amateur radio - Hackaday

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Hackaday Links: February 7, 2021

Posted: 07 Feb 2021 04:00 PM PST
https://hackaday.com/2021/02/07/hack...bruary-7-2021/


Whats that they say about death and taxes? Apparently that maxim doesnt
apply to Flash, at least when it comes to the taxman. As we noted last
week, the end of the Adobe Flash era took with it a scheduling and routing
app for the railway system in a Chinese city. This time around, its the
unfortunately acronymed SARS, for South African Revenue Services, having
Flash woes. They still have several online tax forms that havent been
migrated to HTML5, so to keep the revenue flowing they built their own
Flash-enabled browser. Taxpayers are free to download and use the browser
while SARS works on getting the rest of their forms migrated. It sort of
reminds us of those plans the Internal Revenue Service has to ensure tax
collection continues after a nuclear apocalypse death and taxes indeed.

Trouble for Nintendo in the EU? It looks that way, as consumer groups have
made the case to EU regulators that Nintendos wildly popular Switch
consoles are showing unacceptably premature obsolescence with the notorious
Joy-Con drift issue. The problem, which manifests as players being unable
to control a game due to constant movement despite no inputs on the
joystick-like controller, requires a repair, one that Nintendo initially
only did for free as warranty service for consoles less than a year old.
For consoles out of the warranty period, Nintendo was charging €45, which
is approximately the same as what a new controller would cost. This didnt
sit well with regulators, and now theyre breathing down Nintendos neck.
They now offer free repairs for up to two years, but theyre still under the
EU microscope. The interesting bit in the linked document is the technical
reason for the problem, which is attributed to premature PCB wear possibly
meaning the traces wear away and inadequate sealing of the Joy-Con
mechanism against dust intrusion.

Last year looked as though it was going to be an exciting one with respect
to some of our nearest solar and galactic neighbors. For a while there, it
looked like the red giant Betelgeuse was going to go supernova, which would
have been interesting to watch. And closer to home, there were some signs
of life, in the form of phosphine gas, detected in the roiling atmosphere
of our sister planet, Venus. Alas, both stories appear not to have panned
out. The much-hoped-for (by me) Betelgeuse explosion, which was potentially
heralded by a strange off-cycle dimming of the variable star, seems now to
be due to its upper atmosphere cooling by several hundred degrees. As for
Venus, the phosphine gas that was detected appears actually to have been a
false positive triggered by sulfur dioxide. Disappointing results perhaps,
but thats how science is supposed to work.

Amateur radio often gets a bad rap, derided as a hobby for rich old dudes
who just like to talk about their medical problems. Some of that is
deserved, no doubt, but theres still a lot of room in the hobby for those
interested in advancing the state of the art in radio communications. In
this vein, we were pleased to learn about HamSCI, which is short for Ham
Radio Science Citizen Investigation. The group takes to heart one of the
stated primary missions of amateur radio as the “ontinuation and extension
of the amateurs proven ability to contribute to the advancement of the
radio art.� To that end, theyll be holding HamSCI Workshop 2021, a virtual
conference that will be focused on midlatitude ionospheric science. This
appears to be a real science conference where both credentialed scientists
and amateurs can share ideas. Theyve got a Call for Proposals now, with
abstracts due by February 15. The conference itself will be on March 19 and
20, with free admission. The list of invited speakers looks pretty
impressive, so if you have any interest in the field, check it out.

And finally, we got a tip this week about a collection of goofy US patents.
Everything listed, from the extreme combover to baby bum-print art, is
supposedly covered by a patent. We didnt bother checking Google Patents,
but some of these are pretty good for a laugh. We did look at a few,
though, and were surprised to learn that the Gerbil Shirt is not a garment
for rodents, but a rodent-filled garment for humans.