IcedRaktajino

With the powerful off-the-shelf hardware available to us common hardware hobbyist folk, how hard can it be to make a smartphone from scratch? Hence V Electronics’s Spirit smartphone project, with the video from a few months ago introducing the project.

As noted on the hardware overview page, everything about the project uses off the shelf parts and modules, except for the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5 (CM5) carrier board. The LCD is a 5.5″, 1280×720 capacitive one currently, but this can be replaced with a compatible one later on, same as the camera and the CM5 board, with the latter swappable with any other CM5 or drop-in compatible solution.

The star of the show and the thing that puts the ‘phone’ in ‘smartphone’ is the Quectel EG25-GL LTE (4G) and GPS module which is also used in the still-not-very-open PinePhone. Although the design of the carrier board and the 3D printable enclosure are still somewhat in flux, the recent meeting notes show constant progress, raising the possibility that with perhaps some community effort this truly open hardware smartphone will become a reality.

There have been a couple of posts somewhat recently asking what can be done to attract new users to the Fediverse. My answer was basically "make it something new people would want to see and stick around for". The crux of that was basically less news, less politics, less rage and more, well, anything else.

So, I would like to propose a challenge to all: Let's try that. At least for a week.

Sound good? Here's how you can participate:

1. If you're one who posts a lot of news/politics...stop or at least slow down. Post literally anything else. Or try to post less rage-inducing news and try to dig up the good news that's happening. Sorry !upliftingnews@lemmy.world but it's the regular news communities that are flooding the zone with every single bad thing that happens anywhere in the world, so we may be stealing some of your content with this one.

2. Think before posting something. Are you only posting it because you're mad about it and you think other people should be mad about it too? If so, maybe post something else. Is there already similar coverage of that? Chances are, we don't need more of it.

3. If you're a lurker, post something. Add your voice.

4. Refrain from upvoting / booting all the negativity. Yes, it may feel good to upvote for visibility because "people need to know this" but the end result is the feed turning into a list of things to rage about. If you see good/non-rage news, upvote that for visibility. I've seen many posts like that languish with a few tens of upvotes at most while the rage-inducing news gets hundreds of upvotes.

5. Post what makes you happy rather than what you're angry about.

6. Avoid dogpiling on people if they express a different opinion. I'm not saying feed the trolls or pat them on the head, just merely "disengage" or avoid the impulse to virtue dump on them and such.

7. If you have a hobby, share it! There's plenty of hobby communities that would greatly benefit from additional contributors. If you're boring like me, well, there's !Dullsters@dullsters.net or !dull_mens_club@lemmy.world (the latter welcomes all as the name is just a reference to the original)

8. If you're already doing the above: THANK YOU ❤️. Maybe consider posting a little more unless you think additional contributions would be spammy.

9. Anything else you can think of to make the homepage/experience feel more welcoming and less like an angry mob (suggestions in the comments are more than welcome).

I know not everyone will participate, and that's okay. Simply adding more positivity and posting/boosting less rage can have a positive effect on what shows up on /all which is what potential new users see by default.

So, let's try this for a week and see what happens. Who knows? Maybe the established userbase will find it refreshing as well.

Who's with me?

Note: Summary is from Hack-a-Day since this is long but interesting read about how modern computerized air traffic control evolved.

It is a movie staple to see an overworked air traffic controller sweating over a radar display. Depending on the movie, they might realize they’ve picked the wrong week to stop some bad habit. But how does the system really work? [J. B. Crawford] has a meticulously detailed post about the origins of the computerized air traffic control system (building on an earlier post which is also interesting).

Like many early computer systems, the FAA started out with the Air Force SAGE defense system. It makes sense. SAGE had to identify and track radar targets. The 1959 SATIN (SAGE Air Traffic Integration) program was the result. Meanwhile, different parts of the air traffic system were installing computers piecemeal.

SAGE and its successors had many parents: MIT, MITRE, RAND, and IBM. When it was time to put together a single national air traffic system the FAA went straight to IBM, who glued together a handful of System 360 computers to form the IBM 9020. The computers had a common memory bus and formed redundant sets of computer elements to process the tremendous amount of data fed to the system. The shared memory devices were practically computers in their own right. Each main computing element had a private area of memory but could also allocate in the large shared pool.

The [9020]* ran the skies for quite a while until IBM replaced it with the IBM 3083. The software was mostly the same, as were the display units. But the computer hardware, unsurprisingly, received many updates.

