I'm assuming that given the age of the satellite and the description in the article of it being silent means that it doesn't have the ability to change its orbit at all.

That being the case, if we want it back then we're going to have to get it with something that can match its orbit.

Unless it's mighty close in its orbital parameters to that of the ISS (doubtful) then it'll be a lot easier/cheaper/safer to use a smaller custom-built vessel to go fetch it.

I have a (single) Kidde smart wired Smoke/CO detector that does exactly that. I get a notification if it or any of my house's seven other wired smoke/CO detectors sound off.

The advantage is that I don't have to buy a more-expensive detector for every station, so that significantly reduces the cost versus what I would have had to spend to do this with the Nest Protect.

There are some compromises: All of my detectors have to be the Kidde brand because there is no required cross-brand standardization on the signals used for communication between the units (why??) , and although the detectors themselves continue to work during a power outage using their internal batteries, the wifi hardware is AC-powered-only so app notifications don't happen.

This is in a remote lake house so having app notifications is a huge advantage. If a fire starts when I'm away, I might get a notification and then use internal security cameras, etc. to verify smoke in the house. I can call the local volunteer fire department and presumably they'll make it there within 20 minutes so they can watch it burn down the rest of the way. That seems somehow better than me not knowing at all until I pull up in the driveway to find the burned-out shell of a house.

Methinks they WANT an armed uprising. They'd declare martial law and - as a certain someone once said - "Suspend the Constitution". Saves them all the trouble of the current process of merely ignoring it.

I'm glad that you were able to overcome your failed overnight charging situation with a nearby DC fast charger. Not everyone has the luxury of such a facility within a reasonable distance of their home or in the direction of their planned travels. Or have the unplanned extra 30-60 minutes to spare when they're traveling on a schedule.

And, if anyone cares, in the USA it's pronounced "HUN-day" - rhymes with "Sunday". They had a commercial about it years ago, and their Montgomery, Alabama tour starts out with an introduction that tells you that.

It bugs me when I watch supposed-expert auto vloggers that haven't bothered to research it before making their videos.

Sigh... Ok, I see that now, and the fact that this is abuseable makes me say - as I do far too often these days - "This is why we can't have nice things".

Why would websites be allowed to put stuff into the paste buffer?

Looks like "": followed by just about any other character causes a crash. Oops.

I still have one of those Intel keychains. I'll have to go back and take a closer look at it.

Ah, MOSIS. That certainly brings back the memories. Back in the early 1990s I worked as the IT guy for the Electrical Engineering Department of a certain state university (to be left unnamed for reasons you'll understand here). We had just received our first student-designed chip fabricated by MOSIS, which came as several packaged ICs with what I recall to be a nice 8x10 photomicrograph of the die.

Right in the middle of the die, in capital letters 50 microns tall on the die but larger and oh-so-legible on the 8x10, was the phrase:

    XX SUX

where "XX" is the common abbreviation for another (larger) state school that was our rival in every way: sports, money, facilities, sports. I was the unfortunate soul who delivered the photo to the faculty member in charge of the grad student designers and had to explain "XX SUX" to the foreign-born professor. He was unfamiliar with the phrase and for some reason I chose to use the oral sex origin of the expression rather than just glossing it over and saying it meant the other school was really bad. It was... an uncomfortable conversation.

I'm pretty sure it was a bit of a political problem for the professor. Designing and fabrication of a chip was a pretty big deal, as it was a first for our state and was going to be given the dog-and-pony show treatment to seek more funding from our legislators so we could improve our program and fabricate more chips. Unfortunately, our state government was/is heavily favorable to "the other guys" and the insult encoded in silicon wouldn't have been very well received. I still remember the bit of carefully-placed Post-It note covering the inscription at the center of the photo when it was displayed in the glass case outside of the lab and in the copies given out for publicity and and in funding proposals.

A second memory: I dealt with a team of brilliant - but very hard to restrain - grad students who were always trying to push the boundaries of what was allowable. They had worked out the reflectivity of the various layers of a chip: metal, oxide, polysilicon, etc and had written software that took a 128x128 image and used dithering of the reflectivities to render the image into something that could be inserted into a chip design. The image would be viewable in reasonable grayscale when the die was viewed from a certain angle. Most importantly, the rendered pattern would pass all of the verification rules that helped prevent the submission of invalid semiconductor designs. (Btw, please forgive me if I have some of the terminology incorrect here; I'm not an EE and in any case it's been 30+ years, but you get the idea.)

