[HN Gopher] macOS menu bar app that shows how full the ISS urine...
___________________________________________________________________
macOS menu bar app that shows how full the ISS urine tank is in
real time
Author : ajdude
Score : 968 points
Date : 2024-12-24 22:38 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| bagels wrote:
| I wish there was more written in the readme about the motivation
| for this project.
| jsheard wrote:
| Knowing the status of the ISS piss tank is its own reward.
| jaennaet wrote:
| See, you get it.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| I mean,
|
| > Not the epitome of good coding practices since this was my
| first Swift & macOS app ever, may break in exciting ways at the
| slightest excuse.
|
| sounds like it's a learning exercise. One of my first
| interesting programs was a weather app; this is just a weirder
| version of that.
| beAbU wrote:
| I wonder how many amazing things put there died a crib death
| because the creator struggled to find a "real" motivation for
| it's existence.
|
| I reckon more often than not "because I wanted to" is more than
| enough for many things.
| dialup_sounds wrote:
| I expected to see a CoC in the repo.
| jaennaet wrote:
| Good point! I'll have to add that in at some point after the
| holidays.
|
| My motivation was entirely that I thought this was both a
| hilariously stupid use of a space station's telemetry stream,
| but also kind of amazing at the same time. Also a great excuse
| to learn Swift, but the sheer ridiculousness was what drove me.
|
| Like I said in my earlier Show HN post on this (I think? Or
| maybe on Bluesky), it's remarkable that we live in a world
| where it takes an afternoon to bang out a joke application that
| reads actual realtime telemetry data from a space station's
| toilets.
| zanderwohl wrote:
| I enjoy that you learned how to use Swift in some new ways,
| including the MacOS menu bar. This is a perfect practice
| project, it seems.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| I... Did _not_ know that was public information.
| Oarch wrote:
| It's publicly funded!
| pooper wrote:
| I didn't know that working for a state-funded college meant
| my pay information would be public information until one day
| someone told me they googled me and found how little I was
| making...
| qingcharles wrote:
| Username checks out.
| bowsamic wrote:
| I was a LIGO member, which is publicly funded, and our live
| data stream was extremely secret, and in fact when you
| publish a paper you have to go through an internal review
| process called P&P that checks if you're using any secret
| data without permission
| lostlogin wrote:
| An API may have saved a Freedom Of Information Act request.
| btown wrote:
| > I found out about the data stream from https://iss-
| mimic.github.io/Mimic/, which has considerably more and more
| interesting stats than just how full the piss tank is.
|
| > I will not be adding any of them.
|
| This, right here, is how you communicate non-goals of a project.
| Just perfect open-source communication best practices. We all
| stand to learn from this project.
|
| (Though, predictably, some of us sit to interact with it.)
| omoikane wrote:
| > https://iss-mimic.github.io/Mimic/
|
| Be sure to also read the project page:
|
| https://github.com/ISS-Mimic/Mimic
| spoonfeeder006 wrote:
| All that data seems would be really helpful to help me do some
| nasty social engineering with the ISS and crew
|
| Only thing now is how to haul my ass up there to do that
| dylan604 wrote:
| > Only thing now is how to haul my ass up there to do that
|
| If you take a ride on Starliner, you might need to ensure
| your schedule is extremely flexible
| brian-armstrong wrote:
| "I'm calling about your space station's extended warranty"
| voxelghost wrote:
| I don't know why, but I imagine a situation where all
| communication has broken down, and the only working sensor is
| the one in the piss-tank, and the astronauts have to
| communicate in morse by modulating the delta in the tank. And
| some guy with ADHD, and this menu bar app installed, is going
| to figure out whats going on what is going on, and save them
| all. (Hey, Hollywood - if this turns into a movie - I want my
| royalties)
| semitones wrote:
| Brilliant!
| dhosek wrote:
| The hardest thing for me to believe in _The Martian_ was that
| one of the astronauts would have brought a book with a
| printed ASCII table in it.
