Showing all posts tagged: technology

An app that points to centre of the Milky Way galaxy

26 March 2024

Night sky and stars seen through gap in a rock canyon, photo by Pexels.

Image courtesy of Pexels.

Tangentially related to my previous post… product designer and technologist Matt Webb has created an app, named Galactic Compass (link to Apple app store), that points to the centre of the galaxy.

When on the (far less light polluted) NSW Central Coast, I can kind of look down from the tail of the constellation Scorpius (the scorpion), and be observing the right patch of the night sky.

When back amongst the super bright lights of Sydney though, that can be a little trickier. Like, find a star, any star, let alone the Scorpius constellation.

Read also Galactic Compass’ origin/development story, the app was built with help from ChatGPT.

RELATED CONTENT

, , ,

A patch for computer software one light-day away on Voyager 1

25 March 2024

One of the computers on NASA’s deep space probe Voyager 1 is experiencing some sort of malfunction, with recent signals from the probe containing no usable data. Mission engineers are apparently confident the problem can be resolved, even though Voyager 1 is almost a light-day distant, meaning it’ll take time to apply a fix:

Because Voyager 1 is more than 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) from Earth, it takes 22.5 hours for a radio signal to reach the spacecraft and another 22.5 hours for the probe’s response to reach antennas on the ground. So the team received the results of the command on March 3. On March 7, engineers began working to decode the data, and on March 10, they determined that it contains a memory readout.

Although Voyager 1, and deep space counterpart Voyager 2, have left the solar system and are in interstellar space, it is estimated it will take Voyager 1 another three hundred years to reach the Oort cloud. The vastly scattered debris, rocky remnants of the formation of the solar system, that constitutes the Oort cloud, may extend more than two light years from the Sun. That’s about half way to the nearest star system, Alpha Centauri.

So to be truly beyond the solar system, I imagine the Voyager probes will need to clear the Oort cloud first. We might be waiting sometime for that to happen. It’s incredible the way mission controllers can keep tabs on deep space missions though, and trouble shoot, and perhaps remedy problems, despite their distance from the Sun.

About twenty years ago, scientists were puzzled by changes in the trajectories of deep space probes Pioneers 10 and 11. Somehow both craft, then located in the Kuiper belt, which is situated beyond the orbit of Neptune, appeared to have slowed down slightly. All sorts of theories were advanced to account for the anomaly, including the idea that gravity may be behaving in ways not seen before.

After analysing gargantuan quantities of data, mission engineers determined that heat loss was having a subtle influence on the movements of the probes, in that it was acting a little like a brake. Contact with both vessels had been lost by that stage, so even if a fix could have been devised, it unfortunately could not have been applied.

RELATED CONTENT

, ,

Stalkerware users should be watching themselves, not others

21 March 2024

Sydney based Australian author Kerri Sackville, writing for The Sydney Morning Herald, on the subject of stalkerware, insidious apps that track the activities of a person you want to keep tabs on:

But I had nothing to gain from spying on him because I already knew what to do. In intimate partnerships, the desire to spy can only mean one of two things: that something is terribly wrong in your relationship, or that something is terribly wrong with you. If it’s the former, the solution is not to dig up answers; the solution is to get out of the relationship.

But trust, or lack thereof, isn’t necessarily why people use stalkerware apps. They sometimes also seek to control and coerce those they are monitoring. To them, it has little to do with trust. It’s more about rampant entitlement. They somehow feel as if they have every right to spy on someone, and as such are completely oblivious to the wrong they are doing.

Something is indeed terribly wrong with such people.

RELATED CONTENT

, , ,

Personal websites keep the internet fun and real

20 September 2023

The internet felt like an unexplored new frontier when I launched the first iteration of disassociated in 1997. New frontier may seem ornate, trite even, but it was an apt description.

We were feeling our way in the dark, and I’d say most of us were clueless as to what the internet could one day become (although without doubt some people had one or two ideas).

Certainly though today’s internet is worlds removed from that of twenty-five years ago, and being online sometimes feels more like a case of running to stand still.

But it’s not all bad, and at least we still have our personal websites. New York City based creative professional Rachel J. Kwon has put together a collection of blog posts and articles written by publishers of personal websites, who expound the positives of their web presences.

Long may personal websites be with us.

RELATED CONTENT

, , ,

Should we let micro-blogging fade away with Twitter?

19 September 2023

Threads. Mastodon. Bluesky. They’re among options for fans of micro-blogging who want to leave Twitter behind. But is seeking out alternatives to Twitter really the solution? American computer scientist and author Cal Newport, writing for The New Yorker, believes we should instead move on from what he sees as the flawed idea of a global conversation platform:

Fortunately, the original small community ethos of the early Internet seems to be mounting a comeback in forms like podcasting, e-mail newsletters, Discord groups, and TalkNats.com-style discussion sites—all of which can offer a more homegrown and personal variety of online interaction.

