Jpegli: Google’s Better JPEG And Possible Death Knell For WebP

April 7, 2024 by Maya Posch 56 Comments

Along with the rise of the modern World Wide Web came the introduction of the JPEG image compression standard in 1992, allowing for high-quality images to be shared without requiring the download of a many-MB bitmap file. Since then a number of JPEG replacements have come and gone – including JPEG 2000 – but now Google reckons that it can improve JPEG with Jpegli, a new encoder and decoder library that promises to be highly compatible with JPEG.

To be fair, it’s only the most recent improvement to JPEG, with JPEG XT being introduced in 2015 and JPEG XL in 2021 to mostly deafening silence, right along that other, better new image format people already forgot about: AVIF. As Google mentions in their blog post, Jpegli uses heuristics developed for JPEG XL, making it more of a JPEG XL successor (or improvement). Compared to JPEG it offers a higher compression ratio, 10+-bit support which should reduce issues like banding. Jpegli images are said to be compatible with existing JPEG decoders, much like JPEG XT and XL images.

Based on the benchmarks from 2012 by [Blobfolio] between JPEG XL, AVIF and WebP, it would seem that if Jpegli incorporates advancements from AVIF while maintaining compatibility with JPEG decoders out there, it might be a worthy replacement of AVIF and WebP, while giving JPEG a shot in the arm for the next thirty-odd years of dominating the WWW and beyond.

Voyager 1 Issue Tracked Down To Defective Memory Chip

April 6, 2024 by Maya Posch 52 Comments

After more than forty-six years all of us are likely to feel the wear of time, and Voyager 1 is no different. Following months of harrowing troubleshooting as the far-flung spacecraft stopped returning sensible data, NASA engineers now feel confident that they have tracked down the cause for the problem: a single defective memory chip. Why this particular chip failed is unknown, but possibilities range from wear and tear to an energetic particle hitting it and disrupting its operation.

We’ve covered the Voyager 1 troubleshooting saga so far, with the initial garbled responses attributed to a range of systems, but narrowed down to the Flight Data Subsystem (FDS), which prepares data for transmission by the telemetry modulation unit (TMU). Based on a recent ‘poke’ command that returned a memory dump engineers concluded that the approximately 3% of corrupted data fit with this one memory chip, opening the possibility of a workaround.

Recently NASA engineers have also been working on patching up the firmware in both Voyager spacecraft, against the background of the dwindling energy produced by the radioisotope generators that have kept both spacecraft powered and warm, even in the cold, dark depths of Deep Space far beyond the light of our Sun.

3M’s Floppy Disks: A Story Of Success And The Birth Of Imation

April 5, 2024 by Maya Posch 31 Comments

3M, or as it was officially called until 2002, the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company is one of those odd-duck companies where if you ask what products they manufacture the answer is pretty close to a general ‘yes’. Throughout its 121 year history, it’s moved from producing sandpaper to also producing adhesives, laminates, personal protective equipment, as well as a nearly infinite list of further products which at one point in time included a magnetic storage range of products. How this latter came to be is the subject of an article by [Ernie Smith], focusing on floppy disk storage.

Although 3M was not the one to invent floppy disks or magnetic storage, their expertise in making small grains of material stick in an organized fashion on a wide range of materials came in handy. This first allowed 3M to make a name for itself with its Scotch magnetic (reel-to-reel) tape, followed by 3M moving into the floppy disk market by 1973. Over the years following this introduction, 3M storage media came to be known as highly reliable, but as the 1990s saw the magnetic storage market mature and stagnate, 3M management saw the writing on the wall and spun this division off into a new company: Imation.

While the floppy disk isn’t quite dead yet, at this point in time Imation and its main competitors like Memorex are now mostly just a fading memory — while 3M is still plowing ahead, creating new divisions and divesting as opportunities arise.

Where Graph Theory Meets The Road: The Algorithms Behind Route Planning

April 4, 2024 by Maya Posch 35 Comments

Back in the hazy olden days of the pre-2000s, navigating between two locations generally required someone to whip out a paper map and painstakingly figure out the most optimal route between those depending on the chosen methods of transport. For today’s generations no such contrivances are required, with technology having obliterated even the a need to splurge good money on a GPS navigation device and annual map updates.

These days, you get out a computing device, open Google Maps or equivalent, ask it how you should travel somewhere, and most of the time the provided route will be the correct one, including the fine details such as train platform and departure times. Yet how does all of this seemingly magical route planning technology work? It’s often assumed that Dijkstra’s algorithm, or the A* graph traversal algorithm is used, but the reality is that although these pure graph theory algorithms are decidedly influential, they cannot be applied verbatim to the reality of graph traversal between destinations in the physical world.

