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170 Articles

Broadband Across The Congo

September 20, 2021 by 34 Comments

If you live in much of the world today, high-speed Internet is a solved problem. But there are still places where getting connected presents unique challenges. Alphabet, the company that formed from Google, details their experience piping an optical network across the Congo. The project derived from an earlier program — project Loon — that used balloons to replace traditional infrastructure.

Laying cables along the twisting and turning river raises costs significantly, so a wireless approach makes sense. Connecting Brazzaville to Kinshasa using optical techniques isn’t perfect — fog, birds, and other obstructions don’t help. They still managed to pipe 700 terabytes of data in 20 days with over 99.9% reliability.

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Google’s Periodic Table

August 13, 2021 by 43 Comments

One of the nice things about the Internet is that you don’t need huge reference books anymore. You really don’t need big wall charts, either. A case in point: what science classroom didn’t have a periodic table of the elements? Now you can just look up an interactive one from Google. They say it is 3D and we suppose that’s the animations of the Bohr model for each atom. You can debate if it is a good idea to show people Bohr models or not, but it is what most of us learned, after all.

While the website is probably aimed more at students, it is a handy way to look up element properties and it is visually attractive, too. You probably remember, the columns are no accident in a periodic table, so the actual format doesn’t vary from one instance of it to another. However, we liked the col coding and the information panel that appears when you click on an element.

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Hackaday Links: July 25, 2021

July 25, 2021 by 10 Comments

Everyone makes mistakes in their job, but very few of us get the chance to make a one-character mistake with the potential to brick millions of devices. But that’s what happened to a hapless Google developer, who made an understandable typo in the ChromeOS code that ended up making it all the way to production. The error, which was in the OS encryption keys vault, was supposed to include the “&&” operator for a logical AND. The developer instead used a single ampersand, which broke the who conditional statement. This meant the OS evaluated even correct passwords as invalid, leaving users locked out of their Chromebooks. To be fair to the developer there should be a lot of QA steps between that typo and production, but it still has to sting.

Speaking of whoopsies, sometimes it just doesn’t pay to be right on the internet. It started when a player of the popular tank battle simulator “War Thunder” took issue with the in-game 3D model of the British Challenger 2 main battle tank. The player argued that the model was inaccurate to the point of affecting gameplay, and thought the model should be changed to make things more realistic. There seemed to be some basis for this, as the player claimed to have been a Challenger 2 commander and gunnery instructor. What’s more, like any good Netizen, the player cited sources to back up the claims, including excerpts from the official Challenger 2 instruction manual. Players on the War Thunder forum flagged this as likely classified material, but the player insisted that it wasn’t — right up to the point where the UK Ministry of Defence said, “Not so fast.” It turns out that the manual hasn’t been declassified, and that releasing the material potentially runs afoul of the Official Secrets Act, which carries with it up to 14 years detention at Her Majesty’s pleasure.

For fans of pinball, the announcement that the Museum of Pinball in Banning, California is closing its doors for good is probably a mix of good news and bad. It’s obviously bad news for any museum to close, especially one that curates collections from popular culture. And there’s no denying that pinball has been a big part of that culture, and that the machines themselves are often works of electromechanical art. But it appears that the museum just couldn’t make a go of it, and now its cavernous space will be sold off to a cannabis grower. But the sad news is tempered by the potential for private collectors and other pinball aficionados to score one of the estimated 1,100 pins the museum now needs to find a home for. We’ve never been to the museum, so it’s hard to say what kinds of machines they have and how collectible they are, but regardless, the market is about to be flooded. If you’re nearby, you might want to take a chance to see and play some of these machines one last time, before they get shipped off to private game rooms around the world.

