The Orbital Index is a weekly technical newsletter focused on space science and exploration, the space economy, and related activities. They maintain a list of space-related code, APIs, data, and other resources, much of it under FOSS licenses: https://github.com/orbitalindex/awesome-space
Gained my first payout from YouTube, covers my costs so far for https://foss.video.
Thinking I can maybe grow these in parallel so YouTube income covers the cost of proving a YouTube alternative for #foss content.
I wrote, illustrated, designed and edited a #book. First timer.
It's been six months and I just realized I did it entirely with #foss (free and open source software), including the OS, #linux. The only exception being the pencil and paper I used for the original writing and sketching. Didn't plan it, I use #krita on a daily basis for my professional #illustration commissions. I thought it was worth mentioning because #foss is unfairly despised by media creation professionals (who are often under-payed).
I published 50 copies, funding it myself. I'm not selling it, I'm giving it as a gift to people from whom I've learned something, or not. It feels much better than any commission I've been payed for, ever. It has given way to very interesting conversations. It's a pretty dark book, and has lots of newbie mistakes (biggest one on the cover...).
I put a belly band on two copies and secretly left them on a shelf in a very popular book store (anti-theft?). The band says "this book is not for sale, it has to be stolen". It's been sitting there for more than a month... even though it's free. Either the book is very bad, or people don't dare, or daring people don't go into book stores, or people don't like free books, or...
Amethyst brings the Nostr social network to your Android phone. Just insert your Nostr private key and start posting.
Nostr is a simple, open protocol that enables decentralized, and censorship-resistant social media. Instead of a single website, it’s a network of thousands of users posting to each other's relay servers that can all interact with one another, seamlessly.
I was playing with this, it's simple enough to install - NOTE: it needs PAM, so that's a definite minus, but they say they're working on that (We'll see).
Also, it's certainly not ready for prime time now; most common use cases aren't supported - there's no fine grained control that it is typically used for: Per user, per command, per host defaults, etc.
If all you're doing is shielding yourself from borking your system, then it works ok.
Another item ✅ off the list - get DeepL Translate for posts working. Thank you answering the queries (sometimes dumb) and were patient + courteous, as usual.
“I want to do this > But I’m scared > Do it Scared.”
I just stumbeled across OniStep (.com) and it's closed windows software. But it's virtually what I have been wishing for from AI for Linux.
Researching what to do is half of using linux. What command? What software? How do I _? And there is a lot of great documentation, and I do indeed RTFM. But giving and receiving help could be a lot less circuitous.
Could we crowdsource built-in help for #FOSS? Could the cursor be programmable now?
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HelioLinc3D is a new program to discover Near Earth Objects (NEO). Working on a NEO data set, its made its first discovery: a "potentially hazardous" 180m asteroid designated 2022 SF289 that passes within 225,000km of Earth orbit, which older surveys had missed. Requiring half the number of images conventional survey algorithms would use, HelioLinc3D combined fragments of data spread across 4 nights of observations to make the discovery: https://www.washington.edu/news/2023/07/31/heliolinc3d/
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A discovery of a Near Earth Object is made when a point of light is observed in a series of night sky images moving unambiguously in a straight line. Collecting the necessary evidence can be stymied by poor weather, extreme faintness of the object, or hidden in the background glare of brighter stars.
HelioLinc3D is open source software specifically designed for the Vera C. Rubin Observatory and its 10-year survey of the sky to begin in 2025: https://github.com/lsst-dm/heliolinc2
I also have the most important part, working code that talks to the radios and routes / rewrites packets. Right now it can send/receive, digipeat, and gate to and from the igate.
The picture below is of a microcomputer (like a raspberry pi, its a khadas) running digipex and showing the packets it deals with on the miniature screen.
