Future Women interviews Aude Vignelles:

She later became the inaugural Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of the Australian Space Agency (ASA) which launched in 2018 and saw its first astronaut complete training this year. That astronaut – Katherine Bennell-Pegg – was Vignelles’ first employee and is part of a shift in the gender balance in the space industry.

“When I set up the Chief Technology Office in Australia and the Australian Space Agency, all my recruits were women… And at some point, HR told me, you need to recruit men,” she says. “What a nice problem to have.”

In 2005 I attended the IEEE Milcom conference to present a paper.

Unfortunately for me, the conference was held in Atlantic City, the second-most popular American gambling resort after Las Vegas.

To get to Atlantic City, I flew into Philadelphia and took a train from 30th Street Station. That station is something special; art deco architecture and statues of angels. It's a taste of heaven. The train powered the fifty miles to Atlantic City as dusk fell, and I could soon see the signs on top of the towers and casinos looming over the horizon. TRUMP was seared into my consciousness, in red neon, in the night. It was a journey from heaven into hell.

If you're not a fan of casinos and their attractions, Atlantic City isn't much to write home about. There's the boardwalk and local history, but many local shops have shuttered, and anything that remains is casino-owned. I recall eating at an Indian restaurant, ordering several dishes as you would in the UK. But all the dishes were supersized, and I had to leave a lot.

Getting taxi receipts to expense the trips was a challenge; people come to a casino town to spend money, not to keep track of it, and I wound up with a variety of scribbled doodles. On the way out of town, the lone taxi operator that answered the phone refused to believe that I was where I said I was, until I managed to convince her that I had been in a motel that was recently built. GPS adoption and the wide availability of mapping has changed that, for the better.

I've passed through Reno, too, and gambling is big in Sydney. But I remain uncomfortable in casinos; I know that they're places that are carefully designed to be not to my benefit, and that the house always wins.

Ships

Australia’s $528m Antarctic icebreaker wider than initially designed as bridge impasse labelled 'farcical', Henry Belot, The Guardian, 25 August 2023.

Ferries

'Fiasco': New Sydney ferries too tall for two bridges, Freya Noble, 9News, 20 August 2020.

Trains

New intercity trains too wide for rail line to stations in Blue Mountains, Matt O'Sullivan, Sydney Morning Herald, 6 October 2016.

I'm detecting something of a trend here.

This is a placeholder for growing notes on my Intel NUC M15 laptop, model LAPBC710, launched Q4 2020, bought June 2022. There are two variants of this: Intel i5 processor, 8GB RAM, no touchscreen, and faster i7, 16GB RAM, with a touchscreen. I bought the i7. 11th generation processor; I'm told the more expensive 12th generation (LAPRC710/510) has poorer battery life. 512GB NVMe M.2 drive on this model, Intel Iris XE integrated graphics.

The screen can lie 180 degrees flat -- needed for touch. Folding back behind the keyboard and pretending to be a tablet isn't worth it. The M15's full HD 1920x1080 display is pretty standard at this point in 2023. Could be higher, especially if it wasn't touch, but does it really matter? The serviceable camera above the screen was criticised in reviews, and probably could have been better given that the screen lid is over 4mm thick. Two USB-A ports, two chargeable USB-C ports, one of each on each side, HDMI and 3.5mm headphone jack.

The M15 hardware is robust, and resembles a modern MacBook Pro, the template for many laptops. (The software, though...) Like the Blackbook of old, there's an all-black variant -- but that black will scratch to reveal the aluminium beneath, the black keys are less distinguishable, and it will soak up the sun more in Australia.

Necessary links:

• Model support information.
  
• latest driver updates (February 2024 v4.0, 1.7 GB package. Installing these shows the limits of the whole Wintel experience.)
  
• Intel Software Studio, which controls locking the screen and going to sleep if it decides you're not there, but kept deciding I wasn't there. Fixed in those latest drivers, apparently. This overblown control panel is also in the Microsoft Store.
  
