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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • CARROT’s big premium selling point is letting you pick which weather data provider the app references. Darksky/Weatherkit went through a perceived slump after their acquisition, so folks turned to sites like https://www.forecastadvisor.com/ to figure out who was providing the most accurate data in their region.

    Other than that, it offers up a few more detailed views, push notifications, and other UI tweaks. They’re one of those companies that tries jumping onboard with things like Apple Watch apps or home screen widgets ASAP.

    You probably don’t need CARROT, but if you don’t like the stock Weather app, CARROT probably has something for you.




  • It’s probably worth mentioning that the book’s a police procedural / crime novel. 👍 It takes place about 25 years after the fictional pandemic. The story starts off with a robot-piloting protagonist’s first day on the job as part of the FBI’s robot-crimes division. It almost won a Hugo and is worth taking a look at if the premise sounds interesting.





  • It’s Lock-In by John Scalzi. After a ~weird flu~, a large portion of the population are left paraplegic and can only interact with the world by remotely controlling humanoid robots. It’s still fairly early on in the tech, so most folks are walking around in generic of the shelf units that are only a few generations removed from the Boston Dynamics or Atlas robots.

    It was a really weird novel to be reading during the first week of Covid shutdowns.




  • Reminds me of when a recent sci-fi author wrote a first person novel with an androgynously named protagonist. They didn’t ever directly refer or allude to the character’s sex in the novel. Fan communities and book clubs spent months realizing they’d subconsciously given the protagonist pronouns in their head. (It’s less awkward than it sounds due to the sci-fi premise.) The author only addressed it months after it came out. They got both Wil Wheaton and Amber Benson to create identical audiobooks for the sequel.




  • FlatFootFox@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzVoyager 1
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    2 months ago

    Modern satellites are protected by various means of encryption, but there’s an enthusiast community that tracks down and communicates with very old unencrypted zombie satellites. There’s even been an NGO which managed to fire rockets on an abandoned NASA/ESA probe (with their approval.)

    The Voyagers benefits primarily from the lack of groups with an adequate deep space network to communicate with it. Their communication standards are otherwise completely open and well documented.


  • FlatFootFox@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzVoyager 1
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    2 months ago

    I still cannot believe NASA managed to re-establish a connection with Voyager 1.

    That scene from The Martian where JPL had a hardware copy of Pathfinder on Earth? That’s not apocryphal. NASA keeps a lot of engineering models around for a variety of purposes including this sort of hardware troubleshooting.

    It’s a practice they started after Voyager. They shot that patch off into space based off of old documentation, blueprints, and internal memos.


  • Just got my Ambient Twilight silent choc switches in! These switches feel incredible. I’d been running tape/floss modded Red Pros up until now. Their sound is similar depending on how well you did the mod, but they always felt disappointingly mushy. The Twilights are even quieter and have a nice satisfying linear feel. They’re definitely quiet enough to start bringing to the office more regularly.

    The keyboard’s a variant to last year’s TypeBoy. A pair of modded Game Boy Advance cartridges house a custom PCB, XAIO BLE, shift register, and Sharp Memory Display. (When you don’t accidentally crack one during installation. Whoops.) The Mark II trades the staggered column setup for an ortholinear layout with an offset mod row. The new shape helps channel the handheld vibes a bit better. I went with a PCB stack this time for the case. Partially to try something new, partially to hide the bright Pro Red switches. I’ll have to let the Twilights shine a bit more on the next revision.