The GPS III Rollout Is Almost Complete, But What Is It?

April 28, 2026 by Tom Nardi 12 Comments

Considering how integral it is to our modern way of life, you could be excused for thinking that the Global Positioning System (GPS) is a product of the smartphone era. But the first satellites actually came online back in 1978, although the system didn’t reach full operational status until April of 1995. While none of the active GPS satellites currently in orbit are quite that old, several of them were launched in the early 2000s — and despite a few tweaks and upgrades, their core technology isn’t far removed from their 1990s era predecessors.

But in the coming years, that’s finally going to change. Just last week, the tenth GPS III satellite was placed in orbit by a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. Once it’s properly configured and operational, it will join its peers to form the first complete “block” of third-generation GPS satellites. Over the next decade, as many as 22 revised GPS III satellites are slated to take their position over the Earth, eventually replacing all of the aging satellites that billions of people currently rely on.

So what new capabilities do these third-generation GPS satellites offer, and why has it taken so long to implement needed upgrades in such a critical system?

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Trying Pair Programming With An LLM Chatbot

April 27, 2026 by Maya Posch 65 Comments

When it comes to software developers, there are a few distinct types. For example, the extroverted, chatty type, who is always going out there to share the latest and newest libraries and projects with everyone, and is very much into bouncing ideas off others, regardless of whether they know what you’re talking about. Then there is the introverted loner, who prefers to tackle programming challenges by bouncing things around inside their own minds and going on long walks to mull things over before committing to anything significant.

This leads to interesting scenarios when it comes to management-enforced ‘optimization’ strategies, like Pair Programming. This approach involves two developers sharing the same computer and keyboard, theoretically doubling the effective output by some kind of metric, but realistically often leading to at least one side feeling pretty miserable and disconnected unless you put two of the chatty types together.

As a certified introverted loner developer, the idea of using an LLM chatbot as a coding assistant naturally triggers unpleasant flashbacks to hours of forced awkward pair ‘programming’. However, maybe using an LLM chatbot could be more pleasant because you can skip the whole awkward socializing bit. In order to give it a shake, I put together a little experiment to see whether LLM-based coding assistants is something that I could come to appreciate, unlike pair programming.

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VCF East And Maker Faire Make For A Busy Weekend

April 23, 2026 by Tom Nardi 15 Comments

For those of us with an interest in hacking and making, events where we can meet up with like minded folks and check out the projects they’re working on don’t exactly happen every day. Unless you’re able to travel around the country (or even better, the world), you usually have to make do with the handful of annual events that are within a reasonable distance of your home. If you’re lucky that may give you two or three opportunities during the year to look forward to, generally spaced out enough that you’ve got adequate time to prepare ahead of the event and decompress afterwards.

But occasionally, the planets and geekdoms align. Such was the case this past weekend in the Northeastern United States, with Vintage Computer Festival East and the Philadelphia Maker Faire taking place simultaneously. Both are established must-see events for their respective communities and cover roughly the same geographical area, so if you happened to have a foot in each camp, this presented quite a difficult decision.

That is unless you took the third option. As the Philly Maker Faire was on Sunday and VCF took place over the span of the whole weekend, there was a narrow path to attend both events. It wouldn’t be ideal, of course. For one thing it would mean speed running VCF East, and there was a couple hundred miles of travel to contend with. We won’t even talk about the physical toll incurred — while there doesn’t appear to be any official dosage recommendation from the Surgeon General, surely this level of exposure to non-conforming technologists carries with it some risks.

But sometimes such sacrifices must be made, especially if you’re being paid to make them. So I packed up twice the normal number of Wrencher stickers, and hit the road in an effort to deliver a condensed version of my experience at these two fantastic events.

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What Have We Dumped On The Moon?

April 22, 2026 by Al Williams 56 Comments

If you read a headline that signs of intelligent life were found on the moon, you might suspect a hoax. But they are there! Humans have dumped a lot of stuff on the moon, both in person and via uncrewed rockets. So after the apocalypse, what strange things will some alien exo-archaeologist find on our only natural satellite?

The Obvious

Of course, we’ve left parts of rockets, probes, and rovers. Only the top part of the Apollo Lunar Excursion Module left the moon. (See for yourself in the Apollo 17 ascent video below.) The bottoms are still there, along with the lunar rovers and a bunch of other science instruments and tools. There are boots and cameras, as you might expect.

