Could Solar-Powered Airships Offer Cleaner Travel?

The blimp, the airship, the dirigible. Whatever you call them, you probably don’t find yourself thinking about them too often. They were an easy way to get airborne, predating the invention of the airplane by decades. And yet, they suffered—they were too slow, too cumbersome, and often too dangerous to compete once conventional planes hit the scene.

And yet! Here you are reading about airships once more, because some people aren’t giving up on this most hilarious manner of air travel. Yes, it’s 2024, and airship projects continue apace even in the face of the overwhelming superiority of the airplane.

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DB Cooper Case Could Close Soon Thanks To Particle Evidence

It’s one of the strangest unsolved cases, and even though the FBI closed their investigation back in 2016, this may be the year it cracks wide open. On November 24, 1971, Dan Cooper, who would become known as DB Cooper due to a mistake by the media, skyjacked a Boeing 727 — Northwest Orient Airlines Flight 305 — headed from Portland to Seattle.

During the flight, mild-mannered Cooper coolly notified a flight attendant sitting behind him via neatly-handwritten note that he had a bomb in his briefcase. His demands were a sum of $200,000 (about $1.5 M today) and four parachutes once they got to Seattle. Upon landing, Cooper released the passengers and demanded that the plane be refueled and pointed toward Mexico City with him and most of the original crew aboard. But around 30 minutes into the flight, Cooper opened the plane’s aft staircase and vanished, parachuting into the night sky.

In the investigation that followed, the FBI recovered Cooper’s clip-on tie, tie clip, and two of the four parachutes. While it’s unclear why Cooper would have left the tie behind, it has become the biggest source of evidence for identifying him. New evidence shows that a previously unidentified particle on the tie has been identified as “titanium smeared with stainless steel”.

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Switching Regulators For Dummies

We often use linear regulators in our designs. They are cheap and simple – you put the regulator chip itself on the board, add two capacitors, and get a voltage. Linear regulators are imperfect, of course – they can’t help but waste the voltage difference as heat, for a start, which straight up excludes them for high-current purposes, or significant voltage difference conversions, unless you have a hefty heatsink handy. They also can’t boost voltage, which means you can only go from high to low – a bit of a disappointment.

Of course, we haven’t been just throwing our hands up in the air if a linear regulator doesn’t fit our purpose. Switching regulators have none of these disadvantages, which is why your mobile phone alone has a few dozen of these. They are way more efficient and hi-tec, able to convert one voltage into another while losing hardly any power into heat. All that you need to do is switch an inductor at a somewhat high frequency!

However, for some, switching regulators might look a bit intimidating. They tend to have higher standards for board layout compared to linear regulators, and, they do need an inductor – sometimes, a few more components too. Inductors alone are somewhat intimidating components, with a fair few more parameters than we’d expect, and you might get confused when looking into adding a switching regulator to your circuit.

No more! In this article, I shall give you the switching regulator basics, remove any fog of war that might be clouding your vision, and show you just how easily you can get a good few amps at your favourite voltage whenever you need it. Continue reading “Switching Regulators For Dummies”

X-Ray Investigations Hack Chat

Join us on Wednesday, January 24 at noon Pacific for the X-Ray Investigation Hack Chat with Ahron Wayne!

It’s hard to imagine a world where we didn’t figure out how to use X-rays to peer inside things. Before Röntgen’s discovery that X-rays could penetrate living tissue, doctors had only limited (and often unpleasant) ways to get a look at what was going on inside the human body, and few of us would want to return to those days.