If you’re thinking that there’s no need to read the original post now that you’ve got the highlights from us, we’d urge you to click the link anyway. The post has a tremendous amount of detail and research. We’ve only scratched the surface.

*The original article on HaD had typo'd that to 9200 which I fixed here.

S4E12: Verna

Example: https://startrek.website/post/34339664/20938570

Post started out in c/startrek but was edited to c/DaystromInstitute. However, the post itself still shows up in the c/StarTrek community but the sidebar info shows as Daystrom.

Chances are this is just Lemmy not handing that edit correctly, but it seems like it could potentially cause problems with moderation.

I've got plans to add a mid-sized solar system to my home this spring, and I'm wondering if there's a community appropriate for discussing that, asking questions, bouncing ideas around, etc.

The various technology communities seem too generic and more focused on tech coverage in the news. There's solarpunk technology, but it seems more about "here's how to use a magnifying glass and aluminum foil to cook an egg in 6 hours" and I'm looking for more practical discussions and solutions.

So is there a community for PV enthusiasts to talk shop?

What do you call Jeffrey Combs standing around by himself?

"A Star Trek convention"

Inspired by a comment thread with @Powderhorn@beehaw.org

TL;DR: The space-suited astronaut got into a bag, opened a canister that filled it with foam all around them (think that spray foam insulation in a can), and hurtled back to earth until a parachute kicked in. Something like those "egg drop challenges" you would do in science class but turned up to 11.

MOOSE, originally an acronym for Man Out Of Space Easiest but later changed to the more professional-sounding Manned Orbital Operations Safety Equipment, was a proposed emergency "bail-out" system capable of bringing a single astronaut safely down from Earth orbit to the planet's surface. The design was proposed by General Electric in the early 1960s. The system was quite compact, weighing 200 lb (91 kg) and fitting inside a suitcase-sized container. It consisted of a small twin-nozzle rocket motor sufficient to deorbit the astronaut, a PET film bag 6 ft (1.8 m) long with a flexible 0.25 in (6.4 mm) ablative heat shield on the back, two pressurized canisters to fill it with polyurethane foam, a parachute, radio equipment and a survival kit.

The astronaut would leave the vehicle in a space suit, climb inside the plastic bag, and then fill it with foam. The bag had the shape of a blunt cone, with the astronaut embedded in its base facing away from the apex of the cone. The rocket pack would protrude from the bag and be used to slow the astronaut's orbital speed enough so that he would reenter Earth's atmosphere, and the foam-filled bag would act as insulation during the subsequent aerobraking. Finally, once the astronaut had descended to 30,000 ft (9.1 km) where air was sufficiently dense, the parachute would automatically deploy and slow the astronaut's fall to 17 mph (7.6 m/s). The foam heat shield would serve a final role as cushioning when the astronaut touched down and as a flotation device should they land on water. The radio beacon would guide rescuers.

General Electric performed preliminary testing on some of the components of the MOOSE system, including flying samples of heat shield material on a Mercury mission, inflating a foam-filled bag with a human subject embedded inside, and test-dropping dummies and a human subject in MOOSE foam shields short distances. U.S. Air Force Capt. Joe Kittinger's historic freefall from a balloon at 103,000 ft (31,000 m) in August 1960 also helped demonstrate the feasibility of such extreme parachuting. However, the MOOSE system was nonetheless always intended as an extreme emergency measure when no other option for returning an astronaut to Earth existed; falling from orbit protected by nothing more than a spacesuit and a bag of foam was unlikely to ever become a particularly safe—or enticing—maneuver.

Neither NASA nor the U.S. Air Force expressed an interest in the MOOSE system, and so by the end of the 1960s the program had been quietly shelved.

'Kids These Days' and 'Beta Test' reflect the push and pull between 'Starfleet Academy' and its twin desires of feeling like 'Star Trek' while also trying something new.

Starfleet Academy has launched out of spacedock—well, come to landing in San Francisco, really—with a two-episode premiere that speaks to two very different sensibilities the show has. The first is more classically Star Trek, even as it does a lot of legwork to introduce us to the kids, teachers, and villains we’ll be spending time with this season, and the second leans more into the kind of young adult vibe the show finds freshness in, albeit with some occasionally jarring results. But while there’s stronger to come in Starfleet Academy‘s debut season, these are two episodes that give us a good picture of what the show can play with in the Star Trek universe.