Spaceflight related in the sense of the business of spaceflight. Any shareholders that were still holding the Astra space stock on the last day of public trading appear to be in the class. This is the company that was publicly traded before the former CEO found some private financing and bought up the all the stock or pennies on the dollar to take the company private in 2021.

The website looks sketchy, but it was delivered through a trusted brokerage so I believe its legit.

This is the TV show "Wings". This episode aired in 1994, so this is probably work Frakes was doing right after "All Good things..." wrapped.

From the article:

"Russian President Vladimir Putin’s surprise move is widely regarded as the first step toward passing the assets into the hands of Kremlin-friendly investors and comes as part of a renewed push against Western businesses still operating in the country amid the Ukraine war."

I doubt Ukrainian forces are watching our little Lemmy Community here, but in case they are here's an idea.

Use old T-55 tanks, with some modifications, as engineering recovery vehicles for Ukrainian Droid TW-12.7 and other UGV (uncrewed ground vehicles).

T-55 tanks do not provide enough firepower or protection for Ukrainian soldiers, so I completely agree with Ukraine's decision to not field them as crewed tanks. Ukrainian soldier's lives are too valuable to put them in harms way in a T-55 on the battlefield. However, as an uncrewed vehicle there may be value.

• being heavy tracked vehicles the T-55 might be able to traverse ground that smaller modern UGVs would get stuck in.
• T-55s have strong armor against small arms.
• The rotating turret with its long barrel could be used as a boom with a electric winch welded to its end for attaching to stuck, damage, or discharged UGVs to drag them back to the rear for repair/recharge/redeployment.
• The converted T-55 could itself would be uncrewed (keeping Ukrainian solders safer behind off frontlines) with robotic controls installed to drive the tank, work the turret, and winch.
• the T-55 being diesel means it can convert fuel into electricity on the battlefield. Future UGV combat vehicle batteries could be recharged in situ allowing them to loiter longer without having the combat UGVs to return to the rear to recharge. Alternatively, the robotic T-55 might be able to do battlefield battery swap with more substantial battery and UGV modification.
• The T-55 usually has a manually loading 100mm gun. Last time I heard these shells were in short supply, and also require manual loading. These smaller shells don't provided enough power to justify fielding artillery units or tank battalions with. However, Ukrainian operators could load a single round into the gun prior to deploying the robotic T-55 converted engineering vehicle. It would allow operators to also fire that one round in defense, or offense on the battlefield remotely. Because on a single round would be available for firing, the meager 100mm shell supply would be significantly extended.

The obvious problem is that I'd imagine a T-55 on the battlefield would be swarmed by Russian drones the moment it shows its there so this idea is likely not viable from the beginning.

Thoughts?

With The Bay now out of business, that was the last chain I knew I could find Stanfields undershirts in at retail. Online orders aren't really an option for me. While the Stanfields website has a store finder, it will list the store if they carry any Stanfield product. So a store that carries only Stanfield base layers won't help me.

Anyone know where I can buy Stanfield undershirts in southern Ontario?

You can answer in one of two ways:

• Serious - actual serious suggestions for tracks
• Fantasy - not serious, but where you'd love to see F1 run

Here's my answers...

Serious:

China x2, and Japan x2. As in, run two completely extra races at each track. The teams, cars, and gear will already be in both places. Simply add a few days between the races and run on the same courses having the second race at the same track count for an extra set of points as though it was at a different geographic location.

Fantasy:

Max already has time time booked at the the Nürburgring. How about they use that for an F1 event on the 2026 calendar. With the lack of power of the current 2026 spec cars it won't be as dangerous as before. They could say they're doing it to honor Niki Lauda. There have been F1 cars on the Nürburgring as recently as 2020 but not as an official race.

Don't forget this product for those really stubborn ones.

This text description is mine, not from the article. The article linked goes into much more detail.

This is an anti-scam/anti-fraud protection measure. This is apparently a method folks are getting their accounts cleaned out by thieves. They get your SSN, name, and account number from one of the many data breaches that happen today, they open an another account at another brokerage in your name, then transfer your funds out to the new brokerage they control. The system used to do this is called ACATS which is designed to easily let customers transfer funds from other accounts, but it is apparently easy to abuse.

Fidelity makes turning on the block crazy easy just by logging into your account and setting the "Money Transfer Lock" to "on". If you ever do want to use the ACATS to legitimately move your money to another broker, you just need to go back in here and set it to "off", complete your transfer, and turn it back "on" if you still have funds remaining.

Vanguard has this feature too, but its super sketchy to get it turned on. You have to call the vanguard agent, pass an OTP code, try to get them to understand what you're asking for as the agent I talked to did, get transferred around again a few times, do another OTP to a different department and finally they enable it. However they say it takes 5-7 days to take effect. Better than nothing I suppose.

Currently Schwab doesn't have a feature to block ACATS transfers at all in any capacity.

TLDR; more things working. More confidence of this being a permanent go-forward solution.

USB-C 2nd port now working

Both USB-C ports are working now, and also with hubs (both USB3 and USB2 hubs) with devices off of them. I wish I could say it was up to my diligent work, but what seemed to do the trick was just a reboot. I’ve rebooted multiple times since that one time for other reasons and both USB-C ports continue to work. My USB-C (USB3) gigabit NIC is also consistently working, which is great.

