every now and then I return here on friendica to try and see if I like it as much as sharkey, not feeling any particular difference.
i'm realising the question is wrong-worded: basically the contents are the same, as long as I can follow the same ppl in both (or all three, if we want to add my Mastodon profile currently in standby), so it's only a matter of ui/ux and features on my end? Probably I think. And this is pretty much the good thing of the Fediverse, in theory; the bad thing is that the way this is delivered AND communicated outside of the fedi clique is not always the best imho

Couple days ago a friend managed to (MAYBE) comprehensibly explain me how federation btw instances works, and it kinda doesn't feel that optimal, or basically good. And, notwithstanding all the hashtags, antennas, or any other stuff, I still can't find a quick, simple way to tailor my feed; I understand the control etc but there must be a way to keep control of my presence while not having to spend a week to set it up -and see it doesn't work-.

If you built a car in, say, Germany, for use in Canada, you could assume that the roads will be more or less the same. Gravity will work the same. While the weather might not be exactly the same, it won’t be totally different. But imagine designing the Lunar Excursion Module that would land two astronauts on the moon for the first time. No one had any experience landing a craft on any alien body before.

The LEM was amazing for many reasons, but as [Apollo11Space] points out, the legs were a particularly thorny engineering problem. They had to land on mostly unknown terrain, stay upright, allow for the ascent module to take off again, and, of course, not weigh down the tiny spaceship. They also had to survive the blast of the LEM’s engine.

Sure, there were some automated probes that landed in 1966 (the Soviets got there first, but NASA was just a few months behind). But by 1966, the first LEM was already three years old.

The video shows how many options were on the table, but the four-legged splayed footprint design was the winner. A Canadian company was instrumental in the successful production of the legs. One interesting thing is that the legs had a one-shot aluminum honeycomb shock absorber that destroyed itself as it absorbed the impact of landing.

It offers a fascinating glimpse into how it must have been to design something for the unknown, which couldn’t be properly tested until it was actually used. It was also fun to see the giant gantry they used to simulate lunar gravity for the test articles (that didn’t look much like the real thing, by the way).

The LEM famously served as a lifeboat for Apollo 13, but the legs probably didn’t matter for that. Of course, what we usually talk about is the amazing software onboard, but that’s only part of the story.

youtube.com/embed/lsiUJnaU1Ek?…

hackaday.com/2025/10/13/buildi…

[Vik Olliver] has been extending the lower resolution limits of 3D printers with the RepRapMicron project, which aims to print structures with a feature size of ten micrometers. A molten plastic extruder would be impractical at such small scales, even if a hobbyist could manufacture one small enough, so instead [Vik]’s working on a system that uses a very fine needle point to place tiny droplets of UV resin on a substrate. These points have to be sharper than anything readily available, so his latest experiments have focused on electrochemically etching his own needles.

The needles start with a fine wire, which a 3D-printed bracket holds hanging down into a beaker of electrolyte, where another electrode is located. By applying a few volts across the circuit, with the wire acting as an anode, electrochemical erosion eventually wears through the wire and it drops off, leaving an atomically sharp point. Titanium wire performs best, but Nichrome and stainless steel also work. Copper wire doesn’t work, and by extension, nor does the plated copper wire sometimes sold as “stainless steel” by sketchy online merchants.

The electrolyte was made from either a 5% sodium chloride solution or 1% nitric acid. The salt solution produced a very thin, fine point, but also produced a cloudy suspension of metal hydroxides around the wire, which made it hard to tell when the wire had broken off. The goal of nitric acid was to prevent hydroxide formation; it produced a shorter, blunter tip with a pitted shaft, but it simply etched the tip of the wire to a point, with the rest of the wire never dropping off. Some experimentation revealed that a mixture of the two electrolyte solutions struck a good balance which etched fine points like the pure salt solution, but also avoided cloudy precipitates.

If you’re interested in seeing more of the RepRapMicron, we’ve looked at a previous iteration which scribed a minuscule Jolly Wrencher in marker ink. On a more macro scale, we’ve also seen one 3D printer which used a similar resin deposition scheme.

hackaday.com/2025/10/13/etchin…

You have some fine pitch soldering to do, but all you have on hand is a big soldering iron. What do you do? There are a few possible answers, but [Mr SolderFix] likes to pull a strand from a large wire, file the point down, and coil it around the soldering iron. This gives you a very tiny hot tip. Sure, the wire won’t last forever, but who cares? When it gives up, you can simply make another one.

