Another day, another crop of newly minted minimal astronauts, as Blue Origin’s New Shepard made a successful suborbital flight this week. Everything seemed to be going according to plan, at least until the end, when an “unexpected event in the foliage” made the astronaut’s exit a little more complicated than usual. The New Shepard capsule was in bad taste to land with a patch of West Texas brush directly aligned with the hatch, making it difficult to find a good base for the platform used by the astronauts for the obligatory ‘smile and wave’ upon exit. Blue Origin’s ground crew, dressed in their stylish black and blue outfits that must be murderously impractical in the West Texas desert, pounded down the brush to install the stairs, but had a lot of trouble getting them straight. Even with the improvised landscaping, the terrain made it difficult to get a good foundation without adding random bits of stuff to support one leg, an important task considering that one of the new astronauts was a 90-year-old man. It seems rather shortsighted not to have adjustable legs on the stairs, but it is true.
Over the years, this space has recorded the closure of several physical surplus stores in a kind of slow-motion death spiral. While they are all a loss to the hobbyist community, this one hits close to home as it is the only one we have actually visited in person. ‘You-Do-It Electronics Center’ was a fixture of the Boston surplus scene for 75 years, a relic of an era when dozens of major manufacturers built their homes in the suburbs within the I-95/Route 128 loop – all roads in Massachusetts have at least two names. Digital Equipment Corp., Wang, Data General and Polaroid, not to mention defense companies like Raytheon and institutions like MIT and Lincoln Laboratories, all contributed to the glut of electronic surplus, much of it ending up on the shelves at You – Do-It’s huge store. We remember spending an afternoon there and feeling a bit like we were in Disneyworld; there was way too much to see in one day, and you could easily spend a lot of money. The announcement doesn’t mention a reason for the closure, but we suspect it’s just not possible for owners to keep up with the dwindling demand for random bits and pieces of electronics. Goodbye, You-Do-It, and thanks for the memories.
If you enjoy working on vehicles as much as we do, you’ve probably come across a job that would have been a lot easier if you only had access to the car’s original workshop manuals. We’ve been in that boat before and been sorely tempted to spend whatever the manufacturer charges for a paper copy of the manual, price be damned. Or there’s Operation CHARM, or a collection of high-quality auto repair manuals, which is exactly what it sounds like: an online archive of scanned manuals for virtually every car or truck made between 1982 and 2013. We took a look at Toyota’s offering. , and while the navigation is a bit quirky, the scan quality is quite good. What’s really nice is that you can download a zip file of all the good stuff for offline use. At least theoretically; the servers were overloaded every time we tried. It’s hard to say what the rights situation is with this material or how long it will take before a takedown notice is issued, so strike while the iron is hot.
Here’s another bummer to add to your schedule: Teardown 2024. Scheduled for the weekend of June 21 in Portland, Oregon, Teardown is shaping up to be a pretty good time. The CFP link is still active, so it appears they are still accepting proposals.
And finally, it’s the dumbest toolchain we’ve ever seen: Compilerfax. First, print a copy of your C code and then fax it to a special telephone number using a hamburger-shaped telephone. A Raspberry Pi will decode and OCR the fax, send the code to GCC for compilation and, if present, generate a report with the output. The Pi then calls the original fax number back and prints the report. Unfortunately but wisely, this service is not publicly accessible, as it is only available on the York Hackerspace private phone system in Great Britain. But if you’re going to EMFCamp next week, you might want to give it a try.