Display

Still with my old DL-165 based Displaylink adapter, I’ve revered back to the default resolution of 1680x1050 at 60Hz. At the display adapters limit of 1920x1080 the desktop stitching seems to be unreliable where there will be overlap between the left and right displays by about 30 pixels. Additionally video performance is noticeably impacted for full motion video at the max res. The overlap is likely fixable, but I’m just going to source a modern Displaylink adapter instead of trying to get this one from 2009 working solid on a machine from 2022. The current config is still sufficient with the old adapter for my needs right now.

I’ve also dug quite a bit more into Displaylink technology in general to understand what is going on under the hood. It can be very CPU and RAM hungry. At one point I had a kworker thread taking 48% of the total system CPU and as soon as I unplugged the Displaylink adapter that thread disappeared. I’m also seeing much of the 24GB of RAM in this laptop being used by something and I suspect a its also Displaylink. I don’t know if its because of this old model, or if all Displaylink adapters would have equal resource consumption on the host system.

I want to figure out how to see how much of the shared memory is being consumed for the integrated graphics, and for the Displaylink frame buffer but having found a measurement point for either yet.

Power Management

I’ve done some work with ACPI and power configuration on x86 systems and assumed much would be the same. That was NOT a good assumption. At least Mac silicon doesn’t use anything like BIOS, EUFI, or ACPI. Instead it uses a Device Tree initialization which is something I’ll have to do a lot of reading on. Further, I’ve read some of the documentation from the m1n1 developers regarding the SMC where I’m guessing all of the power management sensors, data, and many of the controls reside to improve the power management of the hardware under Linux. The 1400 different values, with many being read/payload returns show me that the folks working on this have already done a HUGE amount of work, and there is still so much left to uncover with no documentation from Apple.

General

I’m doing more tweaks to the desktop environment. Learning the keyboard shortcuts, and uncovering small nice features (like “limit battery charging to X%”). I now have the unit only charge to 80% before stopping to save wear and tear on the battery from deep cycling.

The unit is plenty fast for my need and I have room to grow in it. My thanks again to the Asahi developers both past and present as well as the Fedora Remix maintainers!

TLDR; So far so good! I'm not seeing any dealbreakers yet, and the prospects look good for a permanent solution for me.

I have never been a Mac owner prior to this (but have used them for work numerous times). My (new to me) used Macbook Air M2 arrive in the mail yesterday. After making sure all the hardware was functional in OSX, I used the curl based Asahi Linux installer, choosing Asahi Fedora Remix with KDE.

The install:

Very VERY easy! The installer was probably the best Linux installation experience I've ever had. Of the 2TB storage I reserved 500GB for OSX, allocated 1TB for Asahi, and leaving 500GB unallocated (plans for later).

The good:

• The desktop experience is fast and responsive. - I was worried now that I was in ARM (aarch64) architecture, applications I wanted to use would have issues with compatibility. I have zero issues installing and running from simple "dnf install" commands. So far all have aarch64 native builds.
• I have a functional external display
• The macbook hardware is high performing, low weight, and great build quality.
• Battery life looks decent enough for my needs

The bad:

• External Display: While I mentioned I have a working display, its via an old DL-165 based USB 2.0 Displaylink adapter. It appears to be very finicky with which DVI to HDMI adapter it will work with. Additionally, on first use it doesn't appear to set up the display properly for the 1920x1080 resolution (the limit of this adapter) but instead defaults to 1650x1080. I've been able to fix this with a kscreen-doctor command on the CLI though. I may have to do more to automate this in the future, though.
• Power management/hibernation: I learned that Asahi not only doesn't support S4 hibernation (my ACHI sleep profile of choice), but its not even on the development roadmap. I've seen a couple of the developer notes as to the difficulties, and it makes sense with the limited resources, so I agree with their path. However, that leaves me with concerns for the life of the hardware. In the days ahead, I'll explore what I can do from userland to reduce impact on the hardware and cycles on the battery.
• USB port behavior: The Macboook air only has 2 USB-C/Thunderbolt ports. I understand Thunderbolt isn't supported yet, and I'm just fine with that. USB3 is plenty for all of my needs at this point. However, the two ports on the unit don't seem to behave the same. The USB-C port closer to the charging port works with my USB-C hub, USB2 DisplayLink adaptor, and USB2 100Mb/s NIC, and even my USB2 headset/mic. None of these work on the second USB-C port on the Macbook. I would have written this off as bad hardware, but USB-C charging works fine on this port. I need to do more checks from OSX to validate hardware functionality, and more investigation on /var/log/messages to see if I can find a reason for this difference. I did see a developer note that one USB-C port on the Mac is more functional for development, but I don't know what that means yet.
• Community: I haven't found THE PLACE where Asahi users congregate to talk about issues or solutions. I see there's a Reddit subreddit which has the most (but I have chosen to not post to Reddit anymore, and avoid it as much as possible). There is a Fedora community with some Asahi posts. Lastly, today I found this Lemmy community with a handful of users. I hope to find THE PLACE to best be able to learn from others and share what I've learned.

No spoilers in my post here, but I can make no claim about what others may respond with:

The thought of living consciously for infinity can be just as existentially terrifying as winking out of existence at the moment of mortal death. There's a really pleasant balance that Pullman created in this series that is incredibly appealing.