Nuke

especially if you account for the fact that mars has dust storms. if enough dust can accumulate on a solar panel to shut down a rover, then enough can bury the sample tubes, then any retrieval system would have to dig it out. granted you would only need either a high rpm fan or compressed gas blower. the whole retrieval process would involve re-tracing the route of the current rover, so very little new ground would be covered. picking up a carousel would have allowed a path crossing route and could have actually done more science. i dont know how "maybe we can pick them up later" got the nasa stamp of approval.

does it have to return the samples directly to earth? what if they deliver them to the iss and then they can be returned to earth during a routine dragon flight. then you just need a small srb to get it off mars and a small second stage with a hall thruster. you can also save weight if the lander can manufacture fuel from the mars atmosphere. thus you can demonstrate isru and remote refueling on the same mission. though i dont know who came up with the idea of dropping samples as the rover moved on, now you just suddenly have a need for a second rover (or helicopter) with an apparatus to grapple the tube. seemed it would have been smarter to put the tubes into a carousel and drop that off as one piece. and the whole thing could be picked up and put in the rocket.

hax!

i just wish when they used this excuse they would only update security.

just checking to see if my beneath the planet of the apes reference is still intact. meh, close enough. if only there was a dark theme so im not so distracted by my eye floaties.

very gwar-like. i like it.

i do have a cat that gives me drama when i dont pet her enough. she will give love lacerations when she wants attention.

somebody put out a vr mod for mechwarrior 5. playing that.

i like to think he is slaying mice in valhalla. he was the top cat most of his life, even managing to chase off the occasional dog well into his final months. and it makes sense that he would check out on his terms.

i think a lot of that is secondary infections caused by other bacteria. but ymmv. i get bites and scratches all the time, and they usually heal up pretty fast. cats usually tone it down a bit with people they like if they are just playing. but if they feel threatened the will unleash their full feline fury. usually that only happens to people who mistreat the cats, people they dont know, or if they are in a bad mood and you didn't notice and give them space. that said a little iodine or peroxide goes a long way if the cat did any major damage. cat scratch fever is a myth at worst, and a good motorhead cover at best.

manwhile on the paypal is stupid front. you cant log in on a pc without a phone. but you can install android x86 to a vm install the app and use the exact same credentials to log in from there. do they think hackers are ignorant to vms? why doesnt the app require a second factor? i swear its all about turning people into phone-slaves and has nothing to do with security. totp is better and doesnt need another gadget that i dont want.

exposure to critters is a good work out for the immune system. id actually say its a bigger risk long term not to have cats. humans were never meant to live sterile lives.

old cat walked off last night and didnt return. he was in a bad way. aside from the way he was rapidly losing muscle mass over the last few months and was all fur and bones. i suspect he was in renal failure because the way he kept going to the litter box without much progress. he was letting out painful meows through out the day. he had a dark red discharge from his nose i had to clean up twice that morning. we were talking about going to the vet to have him put down. id just finished cleaning the house and was in the process of hauling out trash and the cats all decided it was time to go outside. but it wasn't long before we noticed old cat was gone. he probibly crawled under someone's house to wait for the inevitable, as old dying animals tend to do. we waited until bed time for him to return. i put a towel in a box in case he came back and left a dish of cat treats near the box and rigged up a 5ghz surveillance camera in case he came home in the night. but i never saw him nor was the box slept in or the treats eaten. it rained and the tempurature got below 50f, so im going to go take a tour of his usually hiding places again today see if i can find him, but things dont look good. he either found a place to die, got picked up by doo gooders who didnt know any better, or by an eagle or a bear.

something involving a medieval catapult as a second stage.

i figure i can stuck my old linksys up there, but that only tops out at 54megabit. i wonder what an esp32 can do, its got a much beefier mcu. but i only have one of those and its in use in another project. i think its got a dual core 240mhz processor (i think its risc-v based), so it might move data faster, but not much faster. keep in mind with how much it rains around here, this project is completely impractical. and i can just steal wifi from the library thats kitty corner from my place anyway. they used cedar siding.

im banned after the incident with the tequila.

its a rental.

the aluminum siding on our house got me thinking. how do i get internet access on my porch through the massive faraday cage? ok so ive been thinking about that a while now. i mean the obvious answer is to stick a wifi repeater in the window. but thats the lame lame throwing the money at the problem that most normal people do. a less wasteful plan involves using one of my old routers as a bridge (which i use all the time in order to netboot new pcs and instal an os). i got 2 such routers flashed with ddwrt to enable this functionality. but no! whats the fun in using a ready made solution? a google search lead me to a github page hosting an esp8266 wifi repeater custom firmware for everyone's favorite $6 iot widget. after about four hours of hunting pinouts and running jumper wires and swearing at the flash utility, and then setting it up to connect to my network i managed to get the quarter-sized wifi repeater to work. i just need to stick it in the window and problem solved right? not so fast! because the speed test revealed this thing to cap out at about 420 kilobits a second.

