Power all the things.
YouTuber Handy Geng built a massive 27,000,000mAh power bank that is capable of recharging any device and even powering a washing machine.
How do you look back over your life and divide it up? Maybe by decades, cultural moments, or geopolitical events. For radio amateurs with older callsigns there’s a temptation to do so by solar cycles, as the roughly 11-year period of the Sun’s activity had a huge effect on radio propagation through the charge it creates in the upper atmosphere. We’re now in solar cycle 25, numbered since the 18th century when the science of solar observation began, and as never before we’re surrounded by information from experts such as [Dr. Tamitha Skov], the so-called [Space Weather Woman]. When she says something is on the way we listen, so a recent Tweet predicting a direct hit from a solar storm with a good probability of auroras in lower latitudes is very much worth sharing.
We must extend our commiserations to readers in equatorial climes and ever through the lower half of the USA, southern Europe, the Middle East, India, Japan, and China. You won’t see the aurora we’ll catch in Europe along with our friends in New Zealand, Canada, Russia, and northern USA. But even then to those of us at moderate latitudes an aurora is a pretty rare event, so we’re hoping for clear skies on the 2nd of February and would advise you to look out too if you’re in the likely zone even if they won’t be quite as impressive as those in our header picture. Meanwhile radio amateurs everywhere don’t have to see pretty lights in the sky to reap the benefits in terms of propagation, so happy DX hunting! The Tweet is embedded below the break, so you can play the timeline for yourselves.
Direct Hit! NASA, NOAA & MetOffice predictions agree the #solarstorm launched Jan 29 will hit Earth by early Feb 2! This one is slow so expect #aurora only as far south as Netherlands, north USA, & up to north New Zealand & Tasmania. #GPS & HF #radio issues on Earth’s nightside! pic.twitter.com/Uua1LGMgJR
Accelerating Research To Prevent & Cure Disease — Dr. Kevin Perrott, Ph.D., Founder & CEO, OpenCures; Co-Founder & Treasurer, SENS Research Foundation
Dr. Kevin Perrott, Ph.D. is Founder and CEO, OpenCures (https://opencures.org/), Adjunct Professor, University of Alberta, Co-Founder and Advisor, Oisin Biotechnologies, President, of Global Healthspan Policy Institute, and Co-Founder and Treasurer, SENS Research Foundation.
One structure on the dwarf planet Ceres made big news but there is a hitch. It seems that the square-shaped form inside a larger triangle, located in a crater. Everyone else saw it, but the use of artificial intelligence might be a square peg not fitting a round hole. This remark by a Spanish neuropsychologist is questioning the veracity of depending on AI, which might be unsound by SETI.
Ceres is located in the main asteroid belt, a dwarf planet, and the biggest object too. One of its craters, Occator had bright lights which lead to several ideas of what it was. NASA sent the Dawn probe to go close enough to capture visual evidence of what these lights were and solve the mystery. These lights were from volcanic ice and salt eruptions, nothing more.
It gets more interesting as researchers based in the University of Cadiz (Spain) have examined images of these spots. Areas like them are called Vinalia Faculae, in an area where geometric contours are very evident for observers. It now serves as a template to compare how machines and humans perceive images on planetary surfaces in general. Tests like these will show artificial intelligence can see technosignatures of other lifeforms besides human-civilization.
In a new interview with Bloomberg, Sweeney said Musk blocked all social media accounts connected to Sweeney on Sunday night. “You know, it’s kinda strange, he wants it down and seems like he’s really mad,” Sweeney told Bloomberg.
Sweeney told Insider last week Musk had introduced some measures he himself had recommended during their Twitter conversation, which make it harder to track the jet.
Harder, Sweeney said, but not impossible. “I just have to work around it,” Sweeney told Insider.
The movements are driven by a chemical reaction that consumes molecular energy for this purpose.
Often, we need to power a 5V-craving project of ours on the go. So did [Burgduino], and, unhappy with solutions available, designed their own 5V UPS! It takes a cheap powerbank design and augments it with a few parts vital for its UPS purposes.
You might be tempted to reach for a powerbank when facing such a problem, but most of them have a fatal flaw, and you can’t easily tell a flawed one apart from a functioning one before you buy it. This flaw is lack of load sharing – ability to continue powering the output when a charger is inserted. Most store-bought powerbanks just shut the output off, which precludes a project running 24/7 without powering it down, and can cause adverse consequences when something like a Raspberry Pi is involved.
Understandably, [Burgduino] wasn’t okay with that. Their UPS is based on the TP5400, a combined LiIon charging and boost chip, used a lot in simple powerbanks, but not capable of load sharing. For that, an extra LM66100 chip – an “ideal diode” controller is used. You might scoff at it being a Texas Instruments part, but it does seem to be widely available and only a tad more expensive than the TP5400 itself! The design is open hardware, with PCB files available on EasyEDA and the BOM clearly laid out for easy LCSC ordering.
Cam & Dowel Jig is a collection of preset jigs and various tools that are designed to help guide users through designing and constructing their own bespoke furniture.
If you didn’t pick up woodworking as a hobby during the quarantine, chances are you at least tried. In a perfect world, we’d have the know-how to pick up some tools, some pieces of wood, and design our living rooms with our own collection of bespoke furniture. Alas, this is no perfect world so we’ll need some shortcuts. Luckily, David Needham of Kingfisher Design Studio has us covered with an intuitive tool kit designed to streamline bespoke, DIY furniture-building projects.
