In Europe, where this is being written, and possibly further afield, news reports are again full of drone sightings closing airports. The reports have come from Scandinavia, in particular Denmark, where sightings have been logged across the country. It has been immediately suggested that the Russians might somehow be involved, something they deny, which adds a dangerous geopolitical edge to the story.
To us here at Hackaday, this is familiar territory. Back in the last decade, we covered the saga of British airports closing due to drone sightings. In that case, uninformed hysteria played a large part in the unfolding events, leading to further closures. The problem was that the official accounts did not seem credible. Eventually, after a lot of investigation and freedom of information requests by the British drone community, there was a shamefaced admission that there had never been any tangible evidence of a drone being involved.
If you know anything about Mickey Mouse, you’ll be able to tell us that his first outing was in 1928’s Steamboat Willie — an animated short that sees our hero as the hapless pilot of a riverboat battling an assortment of animals and his captain. It entered the public domain last year, meaning that it and the 1928 incarnation of Mickey are now free of any copyright obligation to the media giant.
There’s an interesting development from Florida on that front though as it seems Disney may have been testing this through legal means, and now a law firm wants to see them in court over their proposed use of the film in an advert.
Of course here at Hackaday we don’t cover the dry subject of Florida legal news as a rule, but we are interested in the world of copyright as it applies to many other things that do come under our eye. As we understand it the law firm is requesting the judge assert their protection from trademark claims over the use of Disney’s 1928 Willie, given that there have been claims from the entertainment giant against others doing the same thing.
It’s hardly surprising that a large corporation might seek to use legal muscle and trademark law to de facto extend the term of Mickey’s protection beyond the defined copyright expiration date, so for once it’s refreshing to see them come up against someone unafraid of a courtroom.
We hope that common sense will prevail, and this undermining of a cherished right (not to mention prior case law) is not allowed to succeed. Meanwhile if you’d like a 1928 Mickey that Disney have shied away from coming after, look no further than the EFF.
Oh, Radio Shack. What a beautiful place you once were, a commercial haven for those seeking RC cars, resistors, and universal remotes. Then, the downfall, as you veered away from your origins, only to lead to an ultimate collapse. More recently, the brand was supposed to return to new heights online… only to fall afoul of the Securities and Exchange Commission. (via Yahoo Finance, Bloomberg)
The Radio Shack brand was picked up a few years ago by a company known as Retail Ecommerce Ventures (REV). The company’s modus operandi was to take well-known but beleaguered brands and relaunch them as online-only operations. Beyond Radio Shack, REV also owned a number of other notable brand names, like Pier 1, Modell’s Sporting Goods, and Dress Barn.
Unfortunately, the Radio Shack rebirth probably won’t reach the stellar heights of the past. Namely, because REV has been accused of operating a Ponzi-like scheme by the SEC. Despite huge boasts allegedly made to investors, none of REV’s portfolio of brands were actually making profits, and the SEC has charged that the company was paying investor returns with cash raised from other investors — unsustainable, and a major no-no, legally speaking. In any case, the SEC charges apply directly to REV. The RadioShack brand has since been acquired by Unicomer Group, which operates the current online business, and has no ties to REV or its former operators.
We were cautiously optimistic when we heard about the REV buyout back in 2020, but at this point, it’s probably best to come to terms with the fact that Radio Shack won’t be returning to its former glory. The name will linger in our hearts for some time to come, but the business we knew is long gone. Sometimes it’s better to look to the future than to try and recreate the magic of the past, especially if you’re doing inappropriate things with other people’s money in the process.
Can you feel the nip of fall in the air? That can only mean one thing: Supercon is just around the corner. The next few weeks are going to bring a blitz of Supercon-related reveals, and we’re starting off with a big one: the workshops.
