Net Work
Alan Winstanley
Our Internet and technology column is optimistic about small satellite launching programmes
in the UK, despite recent setbacks; and we also rediscover the real, historical roots of
documentation and the Information Age.
T
his month’s Net Work column
was going to lead with the
latest space news from Britain,
hopefully buoyed by Virgin Orbit’s
successful launch of a crop of small
satellites from Spaceport Cornwall in
south-west England (see last month).
As I was writing, one eye was on
my dual monitors, my PC TV card
showing events unfolding at the nighttime launch event in Cornwall in
January. With the backing soundtrack
of the Rolling Stones’ ‘Start Me Up’,
I grabbed screenshots of the Cosmic
Girl 747 taking off before thousands of
cheering spectators, with infographics
showing the fast-diminishing fuel
level of the LauncherOne rocket as
it headed into orbit.
With Cosmic Girl returning to land,
everything looked rosy, so I pressed on
with my routine, until a news alert on
my phone half an hour later said that
the rocket had failed to reach orbit. The
last I heard before I switched off in the
early hours was that the rocket had suffered an ‘anomaly’. It would turn out to
be a failure of the rocket’s second-stage
engine. After reaching hypersonic speed
the rocket reached space but failed to
achieve its intended orbit. Next morning, we learned that LauncherOne had
fallen into the Atlantic somewhere, one
good reason why the flight path was
over open sea.
In late 2022, Skyrora attempted to launch a Skylark L from Iceland ahead of a planned
full orbital launch from the UK in 2023. It fell into the sea.
Obviously, this was a major setback,
but bystanders interviewed in a TV
vox-pop still seemed quite upbeat and
stoical. The English county of Cornwall got some welcome publicity and
the new spaceport had been built on a
small airstrip without the largesse of a
NASA-sized budget; besides, four previous Virgin Orbit missions in the US had
successfully placed a total of 33 small
satellites into orbit for the US military
and government, flying on trajectories
that were impossible for conventional
(vertical) launches to follow. Richard
Branson has refocused his space ambitions away from the indulgent Virgin
Better luck next time: Virgin Orbit’s first launch from UK soil was unsuccessful after the
rocket’s second-stage motor failed.
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Galactic space tourist plane (Net Work,
July 2021) and towards small satellite
launches instead, so hopefully the next
mission will be a successful one and
will restore credibility in the Virgin
Orbit launch programme.
Can’t get no satisfaction
There is more competition gunning
for the UK’s emerging small satellite
launching business, starting with Skyrora, a firm which ‘attempted to launch’
its home-grown Skylark rocket from a
site in Iceland late last year. Sadly, the
rocket nosedived into the Norwegian
Sea instead, but Skyrora gained useful
experience in logistics and hands-on
practice using its mobile launch complex, working closely with the Icelandic
government. The mission is just one
more bump in the learning curve, as
Lee Rosen, Chief Operations Officer
at Skyrora, said: ‘I can assure you that
despite the best design, build, and test
preparations, anomalies still unfortunately do happen.’ Virgin Orbit will
doubtless agree. Skyrora is planning
to produce an intriguing range of small
launch vehicles and space tugs, with
more news available on skyrora.com
There are plenty of other new developments to look forward to, including
an entirely separate operation taking
shape at Space Hub Sutherland, located on the northernmost tip of Scotland.
The new facility – dubbed ‘Scotland’s
Practical Electronics | March | 2023
The Orbex engine will use 3D parts printed on Europe’s largest custom-made AM metal-printing machine.
Sustainable Spaceport’ – will be the
world’s only carbon-neutral launch site
and is being leased in its entirety for
50 years by Orbex, a UK-based small
satellite start-up with design and production facilities based in Denmark.
The company is currently developing a
high-technology vertical microlauncher
rocket fuelled by a bio-propane propellant, which will have 96% lower
carbon emissions compared with rival
fossil-fuelled systems, Orbex says.