And finally, exciting news from Hackaday superfriend Fran Blanche, who will soon tick an item off her bucket list with a zero-G ride on “G-Force 1”. Not to be confused with its military cousin the “Vomit Comet”, the weightlessness-simulating aircraft will afford Fran a total of about five minutes of free-fall when she takes the ride in a couple of months. There will also be periods of the flight that will simulate the gravity on both the Moon and Mars, so Fran has promised some Matt Damon mythbusting and Buzz Aldrin moonbouncing. And always one to share, Fran will bring along a professional video crew, so she can concentrate on the experience rather than filming it. We’ve actually scheduled Fran for a Hack Chat in August, to talk about the flight and some of her other cool goings-on, so watch out for that.

Project Starline Realizes Asimov’s 3D Vision

May 20, 2021 by 36 Comments

Issac Asimov wrote Caves of Steel in 1953. In it, he mentions something called trimensional personification. In an age before WebEx and Zoom, imagining that people would have remote meetings replete with 3D holograms was pretty far-sighted. We don’t know if any Google engineers read the book, but they are trying to create a very similar experience with project Starline.

The system is one of those that seems simple on the face of it, but we are sure the implementation isn’t easy. You sit facing something that looks like a window. The other person shows up in 3D as though they were on the other side of the window. Think prison visitation without the phone handset. The camera is mounted such that you look naturally at the other person through your virtual window.

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3D Animation For All Thanks To Google AI

April 15, 2021 by 10 Comments

Google rarely fails to impress with technology demos. Their latest — Monster Mash — is aimed at using artificial intelligence to allow the creation of simple 3D animations without a lot of training or trouble. We’ll warn you: we aren’t artists so we didn’t get the results the demos were showing, but then again, if you are even a little artistic, you’ll probably have better luck than we did. You might want to start watching the video, below.

There’s also a research paper if you are more interested in the technology. The idea is to make simple line drawings in 2D. Then you inflate the object to 3D. The final step is to trace out animation paths.

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Can You Code Without Google?

February 13, 2021 by 106 Comments

Imagine for a moment that something has taken out your phone line, cell, and fibre connection so you have no internet. For some of you this may even be reality, but go with it and imagine yourself deciding to use your unexpectedly disconnected lockdown time pursuing that code project you always promised yourself. You pull out your laptop and fire up a code editor. Can you write code that works, without the Internet as a handy crib sheet? [Austin Z. Henley] couldn’t, when he tried writing a straightforward web app. He uses it as a hook to muse on the nature of learning, and it’s certainly a thought-provoking subject.

It has become an indispensable tool for the engineer and the coder alike, to constantly refer to online knowledge. This makes absolute sense, as it provides a reference library that will be many orders of magnitude in excess of anything an individual can possibly hold personally.

This holds true whether the resource takes the form of code snippets from StackOverflow or GitHub, or data sheets from TI or Microchip. Even our calculations have moved online, as it’s often much quicker to use an online calculator on a web page to derive for example an impedance calculation. This is not necessarily a bad thing, instead it’s an enabler; skills that used to take months to master due to slow information access can now be acquired in an afternoon. But it does pose the interesting question, in the Internet age what is the measure of an expert coder? Is it the ability to produce the code effectively with whatever help is available, or is it a guru-like mastery of the code? Maybe it’s both. If you have the Internet, give us your views in the comments.

Google Loon’s Internet Balloons Come Back To Earth After A Decade In The Stratosphere

January 28, 2021 by 47 Comments

After a journey of a decade, what started as Project Loon by Google is no more. Promoted as a way to bring communications to the most remote parts of the globe, it used gigantic, high-altitude balloons equipped with communication hardware for air to ground, as well as air to air communication, between individual balloons. Based around LTE technology, it would bring multiple megabit per second data links to both remote areas and disaster zones.

Seven years into its development, Loon became its own company (Loon LLC), and would provide communications to some areas of Kenya, in addition to Sri Lanka in 2015 and Puerto Rico in 2017 after Hurricane Maria. Three years later, in January of 2021, it was announced that Loon LLC would be shutting down operations. By that point it had become apparent that the technology would not be commercially viable, with alternatives including wired internet access having reduced the target market.

While the idea behind Loon sounds simple in theory, it turns out that it was more complicated than just floating up some weather balloon with LTE base stations strapped to them.

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