Welcome to the Galmon project! Our goals are to monitor the major Global Navigation Satellite Systems, including GPS, GLONASS, Galileo and BeiDou, but also Space Base Augmentation Systems like WAAS, EGNOS and GAGAN. Galmon is an open source & open data project with a community of over 30 station operators running...

Last year I wrote a post listing what I had been doing in 2018, because it turned out it was a lot, so much that it was useful to summarise it somewhat. This year there is less to report, but people have wondered what I’ve been up to. And I’ve learned that if you leave room for speculation about your intentions,...

What is life? This question keeps many people awake at night and has led to rafts of definitions, some involving features (procreation, metabolism and so forth), some involving chemistry, entropy or energy flux and some are of a more philosophical bent. A BBC article noted there are over 100 definitions of life and...

Note: This article covers a lot of well-trodden ground, although this post has the benefit of 1) being rather brief and 2) advancing slightly on from earlier work. Noam Chomsky wrote 39 dense pages of philosophy on this subject in “Mysteries of Nature: How Deeply Hidden”. Evolutionary’s leading light Ernst Meyr...

Dear anonymous internet user, dear corporate employee hiding behind a gmail.com address, dear “GitHub account with a single issue”, Thank you for your interest in my free software, my project or the documentation I wrote for you. I am happy to hear you want to ask a question, have a problem, or perhaps even inform...

This page collects links to raw and live sources on how well the planet, including its vital infrastructure, is doing right now, potentially visualised attractively. But the key thing is, we want Real Data, from the most direct sources. Sources are expected to be realtime or at least updated frequently. Mere...

By bert hubert / bert@hubertnet.nl This post is an excerpt of a far longer post on Galileo, its structures and the cause of the outage. Here we’ll only focus on the outage - the potential underlying reasons behind it are described in the full article. Since the week-long outage in July I’ve been fascinated by...

By bert hubert / bert@hubertnet.nl In this post I want to document some mostly non-technical aspects of the EU’s Galileo Satellite Navigation Network. I will also share some observations on how things are going, and perhaps how they could be improved. NOTE: A shorter version of this article, focusing only on the...

The Netherlands is struggling with a shortage of primary school teachers, which as a nice side effect means that I get ample opportunities to do technical propaganda in the name of education. This is a quick writeup of a lesson on how GPS (or in general, satellite based navigation) works. I’d like to thank Jasper...

Note: For context, please see this article on the Economist Job. I also want to thank Job Snijders who was of great help in writing this article. How the Internet Leaks A few weeks ago large swathes of the internet stopped working around the world. The cause was quickly found: a computer networking mistake over at a...

Note: For context, please see this article on the Economist Job. This is a condensed and updated version of my earlier post On the pan-genome. Towards a multi-stranded genome Given that the completion of the human genome project was announced in 2003, one could be forgiven for thinking the kinks would have been...

Over the holiday, I ran into this job advertisement from The Economist: The Economist is looking for a new Science and Technology correspondent. Knowledge of the field, an ability to write informatively, succinctly and wittily, and an insatiable curiosity are more important attributes than prior journalistic...