Month: June 2021

Enlarge / Starlink satellite dish and equipment in the Idaho panhandle's Coeur d'Alene National Forest. (credit: Wandering-coder)

A Starlink beta user in Arizona said he lost Internet service for over seven hours yesterday when the satellite dish overheated, demonstrating one of the drawbacks of SpaceX's broadband service. When the user's Internet service was disrupted, the Starlink app provided an error message saying, "Offline: Thermal shutdown." The dish "overheated" and "Starlink will reconnect after cooling down," the error message said.

(credit: Reddit user SocietyTomorrow)

The user, named Martin, posted a screenshot of the error message on Reddit. He contacted Starlink support, which told him, "Dishy will go into thermal shutdown at 122F and will restart when it reaches 104F." Martin decided to give the dish a little water so it could cool down. He pointed a sprinkler at Dishy, and once it cooled enough to turn back on, "I immediately heard YouTube resume playback," he wrote yesterday.

But the Internet restoration was short-lived, Martin told Ars in a chat today.

Enlarge / Detail showing fashionable pointed shoes of two English courtiers of Richard II, 14th century. One has two different colored shoes and chains hanging from his knees, gold necklace. Hand-painted copy of 14th-century art (c. 1847). (credit: Culture Club / Getty Images)

As many as one in three Americans suffer from bunions, those painful bumps that form on the outside of the big toe. Wearing ill-fitting shoes that cramp the toes, or high heels, can make the pain even worse, since they increase pressure on the big toe joint. That doesn't deter people from wearing them, however. It's a well-established maxim that sometimes one must suffer in order to be fashionable.

According to a recent study published in the International Journal of Paleopathology, people in the European Middle Ages also suffered in the name of fashion—in this case, shoes with exaggerated pointed toes. University of Cambridge archaeologists studied skeletal remains excavated from Cambridge and found evidence that bunions were far more prevalent in remains from the 14th and 15th centuries than in those from earlier centuries, when more pragmatic footwear was popular. This may, in turn, have increased the risk of suffering fractures from falls.

"We were quite fortunate that we happened to be studying a time period where there was a clear change in shoe fashion somewhere in the middle of our sample," co-author Piers Mitchell told The Guardian. "People really did wear ridiculously long, pointy shoes, just like they did in [the] Blackadder [TV series]." (You can see series star Rowan Atkinson sporting such shoes below and in this clip from the S1 episode "Born to Be King.")

Enlarge / Fluorescent tagged DNA is the key to a new storage system. (credit: Gerald Barber, Virginia Tech)

DNA-based data storage appears to offer solutions to some of the problems created by humanity's ever-growing capacity to create data we want to hang on to. Compared to most other media, DNA offers phenomenal data densities. If stored in the right conditions, DNA doesn't require any energy to maintain the data for centuries. And due to DNA's centrality to biology, we're always likely to maintain the ability to read it.

But DNA is not without its downsides. Right now, there's no standard method of encoding bits in the pattern of bases of a DNA strand. Synthesizing specific sequences remains expensive. And accessing the data using current methods is slow and depletes the DNA being used for storage. Try to access the data too many times and you have to restore it in some way—a process that risks introducing errors.

A team from MIT and the Broad Institute has decided to tackle some of these issues. In the process, the researchers have created a DNA-based image-storage system that is somewhere between a file system and a metadata-based database.

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Today's Dealmaster is headlined by a nice bundle for Nintendo Switch owners: those who pick up a 12-month Nintendo Switch Online Family Membership at its usual going rate of $35 can currently get a 128GB SanDisk microSD card for no extra cost. For reference, the microSD card included in the deal typically retails around $25 online. The offer is currently available at several retailers and, according to Target's listing, will expire June 19.

Generally speaking, Nintendo's paid online service isn't quite as essential for Switch owners as Sony's PlayStation Plus and Microsoft's Xbox Live are for their respective platforms, which tend to put a greater emphasis multiplayer games as whole. Still, a membership is required to utilize the online components of several (but not all) Switch games—including Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, Overwatch, and the like—and make cloud save backups. It gives access to more than 100 mostly-well-regarded NES and Super Nintendo games, too, as well a couple of inventive battle royale games in Tetris 99 and Pac-Man 99. Note that this deal specifically applies to a Family Membership, which can cover up to eight different Switch users in a designated "family group." If you're only buying for yourself, a 12-month solo membership still goes for $20.

The microSD card, meanwhile, is SanDisk's officially licensed and plainly named microSDXC Card for Nintendo Switch, which we've recommended in the past. It's a UHS-I card with a U3 or V30 speed rating: not the fastest option on the market, but speedy enough to comfortably record 4K video and plenty capable enough to stash and run games on the current Switch hardware. A microSD card is still borderline essential for Switch owners given that the console only comes with 32GB of storage on its own; this one has remained quick and dependable in our long-term testing.

Enlarge / Please show your retired operating system the respect it deserves, with a proper Viking funeral. (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

A new Windows visual refresh, code-named Sun Valley. is on the way this summer. Until recently, we've assumed that this update would simply bring a new look for Windows 10 21H2—the major release of Windows 10 in the second half of 2021—but new information in the form of posted end-of-life (EOL) dates for Windows 10 and a leaked screenshot of something purporting to be "Windows 11 Pro" heavily imply that serious changes are on the way.

Windows 10 EOL in 2025

Rumors of Sun Valley being "Windows 11" have been circulating for months—but until recently, we didn't put much stock in them. Windows 10 was intended to be Windows as a Service—a radical departure from the prior era of new, major Windows releases every three years or so. It seemed likely that Sun Valley's "sweeping visual rejuvenation" would result in Windows 10 21H2 looking very different from Windows 10 21H1. Why fix what's not broken?

The first strong indication that bigger things may be coming landed last week from a Microsoft-published EOL notice for Windows 10. "Windows 10 Home and Pro"—no codenames, no minor version numbers—is now listed as retiring on October 14, 2025. "Retiring" is a part of the Modern Lifecycle Policy and means that the retired product leaves support entirely; this does not follow the old Fixed Lifecycle Policy with "mainstream" and "extended" support. Retired is retired—hit the pasture.

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  A Subscriber Edition page in the Podcasts app. [credit: Apple ]

As previously announced in April, Apple has today launched its new Podcasts Subscriptions feature on iOS, iPadOS, and macOS. The system allows users to subscribe to podcasts (or groups of podcasts called Channels) for extra perks.

Perks can include early access to episodes, as well as ad-free listening. Some shows may offer bonus content for subscribers as well. You can subscribe to a podcast with just one button using Apple's payment system.

Podcast creators can charge whatever they please, with the minimum subscription fee being $0.49 per month. Apple takes 30 percent of that amount for the first year, but if a subscriber remains active beyond 12 months, Apple switches to taking just 15 percent of that subscription fee.

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  Samus Aran is back in a 2D adventure. [credit: Nintendo ]

Nintendo rolled out dozens of game and feature announcements over the course of a nearly 40-minute Direct presentation today. If you don't have the time or inclination to watch the entire video, we've gathered all of the relevant news in a convenient quick-access format below.

Upcoming Switch exclusives

• Metroid Dread is the first completely new 2D Metroid game in about 19 years and focuses on "a new feel, showcasing a variety of threats." It's coming to Switch on October 8 as Nintendo continues work on Metroid Prime 4. Read more in our separate write-up.