On the back of SpaceX and T-Mobile's announcement last week that they're gonna offer basic satellite connectivity to regular smartphones, there's a fresh rumour that Apple might be announcing something similar next week. Globalstar said earlier in the year that they've purchased 17 new satellites for a "potential customer" and now Apple's got this "Far Out" space themed invite. The timing of everyone's announcements has lead to speculation that the iPhone 14 will have special hardware to talk to Globalstar's constellation. It would work via existing satellite spectrum, so no need for regional telco regulator approvals. Yeah, it's a loose connection but fascinating nonetheless.
Also on the topic of space - get hyped for Artemis 1, aka Exploration Mission-1, taking place at around 8:30pm AEST tonight weather permitting. This is the first full launch of NASA's big fucking rocket, the Space Launch System (SLS) and the Orion spacecraft that'll eventually ferry humans back to the Moon in 2024. Wikipedia has a great graphic showing the mission plan. If you've ever read about the Apollo missions, Artemis is basically Apollo 10 just with fancy mannequins hooked up to telematics instead of humans. A dry run for the big show in 2024. Artemis 1 will be live streamed in glorious 4K on YouTube in prime time for Australian viewing.
Good news for future apartment dwellers who want to own an electric car - the National Construction Code will be updated to include "provision of base infrastructure for future cabling and control-point installation at the time of construction". Too bad if you already live in an apartment block and have a stubborn owners corporation. For those building a new house, the NCC will be updated so that homes have to achieve 7-stars of thermal performance. There's plenty of ways to achieve that, but the easiest is to slap on solar panels. Because it's the easiest it's what will likely be installed on most homes by default. The updated NCC will take effect 1st October 2023.
BirdNET is a citizen science project "focused on the detection and classification of avian sounds using machine learning". It runs on iOS and Android and can detect bird noises, as well as submit observations of birds and their sounds. BirdNET-Pi is an easy way to set up a Raspberry Pi running BirdNET that goes in your backyard to collect data for this project, as well as keep a log of birds that visit your area. It displays all this info in a cool web interface with graphs and shit. If I had a spare Raspberry Pi (fucken semiconductor shortage) I'd pop one in my backyard now!
📻 Know Your Enemy - Rage Against The Machine
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