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LTA’s Pathfinder 1: The Dawn Of A New Age Of Airships?

March 4, 2025 by 34 Comments

Long before the first airplanes took to the skies, humans had already overcome gravity with the help of airships. Starting with crude hot air balloons, the 18th century saw the development of more practical dirigible airships, including hydrogen gas balloons. On 7 January 1785, French inventor, and pioneer of gas balloon flight Jean-Pierre Blanchard would cross the English Channel in such a hydrogen gas balloon, which took a mere 2.5 hours. Despite the primitive propulsion and steering options available at the time, this provided continued inspiration for new inventors.

With steam engines being too heavy and cumbersome, it wasn’t until the era of internal combustion engines a century later that airships began to develop into practical designs. Until World War 2 it seemed that airships had a bright future ahead of them, but amidst a number of accidents and the rise of practical airplanes, airships found themselves mostly reduced to the not very flashy role of advertising blimps.

Yet despite popular media having declared rigid airships such as the German Zeppelins to be dead and a figment of a historic fevered imagination, new rigid airships are being constructed today, with improvements that would set the hearts of 1930s German and American airship builders aflutter. So what is going on here? Are we about to see these floating giants darken the skies once more?

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FOSDEM 2025, A Hardware Hacker’s Haven

March 3, 2025 by 3 Comments

Have you been to FOSDEM? It’s a yearly two-day megaconference in Brussels, every first weekend of February. Thousands of software and hardware hackers from all across Europe come here each year, make friends, talk software and hardware alike, hold project-specific meetups to drink beer and talk shop, and just have a fun weekend surrounded by like-minded people.

In particular, FOSDEM has free admission – drop by for the weekend, no need to buy entry tickets, just sort out your accomodation, food, travel, and visit for a day or two. I’ve covered FOSDEM quite extensively in 2023, so if you want to know more about how it works, I invite you to check out that article – plenty of stories, cool facts about FOSDEM, showcases, and so on. This year, I’ve also been to FOSDEM, it’s been pretty great, and I’d like to tell you about cool things I’ve seen happen during FOSDEM 2025.

FOSDEM is often described as an open software conference, and you might’ve had been fooled by this if you simply have checked the Wikipedia page. However, let me assure you – there’s always plenty of hardware, large amounts of it! This year, I feel like hardware has taken the spotlight in particular – let me show you at least some of it, so that you know what kinds of cool stuff you can expect and plan for in 2026.

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Too Smooth: Football And The “KnuckleBall” Problem

February 26, 2025 by 25 Comments

Picture a football (soccer ball) in your head and you probably see the cartoon ideal—a roughly spherical shape made with polygonal patches that are sewn together, usually in a familiar pattern of black and white. A great many balls were made along these lines for a great many decades.

Eventually, though, technology moved on. Footballs got rounder, smoother, and more colorful. This was seen as a good thing, with each new international competition bringing shiny new designs with ever-greater performance. That was, until things went too far, and the new balls changed the game. Thus was borne the “knuckleball” phenomenon.

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The Importance Of Current Balancing With Multi-Wire Power Inputs

February 24, 2025 by 87 Comments

In an ideal world, devoid of pesky details like contact resistance and manufacturing imperfections, you would be able to double the current that can be provided to a device by doubling the number of conductors without altering the device’s circuitry, as each conductor would carry the exact same amount of current as its neighbors. Since we do not actually live inside a simplified physics question’s scenario, multi-wire powering of devices comes with a range of headaches, succinctly summarized in the well-known rule that electricity always seeks the path of least resistance.

As recently shown by NVidia with their newly released RTX 50-series graphics cards, failure to provide current balancing between said different conductors will quickly turn it into a practical physics demonstration of this rule. Initially pinned down as an issue with the new-ish 12VHPWR connector that was supposed to replace the 6-pin and 8-pin PCIe power connectors, it turns out that a lack of current balancing is plaguing NVidia GPUs, with predictably melty results when combined with low safety margins.

So what exactly changed that caused what seems to be a new problem, and why do you want multi-wire, multi-phase current balancing in your life when pumping hundreds of watts through copper wiring inside your PC?

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NASA Taps Webb To Help Study 2032 Asteroid Threat

February 13, 2025 by 43 Comments

In all likelihood, asteroid 2024 YR4 will slip silently past the Earth. Based on the data we have so far, there’s an estimated chance of only 2.1% to 2.3% that it will collide with the planet on December 22nd, 2032. Under normal circumstances, if somebody told you there was a roughly 98% chance of something not happening, you probably wouldn’t give it a second thought. There’s certainly a case to be made that you should feel that way in regards to this particular event — frankly, it’s a lot more likely that some other terrible thing is going to happen to you in the next eight years than it is an asteroid is going to ruin your Christmas party.

That being said, when you consider the scale of the cosmos, a 2+% chance of getting hit is enough to raise some eyebrows. After all, it’s the highest likelihood of an asteroid impact that we’re currently aware of. It’s also troubling that the number has only gone up as further observations of 2024 YR4’s orbit have been made; a few weeks ago, the impact probability was just 1%. Accordingly, NASA has recently announced they’ll be making time in the James Webb Space Telescope’s busy scientific schedule to observe the asteroid next month.

So keeping in mind that we’re still talking about an event that’s statistically unlikely to actually occur, let’s take a look at what we know about 2024 YR4, and how further study and analysis can give us a better idea of what kind of threat we’re dealing with.

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Plastic On The Mind: Assessing The Risks From Micro- And Nanoplastics

February 12, 2025 by 45 Comments

Perhaps one of the clearest indications of the Anthropocene may be the presence of plastic. Starting with the commercialization of Bakelite in 1907 by Leo Baekeland, plastics have taken the world by storm. Courtesy of being easy to mold into any imaginable shape along with a wide range of properties that depend on the exact polymer used, it’s hard to imagine modern-day society without plastics.

Yet as the saying goes, there never is a free lunch. In the case of plastics it would appear that the exact same properties that make them so desirable also risk them becoming a hazard to not just our environment, but also to ourselves. With plastics degrading mostly into ever smaller pieces once released into the environment, they eventually become small enough to hitch a ride from our food into our bloodstream and from there into our organs, including our brain as evidenced by a recent study.

Multiple studies have indicated that this bioaccumulation of plastics might be harmful, raising the question about how to mitigate and prevent both the ingestion of microplastics as well as producing them in the first place.

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The Science Behind Making Buildings Comfortably Non-Combustible

February 11, 2025 by 33 Comments

Although the most fire-resistant building is likely a windowless, concrete bunker, this tends to be not the vibe that most home owners go for. This is why over the years construction of buildings in areas prone to bush- and wildfires – i.e. an uncontrolled fire in an area with combustible vegetation – has adapted to find a happy medium between a building that you’d enjoy living in and a building that will not instantly combust the moment an ember from a nearby wildfire gently touches down upon any part of it.

To achieve this feat, the primary means include keeping said combustible vegetation and similar away from the building, and to make the house as resistant to ember attacks as possible. That this approach is effective has been demonstrated over the course of multiple wildfires in California during the past years, whereby houses constructed more recently with these features had a much higher chance of making it through the event unscathed.

Naturally, the devil is in the details, which is why for example the Australian standard for construction in bushfire-prone areas (AS 3959, last updated in 2018, 2009 version PDF) is rather extensive and heavy on details, including multiple Bushfire Attack Level (BAL) ratings that define risk areas and legally required mitigation measures. So what does it take exactly to survive a firestorm bearing down on your abode?

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