But what about the strange things? As of 2012, NASA compiled a list of all known lunar junk that originated on Earth. The list starts with material from the non-Apollo US programs like the Surveyor and Lunar Prospector missions. Next up is the Apollo stuff, which is actually quite a bit: an estimated 400,000 pounds, we’ve heard. This ranges from the entire descent stage and lunar overshoes to urine bags. There are even commemorative patches and a gold olive branch.

After that, the list shows what’s known to be on the surface from the Russian space program, along with objects of Chinese, Indian, Japanese, and European origin.

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SuperDisk: The Better Floppy That Never Caught On

April 21, 2026 by Zoe Skyforest 47 Comments

Once the microcomputer era got going in earnest, the floppy disk quickly supplanted the tape as the portable storage method of choice. They were never particularly large, but they were fine for the average user to get by.

At the same time, it wasn’t long before heavier-duty removable storage solutions hit the market for power users who needed to move many megabytes at a time. In the 1980s, these were primarily the preserve of big print shops, corporate users, and governments. By the 1990s, even the mildly savvy computerist was starting to chafe against the tyrannical 1.44 MB limit of the regular 3.5″ diskette. Against this backdrop launched the SuperDisk—the product which hoped to take the floppy format to the next level, yet faltered all the same.

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Making A Bronze Mirror From Scratch

April 17, 2026 by Maya Posch 18 Comments

Although modern-day silvered glass mirrors have pretty much destroyed the market for bronze mirrors, these highly polished pieces of metal once were the pinnacle of mirror technology. Due to the laborious process required these mirrors saw use essentially only by the affluent. That said, how hard would it be to make a bronze mirror today with all of the modern technologies that even a hobbyist can acquire for their shed? Cue [Lundgren Bronze Studios] giving it a shot, starting by casting something flat-ish to start polishing.

Just getting that initial shape to start polishing is a chore, with hammering out the shape possibly being also a viable method. When casting metal it’s tricky to avoid having air bubbles and other defects forming, though using a sand mold seems to help a lot.

After you have the rough shape, polishing using power tools seems like cheating, but as you can see in the video even going from 50 to 8000 grit with a rotating disc left countless scratches. Amusingly, hand sanding did a much better job of removing the worst scratches, following which a polishing compound helped to bring out that literal mirror finish.

A quick glance at the Wikipedia entry for bronze mirrors shows that a tin-bronze alloy like speculum metal was used for thousands of years as it was much easier to polish to a good mirror finish. The metallurgy of what may seem like just a vanity item clearly goes deeper than just polishing up a metal surface.

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A Tale Of Cheap Hard Drives And Expensive Lessons

April 15, 2026 by Tom Nardi 87 Comments

When it comes to electronic gadgets, I’m a sucker for a good deal. If it’s got a circuit board on the inside and a low enough price tag on the outside, you can be pretty sure I’ll be taking it home with me. So a few years ago, when I saw USB external hard drives on the shelf of a national discount chain for just $10, I couldn’t resist picking one up. What I didn’t realize at the time however, was that I’d be getting more in the bargain than just some extra storage space.

It’s a story that I actually hadn’t thought of for some time — it only came to mind recently after reading about how the rising cost of computer components has pushed more users to the secondhand market than ever before. That makes the lessons from this experience, for both the buyer and the seller, particularly relevant.

What’s in the Box?

It wasn’t just the low price that attracted me to these hard drives, it was also the stated capacity. They were listed as 80 GB, which is an unusually low figure to see on a box in 2026. Obviously nobody is making 80 GB drives these days, so given the price, my first thought was that it would contain a jerry-rigged USB flash drive. But if that was the case, you would expect the capacity to be some power of two.

Upon opening up the case, what I found inside was somehow both surprising and incredibly obvious. The last thing I expected to see was an actual spinning hard drive, but only because I lacked the imagination of whoever put this product together. I was thinking in terms of newly manufactured, modern, hardware. Instead, this drive was nearly 20 years old, and must have been available for pennies on the dollar since they were presumably just collecting dust in a warehouse somewhere.

Or at least, that’s what I assumed. After all, surely nobody would have the audacity to take a take a bunch of ancient used hard drives and repackage them as new products…right?

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