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| I mean, why even use an ASCII table at that point? For
| initial comm you could just do A=0, B=1 etc. for initial
| comms (until you get to the point you want to reprogram the
| eeprom) you can have higher bandwidth communication.
| hoten wrote:
| If I remember correctly, the book addressed this. 26
| division of a circle was too much for reliable
| determination of which sign the camera was pointing at,
| so 16 (hex) made the angles more workable.
|
| If we're talking efficiency, I wonder why he didn't
| consider Morse code. Well I guess that's easy, even
| though it's faster it takes a skilled operator to read it
| in realtime, and he had little time to write any
| individual bit of information down (cumbersomely writing
| in sand is slow)
| Thorrez wrote:
| You can't represent 26 possibilities with a single hex
| digit. So it'll require 2 hex digits.
|
| If you're going to require 2 digits, then that can be
| done with 2 decimal digits as well. So there's no need
| for hex, and no need for ascii tables.
|
| However, if you need more than just the 26 letters, e.g.
| if you also need numbers and/or punctuation, then ascii
| might be useful, and hex might be useful to encode ascii
| into 2 digits.
| vasco wrote:
| If I send you this: 48697468657265
|
| Why do I need to send it to you 2 digits at a time? It's
| valid hex that converts to ascii, only 1 symbol at a
| time, which is how he communicated.
|
| He could've done it with just a card for 0 and another
| for 1 if he really wanted.
| Thorrez wrote:
| I didn't say it needs to be sent 2 digits at a time.
|
| The points of my previous comment:
|
| * Ascii is only needed if we need to encode things other
| than just letters (or if case matters).
|
| * Hex is only better than decimal if hex allows the
| number of digits to be reduced. If we need to only encode
| 26 elements, then hex doesn't reduce the number of digits
| compared to decimal, so hex has no advantage over decimal
| in the 26-element case.
|
| Using just 0 or 1 will increase the number of digits
| needed, so has a clear disadvantage compared to hex or
| decimal.
| vasco wrote:
| > Hex is only better than decimal if hex allows the
| number of digits to be reduced. If we need to only encode
| 26 elements, then hex doesn't reduce the number of digits
| compared to decimal, so hex has no advantage over decimal
| in the 26-element case
|
| He had more than 26 things to encode, I believe he
| started with numbers, letters and a question mark.
|
| > Using just 0 or 1 will increase the number of digits
| needed, so has a clear disadvantage compared to hex or
| decimal
|
| Using 0 or 1 decreases that to only 3 cards (including
| question mark), and increasing the safety margin to
| 120deg on the setup he had. It'd take longer but be more
| robust.
| shortrounddev2 wrote:
| He later painstakingly translates machine code
| transmitted via the camera to the rover which patches the
| software to allow him to chat via text, so hex came in
| handy
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| Too bad he didn't know Hangul (Korean writing system). He
| could have managed to communicate well enough with half a
| dozen chars.
| frosted-flakes wrote:
| It wasn't a book, it was on Johansen's laptop. And the
| ASCII was for communicating by pointing the camera on the
| mars rover, because it couldn't be positioned precisely
| enough for 26 different positions.
| artemiszx wrote:
| I mean they had laptops; just
|
| for (unsigned char i = 0; i < 127; i++) { printf("%x:
| %c\n", i, i); }
| Munksgaard wrote:
| Or `man ascii`
| ed_elliott_asc wrote:
| Surely `spaceman ascii`
| IgorPartola wrote:
| It's a book. Explaining a lookup table is way easier for
| a reader than explaining this code snippet.
| elygre wrote:
| I love how that's the hardest thing to believe.
| sudhirj wrote:
| Why, wasn't The Martian an example of hard sci-fi, a
| story that conforms strongly to the known laws of
| physics? Not necessarily probability, economics or
| politics, but hard sci-fi is written to be plausible.
| simpaticoder wrote:
| The story is enjoyable, but like most such tales is
| amounts to building a string of deadly obstacles for the
| protagonist and then giving him _just enough_ to survive
| each one. (FWIW the least realistic step was the ship
| turning around to get him, because spaceships typically
| don 't carry any extra fuel. But in general there were
| too many resources lying around for him to use,
| especially the unattended lift vehicle. The plutonium
| core and the potatoes were a nice touch, though.)
| ffsm8 wrote:
| > _Hey, Hollywood - if this turns into a movie - I want my
| royalties_
|
| We already have precident on that topic via that short story
| about the reverse isekai airplane carrier to ancient Rome
| that was written on Reddit in early 2010s.