Many people have done things like this before — we are guilty — but we really liked [Mr Solder Fix’s] presentation over two videos that you can see below. He coils his wire over a form. In his case, he’s using a screwdriver handle and some tape to get to the right size. We’ve been known to use the shanks of drill bits for that purpose, since it is easy to get different sizes.

Truthfully, while sometimes you do really need a tiny tip, we prefer having a tip with some thermal mass. If you use something shaped like a slotted screwdriver blade, you can get contact area when you need it, or rotate the iron 90 degrees and get a very narrow profile.

But the copper coil method does work well, as you can see. This will work with nearly any iron. The first examples with fairly large resistors work predictably well. But we were really impressed with some of the very fine pitch connectors in part 2.

Of course, a fine tip is only part of the equation. It doesn’t hurt that he has a microscope and thin solder. If you want to up your SMD game, Oregon State University can help. We find it amusing that many products today are smaller than the components we used to use.

youtube.com/embed/jdWskB1ee_I?…

youtube.com/embed/JG3jD9eMc8g?…

hackaday.com/2025/10/13/smd-so…

Hyperspectral cameras aren’t commonplace items; they capture spectral data for each of their pixels. While commercial hyperspectral cameras often start in the tens of thousands of dollars, [anfractuosity] decided to make his own with the Waverider.

To capture spectral data from every pixel location in the camera, [anfractuosity] first needed a way to collect that data — for that, he used an AFBR-S20M2WV, a miniature USB spectrometer he picked up second-hand. This sensor allows for the collection of data from 225 nm all the way up to 1000 nm. Of course, the sensor can only do that for one single input, so to turn it into a camera, [anfractuosity] added a stepper-driven x-y stage controlled by a Raspberry Pi Pico and some TMC2130 stepper drivers.

With some 3D-printed parts to hold things together and a fiber-optic cable, [anfractuosity] now had a way to move the one-pixel camera through a wide range of locations, turning that one pixel into a much larger pixel array needed to get a recognizable image out. It’s not the fastest camera we’ve seen — with one 400 × 400 array of images taking almost 19 hours to capture — but it does produce an image that has far more than one RGB value per pixel.

Head over to [anfractuosity]’s site to check out all the images created and to find out more about this project, and check out some of our other single-pixel camera projects we’ve featured in the past. Or, maybe you can use your phone.

youtube.com/embed/ZXXJrwNGh8A?…

hackaday.com/2025/10/13/waveri…

In the law enforcement context, “data retention” refers to the mandatory retention by providers of electronic communications services (email, private messaging, internet access providers, etc.) of metadata of all their users only for law enforcement purposes. Because it is applied to everyone indiscriminately, it constitutes a mass surveillance measure. After the former Data Retention Directive was struck down by the CJEU in 2014 as it violated fundamental rights, the Commission is seeking to adopt new rules at EU level, posing a clear threat to everyone’s digital rights.

The post Mass surveillance of telecommunications document pool appeared first on European Digital Rights (EDRi).

Lettura interessante.

micromega.net/netanyahu-hamas-…

Contro Netanyahu sì, contro Putin e Hamas no: una catastrofe etica – MicroMega

La profonda incoerenza della sinistra è dovuta alla visione omogenea e manichea dell’Occidente come Male assoluto.

^Micromega

Periodicamente suggerisco quali canali e spazi web permettono di seguire slowforward e quindi essere informati di notizie di politica, scritture di ricerca, arte contemporanea, musica sperimentale, glitch, asemic writing, festival, presentazioni, eventi e altro.

Tanto per cominiciare, l’indirizzo del sito è:

(1) slowforward.net

(2) E per avere aggiornamenti ci si può registrare (insieme ad altri 1800+ subscribers) seguendo queste semplicissime indicazioni: archive.org/details/follow-slo…

(3) Altrimenti ci si può iscrivere ai canali che seguono (a volte più ricchi dello stesso slow): telegram = https://t.me/slowforward instagram = tinyurl.com/slowforward-ig whatsapp = tinyurl.com/slowchannel

(4) Mentre ko-fi funziona sia da rilancio di post vari, sia da microdiario saltuario, e da luogo che permette a chi lo desidera di sostenere anche con un semplice caffè il mio lavoro quotidiano: tinyurl.com/differxx

(5) In attesa di migrare su peertube, slowforward ha i propri video qui, e dei link condivisi nello spazio post

(6) Infine, non amando io (pur stando su) facebook, segnalo che ogni post che compare su slowforward viene puntualmente ripubblicato/linkato qui: mastodon.uno/@