• that lock-and-sleep problem I ran into. An earlier description and advice.
  
• But installing all of those drivers I had to download, instead of just the two I needed, to fix one problem introduced another -- the microphone stopped working. Described in this thread, and eventually a support page, which is inaccurate and of little help.
  
• Intel Driver and Support Assistant -- covers Iris XE, but is not that NUC-specific.
  

I haven't installed or played with the Alexa Assistant to make the light bar at the front under the touchpad light up. I thought that was the only real gimmick on this, apart from their take on presence detection -- but the Intel SmartArray microphone now appears gimmicky, too.

As Intel intended the NUC range to be rebranded by others, which is why the M15 is sold as a 'laptop kit,' it lacks visible branding apart from a small Intel evo hologram sticker below the keyboard and technical data on the underside of the case -- the lack of branding gimmickry is a nice touch, at least. evo seems to be an Intel marketing push now that they've stopped trying to push Ultrabooks.

I'm not too fussed about first-person games or blockchains, but I did not anticipate high-end graphics' use in Artificial Intelligence: rendering (such as Midjourney) and Large Language Models (LLMs: ChatGPT and the like). Still, it will be a while before those run well on laptop GPUs.

There's a flashier, plasticky, different NUC X15 model with a higher-resolution screen and a range of dedicated graphics cards, but that's prone to overheating. This M15 is probably the best that Intel can offer in terms of quality -- and better than the revised model with the later 12th generation processor. I've heard informally that M15s with 12th generation Intel processors run hot with fans whirring, presumably because the new processor, with a more demanding thermal envelope, was placed into a case and cooling designed around the attributes of the 11th generation and its lesser Thermal Design Power requirements. The 11th generation i7-1165G7 processor has a minimum power draw of 12W, while the 12th generation i7-1260P processor draws 20W and has a comparable base power of 28W -- more than twice as much. The TDP-up of the 11th gen is also 28W, so if thermals were designed for 11th gen, 12th gen pushes them.It's the cooling problem of beefy Intel processors in sleek cases that plagued Apple and its MacBooks for years. (12th-generation Intel processors are split into P or lower-power U processors, which have less battery draw and better cooling needs.)

I bought the M15 after a disastrous experience with a similarly-specified Lenovo Yoga 7i evo foldable whose fans kept whirring even when it was asleep, and which suffered multiple support calls from the Philippines to try to install drivers to fix it, before it was eventually fully refunded. But driver problems -- and cooling problems -- seem endemic to Intel laptops. These evo laptops are not good. Contrary to early claims to the contrary, they definitely do suck.

My M15 came with Windows 10, and, after experiencing 11 on the Yoga, I haven't upgraded. I'll stick with Windows 10 for as long as possible. This required a workaround to remove a license dialog that can't be backed out of, so that I could continue to get Windows 10 updates. But as soon as I pressed Update, it started downloading Windows 11 again. sigh. Here's how to prevent Windows 11 at all costs.

In July 2023 Intel announced that they were exiting the NUC business and support for the NUC mini PCs has transitioned to ASUS. Support for the NUC laptops appears to have vanished -- ASUS already has laptops. Next Unit of Computing? Ha.

Ollee laptop sales

In November 2021, I bought a reduced-price Ollee laptop from Harvey Norman in Australia in a Black Friday sale, for under AU$250. Model L116HTN65PW. 4GB memory, and with a small, but relatively high-resolution, 11.6" 1920x1080 Full HD screen. This laptop -- or netbook? -- has an ice-white case, so some informally call it a 'snowbook'. It's an upgrade to my Asus F102BA of yore after seven years.

Ollee seems to be a house brand of the Harvey Norman department store, distinct from the Australian Ollee that sells macrame laptop sleeves. This laptop appears be built in China, may be similar to an Acer model, but designed in New Zealand, and there have been previous iterations (typically Atom processors, with 2GB and, later, 4GB of memory). There is little model or support information on the web.