The Orbex Prime launcher, first revealed last May, will have unique
3D-printed engines after the firm commissioned a custom machine from
Germany’s AMCM GmbH that will be
Europe’s largest AM (additive manufacturing) metal-printing machine. The
process can ‘print’ components from
titanium and aluminium, and this onepiece 3D solution overcomes problems
and weaknesses introduced by joints or
seams in complex metal components
and housings. The bespoke facility
will enable Orbex to build more than
35 large-scale rocket engines (seven
engines per rocket) and main stage turbopumps every year, the makers say.
The emerging service has already
been awarded ‘Preferred microlauncher’
status by the European Space Agency,
and test launches were scheduled to
start from the early 2020s, with launch
frequencies of 12 per year. Orbex is
supported by the Highland and Islands
Enterprise (HIE) agency who write
more about the project at: https://bit.
ly/pe-mar23-hie – readers can track
developments at: https://orbex.space
In the meantime, Elon Musk’s SpaceX
launched another 51 Starlink satellites into LEO (low-earth orbit) in
Practical Electronics | March | 2023
mid-January, making some 3,300 in
all. The Starlink network is also playing
a key role in providing Internet access
in the Ukraine war, with some ten thousand Starlink antennae having been
delivered to the conflict zone. At the
same time, SpaceX graciously launched
a second tranche of 40 satellites for its
friendly Starlink rival OneWeb, the
UK-based satellite communications
company that became ensnared in the
Ukraine conflict after Russia seized
36 OneWeb launch-ready satellites,
valued at $230m, from the Baikonur
Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. This latest
mission brings the number of missions
flown by SpaceX to an incredible total
of 201 launches, and OneWeb now has
542 satellites in LEO to increase its
own coverage across the globe.
An essential utility
Today’s Internet is seen as an essential
utility, and at least two generations
of users have never known life without the web. The smart home relies
on network and cloud connectivity, and controlling a ‘smart’ bulb
or mains socket – for example, via
TP-Link’s Tapo range described in
recent columns – is second nature
for a generation that has grown up
in a connected world.
Plenty has been written about the Internet’s evolution since the late 1980s
when scientists working at the CERN
particle physics laboratory, located on the
French-Swiss border, wanted to access
and share technical information and data,
but were handicapped by the disparate
network of computers on which information was hosted. This led the British
CERN scientist Tim Berners-Lee to create
a protocol that would allow complex
information to be shared more readily
over a network. The principles of hypertext markup language were fleshed
out, with HTML (HyperText Markup
SpaceX gave Starlink rival OneWeb a helping hand with the launch of 40 more satellites
into low-earth orbit in January.
13
itself a fascinating study, which I hope
to cover in a future column.
Paul Otlet: the father
of documentation
Paul Otlet (1868-1944) co-founded with Henri La Fontaine the International Institute of
Bibliography, which later became known as the Mundaneum – for more details, visit:
https://bit.ly/pe-mar23-otlet (Image: mundaneum.org).
Language) offering the ability to encode
or ‘mark up’ and tabulate textual information, style the text, embed images and
include those all-important hyperlinks
that allowed users to jump seamlessly
from one web page or server to another.
Gradually, a language evolved, intended
to make data accessible in a consistent
way, and Sir Tim Berners-Lee was duly
credited (and then knighted) as the ‘father
of the web’. Web design software such
as Softquad’s Hot Metal Pro then put
web design within reach of everyday
home computer users for the first time,
as enthusiasts grappled with the use of
HTML and FTP (File Transfer Protocol).
There is a project to restore the world’s
first web address – info.cern.ch – at:
https://bit.ly/pe-mar23-cern1 and the
first-ever web pages can still be seen
at: https://bit.ly/pe-mar23-cern2
The topic of Internet etiquette or ‘netiquette’, a subject that has vanished
from today’s online vocabulary, was
also thought about, and early guidelines
were signed off by Berners-Lee himself,
see: https://bit.ly/pe-mar23-cern3
Building a web presence soon became
a must-have for industry, commerce and
education, sectors that recognised the
need to put their information online
and generally interact better with web
visitors. One example is Intel’s earliest
spidered web page from 1996, archived
at: https://bit.ly/pe-mar23-int1
Graphic content
At a time when web pages contained
little more than ‘silos’ of static information and ‘raster’ (pixel-based) images
(ie, jpegs and gifs), website visitors
were surprised to suddenly see actual
moving graphics for the first time. In the
mid 1990s, the author noted how one
web surfer had marvelled at seeing a
‘spark’ glyph travelling around an Intel
web page: it was an early example of an
animated .gif. An Intel page from 1999
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has another animated .gif and can be
found at: https://bit.ly/pe-mar23-int2
Early on, the Internet’s low-capacity
bandwidth meant that static web pages
were fit only for carrying text, raster
images or lightweight cartoon-style
‘Flash’ animations. Instead of using
blocky pixelated graphics, Flash was a
scalable vector graphic technology that
started life as FutureSplash Animator, a
software suite that was acquired by the
sadly missed Macromedia, before being
swallowed up by the Adobe empire.
