Flirting With Kessler: Why Space Debris Physics Make It Such An Orbital Pain

November 5, 2024 by Maya Posch 37 Comments

Picture in your mind a big parking lot with 131 million cars on it. Now imagine that they are spread out over the entire Earth’s inhabited areas. Although still a large number, it is absolutely dwarfed by the approximately 1.47 billion cars registered and in use today, with room to spare for houses, parks and much more. The 131 million represents the total number of known and estimated space debris objects in Earth orbit sized 1 mm and up, as per the European Space Agency. This comes on top of the approximately 13,200 satellites still in Earth orbit of which 10,200 are still functional.

Now imagine that most of these 131 million cars of earlier are sized 10 cm or smaller. Spaced out across the Earth’s entire surface you’d not be able to see more than at most one. Above the Earth’s surface there are many orbital planes and no pesky oceans to prevent millimeter and centimeter-sized cars from being spaced out there. This gives a rough idea of just how incredibly empty Earth’s orbital planes are and why from the International Space Station you rarely notice any such space debris until a small bit slams into a solar panel or something equally not amusing.

Cleaning up space debris seems rather unnecessary in this perspective, except that even the tiniest chunk travels at orbital velocities of multiple kilometers per second with kinetic energy to spare. Hence your task: to chase down sub-10 cm debris in hundreds of kilometers of mostly empty orbital planes as it zips along with destructive intent. Surely this cannot be so difficult with lasers on the ISS or something?

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Supercon 2024: Badge Add-On Winners

November 4, 2024 by Tom Nardi 5 Comments

This year we challenged the Hackaday community to develop ~~Shitty~~ ~~Simple~~ Supercon Add-Ons (SAO) that did more than just blink a few LEDs. The SAO standard includes I2C data and a pair of GPIO pins, but historically, they’ve very rarely been used. We knew the talented folks in this community would be able to raise the bar, but as they have a tendency to do, they’ve exceeded all of our expectations.

As we announced live during the closing ceremony at the 2024 Hackaday Supercon, the following four SAOs will be put into production and distributed to all the attendees at Hackaday Europe in Spring of 2025.

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I Installed Gentoo So You Don’t Havtoo

November 4, 2024 by Bryan Cockfield 72 Comments

A popular expression in the Linux forums nowadays is noting that someone “uses Arch btw”, signifying that they have the technical chops to install and use Arch Linux, a distribution designed to be cutting edge but that also has a reputation of being for advanced users only. Whether this meme was originally posted seriously or was started as a joke at the expense of some of the more socially unaware Linux users is up for debate. Either way, while it is true that Arch can be harder to install and configure than something like Debian or Fedora, thanks to excellent documentation and modern (but optional) install tools it’s no longer that much harder to run than either of these popular distributions.

For my money, the true mark of a Linux power user is the ability to install and configure Gentoo Linux and use it as a daily driver or as a way to breathe life into aging hardware. Gentoo requires much more configuration than any mainline distribution outside of things like Linux From Scratch, and has been my own technical white whale for nearly two decades now. I was finally able to harpoon this beast recently and hope that my story inspires some to try Gentoo while, at the same time, saving others the hassle.

A Long Process, in More Ways Than One

My first experience with Gentoo was in college at Clemson University in the late ’00s. The computing department there offered an official dual-boot image for any university-supported laptop at the time thanks to major effort from the Clemson Linux User Group, although the image contained the much-more-user-friendly Ubuntu alongside Windows. CLUG was largely responsible for helping me realize that I had options outside of Windows, and eventually I moved completely away from it and began using my own Linux-only installation. Being involved in a Linux community for the first time had me excited to learn about Linux beyond the confines of Ubuntu, though, and I quickly became the type of person featured in this relevant XKCD. So I fired up an old Pentium 4 Dell desktop that I had and attempted my first Gentoo installation.

For the uninitiated, the main thing that separates Gentoo from most other distributions is that it is source-based, meaning that users generally must compile the source code for all the software they want to use on their own machines rather than installing pre-compiled binaries from a repository. So, for a Gentoo installation, everything from the bootloader to the kernel to the desktop to the browser needs to be compiled when it is installed. This can take an extraordinary amount of time especially for underpowered machines, although its ability to customize compile options means that the ability to optimize software for specific computers will allow users to claim that time back when the software is actually used. At least, that’s the theory. Continue reading “I Installed Gentoo So You Don’t Havtoo” →

Hackaday Links: November 3, 2024

November 3, 2024 by Dan Maloney 22 Comments

“It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times?” Perhaps not anymore, if this Ig Nobel-worthy analysis of the infinite monkey theorem is to be believed. For the uninitiated, the idea is that if you had an infinite number of monkeys randomly typing on an infinite number of keyboards, eventually the complete works of Shakespeare or some other famous writer would appear. It’s always been meant to be taken figuratively as a demonstration of the power of time and randomness, but some people just can’t leave well enough alone. The research, which we hope was undertaken with tongue firmly planted in cheek, reveals that it would take longer than the amount of time left before the heat death of the universe for either a single monkey or even all 200,000 chimpanzees in the world today to type the 884,647 words of Shakespeare’s complete works in the proper order.