Size

The Ollee weighs 1kg, with dimensions of 284mm x 194mm x 16mm at its thickest point. It's very portable.

Interfaces and ports

There's no touch screen, but then the Windows touch interface and experience are quite poor, especially on a hinged screen that can't lie flat, so that's no great loss. There are Bluetooth 4.2 and recent dual-band 802.11ac WiFi. Alongside two USB-A 3.0 ports, the included micro SD card slot and mini HDMI port could be useful. And there are 3.5mm headphone and coax power jacks.

Most interesting - and why it's worth buying - is the empty 80mm bay underneath that can contain a solid-state M.2 drive, which specifications don't even mention - packaging doesn't call this out in the product description on the box, so it doesn't make it into adverts, and the brief manual only mentions 'SSD COVER' in an outline diagram. The best selling point of this laptop is not described and is undersold. More on using that bay later.

Comparable alternatives

Alternatives which also include an externally accessible M.2 bay:

The larger, slightly more expensive, 14.1"-screen L141HTN6SPW sister snowbook model has the same keyboard, physical ports and processor, but a slightly physically bigger, but lower-resolution, 1366x768 screen on a flimsier hinge, with older wireless and only one USB 3.0 port - the other is the much slower USB 2.0. As an older design, it's nowhere near as good value.

A similar model, same case and indicators, older interfaces just like the bigger snowbook, but different colouring, similar slightly cheaper price, is the Kogan Atlas L700, coming with Windows Pro instead of S/Home. Kogan bought the Dick Smith brand when that store collapsed, so this is another in-house product.

M.2 use is growing, with support in a number of higher-end laptops.

(Laptops which may only have an internal M.2 connector, and which may or may not have support for it soldered on, are more trouble than they're worth to open up to try to use. Lenovo IdeaPad, I'm looking at you.)

Processor

This Ollee's previous-generation N3350 Celeron processor, launched 2016, is not powerful - from low to high performance, these days it's Intel Atom, then Celeron, Pentium silver and gold, core M, i3, i5, i7 and i9 (with a range of AMD Ryzen equivalents), then Apple's M1. The Ollee appears to be fanless and silent, with passive cooling via a heatsink. So, it won't heat up much, because it's just not that speedy. The snowbook is a slowbook.

This Celeron processor supports up to 8 GB of RAM, so only having four is a little disappointing

The integrated graphics uses Intel HD Graphics 500.

The Ollee has a TPM 2.0 module, but the Celeron N3350 processor is a generation too old for official Windows 11 support at this time. However, the models I saw in the store were running Window 11, while also showing older 1366x768 displays, so unofficial unsupported installs of Windows 11 may be possible -- and getting the better-than-expected display in the delivered laptop was a nice surprise.

Storage

The included 64GB eMMC flash onboard is just large enough to allow Windows to update itself (32GB, as used on older models, is no longer enough for Windows 10 to perform big updates easily, and after all updates I see 20GB of delivery files for Disk Cleanup to delete). It's easy enough to switch from Windows S to the full Windows 10.

The saving grace that attracted me: there's an 80mm M.2 2280 SSD slot on the underside. By adding a bargain solid state drive in a cheap upgrade, a useful cheap laptop is achieved. By formatting the SSD if needed with Windows Disk Management and switching the faster SSD to C: by cloning the internal drive onto it and setting the new SSD as the bootable startup drive in BIOS, everything is sped up.

Caveats: Buying the right M.2 SSD is tricky; you want low-end SATA for the Ollee, and I've found that 512GB works. M.2 connectors have many variants, but most SATA drives should fit - look at the slot to determine type. If you buy the wrong type of drive, you can always buy a USB cradle that handles any M.2 SSD, and format the SSD for use as an external drive. Western Digital Blue is higher performing than Green, and their SSD Dashboard tool is useful for erasing the SSD and starting over when you can't get partitions right. 512GB SATA for $80 is cheap compared to what flash storage costs when built into a laptop. Apple, I'm looking at you.