|
| By writing the original on a social media platform you've
| effectively given full copyright to this company. If
| royalties need to be paid, they'd be paid to yc, not you
| dartos wrote:
| Tho most likely they wouldn't pay out any royalties and if
| there is legal action, they'll just count it against the
| profits of the movie and record the whole thing as a wash
| and pay no taxes and no royalties.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| > _We already have precident on that topic via that short
| story about the reverse isekai airplane carrier to ancient
| Rome that was written on Reddit in early 2010s._
|
| ... do you mean precedent of a scifi premise from social
| media being turned into a movie? or the precedent of a
| piece of media using a piss-tank 's levels as a means of
| communication?
| ffsm8 wrote:
| I meant the precedent of wherever he'd be able to get
| royalties for something he wrote on a social media
| website.
|
| you're giving full copyright to the social media website
| you're posting on. If someone wanted to buy a licence to
| use this - whatever it might be - the discussion would be
| between the social media platform and the licensee. the
| original author of the work would not have any stake in
| that theoretical situation.
|
| If you were wondering which specific case I'm referring
| to, ForHackernews linked to the wiki article. there is a
| small note on the licensing issue at the end there.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42509955
|
| From what I remember, he had gotten a WB offer - which
| ultimately didn't pan out because a licensing agreeming
| couldn't occur. He'd have had to rewrite the story off-
| reddit for them to be able to license it. And that never
| happened.
|
| (Well, he did rewrite it - but probably took too long, so
| the window of opportunity had already closed and it was
| never made into an actual movie)
| DamonHD wrote:
| Your claim is simply untrue AFAIK.
|
| A social media site typically takes a soft licence
| allowing it to store and reproduce your content (which is
| needed to be able to function), and maybe use it in
| marketing. Some go a little further, but please show me
| one mainstream site that takes over all your (copy)rights
| when you post?
| ffsm8 wrote:
| You might be correct that I'm mistaken wrt the
| intellectual property of comments. I'm not an IP lawyer
| and cannot state it with confidence one way or another.
|
| What I feel comfortable stating is however that we have
| precident for the exact scenario the person I responded
| to (wanting royalties for a storyline they posted on a
| social media website) and this precident showed that are
| least the lawyers of WB were of the opinion that a
| rewrite outside of any social media platform was
| necessary.
| Lvl999Noob wrote:
| > We already have precident on that topic via that short
| story about the reverse isekai airplane carrier to ancient
| Rome that was written on Reddit in early 2010s
|
| Can you please talk about this some more? A cursory search
| did not give me anything. What short story are you talking
| about and which adaptation of it?
| ForHackernews wrote:
| Probably this:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rome%2C_Sweet_Rome
| lobsterthief wrote:
| Such a sad tale. I'd love to watch a documentary about
| this.
| jen729w wrote:
| That's not what I took from that article?
|
| > On October 21, 2011, Reddit administrators explained
| that the licensing terms were designed to protect the
| site from potential legal action, and that they did not
| intend to block the production of the movie.
| bredren wrote:
| Fwiw, this sounds like a take on the novel and subsequent
| franchise 1632. This sci-fi/historical fiction has a
| quarterly fan fiction compilation that has continued even
| after the original author's death.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| Nice, time for a rebasing token that rebases to the Airlock
| Pressure value
|
| scam some boomers with Real World Assets(tm)
| mofunnyman wrote:
| Privacy is not a concern in space I guess. Absolutely horrific, I
| love it.
| daft_pink wrote:
| I'm just waiting for Apple to invent the iSpace Station, where
| privacy is taken seriously and Google writes them a trillion
| dollar check to be the default service provider.
| MarcelOlsz wrote:
| This reminds me of the [0] iBrain.
