP809 reset IC, to reduce idle power usage of the boost converter and disable it below a safe cell voltage.

The final coup de grâce was the eviction of the red LED (D6) and replacing it with the blue LED from D2, to stop the former from draining the cell as well. With these changes in place, no-load power usage dropped from nearly 900 µA to just over 200 µA, while preventing deep discharge. Although this board now has a second life, it does raise the question of what the point of these cheap UPS boards is if you have to spend money and time on reworking them before they’re somewhat acceptable. What is your go-to solution for these boards?