Extending the size of the C:\ partition when you clone the eMMC to SSD can be done with Macrium Reflect Home, which you can download for a 30-day trial. Take care when entering the license key you were emailed; unclick the '30 day trial' box, enter the key, click the box again. A tutorial on cloning the system disk with Macrium is available. I found that Macrium automatically offered to extend the 'right' system partition. (There are a large number of 'free' partition managers that require payment to enable cloning a system partition and what should be now considered basic disk management features. It's an exploitative market. Cloning was a feature of Macrium Reflect Free 7, but was removed from Macrium Reflect Free version 8, which has a poorer user interface, so now you need the newly added intermediate Home edition. You can only run the Macrium trial once, as it messes with the registry -- and that no-trial-allowed feature is inherited by the registry on all boot partitions you clone. If you need the capability, AOMEI Partition Assistant may be better value.)

The Prixton BIOS (American Megatrends Aptio interface) can be entered into on startup by pressing Esc on the top left of the keyboard, or Delete on the right, to change boot settings and switch between drives where Windows Boot Manager is available. (The internal eMMC can be left as a bootable backup/recovery drive, which makes more sense than having a restore partition on a working drive that fails, or than using the eMMC as a slow and soon-to-wear-out working drive.)

Kogan M.2 SSD bays are similar.

Minor things noted

On unboxing, removing the screen protector branded with an Ollee logo is always the most difficult part, as its pulltab tears off. If there had been no printed logo, I would simply have left that thick transparent protector in place. I noticed the clear thin plastic protector stuck over the camera about a month later.

At high screen brightness when the display is all one colour, say, light blue, I saw a slightly brighter ring from the backlight on one model, but that's otherwise barely noticeable. (Don't put heavy objects on a plastic laptop is always good advice.)

The DC transformer integrates an Aussie plug and plastic flanges to ensure space for cooling, making it inconveniently wide for extension blocks. The DC power jack receptacle is of similar diameter to the headphone jack, so it's easy to plug into the wrong port. The power jack is also shorter than the plug, which comes out easily - no MagSafe needed here! The sloped case sides don't help with that or other ports, but USB-A works fine.

Speaking of USB-A, accidentally trying to plug Mini-HDMI into USB-A can bluescreen and reset the laptop. Since USB-C is smaller, it won't have that problem.

On first Windows setup, it's far easier and faster not to give a wifi password, so the setup completes without "Just a minute..." stalling trying to download and install new versions of Windows 10. Add wifi later, add your Microsoft account later when you switch from S to Home, and then let it do the many many Windows updates in the background while using the laptop. (If setup hangs or stalls on updates, doing hard power resets three times in a row while on the Ollee logo with a spinning wait icon, which acts as the Windows logo for this manufacturer-installed Windows, should get you to the reset screen where you can get a do-over.)

Windows estimates the battery life at... two hours? Not great, even for an inaccurate estimator of a never-discharged battery. Running a battery health report with powercfg /batteryreport reports a relatively small Li-ion battery of 29,600 mWh.

Windows thoughts

Disabling Microsoft Edge's Startup boost speeds startup and saves memory... particularly when you don't use Edge. If you do use Edge, look into settings for sleeping unused tabs.

Buy the cheap Microsoft HEVC Video Extensions pack from the App Store, for watching movies. You'll be glad you did - it plays back more smoothly than open-source alternatives, and adds capabilities to the Films & TV app and elsewhere. Install it on all your Windows machines. This should really be included in Windows.

Finally

Hopefully, the Ollee will serve well as a travel netbook for light use. After all, at just over 1kg it's as light as the 2015 11.6" Macbook Air it resembles. Odd that I can't find this product in HN stores outside Australia - not even New Zealand.