RELATED CONTENT

, , ,

Does the backwards compatibility of your website extend decades?

19 September 2023

I hate to think exactly how backwards compatible disassociated is. In the past I strived to work with web standards which ensured some uniformity of visual display, regardless of the web browser, or operating platform, being used to view the website. For the most part, but not quite always, disassociated generally worked as intended.

But in my cross-browser testing I really only used a small selection of better known, and recent release, browsers. I always hoped readers were mostly using these, while also keeping them reasonably up to date. As such, I’ve never given any thought as to how disassociated might present in legacy browsers. When I say lagacy, I’m talking apps that were available close to thirty years ago.

Netscape. Internet Explorer 1. Or Lynx, a browser that rendered websites as text only. While it turns out some of these ancient browsers are still available for download, I doubt few people would use them for regular web browsing. And that’s what my limited cross-browser testing regime is based on.

However, in a fascinating experiment, Anthony, a Sydney based software engineer, recently decided to see how far back in time he could take his website, using some of these legacy browsers:

Between pruning container divs and removing collapsed margins the thought occurred to me that my site —with its spartan design and low-tech philosophy— could have remained pretty much identical since the internet’s early days. This raised an interesting question: Exactly how far back in time could my site’s design have remained the same? How far in the past could this site’s current design have originated? 5 years? 10 years? more?

This all sounds like going down a veritable rabbit hole to me. If I saw a display problem with disassociated, on a browser virtually no one was using, I’d probably be tempted to fix the issue, knowing it might take hours to effect. Therefore I’d probably not attempt the exercise in the first place. And even though Anthony ran into a few rendering issues, some of which he found fixes for, overall his website held up well.

RELATED CONTENT

, ,

Everything I know about floppy disks, by Jonathan Pallant

18 September 2023

Everything you wanted or needed to know about floppy discs. An awesome computer science history resource put together by British IT consultant Jonathan Pallant.

Floppy disk drives are curious things. We know them as the slots that ingest those small almost-square plastic “floppy disks” and we only really see them now in Computer Museums. But there’s a lot going on in that humble square of plastic and I wanted to write down what I’ve learned so far.

RELATED CONTENT

,

Survivalism is the most difficult form of survival

18 September 2023

Making it as a prepper, or survivalist, is not merely a matter of storing some canned food in dug-out somewhere, and watching a few YouTube videos on the subject, warns Jessica Wildfire:

We don’t think about where we’d go to the bathroom. We don’t think about how we’d filter our water. We don’t think about what we’d do without all these survival tools made in a factory somewhere.

RELATED CONTENT

,

The Kagi Search Small Web, promoting independent websites, blogs

12 September 2023

Kagi Search is a pay-to-use subscription search engine founded in 2022, that promises to deliver relevant search results free of extraneous clutter and adverts. Another plus is Kagi’s undertaking not to track users, or collect their data.

But Kagi isn’t only about locating pertinent information and protecting the privacy of users. Last week they launched Kagi Small Web, an initiative highlighting the writing of independent publishers and bloggers whose work is often cast aside by the prevailing algorithms, and omnipresent influencers:

Initially inspired by a vibrant discussion on Hacker News, we began our experiment in late July, highlighting blog posts from HN users within our search results. The positive feedback propelled the initiative forward. Today, our evolving concept boasts a curated list of nearly 6,000 genuine websites featuring people with a wide variety of interests.

I’m chuffed to say disassociated is one of the websites to be included. I’ve spent the last few days clicking through a fraction of the six thousand or so publishers they’ve linked to, and am pleased to see one or two familiar faces. What a great idea this is. Thank you Kagi.

RELATED CONTENT

, ,

Privacy warning: your car may be monitoring your sex life

12 September 2023

The Mozilla Foundation, which is part of the same organisation that produces the Firefox web browser, and the Thunderbird email client, recently examined twenty-five car brands, and found consumer privacy left — to put it mildly — much to be desired. In fact, the foundation discovered cars to be in the “official worst category of products for privacy” that they had ever seen:

Car makers have been bragging about their cars being “computers on wheels” for years to promote their advanced features. However, the conversation about what driving a computer means for its occupants’ privacy hasn’t really caught up. While we worried that our doorbells and watches that connect to the internet might be spying on us, car brands quietly entered the data business by turning their vehicles into powerful data-gobbling machines. Machines that, because of their all those brag-worthy bells and whistles, have an unmatched power to watch, listen, and collect information about what you do and where you go in your car.

Not only did the majority of car brands that were studied collect large quantities of personal data, they were also highly inclined to on-sell that information. But there’s more. Some car brands were found to be gathering information about the “sexual activity” of customers. In other words, if you’re thinking about having sex in your vehicle, think again. Your car may be monitoring, and recording…

RELATED CONTENT

, ,