Month: June 2023

Enlarge / Wyze's controller is a simple way to give a 50-year-old garage door opener an upgrade. (credit: Tim Stevens)

The humble garage door opener has gained a lot of smarts over the years. New models come complete with battery backups and wireless connectivity, even niceties like laser proximity detectors. But, if you live in a house of an older provenance, the machine that hauls your garage door up and down is probably a simpler sort.

The openers in my garage pre-date the Reagan administration. They're Genie models made of stamped metal and painted a period-appropriate shade of avocado green. They are about as far from smart as a device can get.

Thankfully, the Internet of things, or IoT, is here to help inject a little more IQ into even vintage openers like these. The $54.98 Wyze Garage Door Controller is one of the latest. Yes, Wyze, the company known for its impossibly cheap home security cameras. At just $35 a pop, I've peppered my property with many of the company's little white wireless, waterproof streamers.

Enlarge / Cosmonauts Oleg Artemyev, Denis Matveyev, and Sergey Korsakov pose with a flag of the Luhansk People's Republic on the International Space Station. (credit: Roscosmos)

A new report in the Financial Times appears to confirm that the main Russian space corporation, Roscosmos, is recruiting and training a militia to join the country's war effort against Ukraine.

The "Uran" battalion, which translates to Uranus, is to be made up of employees of Roscosmos, as well as those from its dozens of state-owned subsidiaries in the aerospace business. Recruits will receive a 100,000 ruble ($1,200) sign-up bonus, and a monthly frontline duty salary of 270,000 rubles, according to the report. This is far above the wages paid to most employees of Roscosmos.

Among the recruitment efforts are glossy posters, showing soldiers Photoshopped next to space vehicles, and videos that aggrandize participation in the war. In one of these advertisements, the announcer states, "State corporation Roscosmos calls on you to join the Uran volunteer battalion, where you will be trained for victory in this great war." The report indicates that these recruitment videos are playing in the facilities of some Roscosmos entities, where there are 170,000 employees spread across Russia.