Continue reading “Where Graph Theory Meets The Road: The Algorithms Behind Route Planning” →

Amazon’s ‘Just Walk Out’ Shopping Is Out, Moves To Dash Carts At Its Grocery Stores

April 4, 2024 by Maya Posch 60 Comments

After a few years of Amazon promoting a grocery shopping experience without checkout lines and frustrating self-checkout experiences, it is now ditching its Just Walk Out technology. Conceptualized as a store where you can walk in, grab the items you need and walk out with said items automatically charged to your registered payment method, it never really caught much traction. More recently it was revealed that the technology wasn’t even as automated as portrayed, with human workers handling much of the tedium behind the scenes. This despite claims made by Amazon that it was all powered by deep machine learning and generative AI.

An Amazon Dash Cart's user interface, with scanner and display. (Credit: Amazon) — An Amazon Dash Cart’s user interface, with scanner and display. (Credit: Amazon)

Instead of plastering the ceilings of stores full with cameras, it seems that Amazon instead wishes to focus on smart shopping carts that can keep track of what has been put inside them. These so-called Dash Carts are equipped with cameras and other sensors to scan barcodes on items, as well as weigh unlabeled items (like fruit), making them into somewhat of a merging of scales at the vegetable and fruit section of stores today, and the scanning tools offered at some grocery stores to help with self-checkout.

As the main problem with the Just Walk Out technology was that it required constant (700 out of 1,000 sales in 2022) human interaction, it will be interesting to see whether the return to a more traditional self-service and self-checkout model (albeit with special Dash Lanes) may speed things along. Even so, as Gizmodo notes, Amazon will still keep the Just Walk Out technology running across locations in the UK and elsewhere. Either this means the tech isn’t fully dead yet, or we will see a revival at some point in time.

Space Mirrors: Dreams Of Turning The Night Into Day Around The Clock

April 3, 2024 by Maya Posch 28 Comments

Recently, a company by former SpaceX employee Ben Nowack – called Reflect Orbital – announced that it is now ready to put gigantic mirrors in space to reflect sunshine at ground-based solar farms. This is an idea that’s been around for a hundred years already, both for purposes of defeating the night through reflecting sunshine onto the surface, as well as to reject the same sunshine and reduce the surface temperature. The central question here is perhaps what the effect would be of adding or subtracting (or both) of solar irradiation on such a large scale as suggested?

We know the effect of light pollution from e.g. cities and street lighting already, which suggests that light pollution is a strongly negative factor for the survival of many species. Meanwhile a reduction in sunshine is already a part of the seasons of Autumn and Winter. Undeniable is that the Sun’s rays are essential to life on Earth, while the day-night cycle (as well as the seasons) created by the Earth’s rotation form an integral part of everything from sleep- and hibernation cycles, to the reproduction of countless species of plants, insects, mammals and everyone’s favorite feathered theropods.

With these effects and the gigantic financial investments required in mind, is there any point to space-based mirrors?

Continue reading “Space Mirrors: Dreams Of Turning The Night Into Day Around The Clock” →

SatCat5: UART, SPI And I2C Via Ethernet With FPGA-Based Design

April 1, 2024 by Maya Posch 15 Comments

Arty A7-based prototype of SatCat5 with custom switch I/O board. (Credit: The Aerospace Corporation)

To the average microcontroller, Ethernet networks are quite a step up from the basic I2C, SPI and UART interfaces, requiring either a built-in Ethernet MAC or SPI-based MAC, with tedious translation between Ethernet and those other interfaces. Yet what if this translation could be done automatically and transparently? This is what the SatCat5 FPGA-based project by [The Aerospace Corporation] aims to provide: a gateway akin to an unmanaged Ethernet switch that also supports those non-Ethernet links. Recently they answered a range of questions about the project on Hacker News.

The project name comes from the primary target audience: smallsat and cubesat developers, which is an area where being able to route more traffic over a common Ethernet-based bus is a major boon. The provided Xilinx Artix-7-based reference design (pictured) gives a good idea of how it can be used: it combines an Arty A7 development board with a custom PCB containing an Ethernet switch IC (SJA1105), TJA1100 transceiver, two RJ45 jacks and four PMOD connectors, here connected to two UARTs for bidirectional communication between them. Ethernet frame encapsulation is provided using the standard Serial Line Internet Protocol (SLIP), with more details covered in the FAQ. At a minimum an FPGA like a Lattice iCE40 is required, with an MCU capable of using the provided C++ libraries, or a custom implementation.

Thanks to [STR-Alorman] for the tip.