Three jobs for your hands: a galaxy, an airship, a dead memory stick
A thin night, and the only thread is method. Read the sky, lift on hot air, chase a fault down to one broken part.
Three projects crossed the desk tonight. Nothing connects them except this: each is a method a person could run start to finish. Read the sky and find a galaxy. Lift a craft on nothing but hot air. Chase a dead circuit down to the one part that broke.
There is a skywatching guide by Bruce McClure, published by EarthSky on October 7, 2026, that shows you how to find the Andromeda Galaxy by eye, using Cassiopeia. EarthSky calls Cassiopeia one of the easiest constellations to pick out, an M or W shape of stars. In northern autumn it sits above the northeastern horizon at nightfall and climbs higher as the evening goes on. Find the M or W, pick out its brightest star, Schedar, and follow where it points.
The target is Messier 31, or M31, the nearest large spiral galaxy to our Milky Way and about 2.5 million light-years away, the guide says. To the naked eye it is a fuzzy patch. Binoculars help. You need a dark sky for it, and the post comes right out and tells readers to leave the city behind this weekend and go galaxy-hunting.
Hackaday wrote up a radio-controlled airship on October 7, 2026, built by the maker Avery Flies, that lifts on propane-heated air inside a 27-foot nylon envelope. Writing for Hackaday, Tyler August put it this way: "Like a hot air balloon, it gets its lift from the density difference between hot air and the regular atmosphere." The burner runs on two small barbecue-style propane tanks.
Everything that moves on it is electric. A 70 mm electric ducted fan pushes air into the balloon so the envelope holds its shape. A brushless DC motor spins an 18-inch propeller for thrust. Steering is a fabric rudder about a meter across, swung by a winch servo pulled off an R/C sailboat. Combustion lifts; the small electric parts do the rest.
The third one is a rescue. A repair shop that posts as northwestrepair brought back two failed registered ECC DDR5 memory sticks, Maya Posch reported for Hackaday on October 7, 2026. The 128 GB module had failed DDR5 training at boot, which pointed to cracked solder joints under the DRAM packages. One reflow cycle fixed it.
The 256 GB module was the hard one, completely dead. After swapping and reprogramming the SPD ROM, running several reflow cycles and reballing an IC, the shop traced it to a shorted multilayer ceramic capacitor and a broken power management IC, probably from the stick being dropped. "Cracked MLCCs do appear to be a very common cause of failures, as they're often used as filter capacitors," Posch wrote.
None of the three needs the grid, the internet, or a supply chain. A star points the way. Hot air does the lifting. A fault narrows to one part you can swap out. That is the whole idea: look at what is in front of you and work out how it already does the job.
Sources
- Find the Andromeda Galaxy using Cassiopeia · EarthSky, Tonight
- Don’t Worry, This R/C Airship is Supposed To Be On Fire · Hackaday
- Repairing a Couple of Very Expensive Registered DDR5 RAM Sticks · Hackaday