News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

wanick

Re:cp: -r or -R? on Saturday October 03, 2026 @08:55AM (#49943856)
scp took -p from rcp/cp, where it already meant preserve times. So port got -P.
Roman is in now. Search "Roman" and it shows up, about 1.4 million km out on its way to L2. Also added IMAP, Aditya-L1, ESCAPADE and a few others.
Good catch, thanks! It'll be there soon, and checking for it turned up a few more missing spacecraft too.
Service worker cache, so repeat visits download nothing. Fresh catalogs come in the background once a day.
Good idea, noted. For now an asteroid's card shows if it's near-Earth (Apollo, Aten, Amor).
Ha, it's a halo orbit around L2. Turn on "Rotate with Earth" to see the loop itself.
Not a hug of death. It runs live at 1 s/s, but at real time a satellite moves only a pixel or so a second. The middle button toggles pause, so your click paused it. Press it again, or + to speed up.
Added an endless ambient mode with generated music: flybys, eclipses, missions, time-lapses. The ∞ button at the top, F for full screen.
Found it! Search works by name or number, try "Sebmellen" or "31689".
Good point, the page now says it: distances are to scale, the dots are not.
Done, searching "interstellar" now lists all of them.
Fixed most of your list: spacebar pause, Esc to deselect, a white Sun, and the debris orbit bug at high speed. Thanks!
Good idea. For now they have their own group in the list, "Interstellar visitors".
It's the geostationary belt, about 36,000 km up, where satellites stay over one spot on the equator. It's real, only the dots are much bigger than the satellites.
It's a halo orbit around L2. Turn on "Rotate with Earth" to see the loop itself.
Yes, current TLEs propagated backwards. Past 90 days it's marked as an estimate.
WebGL2, no engine.
Not yet, maybe later.
No culling. The vertex shader solves Kepler's equation for every asteroid each frame, the CPU barely touches them.
Yes, state vectors from the Horizons API for each spacecraft, refreshed daily. Thanks for the kete link, I'll take a look.
Thanks, I've already fixed it.
Thanks! It's a byproduct of another project, so hard to say exactly. A few evenings.
Author here. It's a browser view of the Solar System at real scale, with its current state, plus the objects around Earth from the CelesTrak catalog.

Data: CelesTrak TLEs (SGP4), asteroids and comets from JPL SBDB, spacecraft positions from JPL Horizons. Updated daily.

Rendering is WebGL2, orbit propagation runs in web workers. The asteroid set (~30 MB) loads in the background.

The time slider runs forwards and backwards; satellites appear and disappear by launch date.

Re:Firefox 155.0 on Tuesday September 01, 2026 @02:47PM (#49526251)
The best browser I love FF
Re:OpenStreetMap: Admin_level for All Countries on Thursday July 23, 2026 @01:24PM (#49025168)
Fittingly, Peru co-invented the 200-mile zone and still hasn't ratified UNCLOS — it uses its own dominio marítimo concept instead of an EEZ.
Re:Who's Afraid of Chinese Models? on Tuesday July 21, 2026 @03:05PM (#48996658)
Hanlon's razor. It's not the NSA muzzling anyone, it's lawyers terrified of a bad headline. Same outcome, much dumber reason.