The one big problem was that MOSIS rules at the time disallowed any logos, etc more than 50 microns tall. The grad students wanted to put one of their faces on a corner of the chip they were designing but the image would have been larger than allowed. I went around and around with the students about this and ended up contacting MOSIS for an exception, giving their justifications: The pins on the chip were fully-utilized so there were no unused functions they could have added for external testing, the image would be using otherwise empty space on the die, we couldn't have eliminated the empty space to use a smaller die, etc, etc, etc.

Unfortunately, the final answer from MOSIS on this was "no", and I don't recall what they eventually did with the empty space.

Thanks for the trip down memory lane!

In this particular test, a disposal burn was neither planned nor necessary. The trajectory of this mission was designed so that the ship was coming down without needing an end-of-flight burn. The burn they wanted to do - but didn't for some reason - was for testing the ability to re-light the engines in space and wouldn't have had a big impact on re-entry.

But your point is good; before putting this in any kind of orbit where it can do actual useful work they'll certainly need to work out that whole re-lighting the engines thing.

I don't know what they can see, but I assume they get all sorts of information about the platform they're running on. But: that is just an assumption, and you're right that even if Hulu could see the device ownership information I could just as easily attach out-of-household boxes to my Roku account AND give them access to my Hulu account. So yeah, that probably won't help Hulu decide if I was improperly sharing, but I was hoping it might.

Regarding Hulu account restrictions affecting me: The linked article says the restrictions take effect March 14th, so not yet for my plain-old-Hulu account (more about that below). But it sounds like there's a good chance they're going to hose me. As I said in my first post, I alternate between two houses. The article says the updated Hulu TOS now says a household is "the collection of devices associated with your primary personal residence", so if they enforce this house-based restriction it will most certainly affect me. The point of my original post is that I hope they use some intelligence to distinguish between "me" watching programs from two locations vs sharing my account with people outside my home.

So... not yet for regular streaming, but yes, I HAVE already been bitten by a similar restriction from Hulu. As I mentioned in my original post, their add-on Hulu+Live TV offering already has a home-based restriction. I signed up for the service sometime last year and found that it wouldn't let me watch in my second home. I cancelled the service immediately and went with a different live TV streaming service.

Based on the new TOS and my past experience with household-based restrictions I'm worried that the new rules are going to force me to make some hard decisions. Ugh.

I tried Hulu+Live TV and ran into this on day two when I went from my in-town home to my cabin at the lake.

Although their mobile app worked fine in both places, Hulu on my TV streaming boxes wouldn't allow me to watch anything because of the change. I could switch my "home" location to the lake, but I'd have had to switch it back when I went to town again, and they limited the number of times I could do that per year.

I canceled that day and went with another service that didn't have such draconian restrictions.

I have regular-old-Hulu and haven't had the same issue, but it sounds like I'm about to. I've already warned the spouse that changes might be a-coming.

I alternate between two residences - one "official" in town and another at a nearby lake, all thanks to a 90% online job.

I watch the same shows in linear episode order one stream at a time, using Rokus that are tied to a single Roku account. It doesn't take AI to see that I'm not sharing my account with anyone. I'm always "me"; I'm just in two places at two different times.

I canceled Hulu+Live TV within two days of signing up for it because I found that they already enforce this same kind of location-based restriction, and it sounds like the streaming service might have to be next.

Hulu (and others): I get it. But don't penalize your happy, legitimate, paying customers because you can't figure out the difference between me at two locations and my sister-in-law who's shared her subscription with three adult sons and a sister in two states.

How long do you think it'll be before the Chinese copy it and flood Amazon with cheap counterfeits?

The software update they're installing makes it so that if the car is locked using the keyfob remote, it must be UN-locked with the remote or the engine won't start and the alarm will sound. After the update was installed on my Elantra I tested it by non-destructively disassembling my steering column cover and removing the lock and the firmware works as advertised.

When the new firmware is installed they also put an additional sticker on the front driver and passenger windows. It'll take a while, but wanna-be thieves will eventually learn to look for the sticker and skip the cars that have it.

The sticker is a little more subtle than I'd like so I made my own that's more explicit: "NOTICE: 2023 firmware installed. Alarm will sound and engine WILL NOT START without key fob remote."