The Longest Tech Support Call: Apollo 14 Computer Hack

Deep-voiced and aptly named [Scott Manley] posted a video about the computer hack that saved Apollo 14. Unlike some articles about the incident, [Scott] gets into the technical details in an entertaining way. If you don’t remember, Apollo 14 had an issue where the abort command button would occasionally signal when it shouldn’t.

The common story is that a NASA engineer found a way to reprogram the Apollo guidance computer. However, [Scott] points out that the rope memory in the computer wasn’t reprogrammable and there was no remote way to send commands to the computer anyway.

The initial patch had …read more

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Finding The Sun And Moon The New Old-Fashioned Way

The ability to build a robot to take care of a tedious task for you is power indeed. For a few centuries, the task of helping determine one’s location fell to the sextant. Now, you can offload that task to this auto-sextant, courtesy of [Raz85].

To be clear, this robo-sextant doesn’t give you your exact location, but it does find and display the bearing and altitude of the most luminous object around and display them on the LCD — so, the sun and moon. A pair of cheap servos handle the horizontal and vertical movement, an Arduino Uno acts as …read more

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GoodTime nabs $2M to match job applicants with interviewers to save time and build rapport

 Despite countless attempts and millions in venture capital, the calendar, one of the most ubiquitous work tools, has remained largely unchanged for as long as I can remember. Rather than overwrite the calendar in an effort to make it obsolete, Ahryun Moon and Jasper Sone, co-founders of GoodTime, are putting the calendar front and center — embracing it as a means of understanding… Read More Continue reading GoodTime nabs $2M to match job applicants with interviewers to save time and build rapport

Moon Had Magnetic Field At Least a Billion Years Longer Than Thought, Says Study

While the moon has no global magnetic field nowadays, it did have one in the past and researchers believe it lasted at least a billion years longer than previously thought. The Guardian reports: Between 4.25 billion and 3.56 billion years ago, the luna… Continue reading Moon Had Magnetic Field At Least a Billion Years Longer Than Thought, Says Study

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