On Christmas Day 2021 Harvey Norman had this laptop model on sale again, for AU$40 less than I had paid for it. 198 dollars? That's value. Reader, I bought a second one. (That offer and the laptop vanished three weeks later on 15 January. The poorer, larger, sister model was still available.)



Those are cheap and light: down to $99 second-hand, plus another hundred to add a 1TB M.2 flash drive, and at that price, who cares how much a snowbook case yellows or how long it lasts? Reader, I bought a third one, and put a terabyte M.2 drive in it.

In your formative years in the military, you are taught that problems are solved using lethal force.

You then leave the military and integrate back into mainstream society, where you see problems that need to be solved, including that of your own ongoing employment.

So, you become a police officer, where you are again able to solve problems using lethal force, just as you have been taught.

Do remember that 'cover me!' means 'point your weapon at ready' not 'lay down a barrage of covering weapons fire' and you'll be good.

It's 1995, and a callow young man from the north of England is waiting at Waterloo International for the Eurostar, clutching his shiny new ticket and passport with some trepidation. He's early, and he can't afford to be late. He plans to buy another ticket to Toulouse once he gets to Paris, somehow; he hasn't quite figured that out.

There's a coffee shop on the platform; eventually he pays for something called a cappuccino, which sounds European, lowers his luggage, and takes a seat. The drink that arrives is unlike the mugs of instant coffee he's known. The cup has a large bowl and saucer, it's milky, textured - wait, chocolate?

In Toulouse he'll befriend students from many different countries, learn to drink and make espresso shots, to swear in the French he still can't speak. But his horizons are yet to broaden. He hears the boarding call, wipes the foam and chocolate from his lip, and rises. The train is ready; he must be, too.

Light Emitting Diodes for intersatellite links - LEDs4ISLs
at Surrey | at LiveJournal | now tracked at SourceForge

A variety of work has been done on using LEDs for short-range intersatellite links. These are suitable for small, networked, satellites.

A brief video presentation on this topic:

• David Amanor, Small Satellite Communication Subsystem for Inter-Satellite Communication: Design, Model and Analysis of Physical Layer, winner of the Fall 2016 North Carolina A&T Three Minute Thesis (3MT) Competition, North Carolina Agricultural & Technical State University (rules).

Summary slides:

• David Amanor, Visible Light Communication Physical Layer Development for Inter-Satellite Communication, Doctoral Scholars E-Showcase, North Carolina Agricultural & Technical State University, Fall 2017.
• Lloyd Wood, Will Ivancic and Klaus-Peter Dörpelkus, Using Light-Emitting Diodes for InterSatellite links, IEEE Aerospace Conference, Big Sky, Montana, March 2010.

Publications:

• Inter-Satellite Communication System based on Visible Light, D. N. Amanor, W. W. Edmonson and F. Afghah, IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems, May 2018. (DOI 10.1109/TAES.2018.2832938)
• Visible Light Communication Physical Layer Development for Inter-Satellite Communication, D. N. Amanor, PhD dissertation, North Carolina Agricultural & Technical State University, 2017.
• Link Performance Improvement via Design Variables Optimization in LED-Based VLC System for Inter-satellite Communication, D. N. Amanor, W. W. Edmonson and F. Afghah, IEEE International Conference on Wireless for Space and Extreme Environments (WiSEE), Montreal, Canada, October 2017. (DOI 10.1109/WiSEE.2017.8124884)
• Utility of Light Emitting Diodes for Inter-Satellite Communication in Multi-Satellite Networks, D. N. Amanor, W. W. Edmonson and F. Afghah, IEEE International Conference on Wireless for Space and Extreme Environments (WiSEE), Aachen, Germany, September 2016. (DOI 10.1109/WiSEE.2016.7877315).
• Visible Light Communication System for Intersatellite Communication of Small Satellites, D. N. Amanor, W. W. Edmonson and A. I. Anyanhun, Small Satellites Systems and Services - 4S Symposium, Valetta, Malta, June 2016.
• Building and Evaluating COTS Based Optical Interlinks for Nanosatellites, T. Idriss and M. Bayoumi, 24th IEEE Conference on Computer Communication and Networks (ICCCN), Las Vegas, Nevada, August 2015 (DOI 10.1109/ICCCN.2015.7288381).
• Intersatellite Links, L. Wood, United States Patent Application 20100279604, filed 4 May 2009, application published 4 November 2010. Rejected, suggesting that the basic idea is unencumbered and unpatentable.
• Using Light-Emitting Diodes for intersatellite links, L. Wood, W. D. Ivancic and K.-P. Dörpelkus, IEEE Aerospace Conference, Big Sky, Montana, March 2010 (DOI 10.1109/AERO.2010.5446711).