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtV80ZdpTY0
| DonHopkins wrote:
| I love the "Merry Christmas" part, very seasonally
| appropriate. The clown stuff was pretty unexpected though.
| highwaylights wrote:
| Careful. We don't need another iRack situation.
|
| https://youtu.be/xcjLEwZqcQI?feature=shared
| jaennaet wrote:
| Hmm. Maybe the next version should use AI to deduce the path
| the whizzing crew member took, by combining the tank fill
| status with other telemetry data like station orientation,
| vibration in different components etc.
| CodeWriter23 wrote:
| This is weird.
| jaennaet wrote:
| I wholeheartedly agree
| yen223 wrote:
| You could potentially send a notification every time a crew
| member takes a whizz
| dylan604 wrote:
| Could you then start to identify which astronaut by the amount?
| I didn't follow the link to see what other data that is not
| being used contains, but if there's any other chemical analysis
| data it could be done. NASA could then solve their funding
| issues by selling all of that analytics to data hoarders and
| start showing ads on all of the screens on the ISS. Hell, I'm
| now surprised that some YC startup hasn't released a Smart
| Toilet that does this.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| > Hell, I'm now surprised that some YC startup hasn't
| released a Smart Toilet that does this.
|
| Thanks, Smart Pipe!
|
| https://youtu.be/DJklHwoYgBQ?si=xfgjgOVc_P4-k44C
| dylan604 wrote:
| well, rule 42 of the internet: if you can think it, it
| exists on the internet
| Y_Y wrote:
| I'm more concerned about the unthinkable things.
| notpushkin wrote:
| Don't think too hard about it.
|
| And probably let's not apply rule 34 here, either.
| magic_smoke_ee wrote:
| Depending on the frequency of data updates, rate-of-change
| and rate-of-rate-of-change could be calculated and possibly
| correlated with specific user(s).
| MarcelOlsz wrote:
| This is the first and only macOS menu bar app I've ever used and
| I couldn't be happier.
| esprehn wrote:
| Relevant pop-culture:
|
| https://bigbangtheory.fandom.com/wiki/Wolowitz_Zero-Gravity_...
|
| Space toilets are one of those things that are both critical and
| ignored in most depictions of space. Even in all the years of
| Star Trek they have "sonic showers" , but never depict a toilet.
|
| It's amazing that NASA publishes this data in real time.
| unsnap_biceps wrote:
| My pet theory is that Star Trek just beams the waste out of
| folks automatically.
| jsheard wrote:
| Hopefully no beta testers had their guts beamed into space by
| accident when they were dialing it in. What a way to go.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| The frequency with which the supposedly mature tech
| glitches out would have me very leery of using it for
| mundane purposes daily.
| hyhconito wrote:
| Having spent an uncomfortable and expensive night in a
| foreign hospital after creating my own personal fatberg, this
| sounds like a technological innovation that would bring tears
| of joy rather than stress to my eyes.
| dylan604 wrote:
| anyone with kidney stones would be interested as well
| hyhconito wrote:
| Oh yeah been there too. Imagine the day you could beam
| them out!
| smitelli wrote:
| Maybe give my arteries a quick scrape while you're in
| there.
| hk1337 wrote:
| My understanding is the waste gets resequenced and used to
| create other items.
|
| * Enterprise - S1E8 Breaking the Ice
|
| > Tucker: The first thing you've got to understand is we
| recycle pretty much everything on a starship. That includes
| waste, and the first thing that happens to the waste is it
| gets processed through a machine called a bio-matter
| resequencer. Then it gets broken down into.
|
| > So the waste is broken down into little molecules and then
| they get transformed into any number of things we can use on
| the ship. Cargo containers, insulation, boots, you name it.
|
| * Discovery - S3E12 There is a tide...
|
| > Admiral Charles Vance: It's made of our shit, you know.
|
| > That's the base material that we use in our replicators. We
| deconstruct it to the atomic level and then reform the atoms.
| dylan604 wrote:
| I like the story arc in Avenue 5 about dealing with waste in
| space. They went in a slightly different direction though
| throwup238 wrote:
| _> Space toilets are one of those things that are both critical
| and ignored in most depictions of space. Even in all the years
| of Star Trek they have "sonic showers" , but never depict a
| toilet_
|
| Why would they? They have artificial gravity everywhere and
| iirc it's never failed like every other piece of technology
| when the plot demands it. The toilets wouldn't look any
| different, except maybe the ones to accommodate non-human
| species (THAT would be interesting). Star Trek elides a lot of
| things that would otherwise be boring because "post-nuclear war
| Utopia solved it."
|
| Evacuation is only interesting in zero-G. Although to be fair I
| don't remember the expanse or most other hard scifi touching on
| the topic.
