Hackaday Links: January 8, 2023

Something odd is afoot in the mountains around Salt Lake City, Utah, at least according to local media reports of remote radio installations that have been popping up for at least the past year. The installations consist of a large-ish solar panel, a weatherproof box full of batteries — and presumably other electronics, including radios — and a mast bearing at least one antenna. Local officials aren’t quite sure who these remote setups belong to or what they’re intended to do, but the installations obviously represent a huge investment in resources. The one featured in the story was located near the summit of Twin Peaks, which is about 11,000 feet (3,300 meters) in elevation, which with that much gear was probably a hell of a hike. Plus, the owner took great pains to make sure the site would withstand the weather, with antenna mast guy wires that must have required lugging a pretty big drill up with them. There aren’t any photos of the radios in the enclosure, but one photo shows a 900-MHz LORA antenna, while another shows what appears to be a panel antenna, perhaps pointing toward another site. So maybe a LORA mesh network? Some comments in the Twitter thread show most people are convinced this is a Helium crypto mining rig, but the Helium Explorer doesn’t show any hotspots listed in that area. Either way, the owners are out of luck, since their gear is being removed if it’s on public land.

Most of us have probably had the realization that at least some aspects of our professional life bear uncomfortable similarities to Mike Judge’s 1999 cult classic, Office Space. It might be the color of your stapler, or it might be your lack of flair, but for one Seattle-area developer, things allegedly went a little further when he was able to swipe about $300,000 from his employer a couple of bucks at a time. The dev, one Ermenildo Castro, is alleged to have pulled a Pete Gibbons by installing code on the checkout page of his employer, Initech Zulily, which sent the shipping fees to his account. He also is accused of manipulating prices on the e-commerce site to buy $41,000 worth of merchandise for pennies on the dollar, presumably paid for with his ill-gotten gains. Sadly, Zulily security found his secret evil plan in a document on his laptop called “Office Space Project,” while Tacoma police found boxes of merchandise piled up on his porch and driveway. So things don’t look good for Ermenildo; maybe he should have vented his work frustrations in a more constructive way.

If you’ve ever been using Google Maps and thought how cool it would be to press a button and get a freshly updated satellite image displayed, you may be in luck. Sony, in cooperation with the Japanese space agency Jaxa and the University of Tokyo, is launching a service called Star Sphere, which aims to provide custom space-based photography to the masses. The service will provide web-based access to a 6U CubeSat in a 500 to 600 km orbit. Details are sketchy, but it appears the satellite is little more than a Sony 4k digital camera with a 28-135 f/4 zoom lens, along with the equipment needed to keep it in orbit and communicate with Earth. It’s not clear if the satellite is in orbit yet, but Sony claims the public will be able to take custom shots of both Earth and the stars. No word of how much this is going to cost, but they say it’ll be available in the US and Japan this year.

And finally, if you prefer a really, REALLY historical view of our planet from space, check out this interactive ancient Earth visualization. You can go back in time up to 750 million years, and see what the planet looked like before plate tectonics had its way with the current arrangement of continents. There’s a handy “jump to” feature that lets you see what the planet looked like when the first algae appeared, or when our ancestors first came down out of the trees onto the savannah. Another nice touch is the ability to locate your city and keep track of it through time; like a lot of places in North America, my city seems to have spent about 500 million years at the bottom of the sea, only popping up above the surface in the early Triassic period.