Centroid.EU Blog

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Landing on polar Mars, the benefits and drawbacks

January 10th, 2021

In this article I talked about a mission to phobos instead of mars. But that has the ultimate drawback of too little gravity. Astronauts doing the trip will need to work out and replenish their bone marrow and muscles. So landing on Phobos is not a good idea, we need Mars' gravity.

However, I'm more a proponent of having humans land in a polar region of Mars the first time AND use the concept of Avatars being stationed around the equatorial region. This means command and control is in the "white" region and robots running around near the equator. But why? Because the cold may kill any bacterial life that we don't want returning to Earth. But it would also be damn cold for humans so we'd need nuclear generators most likely. I imagine the first human marstronauts will be inside their habitat controlling the robots 2000+ kilometers away, and then working on their own health with gym equipment. A trip out of these modules would be infrequent.

You'll thank me for this brainstorm when no martian virii make it to earth after the voyage home.

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Microsoft/Outlook/Hotmail is blocking SMTP delivery from centroid.eu

January 01st, 2021

This means I can't mail you. Find another email provider if you want to have correspondence with me.

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Happy New Year 2021

January 1st, 2021

I think it's gonna be a good year. New years propositions are that I want to get a job. I also have started 3 projects already last year. I'm giving freifunk a shot again. I hope it won't rob too much of my time. Also I have committed time to attempting to make my G5 run OpenBSD 64-bit. I committed 12 months for that so we'll see. And then there is my DNS server which may take a backseat to the other projects, meaning, that it may not be done everything by years end, but most likely next year some time. We'll see how it all unfolds. So 2021 is like the other years with recycled content. Old to the new :-).

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Raspberry Pi 4B and Network Map

December 29th, 2020

I got a Raspberry Pi 4B for Christmas from my parents. I'm writing this blog post on it. Everything works except sound basically.

Here is my updated Network Map:

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Merry Christmas

December 24th, 2020

I wish you a happy time!

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Earth-Jupiter-Saturn conjunction of 2020

December 22nd, 2020

I missed it, due to bad weather. But I revisited the sight with stellarium:

Since yesterday was also solstice I'd like to show you this apod photo (nasa.gov) that I think is very well done. Joy for 2020!

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Solstice is tomorrow

December 20th, 2020

Solstice is tomorrow. Will we also see the "great/grand conjunction"? Looking out today I have my hopes down for Franconia region of Germany, everything is overcast.

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Things OpenBSD...

December 14th, 2020

I have two great news:

OpenBSD foundation is $4,000 CAD away from reaching their fundraising goal. They'll likely make it with two odd weeks left in the year. Congratulations to OpenBSD! And a big thanks for everyone who donated.
I have committed time from late January to December 2021 to (as a hobby) attempt a backport from the OpenBSD/powerpc64 architecture to the Apple G5 machine (I'll call it OpenBSD/macppc64 from now on). As I have about a year, I'll try to make it work. I did have involvement in the RISCV64 group but I really want to make my G5 work with 4/8 GB of RAM.

I did attempt a G5 port before, in 2018, but failed. Chance has it that I can reuse some of the files I modified back then in this effort so it wasn't all wasted time back then. I'll be focusing on the ofwboot bootloader to compile a FDT binary blob tree on the fly translated from openfirmware. Since both of these are in compatible trees (I think) this should be straight forward work. Once I can boot with a FDT blob in memory we don't have to use openfirmware anymore and can go ahead with simplebus framework that has a lot of support. It will be enough to at least make the kernel print pretty stuff (like config dmesg output). Then comes a hard part, the userland. By then OpenBSD will likely change powerpc64 port to little endian and macppc64 will likely stand on its own in big endian.

If you have an Apple G5, and know how to program C and asm, I invite you to work with me. End of January I'm going to put it all available on github.

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Today is International day of Human Rights

December 10th, 2020

On chat I was joking around about aliens on earth this morning. Yet there is something much more important. Human rights day (UN.org) is today, and is associated with the universal declaration of human rights (of planet earth), this isn't a joke these rights are universal, if you don't know, now you know. Everyone has a right to know them, violations go against humanity universal laws.

Still if you're an alien on planet earth you should also have rights. Even if you are a human that time travels you should be protected by these rights. In my view if you are a time traveller you need to be put into a new clause. In 1948 people did not fathom the Internet or even AI. All AI must adhere to these rights when dealing with humans, this is very important. It's incredible that just recently there was a spat with an engineer of google who was "sacked" regarding some email that mentioned marginalized people. Google should really get an ethics (if that's a word) committee that adheres to human rights.

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