Adobe Flash was powerful but ultimately insecure, and is now long obsolete
(as detailed at: https://bit.ly/pe-mar23flash). However, as current generation
web users grew up seeing Flash animations on-screen, the solid-colour cartoon
fashion is still with us today, especially
on TV commercials.
Today’s web pages bear no resemblance to their 1990s origins, with
sophisticated styling and layout rules
being coded into separate ‘cascading
style sheet’ (CSS) files that need quite a
lot of skill to understand and work with.
Ironically, this has made core web design
far less accessible to non-experts than
before. So, instead, pre-built website
templates from the likes of Wix, Ionis
(formerly 1&1), GoDaddy or Web.com
are used to produce sophisticated-looking results with just a few mouse-clicks.
More advanced Wordpress users have a
choice of flexible drag-and-drop software
such as SeedProd, which is enjoyed by
a million users.
The Internet userbase of the nineties,
hitherto the province of professionals,
managerial types, academics, scientists
and computer hobbyists, would witness
a ‘big bang’ when everyone climbed
onboard thanks largely to aggressive
marketing by America Online (AOL).
It was said at the time that ‘the Internet
was cool until everyone discovered it’,
and the way the web changed for ever is
Although Berners-Lee is associated with
the advent of the world-wide web, an interesting publication landed on my desk
that sheds light on developments that
pre-dated the efforts of CERN to make
information accessible to all. According
to the book Cataloging the World by Alex
Wright, an ardent Belgian bibliographer
named Paul Otlet (1868-1944) could be
considered as the forefather of documentation and the Information Age itself. Just
as Stanford computer science students
Larry Page and Sergey Brin developed
a keen interest in data mining, which
evolved into the Google search engine,
Paul Otlet had an unquenchable passion
for indexing written information. He
made it his mission in life to catalogue
every book, magazine and newspaper –
and make them universally accessible,
an ambition that was a very tall order
in the late 1800s.
The book explains how, in the first
half of the 20th century, Otlet foresaw
a system of networked computers – or
‘electric telescopes’ – that would allow
people to search through millions of interlinked documents, images, audio and
video files. His indexing system would
‘unite individuals and institutions of
all stripes – from local bookstores and
classrooms to universities and governments. He named it a réseau mondial or
a ‘worldwide network’. Otlet prophesied
that, ‘From a distance, everyone will be
able to read text, enlarged and limited
to the desired subject, projected on an
individual screen. In this way, everyone from his armchair will be able to
contemplate creation in its entirety or
in certain of its parts.’ The name given
to this early 20th Century ‘web’ was
the Mundaneum.
Otlet toiled tirelessly for half a century to diligently gather and archive
all manner of documentation sourced
from around the world. The Mundaneum buildings, then scattered around
Brussels, would house some 16 million ‘data’ files, glass plate photographs,
postcards and more. Sadly, World War II
got in the way, and Paul Otlet’s utopian
dream of cataloguing a vast wealth of
documentation would never be realised.
This was also due in no small part to
the severe physical and technological
limitations of trying to index massive
amounts of written information. Today,
the Mundaneum – www.mundaneum.
org – is an exhibition and archive centre
located in Mons, Belgium, and travel
and visitor information will be found
at: https://tinyurl.com/3pp6dy4b
Practical Electronics | March | 2023
Among other things, this fascinating
book describes the creation by Otlet
and Belgian politician, pacifist and
lawyer Henri La Fontaine of a practical
methodology for indexing documents,
called the Universal Decimal Classification (UDC). This library cataloguing
system is still in wide use today, see:
https://udcc.org
Alex Wright’s book also details the
evolution of cataloguing and indexing
systems in general, highlighting practical filing systems (wooden cabinets and
all), and he tells us how one particular
centuries-old artefact would transform
the process of indexing: playing cards,
which were made of a stiff board and to
a standard size, and so were ideal for
slotting into early library index systems.
