Your Open-Source Client Options In The Non-Mastodon Fediverse

May 8, 2024 by Lewin Day 22 Comments

When things started getting iffy over at Twitter, Mastodon rose as a popular alternative to the traditional microblogging platfrom. In contrast to the walled gardens of other social media channels, it uses an open protocol that runs on distributed servers that loosely join together, forming the “Fediverse”.

The beauty of the Fediverse isn’t just in its server structure, though. It’s also in the variety of clients available for accessing the network. Where Twitter is now super-strict about which apps can hook into the network, the Fediverse welcomes all comers to the platform! And although Mastodon is certainly the largest player, it’s absolutely not the only elephant in the room.

Today, we’ll look at a bunch of alternative clients for the platform, ranging from mobile apps to web clients. They offer unique features and interfaces that cater to different user preferences and needs. We’ll look at the most notable examples—each of which brings a different flavor to your Fediverse experience.

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The Computers Of Voyager

May 6, 2024 by Dan Maloney 69 Comments

After more than four decades in space and having traveled a combined 44 billion kilometers, it’s no secret that the Voyager spacecraft are closing in on the end of their extended interstellar mission. Battered and worn, the twin spacecraft are speeding along through the void, far outside the Sun’s influence now, their radioactive fuel decaying, their signals becoming ever fainter as the time needed to cross the chasm of space gets longer by the day.

But still, they soldier on, humanity’s furthest-flung outposts and testaments to the power of good engineering. And no small measure of good luck, too, given the number of nearly mission-ending events which have accumulated in almost half a century of travel. The number of “glitches” and “anomalies” suffered by both Voyagers seems to be on the uptick, too, contributing to the sense that someday, soon perhaps, we’ll hear no more from them.

That day has thankfully not come yet, in no small part due to the computers that the Voyager spacecraft were, in a way, designed around. Voyager was to be a mission unlike any ever undertaken, a Grand Tour of the outer planets that offered a once-in-a-lifetime chance to push science far out into the solar system. Getting the computers right was absolutely essential to delivering on that promise, a task made all the more challenging by the conditions under which they’d be required to operate, the complexity of the spacecraft they’d be running, and the torrent of data streaming through them. Forty-six years later, it’s safe to say that the designers nailed it, and it’s worth taking a look at how they pulled it off.

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NASA Is Now Tasked With Developing A Lunar Time Standard, Relativity Or Not

May 2, 2024 by Lewin Day 82 Comments

A little while ago, we talked about the concept of timezones and the Moon. It’s a complicated issue, because on Earth, time is all about the Sun and our local relationship with it. The Moon and the Sun have their own weird thing going on, so time there doesn’t really line up well with our terrestrial conception of it.

Nevertheless, as humanity gets serious about doing Moon things again, the issue needs to be solved. To that end, NASA has now officially been tasked with setting up Moon time – just a few short weeks after we last talked about it! (Does the President read Hackaday?) Only problem is, physics is going to make it a damn sight more complicated!

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VAR Is Ruining Football, And Tech Is Ruining Sport

April 29, 2024 by Lewin Day 84 Comments

Another week in football, another VAR controversy to fill the column inches and rile up the fans. If you missed it, Coventry scored a last-minute winner in extra time in a crucial match—an FA Cup semi-final. Only, oh wait—computer says no. VAR ruled Haji Wright was offside, and the goal was disallowed. Coventry fans screamed that the system got it wrong, but no matter. Man United went on to win and dreams were forever dashed.

Systems like the Video Assistant Referee were brought in to make sport fairer, with the aim that they would improve the product and leave fans and competitors better off. And yet, years later, with all this technology, we find ourselves up in arms more than ever.

It’s my sincere belief that technology is killing sport, and the old ways were better. Here’s why. Continue reading “VAR Is Ruining Football, And Tech Is Ruining Sport” →

Mining And Refining: Uranium And Plutonium

April 24, 2024 by Dan Maloney 40 Comments

When I was a kid we used to go to a place we just called “The Book Barn.” It was pretty descriptive, as it was just a barn filled with old books. It smelled pretty much like you’d expect a barn filled with old books to smell, and it was a fantastic place to browse — all of the charm of an old library with none of the organization. On one visit I found a stack of old magazines, including a couple of Popular Mechanics from the late 1940s. The cover art always looked like pulp science fiction, with a pipe-smoking father coming home from work to his suburban home in a flying car.

But the issue that caught my eye had a cover showing a couple of rugged men in a Jeep, bouncing around the desert with a Geiger counter. “Build your own uranium detector,” the caption implored, suggesting that the next gold rush was underway and that anyone could get in on the action. The world was a much more optimistic place back then, looking forward as it was to a nuclear-powered future with electricity “too cheap to meter.” The fact that sudden death in an expanding ball of radioactive plasma was potentially the other side of that coin never seemed to matter that much; one tends to abstract away realities that are too big to comprehend.

Things are more complicated now, but uranium remains important. Not only is it needed to build new nuclear weapons and maintain the existing stockpile, it’s also an important part of the mix of non-fossil-fuel electricity options we’re going to need going forward. And getting it out of the ground and turned into useful materials, including its radioactive offspring plutonium, is anything but easy.

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Heating Mars On The Cheap

April 8, 2024 by Lewin Day 78 Comments

Mars is fairly attractive as a potential future home for humanity. It’s solid, with firm land underfoot. It’s able to hang on to a little atmosphere, which is more than you can say about the moon. It’s even got a day/night cycle remarkably close to our own. The only problem is it’s too darn cold, and there’s not a lot of oxygen to breathe, either.

Terraforming is the concept of fixing problems like these on a planet-wide scale. Forget living in domes—let’s just make the whole thing habitable!

That’s a huge task, so much current work involves exploring just what we could achieve with today’s technology. In the case of Mars, [Casey Handmer] doesn’t have a plan to terraform the whole planet. But he does suggest we could potentially achieve significant warming of the Red Planet for $10 billion in just 10 years. Continue reading “Heating Mars On The Cheap” →

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?

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