Other work discussing exploiting Fraunhofer lines as relatively noise-free channels for in-space links includes:

• Fraunhofer filters to reduce solar background for optical communications, E. L. Kerr, SPIE Journal of Optical Engineering, September 1989 (DOI 10.1117/12.7977070).

ShindaiSat and FITSAT-1 demonstrated LED communications to ground. LEDs can also be used for satellite tracking, as planned with LEDSAT (Facebook page).

• A LED-based Technology to improve the orbit determination of LEO satellite, S. Masillo et al., IAC-17,A6,9,5,x41229, International Astronautical Congress (IAC), Adelaide, September 2017.
• LEDSAT: In-Orbit Demonstration Mission for LED-based cluster launch early identification and improved LEO Surveillance, A. Pellegrino et al., IAC-17,A6,10-B4.10,8,x41050, International Astronautical Congress (IAC), Adelaide, September 2017.
• LEDSAT: Design of a cubesat equipped with LEDs as a calibration target, P. Seitzer et al., 7th European Conference on Space Debris, European Space Operations Centre (ESOC), April 2017.
• LEDsats: LEO CubeSats with LEDs for Optical Tracking, P. Seitzer et al., Proceedings of the Advanced Maui Optical and Space Surveillance Technologies Conference (AMOS Technologies), Wailea, Maui, Hawaii, September 2016.
• Development and operations of nano-satellite FITSAT-1 (NIWAKA), Takushi Tanaka, Yoshiyuki Kawamura and Takakazu Tanaka, Acta Astronautica 107 (2015), pp. 112-129.

The black-and-white war-film boffin put a comfy manageable face on military tech; like a lot of stereotypes he provided a sense of familiarity that let you stop asking anxious questions. I'd guess that the stereotype is still around, amazingly, when it's decades out of date, and actual British engineers are more likely to be smoking a spliff than a pipe, and wearing a black T-shirt that says Plus Plus Ungood on the front instead of a labcoat, and even from time to time be women, exactly because the post-war industrial tradition in this country crashed without leaving a culturally obvious successor.


-- Boffins from True Stories: And Other Essays,
Francis Spufford, Yale University Press, October 2017.

It appears that plus plus ungood is now in use as an expression, but only after the introduction of ++ungood; in 2002.

If you don't know Orwell ("doubleplus") or programming ("increment") just say what you see. I've inadvertently managed to dumb Newspeak down even further.

Plus Plus Ungood? This is New New Speak.

Satellite constellations are in the news again. I'd pretty much stopped maintaining my satellite constellations pages during a fifteen-year lull, but now...

• Greg Wyler's OneWeb. Backed by Virgin. The Bloomberg article on Wyler and OneWeb has in-browser animations that put SaVi to shame. This follows Wyler's previous effort, the now operational O3b.
• Cliff Anders' LeoSat, with a new CEO, who has now moved on.
• Yaliny. Crowdsourced laser communications.
• Laser Light Communications.
• exactEarth.
• Spire Cubesats and other imaging constellations.

and whatever Elon Musk and Google are doing - details are emerging. More to come, no doubt.