Hackaday Links: October 9, 2022

Don't you just hate walking out of the bathroom with toilet paper stuck to your shoe? It's a bit like what happened when the Mars Ingenuity helicopter picked up strange debris on one of its landing pads. The foreign object was spotted on the helicopter's downward-pointing navigation camera and looks to the world like a toilet paper streamer floating in the rotor. The helicopter eventually tossed the debris, which floated to the Martian surface without further incident, and with no apparent damage to the aircraft. NASA hasn't said more about what the debris isn't - aliens - than what it is, which of course is hard to say at this point. We'll take a chance and say it's probably something we brought over there, probably a piece of plastic waste lost during the descent and landing phase of the mission. Or, you know, it's closer to Halloween, a time when the landscape is magically festooned with toilet paper overnight. You never know.

In drone news closer to home, there's a story in France of a heist with an unlikely accomplice: a DJI drone. The burglary occurred in Reims in January, and the thieves pulled it off by forcing a grille covering a ventilation duct towards a "technical room" supporting ATMs. In heist movies, this would be the point where the smallest member of the team would grease up and slide down the vent, potentially getting stuck or having a crippling attack of claustrophobia. But instead, they flew a Mavic Mini through the vent and into the room, where the drone was used to press a button to open the door to the room. They pocketed €150,000, a pretty good return on investment for the drone. We can't say we condone theft, but we do appreciate a good heist story, and this one has a nice tech twist. We just hope everyone wore nice costumes.

If you're flying with Lufthansa, the German airline now prohibits Apple AirTags in checked baggage. Or more precisely, AirTags can only be carried in checked baggage if they are completely switched off, which of course makes them useless. Obviously, Lufthansa sees this as a "safety precaution", using the same logic that phones and other devices should be turned off during takeoff and landing, lest avionics chaos ensue. But could it be something else? Perhaps Lufthansa – and other airlines sure to follow its lead – might think that squads of tech-savvy travelers knowing exactly where their lost luggage is when they claim the luggage is untraceable is perhaps a bad look? We don't know how the airlines intend to enforce this ban, so it will be interesting to watch this one unfold.

At the last meatspace superconference in 2019, we remember the enthusiastic words of attendees who traveled to Pasadena by train rather than plane. The trip was long enough and the wagon was roomy enough for them to work on projects along the way, which felt like a blast. There were plans to expand that idea for Supercon 2020, even talking about renting a private car for the trip from Seattle to Pasadena for a rolling mini-hackathon. Well, we all know what happened to that plan, as well as the 2021 plan, but Supercon 2022 is here, and so is the #HackerTrain! It will be on the Amtrak Coast Starlight train from Seattle, an absolutely stunning journey through some of this country's most beautiful scenery - trust us; we rode almost the entire route to Supercon in 2019 and it was the trip of a lifetime. It looks like the train is leaving on 3/11, so if you're in the Venn diagram overlap area of ​​Supercon attendees, train enthusiasts, and those heading to Seattle, consider hopping on the HackerTrain.

And finally, what could go wrong with the Central Intelligence Agency's plan to resurrect extinct species? At least that's what the headlines tell us, though further reading is needed to understand what's going on here, as anything about the US intelligence community is noticeable. The company that is actually trying to genetically "de-extinguish" long-dead species, not just the woolly mammoth but also the Tasmanian tiger and dodo, is called Colossal Biosciences. They have a plan to not only produce a woolly mammoth calf with genetic engineering, but also to "re-wild" it...