Long gone, but now back… sort of. :)
Meet the NASA team that’s using their home PCs to drive and operate the Curiosity rover on Mars. NASA/JPL article Spaceflight.com Article (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech.) Permalink: https://langa.com/?p=5024
(Answer requested by Emm Riosa) OBB files — Opaque Binary Blobs — are files used to store extra data generated by some Android games and apps. This data is private and encrypted (hence “opaque”) so that only the app that generated an OBB can read it. The key thing is that these OBBs are usually…
(Answer requested by Cydonia Robb) You’re really asking about solder, right? Soldering is the application of drop of molten metal to permanently secure electrical components to each other. The most common traditional soldering material is lead because it’s cheap and has a low melting point. But it’s toxic as hell. In many parts of the…
The working guts of Li-ion batteries start as flat sheets. For many heavier-duty and general purpose applications, these sheets are rolled into cylinders because a cylindrical battery can be safer than a flat one: Stacked cylinders allow spaces between them, which can be used to keep hard-working batteries safely cool and responsive. Tesla autos circulate…
(Answer requested by Gabriel Austria) Most Android phones use utterly-standard USB connections. Even if the phone’s screen is cracked or otherwise damaged, if you can still turn the phone on and log in (by any means — face, voice, fingerprint, pattern, password…), you usually can retrieve the phone’s user data via USB. Just plug the…
(Answer requested by Ayesha Fatima.) Almost surely, yes. Most good-quality generators of recent vintage produce electronically-stabilized, sine- or pseudo-sine wave AC power that’s usually fine for any purpose, up to the stated output limits of the generator. (Check the owner’s manual.) But cheap no-name generators, and many older units, may use mechanical voltage/speed governors, and/or…
The world’s first cell phone call took place 47 years ago today, using a prototype Motorola DynaTAC 8000X — the first fully-portable, commercial cell phone. A full charge took roughly 10 hours and yielded 30 minutes of talk time (no data, of course). When it went on sale, it cost $3,995; equivalent to almost $10,000…
(Answer requested by Chris Parson.) Absent proprietary weirdness (e.g. nonstandard plugs or connectors), no. Charging speed is driven primarily by the charger and device’s battery. A “fast-charging cable” is simply one that’s rated to safely carry the higher voltages and amperages that fast chargers employ. That usually means the “fast” cables have somewhat heavier-gauge internal…
Here are the first few frames — click for the whole thing! Permalink: https://langa.com/?p=3993
Those are really two different questions. “Does a USB hub add latency?” Yes. A USB hub isn’t passive wiring: It receives a signal from a source (PC or peripheral), decodes the embedded address information, and then actively retransmits that signal to its destination (peripheral or PC). That process takes a small, but measurable amount of…