As fantastically useful as X-rays and later computed tomography (CT) became in medicine, it didn’t take too long for other uses for the technology to come along. Non-clinical applications for X-ray and CT abound, including their use in non-invasively exploring relics of immense archaeological value. One recent effort in this space that gained a lot of coverage in the press was the combination of CT imaging and machine learning to read the ink inside carbonized papyrus scrolls from the ruins of Pompeii.

join-hack-chatThe result was the “Vesuvius Challenge,” where different teams looked for techniques to virtually unwrap the roasted relics. Ahron’s contribution to the project was a little unusual — he bought a used desktop CT scanner, fixed it up, and started experimenting with reading ink from the carbonized remains of simulated papyrus scrolls. In other words, he made some scrolls, cooked them to beyond well-done in the oven, and tried to understand what happens to ink on papyrus that gets blasted by a volcano. If that’s not enough to get you to stop by the Hack Chat when Ahron joins us, we’re not sure what else would be! Suffice it to say we’re pretty excited about what Ahron has to say about DIY CT,  X-rays, collaborative open-source citizen science, and unwrapping the mysteries of Pompeii.

Our Hack Chats are live community events in the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, January 24 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have you tied up, we have a handy time zone converter.

Featured image: Daderot, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

This Week In Security: Gitlab, VMware, And PixeFAIL

There’s a Gitlab vulnerability that you should probably pay attention to. Tracked as CVE-2023-7028, this issue allows an attacker to specify a secondary email during a the password reset request. Only one email has to match the one on record, but the password reset link gets sent to both emails. Yikes!

What makes this worse is there is already a Proof of Concept (PoC) released, and it’s a trivial flaw. In an HTTP/S post containing the password reset request, just include two email addresses. Thankfully, a fix is already out. Versions 16.7.2, 16.6.4, and 16.5.6 contain this patch, as well as fixes for a flaw that allowed sneaking unauthorized changes into a previously approved merge request, and an issue with Slack and Mattermost where slash commands could be spoofed.

VMware

We don’t want to over-dramatise this vulnerability, but VMware is calling it an emergency. This one affects VMware vRealize and Aria Automation. According to the the CVSS calculator, it’s a low complexity network flaw, but does require at least some privileges. Hopefully more information will come out about this vulnerability, but for now that’s about all we know.

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Tech In Plain Sight: Windshield Frit

You probably see a frit every day and don’t even notice it. What is it? You know the black band around your car’s windshield? That’s a frit (which, by the way, can also mean ingredients used in making glass) or, sometimes, a frit band. What’s more, it probably fades out using a series of dots like a halftone image, right? Think that’s just for aesthetics? Think again.

Older windshields were not always attached firmly, leading to them popping out in accidents. At some point, though, the industry moved to polyurethane adhesives, which are superior when applied correctly. However, they often degrade from exposure to UV. That’s a problem with a windshield, which usually gets plenty of sunlight.

The answer is the frit, a ceramic-based baked-on enamel applied to both sides of the windshield’s edges, usually using silk screening. The inner part serves as a bonding point for the adhesive. However, the outer part blocks UV radiation from reaching the adhesive. Of course, it also hides the adhesive and any edges or wiring beneath it, too.

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Predicting The A-Bomb: The Cartmill Affair

The cover of the infamous issue of Astounding, March 1944

There’s an upcoming movie, Argylle, about an author whose spy novels are a little too accurate, and she becomes a target of a real-life spy game. We haven’t seen the movie, but it made us think of a similar espionage caper from 1944 involving science fiction author Cleve Cartmill. The whole thing played out in the pages of Astounding magazine (now Analog) and involved several other science fiction luminaries ranging from John W. Campbell to Isaac Asimov. It is a great story about how science is — well, science — and no amount of secrecy or legislation can hide it.

In 1943, Cartmill queried Campbell about the possibility of a story that would be known as “Deadline.” It wasn’t his first story, nor would it be his last. But it nearly put him in a Federal prison. Why?  The story dealt with an atomic bomb.

Nothing New

By itself, that’s probably not a big deal. H.G. Wells wrote “The World Set Free” in 1914, where he predicted nuclear weapons. But in 1914, it wasn’t clear how that would work exactly. Wells mentioned “uranium and thorium” and wrote a reasonable account of the destructive power: Continue reading “Predicting The A-Bomb: The Cartmill Affair”