Saturday, July 27, 2024

Hackaday Hyperlinks: February 11, 2024

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Apple’s Imaginative and prescient Professional augmented actuality goggles made a giant splash within the information this week, and take a look at as we’d to withstand the urge to dunk on them, early adopters noticed within the wild are making it means too simple. Granted, we’re undecided what number of of those persons are truly early adopters versus paid influencers, however there was nonetheless fairly a little bit of silliness available, most of it on X/Twitter. We’d like to say that peak idiocy was achieved by those that confirmed themselves behind the wheels of their Teslas whereas carrying their goggles, with one aiming for an early adopter perfecta, however alas, most of those tales look like no less than partially contrived. Some folks have been noticed doing their finest to get themselves killed, others have been content material to only look silly, particularly since we’ve heard that the digital keyboard is presently too sluggish for something however hunt-and-peck typing, which Casey Niestat appeared to substantiate together with his subject testing. After seeing all this, we’re nonetheless uncertain why somebody would strap $4,000 price of peripheral-vision-restricting and simply fenced {hardware} to their heads, however hey — totally different strokes. And for these of you questioning why this stuff are so costly, we’ve acquired you coated.

Ingenuity‘s final airfield. The helicopter is that little smudge within the higher left quadrant. Supply: NASA/JPL

Up on Mars — or over, no matter — Perseverance has managed to seize a long-distance picture of its damaged buddy, Ingenuity. The picture was taken on February 4, about two weeks after the helicopter suffered a mission-ending casualty whereas touchdown after what ended up being its ultimate flight. In line with present location information, the 2 autos are nonetheless a few kilometer aside, so the image is understandably fuzzy. However nonetheless, kudos to the MASTCAM staff for constructing a digital camera that would handle that in any respect. NASA has partially blamed the tough touchdown that tore the information off no less than two of Ingenuity‘s rotor blades on a comparatively featureless stretch of terrain that confused the helicopter’s vision-based navigation system; taking a look at its ultimate resting place, that appears fairly believable. There’s nonetheless no phrase whether or not NASA plans to ship Perseverance over to get a more in-depth take a look at the harm. Given the terrain and the rover’s main mission, we suspect not, however it might nonetheless be good to get them again collectively for one final time.

Excellent news, dangerous information from Germany. The excellent news is that when you’re a community admin with Home windows 3.11 and MS-DOS expertise, a German railway firm is trying to rent you. The dangerous information, after all, is that there’s a German railway firm that should rent a community admin with Home windows 3.11 and MS-DOS expertise. It may not be as dangerous because it sounds, although, for the reason that hiring firm seems to solely be in command of the boards that show the railway schedules and such throughout the nation. So, no less than the trains themselves don’t look like working on an OS that Microsoft dropped help for over 22 years in the past. That’s a aid.

Whereas we’re not eager to push the “it’s aliens” button right here, when a 200-foot radio tower disappears with out a hint, it’s aliens till confirmed in any other case. Even when it’s not aliens, the story is bizarre and arduous to swallow. Supposedly, the transmitter shack for a radio station in Alabama, WJLX, was utterly cleaned out by thieves, who additionally eliminated an adjoining 200-foot-tall (61-meter) guyed tower with out leaving a hint. The Geerling boys have put collectively video wanting into this, utilizing the elder Geerling’s 40 years of expertise as a broadcast engineer to offer this story some much-needed context. Sadly, although, it solely will get weirder in consequence, as photos of the shack reveal that it was fairly decrepit even earlier than it was hit, and the gear inside couldn’t have been price way more than a few hundred bucks. The tower was a rusty pile of junk, too; assuming it was someway fastidiously disassembled and carted away, anybody who purchased it might be loopy to place it again up and use it. So, yeah — aliens.

And at last, in a video that makes us irrationally unsettled, the College of Southern Denmark has developed a completely autonomous drone that may function indefinitely by tapping energy strains for juice. The quadcopter resembles a commercially accessible unit with a posh cable information mounted on high. When the drone must cost, it flies below a high-tension cable and slips a gripper round it. It’s not clear how energy is transferred; inductive coupling appears almost definitely, however a diagram of the UAV has callouts for each “cable contacts” and a “present transformer,” so we’re undecided what to make of this. And earlier than anybody will get as scorching and bothered about this as they did for the power-harvesting fence final week, calm down — though we are able to’t discover any specific indication of this being a collaboration between the researchers and the ability firm, we’d say it’s a fairly protected guess that is sanctioned.



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