So you say you missed the Great Solar Storm of 2024 along with its attendant aurora? We feel you on that; the light pollution here was too much for decent viewing, and it had been too long a day to make a drive into the deep dark of the countryside survivable. But fear not — the sunspot that raised all the ruckus back at the beginning of May has survived the trip across the far side of the sun and will reappear in early June, mostly intact and ready for business. At least sunspot AR3664 seems like it’s still a force to be reckoned with, having cooked off an X-class flare last Tuesday just as it was coming around from the other side of the Sun. Whether 3664 will be able to stir up another G5 geomagnetic storm remains to be seen, but since it fired off an X-12 flare while it was around the backside, you never know. Your best bet to stay informed in these trying times is the indispensable Dr. Tamitha Skov.

Back here on our soon-to-be-incinerated planet, you know we’ve reached the peak of the AI hype curve when you see something like AI competitive thermal paste being hawked. That’s the marketing niche Cooler Master has staked out for its new Cyrofuze 5 thermal paste, which is supposed to somehow make your computer smarter by keeping it cooler? Or maybe not; it’s not really clear from Cooler Master’s Chinese website for the product what the AI advantages are, and sadly the Cryofuze 5 line doesn’t seem to be offered on the US site. Which is a shame, because the new smartening goo comes in six designer colors that for all the world look like a Bob Ross palette — it that alizarin crimson and phthalo blue? Who in their right mind wouldn’t want a chance to color coordinate their thermal grease while simultaneously making their machine more AI competitive?

Speaking of AI, we’ve covered a lot of interactions between humans and autonomous vehicles in this column, with most of them tending toward the violent. But we’ve finally got a more heartwarming interaction to report, where a pedestrian helped a stuck delivery vehicle out of a tough spot. The truck, which is really only a little bigger than those munchie-delivering robots that ply college campuses, maneuvered itself onto a driveway sporting a pair of speed bumps spaced almost exactly as far apart as the vehicle’s wheelbase. The front wheels made it over the first bump, but when it came time to climb both obstacles at the same time, the poor little truck just couldn’t manage it. The fact that the bumps were a significant fraction of the wheel diameter on the tiny truck likely didn’t help, but thankfully a pedestrian took pity and gave the little fella a push. The bot’s rear wheels seemed to be having trouble clearing the last bump, too; the video cuts off too soon to tell, but we’ll give it the benefit of the doubt.

Victim blame is generally in bad form, but if you don’t even bother to change the default password, can you really call a cyberattack a “break-in”? That’s the question we have after learning of an alarming increase in cyberattacks against public infrastructure in the US, including public water supplies in Pennsylvania and Texas. While the separate attacks resulted in no damage to the physical plants, the article links to a report listing some attacks that did result in damage, including an intentional release of 800,000 liters of sewage in Australia in 2000.

And finally, speaking of cybersecurity, if you’ve ever procrastinated on keeping your OS patched, what happened when a Windows XP machine was put online with no protection should spur you into action. YouTuber Eric Parker put an XP machine on the raw internet — no router, no firewall, and no anti-malware software. It only took about ten minutes for the first signs of infection to appear, and things went downhill pretty fast from there. Parker notes that the same setup on a Windows 7 machine resulted in no major malware infections after several hours, which should be a gut punch to those who fought so long against updating from XP.

If there was one question we heard most often this week, it was “Did you see it?” With “it” referring to the stunning display of aurora borealis — and australis, we assume — on and off for several days. The major outburst here in North America was actually late last week, with aurora extending as far south as Puerto Rico on the night of the tenth. We here in North Idaho were well-situated for prime viewing, but alas, light pollution made things a bit tame without a short drive from the city lights. Totally worth it:

Hat tip to Tom Maloney for the pics. That last one is very reminiscent of what we saw back in 1989 with the geomagnetic storm that knocked Québec’s grid offline, except then the colors were shifted much more toward the red end of the spectrum back then.

Despite this being the strongest solar storm in almost 20 years, the damage was nearly non-existent, with reports limited to minor power grid disturbances and some GPS and satellite outages. Starlink service was reportedly impacted, but luckily no satellites deorbited, a distinct possibility for recently launched satellites still in lower orbits due to increased atmospheric drag. Still, it feels like we dodged a cosmic bullet here, and if you have any doubt about that, check this out — it’s a comparison of the sunspot group that just got us with the Carrington Event sunspots from 1859. What a difference a few degrees of latitude makes.

From the “Not Everything Needs to be IoT” files comes a story about the perils of security as an afterthought. The condensed version: tech journalist Kevin Purdy’s new home came with a Rinnai tankless water heater. He hooked up the Rinnai Control-R WiFi module to control the appliance remotely from a smartphone app, and as any good home automation geek would, eventually tried integrating it into Home Assistant. But then he discovered that for an early version of Control-R, there was absolutely no security on the company’s cloud service, making it possible to control any connected Rinnai water heater knowing nothing more than the user’s email address. No auth tokens, no passwords, nothing. Rinnai seems to have added authentication to their newer Rinnai Central system, but the whole story is worth a read, not least for the weaselly responses from Rinnai through a PR firm.

If you thought Clippy, the annoying animated desktop assistant from the bad old days of Microsoft Office 97, had died a well-deserved death in obscurity, think again. Clippy is back, this time as a wise-cracking assistant in an open-source tool called Winpilot, which is designed to eliminate bloatware and turn off annoying defaults in Windows 11. The irony of including an icon of annoyance in an application designed to make your user experience less annoying is rich indeed. It’s not really clear how Winpilot’s author, Belmin Hasanovic, is getting away with using Clippy; we’d have thought Microsoft would protect their IP a little more vigorously, especially when it says things like, “You know something, champ? This is bullsh*t. I started this gig in ’97. My ultimate goal was to take over Bill Gates job.”

The list of announced talks for HOPE XV keeps growing. It’s hard to say how many talks were added since last week, but it looks like a lot. Better get your proposals in soon if you want to have a chance at a talk.

And finally, we’ve featured the work of Montana wheelwright Dave Engels before, specifically the process of shrink-fitting iron tires onto the massive wooden wheels he builds for things like timber carts and borax wagons. The whole thing is a ballet of fire, steel, wood, smoke, steam, and people, and never fails to entertain. But giant wheels aren’t the only thing Engels works on, and some of the smaller wheels have pretty interesting processes behind them too. Fitting rubber tires to cart wheels is a perfect example, and one with a lot of surprises. We had no idea that these tires have steel wires running through them, to keep them firmly seated on the wooden wheel, which also has a shrink-fit steel rim. The machine that tensions the wires while compressing the rubber is fascinatingly complex, too. We were also taken by the parallels between this machine and a modern tire machine, as well as the clear lineage between solid rubber buggy wheels and modern pneumatic tires.