Nobody Cares! (Science & Tech Edition)

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

Do you love that new car smell and take a good whiff when entering such a car? Guess what: it's toxic, because it's the scent of carcinogens!

'New Car Smell' Is The Scent of Carcinogens, And Even Short Trips May Overexpose Us

The average American spends almost one hour each day commuting to work, a number that adds up quickly.

www.sciencealert.com

 

[danielravennest]

Do you love that new car smell and take a good whiff when entering such a car? Guess what: it's toxic, because it's the scent of carcinogens!

Fortunately, my vehicles have that old car smell. They are both 2000 models.

 

[Essence Lumin]

Lastpass is a service for managing passwords. It is very useful to me. I use it heavily. And it's free, but not for long. Beginning next month it will no longer be free to manage your passwords on all devices. Each user will have to choose between their portable or their desktop devices, or pay them $36 / year. That kind of sucks but I'll probably hand over the money. Bitwarden seems to be recommended a lot. I might check that out too.

LastPass’ free tier will become a lot less useful next month

Paid tiers start at $3 a month.

www.theverge.com

 

[Clara D.]

I'm also looking at Kaspersky's free password thingy.

 

[Kokoro Fasching]

Lastpass is a service for managing passwords. It is very useful to me. I use it heavily. And it's free, but not for long. Beginning next month it will no longer be free to manage your passwords on all devices. Each user will have to choose between their portable or their desktop devices, or pay them $36 / year. That kind of sucks but I'll probably hand over the money. Bitwarden seems to be recommended a lot. I might check that out too.

LastPass’ free tier will become a lot less useful next month

Paid tiers start at $3 a month.

www.theverge.com

I have used Roboform for my passwords for the last 15 years or so. First was on the Palm Pilots. I keep a backup set of passwords in Bitwarden. Both are very good and multiplatform, but they are yearly subscriptions as well.

 

[Clara D.]

I'm also looking at Kaspersky's free password thingy.

Heh, the free version allows . . . 15 entries. LAWL.

Looks like it might be BitWarden...

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

I'm using Codebook (formerly STRIP) which you buy a license once and then use Dropbox or Google Drive or whatever to store an encrypted file that you control.

It doesn't do much browser integration but the standalone design seems more fundamentally secure.

 

[Free]

Heh, the free version allows . . . 15 entries.

I allow more entries than that.











*cough*

 

[Soen Eber]

I just use a home brew system to generate and use passwords based on the website name. It's very easy to use.

 

[danielravennest]

JPL Entry, Descent, and Landing Team to JPL Surface Team:

"Your package was delivered at 11:22 am Pacific Standard Time, and left at a secure location in Jezero Crater"

The Perseverence Rover made it to Mars, is on a flat and level spot, and is sending pictures. It will be a day or two to get the landing video back (bandwidth sucks at Mars), and for the rover to unpack itself and get nicer photos. Dust covers are still on the cameras.

 

[Sid]

And here is the second one (from Twitter):

 

[Free]

Turd one!

 

[Free]

Linux has made it to Mars

A rover and a helicopter running Linux land on the Red Planet.

www.theverge.com

Perseverance didn’t traverse the vastness of space alone. Ingenuity, a tiny helicopter, tagged along for the ride. As it’s primarily a technology demonstration, Ingenuity’s destiny is to attempt the first powered flight on any planet other than Earth and to hopefully be the blueprint for future Mars missions. It’s also running on Linux.

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

What's the rover running?

 

[Free]

What's the rover running?

No doubt something NASA-made. But here's the hardware specs:

Perseverance Rover Components - NASA Science

The Mars 2020 rover, Perseverance, is based on the Mars Science Laboratory's Curiosity rover configuration, with an added science and technology toolbox. An important difference is that Perseverance can sample and cache minerals.

mars.nasa.gov

 

[danielravennest]

Percy dangling from the skycrane just before landing. This is one frame from what will be a landing video, which will take more time to download:

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

Linux has made it to Mars

A rover and a helicopter running Linux land on the Red Planet.

www.theverge.com

Question is: which CPU are they using? If anything X86 Minix is probably on Mars, too.

 

[Veritable Quandry]

It's running Skynet.

 

[Casey Pelous]

"Percy?"

 

[danielravennest]

Question is: which CPU are they using? If anything X86 Minix is probably on Mars, too.

Rover Brains

• Processor
  Radiation-hardened central processor with PowerPC 750 Architecture: a BAE RAD 750
  Operates at up to 200 megahertz speed, 10 times the speed in Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity's computers
• Memory
  2 gigabytes of flash memory (~8 times as much as Spirit or Opportunity)
  256 megabytes of dynamic random access memory
  256 kilobytes of electrically erasable programmable read-only memory

There are two complete "compute units", in case one breaks. This is fairly common for space systems. Interplanetary space and the Martian surface are not protected by a magnetic field like the Earth has. So stray high-energy particles can "flip bits" if they fly through sensitive electronics. Radiation hardening is mostly accomplished by using large (i.e. old) feature size for the transistors and wires in the chips. That makes them less likely to be changed. On top of that you typically do error checking in various ways, especially for critical stuff like operating commands.

I'm not sure if Perseverance runs an operating system. The Space Station core computers (which I did software test for) did not. They just loaded the software from EEPROM to RAM when you powered it up, and started running. I assume the 256K EEPROM on the above specs are to bootload software from flash, and I know there are different operating modes (driving, taking pictures, running the arm, doing other science).