We’re looking to go back to the Moon. Not just with robots this time, but with astronauts, too! They’ll be doing all kinds of interesting things when they get there. Maybe they’ll even work towards establishing a more permanent presence for humanity on the lunar surface, in which case they’ll have to get up in the morning, eat breakfast, and get to work.
This raises the question—how does time work on the Moon? As simple as they can be down here, Earthly days and years have little meaning up there, after all. So what’s going on up there?
Everyone loves themes. Doesn’t matter if it’s a text editor or a smart display in the kitchen, we want to be able to easily customize its look and feel to our liking. When setting up a new device or piece of software, playing around with the available themes may be one of the first things you do without giving it much thought. After all, it’s not like picking the wrong one is going to do something crazy like silently delete all the files on your computer, right?
Unfortunately, that’s exactly what happened a few days ago to [JeansenVaars] while trying out a Plasma Global Theme from the KDE Store. According to their Reddit post, shortly after installing the “Gray Layout” theme for the popular Linux graphical environment, the system started behaving oddly and then prompted for a root password. Realizing something didn’t seem right they declined, but at that point, it was already too late for all of the personal files in their home directory.
As I’m sure many of you know, x86 architecture has been around for quite some time. It has its roots in Intel’s early 8086 processor, the first in the family. Indeed, even the original 8086 inherits a small amount of architectural structure from Intel’s 8-bit predecessors, dating all the way back to the 8008. But the 8086 evolved into the 186, 286, 386, 486, and then they got names: Pentium would have been the 586.
Along the way, new instructions were added, but the core of the x86 instruction set was retained. And a lot of effort was spent making the same instructions faster and faster. This has become so extreme that, even though the 8086 and modern Xeon processors can both run a common subset of code, the two CPUs architecturally look about as far apart as they possibly could.
So here we are today, with even the highest-end x86 CPUs still supporting the archaic 8086 real mode, where the CPU can address memory directly, without any redirection. Having this level of backwards compatibility can cause problems, especially with respect to multitasking and memory protection, but it was a feature of previous chips, so it’s a feature of current x86 designs. And there’s more!
We are always fascinated when someone can take something and extend it in a clever way without changing the original thing. In the computer world, that’s old hat. New computers improve, but can usually run old software. In the real world, the addition of stereo to phonograph records and color to photography come to mind.
But there are few stories as strange or wide-ranging as the path to provide color TV. And it had to be done in a way that a color set could still get a black and white picture and black and white sets could still watch a color signal without color. You’d think there would be a “big bang” moment where color TV burst on the scene — no pun involving color burst intended. But there wasn’t. Instead, there was a long, twisted path with many competing interests and ideas to go from a world in black and white to one tinted with color phosphor.
Background
In 1928, Science and Invention magazine had plans for building a mechanical TV (although not color)
It is hard to imagine, but John Logie Baird transmitted color images as early as 1928 using a mechanical scanner. Bell Labs had a demonstration system, also mechanical, in 1929. Baird broadcast using his system in 1938. Even earlier, around 1900, there were attempts to create mechanical color image systems. Those systems were fickle or impractical, though.
Electronic scanning was the answer, but World War II froze most consumer electronics development. Baird showed an electronic color system in late 1944. However, it would be 1953 before NTSC (the National Television System Committee) adopted the standard color TV signal for the United States. It would be almost 20 years later before SECAM and PAL were standardized in other parts of the world.
Of course, these are all analog standards. The world’s gone digital now, but for nearly 50 years, analog color TV was the way people consumed TV in their homes. By 1941, NTSC produced a standard in the United States, but not for color TV. TV adoption didn’t really take off until after the war. But by 1950, the US had some 6 million TV sets.
This was both a plus — a large market — and a negative. No one wanted to obsolete those 6 million sets. Well, at least, the government regulators and consumers didn’t. But most color systems would be incompatible with those existing black and white sets. Continue reading “The Long Strange Trip To US Color TV”→
Every 26 months, Earth and Mars come tantalizingly close by virtue of their relative orbits. The closest they’ve been in recent memory was a mere 55.7 million kilometers, a proximity not seen in 60,000 years when it happened in 2003.
However, we’ve been playing close attention to Mars for longer than that. All the way back in 1924, astronomers and scientists were contemplating another close fly by from the red planet. With radio then being the hot new technology on the block, the question was raised—should we be listening for transmissions from fellows over on Mars?
For our next installment, I have a lovely and daring PCB submitted by one of our readers, [Vas]. This is an ESP32-S3 board that also has an onboard round TFT display, very similar to the one we used on the Vectorscope badge. The badge is self-sufficient – it has an ESP32, it has a display, a programming connector, two different QWIIC ports you could surely use as GPIOs – what’s not to love?
This is a two-layer board, and I have to admit that I seriously enjoy such designs. Managing to put a whole lot of things into two layers is quite cool in my book, and I have great fun doing so whenever I get the opportunity. There’s nothing wrong with taking up more layers than needed – in fact, if you’re concerned about emitted/received noise or you have high-speed interfaces, four-layer is the way to go. But making complex boards with two layers is a nice challenge, and, it does tend to make these boards cheaper to manufacture as a very nice bonus.
Let’s improve upon it, and support [Vas]’s design. From what I can see looking at this board, we can help [Vas] a lot with ease of assembly, perhaps even help save a hefty amount of money if they go for third-party PCBA instead of sitting down with a stencil – which you could do with this board pretty easily, since all of the components on it, save for the display, are the ones you’d expect JLCPCB to stock.
Think of a greenhouse. It’s a structure with glass walls that lets light in and traps heat, all for the benefit of the plants inside. As for how it works, that’s elementary! It’s all down to the greenhouse effect… right?