While many in the industry were at first skeptical of NASA’s goal to put resupply flights to the International Space Station in the hands of commercial operators, the results speak for themselves. Since 2012, the SpaceX Dragon family of spacecraft has been transporting crew and cargo from American soil to the orbiting laboratory, a capability that the space agency had lost with the retirement of the Space Shuttle. Putting these relatively routine missions in the hands of a commercial provider like SpaceX takes some of the logistical and financial burden off of NASA, allowing them to focus on more forward-looking projects.
SpaceX Dragon arriving at the ISS for the first time in 2012.
But as the saying goes, you should never put all of your eggs in one basket. As successful as SpaceX has been, there’s always a chance that some issue could temporarily ground either the Falcon 9 or the Dragon.
While Russia’s Progress and Soyuz vehicles would still be available in an emergency situation, it’s in everyone’s best interest that there be multiple backup vehicles that can bring critical supplies to the Station.
Which is precisely why several new or upgraded spacecraft, designed specifically for performing resupply missions to the ISS and any potential commercial successor, are coming online over the next few years.
For nearly 90 years, American Science and Surplus has been shipping out weird and wonderful stuff to customers far and wide. In the pre-Internet days, getting their latest catalog in the mail — notable for its hand-drawn illustrations and whimsical style — was always exciting. From Romanian gas masks to odd-ball components, there was no telling what new wonders each issue would bring. In time, the printed catalog gave way to a website, but the eclectic offerings and hand-drawn images remained.
Unfortunately, those days are officially no more. Earlier this week, American Science and Surplus had to make the difficult decision to shutter their entire mail order division. It’s no secret that the company as a whole had been struggling over the last few years. Like many small businesses they were hit hard during the COVID-19 years, and while they made it through that particular storm, they faced skyrocketing operational costs.
Earlier this year, the company turned to crowd funding to help stay afloat. That they were able to raise almost $200,000 speaks to how much support they had from their community of customers, but while it put the company in a better position, the writing was on the wall. The warehouse space required to support their mail order operations was simply too expensive to remain viable.
But it’s not all bad news. At least two of the company’s physical storefronts, located in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and Geneva, Illinois will remain open and operate under the ownership of the employees themselves. The fate of the third store in Park Ridge, Illinois is less clear. They currently don’t have a buyer, but it sounds like they haven’t given up hope of selling it yet.
Anyone in the Illinois area feel like getting some buddies together and buying a turn-key surplus business?
When Deluxe Paint came out with the original Amiga in 1985, it was the killer app for the platform. [Christopher Drum] starts his recent article on just that note, remembering the day he and his mother walked into a computer store, and walked out with a brand new Amiga… thanks entirely to Deluxe Paint. Forty years on, how well can this killer app compete?
[Christopher] isn’t putting Deluxe Paint head-to-head with modern Photoshop; they’re hardly in the same class. Not Photoshop, no, but modern applications that do what Deluxe Paint did so well: pixel art. There was no need to call it pixel art back then, no, but with the resolutions on hand, all digital art was pixel art in 1985.
Or 1989, which is when Deluxe Paint III came out– that’s the last version written by Dan Silva and coincidentally the last version [Christopher] owned, and the one he focuses in on his tests. It has held up amazingly well.
Sure, you don’t get a full 24-bit colour palette, but most pixel artists stick to limited palettes still anyway. You don’t quite get a modern UI, but presence of useful keyboard shortcuts allows a Hands-On-Keybord-And-Mouse (We’ll call it HOKAM, in honour of HOTAS in aerospace) workflow that is incredibly efficient.
About the only things [Christopher] found Deluxe Paint III lacked compared to its successors were a proper layering system, and of course the infinite undo we’ve all gotten so used to. (DPIII has an undo button, but it could only store one operation.) He also complained about cursor latency for some brushes, but we wonder if that might have had something to do with Windows and the emulation layer adding a delay. One thing Amiga was always known for back in the day was the snappy cursor movement, even when the processor was loaded.
There were just as many features he found had been forgotten in the new generation — like palatte swapping animations, or flood-filling line gradients.
It’s a small detail, but that’s a nice gradient tool.