Cataloguing the World by Alex Wright
(2014, Oxford University Press, ISBN
978-0-19-993141-5), is available at
Amazon, for more information see:
www.catalogingtheworld.com.
Just touching base
When I’m having a busy day at my
desk, handling a stream of email, or
surfing around on the web, it’s at peak
periods like these that it’s all too easy
to click a link or reply to an email by
dashing off a few lines, without thinking about it first. Most of us can screen
out and delete scams, phishing emails,
potentially dangerous file attachments
or dodgy-looking web links, but more
subtle and sophisticated techniques
can also be used to defraud victims
without a second thought. Sometimes
the damage is already done before the
victim realises a few oh no seconds later
that they have been ‘had’.
In one example, a friend’s Hotmail
account was hacked, and the imposter copied Sarah’s writing style exactly,
writing that she ‘had lost her purse and
was in tears’, which initially had me
fooled. Only when I called her office
was it confirmed that the email was
an imposter (‘Sarah in tears? You must
be kidding!’), but it was the closest I
ever came to falling for a scam, and I
learned a valuable lesson. Others have
not been so lucky.
It’s very easy to fall for this kind of
imposter. A tiny change to an email
address, for example, changing an ‘l’
(L) for a ‘1’ (one) or a ‘g’ for a ‘9’ would
be enough to fool many recipients,
sometimes snaring them with elaborate frauds that could cost the victim
a small fortune, especially when, for
example, property or house sales were
involved. An email imposter might
manage to convince a house buyer
that a solicitor’s bank account details
were wrong and funds should go to
a new account (his). In business or
commerce, junior staff might receive
fraudulent instructions to change a
vendor’s bank details and rush out an
urgent payment to them, which will
deposit cash into a fraudster’s account,
never to be seen again.
Banks are very keen to highlight the
risks of such fraud and will always warn
customers not to rush when making
payments, but stop, think and check
details very carefully first. The best
source of advice is the UK finance sector’s Take Five website at: https://bit.ly/
pe-mar23-t5 and a comprehensive list
of all types of fraud can be found on the
UK’s Action Fraud website at: https://
bit.ly/pe-mar23-a2z
Other news
Last December’s holiday season saw
owners of electric vehicles discovering the limitations of the UK’s nascent
EV charging network as they travelled
around our overcrowded roads. In the
worst cases, queues of over three hours
were seen in some EV pinch points as
owners of Teslas and other marques were
forced to wait patiently in line, something I know we Brits are fond of doing,
while EV cars jostled for a recharge in
the cold, wintry weather – see the video
at: https://youtu.be/3pbrdFnqSBI
Depending who you ask, between
10-20% of battery electric vehicle (BEV)
adopters are reportedly giving up on EV
ownership altogether and reverting to
petrol (gas) to enjoy greater freedom and
less inconvenience. Otherwise, it seems
that most EV owners are converts to electric propulsion for life. Post-pandemic
sales of electric vehicles continue to rise
again in the UK. The Society of Motor
Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT)
states that in 2022, out of 1.6 million
car sales, some 42% of new cars sold
were petrol and about 17% were BEVs,
making them the second most popular
powertrain sold. New diesel car sales
trailed at just 5%. Tesla took 3.4% of
the UK market, more than twice that
of Honda, for example. The UK is once
again Europe’s second biggest market
for new cars, though global component
shortages continue to stymie production.
