Tootfinder

More than 10,000 Starlink satellites currently orbit the Earth.
We see them crawling across dark skies, no matter how remote our location, and streaking through images from research telescopes.
SpaceX recently announced that it wants to launch
one million more of these satellites
as orbital data centres for AI computing power.
A few years ago, we wrote a paper predicting what the night sky would look like with 65,000 satellites from four planned megaconstellatio…

A million new SpaceX satellites will destroy the night sky — for everyone on Earth
If SpaceX launches one million new satellites, it will increase atmospheric pollution and risk of falling debris. And we will see more satellites than stars.

➡️ Open Press Project – The 3D-printed printing press
#bookmarks

Open Press Project – The 3D-printed printing press
Use printmaking for your art whenever and wherever you want. This little 3D-printed press fits into your backpack and gives you the ability to print outside, on vacation or in your living room! We are on a mission to make printmaking accessible to everyone, so you can get free plans to 3D-print your own press!

Had a lovely visit to the #CapeTown Science Centre yesterday. Not too overwhelming, but plenty to expend a little person's energy and pique their curiosity! There is also a very good board game library. Highly recommended for a spare afternoon or two. The annual membership rates are very reasonable, so suspect we'll be back

Good news! There is now a legal defense fund for the Minnesota 15! This is for all the people Trump's feds arrested on Tuesday for their anti-ICE activism in the Minneapolis / St. Paul area. They have a rough road ahead. Let's show them some support.
I can vouch for this specific fund. It's legit.
⚠️ Keep an eye out for the Chuffed site automatically adding a “tip” that is perhaps larger than the amount you want. You can set it to a smaller amount or zero. ⚠️
#Minneapolis #StPaul #Minnesota #iceout
https://chuffed.org/project/186570-minnesota-15-legal-defense-fund

I wrote a blog post on using #Wikifunctions to determine the correct German article (der, die, or das) for a noun. It's an explainer for a tool I recently wrote and walks through calling Wikifunctions and how to fetch lexical data from #Wikidata.

Doing another digikey order.
I can either pay $16.99 for FedEx Saver with 3-day delivery, or $13.99 for FedEx Economy 2nd day air.
Why would I ever pay more to get my package slower???

In the Irish potato famine, Ireland exported record quantities of wheat; in the 1943 famine in Bengal, Bengal was exporting masses of rice; in the famine in Ethiopia in the 1980s, Ethiopia bought helicopter gunships with the profit from exporting water melons.
People don't die in famine because there is no food: they die because they can't afford the food there is.
As @…

The fruits we see
We see pictures of fruit on our phones — apples, oranges, strawberries, bananas. Bright colors, ordinary things that most people rarely think twice about. We look at them for a long time, almost as if our eyes are trying to taste what our mouths cannot. The painful truth is that we are not kept from these foods because they are forbidden or unavailable by choice. Sometimes, we simply cannot afford them

Hate “The Algorithm?” RSS Is One of the Tools You’ve Been Looking For
RSS is one of the best examples we have of the open web, where we can design and customize how we experience the internet, not the other way around.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/06/hate

Hate “The Algorithm?” RSS Is One of the Tools You’ve Been Looking For
Since at least the moment Facebook introduced (and apologized for) its News Feed, “the algorithm” has been shorthand for the ways the tech giants control what we see and when we see it. In the age of enshittification, there is a push to reclaim our feeds and networks. Good news: there’s a tool that’s been around for decades that can help wrangle many of your feeds into something manageable: Really Simple Syndication, more commonly known as RSS.

Well, I tried four thunderscopes streaming to a single client.
It's baaaarely real time running four FFTs at once, anything heavier weight - even a waterfall on top of the four FFTs - makes it slow to below 50 WFM/s and no longer be real time.
But 32 Gbps of real time streaming and FFTing is a pretty decent limit for our current performance. I'll take it.

Officers for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) will be equipped with much-delayed body cameras by the end of the month
But experts have questioned the transparency of a policy that allows the ICE director to restrict the public release of footage unless
“it is in the best interests of the agency”.
Pressure has mounted on the Trump administration to provide body cameras after people caught up in encounters with federal immigration personnel suffered death or serious…

ICE will not reveal body-camera footage unless in agency’s ‘best interests’
Much-delayed devices to be deployed by end of month after immigration agents involved in deaths or serious injuries