people like to get rid of kittens way too early. anything before 8 weeks is too early. i mean they are cute at 6 weeks and its easy to find homes for them. ive heard more reputable cat breeders prefer closer to 4 months. i once acquired an entire litter of week old kittens from a mother that died and i had to bottle feed them. its one of those things thats cute for the first couple days before the sleep deprivation kicks in. but because i could control their interactions with humans they turned out to be pretty good pets. the worst ones are the ones that haven't been socialized by humans. when picking a kitten out of a free kittens box, try to find one that melts into you. if they seem tense or fearful in any way, you might have problems later on down the line. its back to that spay/neuter thing, because you could be up to your eyeballs in kittens if you let it get out of hand. you can (and should) get a shelter cat, but sometimes they are so bureaucratic and it takes forever to get approved for a kitty when the pet store will just hand one to you for a nominal fee, and there are always free kittens that end up in the shelter system anyway. my old kitty is gross and will never not be gross. he is in the process of deteriorating, literally rotting from the inside out and i dont think he can reach anymore. i should give him a bath but i think that might kill him hes so frail. but he can still chase a dog out of his territory so i dont want to put him down. i also have a fat cat that has difficulty sometimes. water makes the fur mat up, so i just tend to use the clippers periodically to keep the fur under control. i suspect feline diabetes, though i dont think i can afford the treatment for that. will probibly restrict her diet more when the old kitty kicks the bucket. if i tried to do that now the other kitties would bully him to death to steal his food.

marking is easily delt with by spay/neuter. just be sure you get it done before they reach puberty. because once they get into the habbit of marking, they never stop. like i couldn't get a vet appointment with my youngest kitty until a month after she went into heat for the first time, now its an acquired behavior. so once a month i go through the house with a black light and a mop. its one of the few legit chores that has to be done at 1 am.

cats are actually very clean most of the time. unless you have a really old cat, or a really fat cat (and i have one of each, the old kitty always smells bad, and the fat kitty sometimes gets stuff stuck in her fur). cleanliness is a stealth feature that help make cats good hunters as most prey species can detect predators by smell alone. so they will keep their fur very clean. cats also have fewer mouth germs than humans, you are probibly better off kissing your kitty than your girlfriend. cat saliva is known to be a natural antibacterial agent and the fact that cats do not really eat sweet things keeps the germ count low. most of the reason humans consider cats gross is the litter box and the occasional hairball. the former is more a problem if you are lazy with the cleaning. keeping the litter clean with 3 cats can be a daily chore. giving the box a good scrubdown every month will keep down any harmful bacteria (though these are only harmful to pregnant women). the former really depends on the cat breed. a long hear cat will produce more hairballs than a short hair cat. regular grooming can help reduce it further. my old cat and the younger kitty have very easy to manage fur and so i let them groom themselves. picking up the occasional hairball is easier than trying to brush a cat that doesnt want to be brushed. the fat cat who also is a long hair breed absolutely needs it because her fur will mat otherwise, but fortunately she actually seems to enjoy being brushed. also the usual vaccinations and preventions for fleas and ear mites is a good idea for outdoor cats. you also tend to have a problem with shedding, but that's a problem you have with any pet with fur. the general rule of thumb is if you dont put the work in you are going to have gross pets. ymmv. i for one have no problems kissing my kitties on the top of their heads or letting them sleep next to me and steal my pillow. provided they don't have fleas at the time (those things caused the black death, so its a good idea to deal with them as they come).

so heres the deal. i want to build a big centrifuge station. ive built many but this time im doing it a bit differently. rather than making one big launch (which i find would be somewhat impractical irl) the station comes in 6 identical segments and a 7th hub segment each on their own rocket. the segments fit just fine in the largest payload fairing. but the hub was problematic in that packaging the individual spokes would require a docking drone of some sort. but with the robotics parts available i thought i do that differently too. so i tried to make a self assembling hub. using one of the engine bulkheads in a 6x1 config, i placed a robotic arm in the center and 6 identical spoke segments. the arm connects to one of the spokes with small docking ports, it then undocks the spoke from the bulkhead and installs it at one of the docking ports on the hub (a tweakscaled hex probe core with 6 docking ports around it). so the way it works is ive used a kal-1k to set the target rotations of the arm to dock with any one of the spokes at 3 different positions. the first is the default storage position. the second aligns the small docking port with the side port on the spoke, and the 3rd moves the whole spoke to align the the medium docking port to its position on the hub. the cool thing is i can use this same sequence on all 6 spokes. i have a second kal-1k that manages the rotation of the arm at 60 degree intervals, and also handles the undock commands. the first port undocks just fine. but once the spoke is undocked you can no longer have any command over it even though you have at least one docking port on it at any given time. so you cant order the small port to automatically undock from the spoke side once it is placed. you can undock from the arm side, however you need to manually click the "make primary docking node" button at the correct point in the sequence (this seems to take the place of the undock button when you have more than one docking port connected simultaneously). i kind of want to automate that as well, but that command is not available in the action groups system at all. its somewhat inconvenient to have to click that button at the right point during the sequence, failure to do so tens to permanently bend the parts or rip the ports off. ive put an idle period in the sequence to give me time to hit the button. it works and i still get the benefit of having a bunch of perfectly aligned spokes without a docking maneuver. but i have ideas for other self assembling structures. anyone got any ideas?

best sp games can hit you with is artificial stupidity. to think with all the advancements in machine learning they would have made some improvements over basic decision trees. and for most games there are always unused gpu resources you can run neural nets on. things like unused cpu cores or the tensor cores in my gpu. (i only lose about 15% of my eth hash rate playing kerbal). would probibly be unrealistic to make every ai in a game use those resources. but if you have alpha ais running neural nets, and beta ais using decision trees. it would be like fighting a mad scientist and his derpy goons.

im actually playing ksp right now, lol. taking a break from mwo and minecraft, my other 2 games. i dont really play a lot of games. i had this habbit of spending money on games, playing for an hour, and then going back to the old stalwarts. sweeden also has an excellent death metal scene.

thats so you can minimize the wear on the bristles. this thing, which used to be one of those things taught in home ec back before schools all got all woke. or on your first day on a janitorial job. or if you apprenticed for any profession that makes a mess. i personally learned it from my grandma, who as bad as she was at raising children, always had an immaculate house.