The cute-looking Ora Cat EV from
China’s Great Wall Motor (GWM) that
I introduced in January 2022’s column
is finally heading onto our roads, but
(surprise) the price has leapt from
an anticipated £25,000 to £32,000
($39,000), another reason why EVs
are beyond the reach of many motorists in today’s market. You can reserve
your very own Ora First Edition Cat
at: https://gwmora.co.uk
Startup EV battery maker BritishVolt
(Net Work, May 22) has gone into administration after struggling to finish
its gigafactory following financial difficulties last year. Work on its super-site
in northern England ground to a halt
while the firm scrambled to secure more
funding, blaming spiralling energy costs,
inflation and factory design changes. A
cash bailout saw the firm’s value plunge
by more than 95% as BritishVolt sought
new investors to find a way forward.
Final delivery of the new plant was due
in 2027, according to a report in Construction News, but who knows what
will happen now with the company’s
half-finished assets.
Terrington
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Practical Electronics | March | 2023
15
www.poscope.com/epe
Driven to distraction: seventeen Tesla owners queue up to recharge in December
(Image: YouTube/ Geoff Buys Cars).
- USB
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microsteps
microsteps
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PoScope Mega1+
PoScope Mega50
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Recorder, Logic Analyzer, Protocol
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16
Users of Windows 8.1 laptops and
PCs are now on their own, as Microsoft
stopped releasing security updates and
fixes after 10 January 2023. Microsoft
customer service for Windows 8.1 machines has also been withdrawn. There’s
still some life left in older systems like
these, and it isn’t entirely necessary to
scrap them: anti-virus software such as
AVG and Kaspersky Free will still run
satisfactorily and safeguard against most
online threats. The Firefox web browser
will also function, though support for
Windows 8.1 may end this year too. The
final version of Google Chrome that runs
under Windows 8.1 is v109, after which
Windows 10+ is needed – older browsers will still run but will not be updated.
One alternative to a Windows laptop
is a Chromebook, which runs Google’s
ChromeOS and needs cloud connectivity for storage. I liken them to using a
tablet with a keyboard. They are touted
as a safe and secure mobile solution that
dispenses with the need for antivirus
software, but what many users won’t
realise is that Chromebooks have an
end-of-life expiry date too, after which
software support and updates will cease.
Chromebooks are manufactured by some
well-known PC brands (eg, Asus, Acer,
HP, Lenovo). You can check their Auto
Update Expiration (AUE) date at https://
bit.ly/pe-mar23-ch1 and there’s more
general guidance published by Google
at: https://bit.ly/pe-mar23-ch2
The number of Google apps and hardware products that have been shelved
has now reached 280. The latest victims
to find their way to the Google Graveyard include Google Stadia, YouTube
Originals and $200 Google OnHub
wireless routers. More at the website:
https://killedbygoogle.com
Thrash metal
Just to prove that the author suffers
his fair share of IT disasters, regular
readers will know of his fondness
for the Humax HDR-Fox T2 personal
video recorder, a hard disk PVR that
has a near-perfect GUI along with a
searchable programme guide. It remains one of the writer’s favourite
bits of kit, despite poorly supporting
a near-zero range of apps (BBC iPlayer is about all). Having diligently
recorded various series and interesting-looking programmes to watch over
the Christmas holidays, the author
turned on the PVR only to be greeted
by a hard disk error message: showing 0% free, the hard disk had crashed
without warning, taking all the TV recordings with it.
It’s simple enough to swap out the
drive, but hard disks that are optimised for video applications are
essential. The same criteria apply to
NAS storage devices and CCTV surveillance recorders: ordinary desktop
PC drives are made down to a price
and aren’t designed to withstand the
constant thrashing of PVR or CCTV
use, so the choice of suitable hard
disks for video dwindles very rapidly. Currently, Western Digital ‘Purple’
or possibly Seagate ‘Skyhawk’ drives
would be suitable, but these can cost
£50 to £80 or more, and I also ruled
out using a solid-state disk. Another
solution was to search out new old
stock (NOS) from older video disk
drive ranges as befits my old video recorder. It wasn’t long before a Seagate
‘Pipeline’ 1TB drive arrived at a cost
of just £27. Job done, until the next
time anyway.
That’s all for this month’s column.
Readers will find an online summary
with links on the Net Work blog of our
website at: www.electronpublishing.
com – see you next month!
The author can be reached at:
alan<at>epemag.net
Practical Electronics | March | 2023