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Capturing Light In A Vacuum: The Magic Of Tube Video Cameras

November 1, 2024 by Jenny List 33 Comments

Cameras are a funny rabbit hole to fall down as a hacker, because we have well over a century of items to pick and choose from, a lot of which can be had for relative pennies. In my case I have more of them than I’d care to mention, mostly film cameras and 8mm movie cameras, but there are one or two that are entirely different. My first interest in electronics came through PAL televisions, so it’s hardly surprising that along the way I’ve also acquired more than one chunky old tube-based video camera. These devices are now long ago supplanted by their solid state replacements, but they retain a fascination for me as the mirror of the CRT-based TV sets I know so well. It’s time for a fascinating descent into the world of analogue video.

Electrons chasing light, chasing electrons

The zig-zag line pattern of a TV scan. — A raster scan pattern. Ian Harvey, Public domain.

The basic mode of operation behind all but some of the very earliest electronic camera tubes is that an electron gun paints its raster of electrons onto a light-sensitive target, and the current flowing through the electron beam varies in proportion to the light at each particular point on the target. This can be used to create a voltage, which when combined with the various sync pulses makes a video signal that would be understood by a monitor. The various different types of tubes have names such as Iconoscope, Emitron, or Vidicon, and while the main differences between those various types of tube lie in the combination of materials and design of their targets. Successive generations of tube made improvements to sensitivity and noise performance, first combining photoemissive layers with electron multiplying layers to amplify the video signal in much the same way as a photomultiplier tube does, and then using photoconductive targets to vary the conductivity of the target depending on the light at a particular point. Continue reading “Capturing Light In A Vacuum: The Magic Of Tube Video Cameras” →

This Week In Security: Playing Tag, Hacking Cameras, And More

November 1, 2024 by Jonathan Bennett 3 Comments

Wired has a fascinating story this week, about the length Sophos has gone to for the last 5 years, to track down a group of malicious but clever security researchers that were continually discovering vulnerabilities and then using those findings to attack real-world targets. Sophos believes this adversary to be overlapping Chinese groups known as APT31, APT41, and Volt Typhoon.

The story is actually refreshing in its honesty, with Sophos freely admitting that their products, and security products from multiple other vendors have been caught in the crosshairs of these attacks. And indeed, we’ve covered stories about these vulnerabilities over the past weeks and months right here on this column. The sneaky truth is that many of these security products actually have pretty severe security problems.

The issues at Sophos started with an infection of an informational computer at a subsidiary office. They believe this was an information gathering exercise, that was a precursor to the widespread campaign. That campaign used multiple 0-days to crack “tens of thousands of firewalls around the world”. Sophos rolled out fixes for those 0-days, and included just a bit of extra logging as an undocumented feature. That logging paid off, as Sophos’ team of researchers soon identified an early signal among the telemetry. This wasn’t merely the first device to be attacked, but was actually a test device used to develop the attack. The game was on. Continue reading “This Week In Security: Playing Tag, Hacking Cameras, And More” →

Boss Byproducts: Fulgurites Are Fossilized Lightning

October 29, 2024 by Kristina Panos 28 Comments

So far in this series, we’ve talked about man-made byproducts — Fordite, which is built-up layers of cured car enamel, and Trinitite, which was created during the first nuclear bomb test.

A fulgurite pendant. — A lovely fulgurite pendant. Image via Etsy

But not all byproducts are man-made, and not all of them are basically untouchable. Some are created by Mother Nature, but are nonetheless dangerous. I’m talking about fulgurites, which can form whenever lightning discharges into the Earth.

It’s likely that even if you’ve seen a fulgurite, you likely had no idea what it was. So what are they, exactly? Basically, they are natural tubes of glass that are formed by a fusion of silica sand or rock during a lightning strike.

Much like Lichtenberg figures appear across wood, the resulting shape mimics the path of the lightning bolt as it discharged into the ground. And yes, people make jewelry out of fulgurites.

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