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 very end, when an “unexpected greenery contingency” made the astronaut’s exit a little more complicated than usual. The New Shepard capsule had the bad taste of touching a bit of West Texas brush directly in line with the hatch, making it difficult to find a good footing for the platform used by the astronauts for the obligatory “smile and wave” on exit. Blue Origin’s ground crew, dressed in their stylish black and blue outfits, which must be deadly impractical in the West Texas desert, stomped down into the brush to set up the ladder, but had a lot of trouble getting it to stand upright. Even with the makeshift landscaping, the terrain made it difficult to find good footing without adding random bits of stuff to prop up one leg, an important task given that one of the new astronauts was a 90-year-old man. It seems pretty short-sighted not to have adjustable stair feet, but there you have it.
Over the years, this space has seen the closure of multiple physical surplus warehouses in something of a slow-motion death spiral. While each one is a loss to the hobbyist community, this one is almost home because it’s the only one we’ve actually visited in person. The You-Do-It Electronics Center has been a fixture of Boston’s surplus scene for 75 years, a holdover from when dozens of major manufacturers made their homes in the suburbs within the I-95/Route 128 loop — all roads in Massachusetts there are at least two names. Digital Equipment Corp., Wang, Data General, and Polaroid, not to mention defense contractors like Raytheon and institutions like MIT and Lincoln Laboratories, all contributed to the abundance of electronic surplus, and much of it ended up on You-Do’s shelves. -It is a huge store. We remember spending an afternoon there and it felt a bit like Disneyworld – there was too much to see in just one day and you could easily spend a lot of money. The announcement didn’t give a reason for the closure, but we’re going to assume that it’s just not possible for the 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 love working on vehicles as much as we do, you’ve certainly come across a job that would be a lot easier if you only had access to the original auto shop manuals. We’ve been in this boat before and were sorely tempted to pay whatever the manufacturer is asking for a paper copy of the manual, price be damned. Either there’s Operation CHARM, or the Collection of High Quality Auto Repair Manuals, which is exactly what it sounds like—an online archive of scanned manuals for nearly every car or truck made between 1982 and 2013. We checked out Toyota’s offerings, and while the navigation is a bit idiosyncratic, scan quality is quite good. The really nice thing is that you can download a zip file with 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 for this material or how long it will be before a takedown request is made, so strike while the iron is hot.
Here’s another con to add to your schedule: Teardown 2024. Scheduled for the weekend of June 21st in Portland, Oregon, Teardown looks like it’s going to be a pretty good time. The CFP link is still live, so it looks like they are still accepting submissions.
Finally, it’s the dumbest toolkit we’ve ever seen: Compilerfax. First, print a hard copy of your C code, then fax it to a special phone number using a hamburger phone. The Raspberry Pi will decode the fax and do OCR on it, send the code to GCC for compilation and generate a report with the output, if any. The Pi then calls back the original fax number and prints the report. Unfortunately, but understandably, this service is not publicly available as it only lives on York Hackerspace’s private phone system in the UK. But if you’re going to EMFCamp next week, you might just be able to give it a whirl.
