Just when you thought the saga of the Bitcoin wallet lost in a Welsh landfill was over, another chapter of the story appears to be starting. Regular readers will recall the years-long efforts of Bitcoin early adopter James Howells to recover a hard drive tossed out by his ex back in 2013. The disk, which contains a wallet holding about 8,000 Bitcoin, is presumed to be in a landfill overseen by the city council of Newport, which denied every request by Howells to gain access to the dump. The matter looked well and truly settled (last item) once a High Court judge weighed in. But the announcement that the Newport Council plans to cap and close the landfill this fiscal year and turn part of it into a solar farm has rekindled his efforts.

Howells and his investment partners have expressed interest in buying the property as-is, in the hopes of recovering the $780 million-ish fortune. We don’t think much of their odds, especially given the consistently negative responses he’s gotten over the last twelve years. Howells apparently doesn’t fancy his odds much either, since the Council’s argument that closing the landfill to allow him to search would cause harm to the people of Newport was seemingly made while they were actively planning the closure. It sure seems like something foul is afoot, aside from the trove of dirty diapers Howells seeks to acquire, of course.

When all else fails, blame the monkey. The entire nation of Sri Lanka suffered a blackout last Sunday, with a hapless monkey being fingered as the guilty party. The outage began when a transformer at a substation south of the capital city of Colombo went offline. Unconfirmed reports are that a troop of monkeys was fighting, as monkeys do, and unadvisedly brought their tussle over the fence and into the substation yard. At some point, one of the warring animals sought the high ground on top of a transformer, with predictable results. How turning one monkey into air pollution managed to bring down an entire country’s grid is another question entirely.

From the enshittification files comes this horrifying story of in-dashboard ads. Stellantis, maker of Jeep, Dodge, Chrysler, and other brands that can reliably be counted upon to be littered with bad grounds, has decided to start putting full-screen pop-up advertisements on infotainment systems. As if that’s not atrocious enough, the ads will run not just when the car is first started, but every time the vehicle comes to a stop in traffic. The ads will hawk things like extended warranties, at least initially, but we predict it won’t be long before other upsell attempts are made. It would be pretty easy to pull in other data to customize ads, such as an offer to unlock heated seats if the outside temperature gets a little chilly, or even flog a pumpkin spice latte when the GPS shows you’re near a Starbucks. The possibilities are endless, and endlessly revolting, because if one car company does it, the rest will quickly follow. Ad-blocking wizards, this may be your next big target.

And finally, calling all hams, or at least those of us with an interest in digital modes. Our own Al Williams will be making an appearance on the DMR Tech Net to talk about his Hackaday recent article on Digital Mobile Radio. The discussion will be on Monday, February 17 at 00:30 UTC (19:30 EST), on Brandmeister talk group 31266. If you’ve got a DMR-capable radio, DMR Tech Net has a handy guide to getting the talk group into your code plug. If none of that makes any sense, relax — you can still tune in online using this link and the Player button in the upper right. Or, if ham radio isn’t your thing, Al will be making a second appearance the next night but on a Zoom call to discuss “How to Become Rich and (almost) Famous on Hackaday,” which is his collection of tips and tricks for getting your project to catch a Hackaday writer’s eye.

This week, we witnessed a couple of space oopsies as both Starship and New Glenn suffered in-flight mishaps on the same day. SpaceX’s Starship was the more spectacular, with the upper stage of the seventh test flight of the full stack experiencing a “rapid unscheduled disassembly” thanks to a fire developing in the aft section of the stage somewhere over the Turks and Caicos islands, about eight and a half minutes after takeoff from Boca Chica. The good news is that the RUD happened after first-stage separation, and that the Super Heavy booster was not only able to safely return to the pad but also made another successful “chopsticks” landing on the tower. Sorry, that’s just never going to get old.

On the Bezos side of the billionaire rocket club, the maiden flight of Blue Origin’s New Glenn ended with the opposite problem. The upper stage reached orbit, but the reusable booster didn’t make it back to the landing barge parked off the Bahamas. What exactly happened isn’t clear yet, but judging by the telemetry the booster was coming in mighty fast, which may indicate that the engines didn’t restart fully and the thing just broke up when it got into the denser part of the atmosphere.

While we’re not huge fans of doorbell cameras, mainly on privacy grounds but also because paying a monthly fee for service just seems silly, we might reconsider our position after one captured video of a meteorite strike. The impact, which occurred at the Prince Edward Island home of Joe Velaidum, happened back in July but the video was only just released; presumably the delay was for confirmation that the object was indeed a meteorite. Joe’s Ring camera captured video of something yeeting out of the sky and crashing into the sidewalk next to the driveway, in the exact spot he’d been standing only moments before. It’s hard to say if he would have been killed by the impact, but it sure wouldn’t have been fun.

While we’re on space-adjacent topics, we saw an interesting story about a satellite that was knocked out of service for a couple of days thanks to 2024 being a leap year. The Eutelsat OneWeb communications satellite went offline on the last day of the year, apparently because some software wasn’t prepared for the fact that 2024 had 366 days. It’s not clear if this caused any problems with the satellite itself, although the company said the problem was with the “ground segment” so it likely wasn’t. Engineers were able to work through the problem and get it back online within 48 hours, but we’re left wondering how something like this could happen with so many standard libraries out there that specifically deal with leap day calculations.

It’s that time of year again — HOPE_16 is gearing up, and tickets for the August 15-17 conference at St. John’s University in Queens are already on sale. It looks like the Call for Proposals is active now too, so if you’ve got a talk you’d like to give, get going.

And finally, sad news for a hapless early adopter of Bitcoin, whose eleven-year effort to locate a hard drive with 8,000 Bitcoin on it has reached a legal end. Back in 2013, a hard drive owned by James Howells containing the Bitcoin wallet was accidentally disposed of, ending up in a landfill in Newport, Wales. Howells immediately asked for permission to search for the missing fortune, which at the time was worth about $7.5 million. This seems to us like his first mistake; in light of the potential payout, we’d probably have risked a trespassing charge. Howells spent the next couple of years trying to get access while assembling a recovery team, with the effort driven by the ever-increasing price of Bitcoin. Howells also brought suit against the council to get access, an effort that a High Court judge brought to an end last week. So Howells is out of luck, and the hard drive, now worth $765 million, still lies in the landfill.