> Let your would-be-rescuers know your position and status
Stupid question, do search and rescue services even have equipment that can tune into HAM frequencies, are they even listening on those frequencies, and do they regularly train on communicating with the HAM community?
I'm sure there are more established ways of radioing for help in the maritime world(Aviation has the guard frequency)
Not a stupid question at all. But these aren't search and rescue services, they are just other sailors. I'm talking about locales that are far far outside of the realm of typical rescue services, and in no particular jurisdiction. Your best bet for rescue is your fellow sailors or commercial shipping traffic. Radio nets like the Pacific Seafarers Net allow you to make yourself known so that folks can keep tabs on you (and you them) in case something happens.
EPIRB and other emergency beacons still use HF radio frequencies (not HAM of course) and countries like the U.S., Australia, New Zealand and others I'm sure are monitoring those signals. But even then, they will first and foremost look to the seafaring community to actually render assistance, and that kind of call to action does often make its way through HAM radio nets, though I'm not sure exactly how, e.g., the U.S. Coast Guard makes that first outreach as the rescue coordinator.
They're in the gradual process of open-sourcing their driver stack by moving the bits they want to keep proprietary into the firmware and hardware, much like AMD did many years ago.
It takes a long time to become mature, but it's a good strategy. NVIDIA GPUs will probably have pretty usable open-source community drivers in 5 years or so.
And yet, not much has changed in that decade, right? Well, other than the Steam Deck, which is a well-defined set of hardware for a specific purpose, and which is the main driver for Linux game compatibility...
And that's great! But for a random owner of random hardware. the experience is, well... same as it ever was?
The experience on random hardware in 2025 is nowhere close to what is was in 2015. Have you tried it recently? In 2025 I can install pretty much any game from Steam on my Linux desktop with an nvidia gpu and it just works. The experience is identical to Windows.
The 2015 experience was nothing like this, you'd be lucky to get a game running crash-free after lots of manual setup and tweaking. Getting similar performance as Windows was just impossible.
> But for a random owner of random hardware. the experience is, well... same as it ever was?
Far from it... the only area you tend to see much issue with a current Linux distro is a few wifi/bt and ethernet chips that don't have good Linux support. Most hardware works just fine. I've installed Pop on a number of laptops and desktops this past year and only had a couple issues (wifi/bt, and ethernet) in those cases it's either installing a proprietary driver or swapping the card with one that works.
Steam has been pretty great this past year as well, especially since Kernel 6.16, it's just been solid AF. I know people with similar experience with Fedora variants.
I think the Steam Deck's success with Proton and what that means for Linux all around is probably responsible for at least half of those who have tried/converted to Linux the past couple years. By some metrics as much as 3-5% in some markets, which small is still a massive number of people. 3-5 Million regular users of Desktop Linux in the US alone. That's massive potential. And with the groundwork for Flatpak and Proton that has been taken, there's definitely some opportunity for early movers in more productivity software groups, not just open-source.
Gaming on linux in 2015 was a giant pita and most recent games didn't work properly or didn't work at all through wine.
In 2025 I just buy games on steam blindly because I know they'll work, except for a handful of multiplayer titles that use unsupported kernel level anticheat.
>And yet, not much has changed in that decade, right?
the performance difference between SteamOS and Windows did
>Well, other than the Steam Deck, which is a well-defined set of hardware for a specific purpose, and which is the main driver for Linux game compatibility...
>And that's great! But for a random owner of random hardware. the experience is, well... same as it ever was?
the 2025 ars technica benchmark was performed on a Legion Go S, not on a steam deck
Instead, can we implement autonomous formation flying? Each aircraft can still have its own engines and control, but can make a V shape allowing the following planes to run more efficiently.
This has been attempted (for a military aircraft IIRC), and proved too difficult to be practical. It may now be possible, but it is more challenging that it appears from just watching our feathered friends.
It's counterintuitive, but beavers fundamentally change the soil conditions and cause a lot of the overall flow to be away from the surface.
Beavers are one of the sadly misunderstood creatures and are almost entirely responsible for all the good valley farmland we have thanks to their thousands of years of terraforming.
If you can afford the medium term loss of land, a beaver setting up a dam on your property is a good thing. Unfortunately, most cannot, or are unaware of the benefits they bring and only consider them pests.
The final version of the Kinect, called "Azure Kinect" was based around the ADSD3100 time-of-flight sensor from Analog Devices. The Kinect has since been abandoned by Microsoft. However, Analog offers a match-box sized module ADTF3175 integrating the ADSD3100-sensor, optics and VCSEL (940nm laser illuminator) with MIPI 4-lanes output. A devkit [1] also exist and is available from mouser, digikey, et al.
I got the dev kit and looking for someone to team up for commercialization of the potential of one megapixel time of flight camera. There will be probably nothing better for a long time due to complex pixel analog circuitry design. It’s very interesting sensor at the moment.
You can also buy a rebranded Azure Kinect called the Orbbec Femto Bolt. Like the original Azure Kinect, the quality is amazing and blows the Realsenses out of the water.
I find this kind of thing a good case for LLMs as they can dumb down the technical jargon:
From Gemini:
```
Imagine you're trying to record someone talking in a noisy room using your MacBook's built-in microphones. This software acts like a super-smart filter:
* It knows where the microphones are: Apple laptops have multiple tiny microphones.
* It listens to all of them at once: It takes the input from all the microphones.
* It figures out where the person talking is: It analyzes the sound to find the direction of the voice.
* It focuses on that voice: It boosts the sound coming from that direction.
* It quiets down the other noises: It reduces the sound from other directions, like background chatter.
So, instead of getting a muddy recording with lots of noise, you get a clearer recording of the person you want to hear.
Basically, it makes your MacBook's microphones sound much better in noisy environments. And it's designed to work within audio programs that use a specific plugin format called LV2.
Stupid question, do search and rescue services even have equipment that can tune into HAM frequencies, are they even listening on those frequencies, and do they regularly train on communicating with the HAM community?
I'm sure there are more established ways of radioing for help in the maritime world(Aviation has the guard frequency)
reply