Fellow geeks - if after all the Galileo outage stuff you feel the need to go down the wire and receive every GPS/Galileo/GLONASS/Baidu/whatever health message, I can recommend the "NAVILOCK 62524 GPS". It has a stonking chipset (u-blox 8) which delivers the goods. 1/5
There is a huge PDF with full details on how to get the chipset to emit what you need, find it here: u-blox.com/sites/default/… 2/5
To get you going, there is the free u-blox 'u-center' tool which, although Windows only, runs under Wine and it helps to get to know the chipset. The device itself is very Linux friendly. 3/5
To deploy under wine, use winecfg to select 'Windows Vista' support level. The GNSS receiver is /dev/ttyACM0 under Linux, which showed up as COM33 under Wine for me 4/5
Finally, be aware that by default, you will not get any Galileo data from the NAVILOCK 62524 unless you request this via the u-blox protocol. Enjoy! 5/5 /cc @navsas
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This is huge news, but easy to miss. We don't all have the same DNA, but many genes exist in different versions. For example, we have a blood type because there are 3 different ABO genes around. Yet up to now the "downloadable human genome" was static, w/a single blood type! 1/
The currently downloadable human genome also appears in significant part to come from @JCVenter, who has done awesome things, but his DNA can't represent us all. Enter the pan-genome - a file format that can encode multiple variations for each point. 2/ berthub.eu/articles/posts…
In the modestly titled "A Draft Human Pangenome Reference", the @HumanPangenome consortium & many of the leading lights in DNA and bioinformatics software development, have published the DNA of 47 diverse individuals, all in a file format that is not a "string" but a graph! 3/
A fun decryption story! In 1914, The Netherlands sent a peace mission to Albania (I did not know this either). The mission commander, Major Lodewijk Thomson, was killed in battle under circumstances that are still unclear. And we'd love to know! en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lodewijk_…
Recently (2009), an encrypted Albanian telegram from that time was found in Dutch military archives. Could this perhaps shed some light on the situation? Intriguingly, no one had ever been able to decrypt the message.
Dutch researcher Florentijn van Kampen, affiliated with Radboud University's iHub, decided to give it a try using modern cryptographic techniques. I mean, 1914 encryption, how hard could it be?! ecp.ep.liu.se/index.php/hist…
The SARS-COV-2 genome has several genes (or ORFs).
Note in green the famous S spike protein. This is what all the vaccines contain or make in your cells. The green proteins are all "structural", so they end up as part of a new virus particle.
Source: chemistryworld.com/the-coronaviru… 2/
A long time ago, we thought one gene would always deliver one protein. Viruses are acknowledged MASTERS at efficiency, so they don't quite work like that. Note the orange '1a' and '1b' genes above, which are ORF1a and ORF1b below. Source: journals.plos.org/plospathogens/… 3/
Brief thread on how Molnupiravir works. This is the promising COVID-19 antiviral that appears to prevent 50% of hospitalizations/deaths, and maybe 100% of deaths, when given very early to high risk COVID-19 patients. merck.com/news/merck-and…
In general, many many things will stop a virus or a disease, as explained in this @xkcd comic. But that is not what we are looking for. We want something that stops a virus dead, but keeps us alive.
Some very good medicines do succeed in stopping a disease, but can't help but also impact us. This is the case for many antibiotics that are lethal to bacteria, but do gum up some of our own works, for example.
If you are into reverse engineering, the EU Galileo navigation satellites are currently transmitting a new signal that enables centimeter level accurate positioning. But! They haven't yet released a description of this format, but the data is there & unencrypted. 1/2
Let me know if you want a dump of many hours of data. The data likely includes a distance vector that describes a correction to a satellite's position, plus a velocity vector, plus a time offset correcting the atomic clock, plus administrative details ('issue of data number') 2/2
I love the EU (honestly!), but I also love the Internet. Through the NIS 2 Directive, the EU is attempting to regulate each and every root server operator (RSO), even those outside of the EU. Doing so will have bad consequences. 1/6 berthub.eu/articles/posts…
There are 12 RSOs. There are over 1300 active root servers. None of these RSOs are 'providers of essential services' individually. Up to 11 of them could fail, and nobody would notice. In 40 years, "the root" has never gone down. 2/6
By attempting to regulate the core of the Internet, the EU risks opening up a Pandora's box: many other governments would like to follow suit. The EU itself has advocated for the current multi-stakeholder "governance" model, in lieu of government action. 3/6