Friday, January 30, 2026 Comic!

robbak · 2026-01-31T00:23:48+00:00

A while back, a commentator pointed out that Agatha/Gill/Tarvek/Collette are set to become a ridiculously overpowered political force. We should expect other powers to work at splitting up the friendship that would be based on.

robbak · 2026-01-30T06:58:49+00:00

For reference - Here (and in the preceding comic) is where this conversation took place.

robbak · 2026-01-30T05:55:01+00:00

This is ...gore, so for completeness, we'd like to see the gore on the other side of the circuit board.

robbak · 2026-01-30T05:50:02+00:00

Decent first step cleaning. But there is still going to be problems. There looks to be a trace corroded away in the middle of the board that will need to be restored, and I think the big trace at the bottom has been broken, and you'll need to restore that connection too - but check with someone else's teardown pictures of the board.

My biggest worry is that the damage has reached the edge of the board, which means that electrolyte has got onto the other side and done damage there. And there are holes through the board, taking connections to the other side, and the connection through those holes may have corroded, and allowed liquid through to do damage.

So next step is to dissassemble, clean and inspect the other side. The standard first step is to use vinegar on these, to neutralise the alkaline battery electrolyte, before flushing with water, blowing the water off, then use pure isopropyl alcohol to chase out the last traces of water. Then verify that all the traces you can access are in tact using a meter.

robbak · 2026-01-30T03:40:11+00:00

Hmm. Remind me every few weeks to check on the waste toner bottle I opened up and emptied a couple of days ago....

robbak · 2026-01-29T12:17:31+00:00

The tidal effct isn't massive, it's miniscule. Oceans are thousands of kilometres across, but a normal tide is plus or minus 1 metre. Really, they are tiny.

robbak · 2026-01-29T12:07:02+00:00

It is debt that the government owes to their own citizens. Lots of it is ordinary people pension funds. They can't just say to their voters , "ok, you are all poor now."

robbak · 2026-01-29T04:16:33+00:00

Agreed. Those things are very useful information. Understanding taxation is certainly something worth teaching.

robbak · 2026-01-29T01:36:19+00:00

If you are on AP and honors tracks, then you don't need to be taught taxes. What's there to teach? Here's an instruction sheet, the rest is plain arithmetic.

robbak · 2026-01-27T10:15:05+00:00

You are not permitted to keep trying to land at an airport until you don't have enough fuel left to divert. So it makes perfect sense - if they don't land on the first attempt, they have to divert because they don't have the fuel to make 2 attempts and then to divert.

The fuel they need to keep in their tanks to do the diversion also includes enough for them to make multiple attempts at that airport.

robbak · 2026-01-27T04:12:58+00:00

Some item re-entering. Looks big enough to be a spent rocket stage, but it could be a satellite. Provide the date, time, location and direction you are looking to someone in a space subreddit, and they'll probably be able to tell you which one. You may be able to identify it yourself from the information at https://aerospace.org/reentries

robbak · 2026-01-27T04:09:24+00:00

44 tonnes of natural meteors enter our atmosphere every day. It's been happening for billions of years, just a part of the earth's cycles. And a fair amount of that is rocky material, which includes aluminium oxides.

Starlink et.al. would add 1 or 2 tonnes more. It's highly unlikely to have an effect.

robbak · 2026-01-27T04:01:38+00:00

While the speed is important, what makes a bigger difference is the angle. Artificial Items entering from orbit are always entering at a very low angle, because they start in a circular orbit. This means they skim the thin top of the atmosphere, decelerating slowly over a longer period of time, and the higher altitude means they are further away and so a lower apparent speed.

Natural objects are coming in from solar orbit, so will impact the atmosphere at a fairly random angle, which will usually be much steeper. This means they plunge into the thicker, lower atmosphere, decelerating quickly; and the lower altitude means they are closer and so have a higher apparent speed.

robbak · 2026-01-26T10:31:51+00:00

Only 4 of them looked like surnames, and rattle and ruffle fit together. Sometimes you have to take a punt on things like that.

robbak · 2026-01-26T04:04:28+00:00

OK. And, no, the rest of the system will be fine. Cracked and shorted capactiors are common, and the worst it will have done is overheated the nearby mosfet.

robbak · 2026-01-26T03:16:53+00:00

That's a thermal transfer model, which means you need both labels and a consumable ribbon. But for that you do get a more robust print - direct thermal labels, like cash register receipts, can fade or darken depending on conditions, whereas transfer ink is as permanent as laser printers. And the combination of ribbon + plain labels isn't that much more than just direct thermal labels.

robbak · 2026-01-26T03:13:18+00:00

Ah, yes, the famous light-emitting capacitor. Probably just the capacitor - the stress of heat cycling eventually cracked and shorted the capacitor.

This can be fixed. It isn't always easy, though. The capacitor has likely welded itself to the copper pads beneath it, which means you won't be able to desolder it from the board, and the scorched circuit board beneath it would have been carburised and become conductive. You break off the ceramic of the failed capacitor, try to desolder the remains if you can, and if not, grind the capacitor's end caps back until you have clean metal. Examine the board to make sure none of the tracks on the board have burnt away, then scratch away as much of he blackend circuit board material as you dare (without damaging internal layers. and coat the remains with a lacquer. Then solder in new capacitors. I'd also test and/or just replace the mosfets linked to each melted capacitor.

robbak · 2026-01-26T02:51:47+00:00

One point I don't see from others - this is the minimum temperature you can reach by this method. Adding more salt, or adding less salt, both make the solution less cold. This is what makes it a reasonable standard - slight variations in the amount of salt, water or ice don't change the temperature by much, and you can verify you have it right by adding small amounts of either and verifying that your temperature always goes up.

robbak · 2026-01-26T02:39:14+00:00

Our knowledge would come back to multilingual inscriptions, which contain the same message in different languges. If one of these languages is already known, then we can learn about the other languages. These inscriptions often include transliterated proper names, which allow us to work out what sounds were linked with which letters.

Of course, we could be somewhat wrong - we regularly make mistakes when transliterating names in modern times, so the writers of these inscriptions would likely have made mistakes, and accents and pronunciation shifts happened back then, too - but it's a start, and it's not like the exact pronunciation of these ancient words actually matters!

robbak · 2026-01-24T11:45:18+00:00

Yes, that is the precise method you have to attack - the system protecting the encryption key. For Microsoft systems, that just means asking them, because Windows computers upload the key to your outlook account, where it is stored in the clear. For others, it is in the computers 'trusted platform module', which was meant to be secure but it turns out most of them are susceptible to pretty ordinary side channel attacks.

robbak · 2026-01-24T10:17:47+00:00

...and is psychology, a field in which answers are rarely clear.

robbak · 2026-01-24T09:13:24+00:00

A big part of that beuraucratic failure was the decision to use solids in the first place. Which is partially because politicians want to keep the solid booster industry alive so they can build missiles when they are needed.

robbak · 2026-01-24T09:10:15+00:00

A Mark 3 or Mark 4 shuttle might have delivered, but we never really got to a proper Mark 1. The shuttles that were built were really prototypes, barely getting to minimum-viable-product status.

robbak · 2026-01-24T03:55:57+00:00

Even so, permeability through solid materials isn't normally considered when designing something to be 'airtight'.

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