nacnud

I built a spaceship for my kids: http://www.duncanjauncey.com/blog/archives/377 (please excuse the tabloid headline of the article)

Riding one of those, galloping along at 70mph, would be quite something. (I guess it's the legged-equivalent of a motorbike?) You'd have to have a lot of trust..

Now you just need a little robot to fetch the things from your basement and put them into a vacuum-tube delivery system.. :)

Please write this up in a few months to share your experiences.

I do the same. A few years ago, I heard a small plane and looked out our skylight. There was a big black storm cloud behind the plane and I remember thinking the pilot was lucky to be outrunning it. I flicked on the cheap aviation radio receiver that I happened to have on my desk, just in time to hear his "mayday, engine failure" call. I watched the aircraft glide down behind some houses in the distance, then made a phone call to the local airfield, who were able to tell me that the pilot was down safely in a field next to a school and they had a recovery vehicle on the way. Phew!

Your description sounds like a very intelligent cache/proxy.

When my AI can talk directly to your AI, we can transfer mail etc without cloud services. If it knows our social network, perhaps it can remotely store encrypted backups of our data, but only with people who we already trust.

True, but it still would be a step in the right direction for home users.

As system administrator of my home network, it worries me that a device on my network might be involved in an attack like this, and I would never know.

Maybe the target of such an attack could gather a list of IP addresses used in the attack, then pass them to Google, who might warn on their search homepage if you browse from one of the IPs on the list? (e.g. "Some of your internet devices may be at risk, click here to find out more") I know IP addresses are a poor proxy for identity, but it could be a step in the right direction.

Ok, but one step at a time! :)

Could this be combined with Theo Jansen's Strandbeest idea, to make a machine that (very) slowly melts a glass road through the desert, powered only by the sun and the wind?

[1] http://www.exploratorium.edu/strandbeest/meet-the-beests

Thanks! The target area is approximately 250 miles equidistant from Iceland & Norway, so it's feasible that one of these boats could cover the entire area (under ideal conditions).

Maybe the disappearance of the transponder signal could trigger another method of investigation, e.g. visual tracking via Planet Labs network of satellites.

Given that the antennae are at surface level and the aircraft are probably between 25,000ft and 40,000ft, I wonder what the ideal maximum range of the receivers would be?

Great work! When (roughly) do you expect it to be launched, and will we be able to receive signals with a Raspberry Pi + Tv Tuner SDR stick? :)

China has Tiangong-1 [1], which is their first step towards a space station. You can spot it with the naked eye [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiangong-1 [2] http://www.n2yo.com/?s=37820

Yep, Juno's orbit will take it much closer than this, so we should expect more interesting photos in about a month's time.

Juno is in a highly elliptical orbit, which will take it within 5000km of Jupiter's cloud tops. This photo was taken from much further away than that. In short, check back in about a month. :)

Not everywhere in the world.

A fair few raspberry-pi tutorials seem to prefer Nano, for users new to Linux.

TANSTAAFL

Amongst other languages, it runs microPython. Documentation here: http://microbit-micropython.readthedocs.org/en/latest/index....

Seems to say "Loading.." indefinitely. (Probably because I'm behind a corp firewall/proxy)

Fascinating reading. This is probably of interest to the wider HN crowd.

My favourite filename trick on Windows is to create a file called "1", then rename it using Windows Explorer using Alt-255 to create a blank character (not a space, but looks like a space).

Crash helmets? (a layer inside, not the whole thing, obviously..)

Interesting - what software are you using to do the recognition (if I may ask)?

Not necessarily American; fresh drinking water is becoming scarcer across the world [1] and therefore even more valuable.

[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2727435/

> Private photography by individuals that can't realistically pool their recordings is something entirely different.

Thought experiment: what if we could?

I guess I was thinking more about smaller GA aircraft, but thanks for the detailed reply.

Surely the landing gear, wing spar attachments, and brakes all have to be able to cope with an unexpected turnback and landing with most of the original weight? (not to mention heavy landings in adverse weather conditions)