| 0_____0 wrote:
| The novel versions of the Expanse do touch on human excreta
| at points. There's a mention of a urine collection device in
| a space suit at some point.
| duskwuff wrote:
| The TV series does too, indirectly. Look up the etymology
| of the expletive "felota".
| crazygringo wrote:
| I suddenly realize, though, that I can't ever remember seeing
| a _bathroom door_ anywhere on any USS Enterprise or similar.
|
| Like, wouldn't there be one tucked away in a back corner of
| the bridge, or a corner of a room or passage adjoining the
| bridge? Shouldn't we see a bathroom door, or at least the
| open entrance to a "bathroom corridor", as the characters do
| a walk-and-talk down the hallways?
|
| And then... regular TV shows show women putting on or taking
| off their makeup in the bathroom mirror, people having a
| conversation through the shower door, someone in a stall
| overhearing a conversation by the sink... has Star Trek
| _ever_ shown that?
|
| What the heck does a bathroom look like on Star Trek? And the
| bathroom signage?
| smitelli wrote:
| The Battlestar Galactica reboot had a few scenes in the
| locker room/shower/toilet area. Pretty spartan, but
| probably familiar to anyone who served on a navy ship.
| p_ing wrote:
| Visually, it's on the bridge of the Enterprise D [0][1].
| Everyone else has to use a bucket [2].
|
| [0] https://cygnus-x1.net/links/lcars/blueprints/star-trek-
| the-n...
|
| [1] https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Bathroom
|
| [2] https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Odo%27s_bucket
| xoxxala wrote:
| There is a bathroom door off the Enterprise-D bridge
| labeled HEAD. And the official deck plans have a second
| bathroom off of Picard's ready room. But those are the only
| official ones.
| ttepasse wrote:
| Star Trek has "sonic showers": https://memory-
| alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Sonic_shower
|
| And for other bathroom activities: One can imagine creative
| use of the transporter. Although:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIsauNJ392o
| semi-extrinsic wrote:
| Isn't it a joke in Space Cowboys, where Tommy Lee Jones
| inspects a gadget and one of the young astronauts tell him it's
| the "ACM - Asshole Centering Monitor"
| dylan604 wrote:
| Centering Module
|
| Of course there was the scene in Apollo 13 about catching the
| clap from sharing relief tubes that puts things in
| perspective
| egypturnash wrote:
| It is a little known fact that everyone in Trek pees and poos
| in the sonic shower.
| wishfish wrote:
| I remember one Star Trek writer theorizing that the Klingons
| were so cranky because they never put toilets in their ships.
|
| I loved Babylon 5. One minor reason was because a scene was
| filmed in a restroom. With ultraviolet lights used in place of
| water for the handwashing. A sign that the characters are
| living in The Future. Showrunner J Michael Straczynski did this
| specifically as a small dig against Star Trek.
| caseyohara wrote:
| Now I'm curious when and how the tank is emptied. Is the waste
| periodically picked up and brought back to Earth? Is it flushed
| directly into space? If not, is it because there is a risk of
| septic satellites, so to speak, stuck in orbit for other
| satellites to collide with? Moreover, what happens if the tank
| reaches capacity?
| lostlogin wrote:
| Shipping water is not ideal, I'm all for filtration and reuse.
| As a true NIMBY, I'll stick with fresh water for myself.
| ThinkBeat wrote:
| The water you can find to drink on earth has most likely been
| recycled through men and beasts countless times over millions
| of years. Though the precise permutation atoms could be new.
| lostlogin wrote:
| Of for sure. It's just that it's a bit too close to home
| when you know who's piss it is you're drinking. I'm more ok
| with diplodocus piss.
| gruturo wrote:
| The Expanse (book series) has a nice quote about water
| that "had been piss and tears and sweat and blood. The
| circle of life on Ceres was so small you could see the
| curve."
|
| (Can't remember if these 2 are actually back-to-back, or
| even from the same book, but I think they were. Been a
| few years).
| gosub100 wrote:
| I can't remember the original source but I recall a
| pseudo inspirational quote that X atoms in your body were
| once part of Michaelengelo (or some other famous person).
| Seems plausible, yet another mind bender attributable to
| quantum physics.
| dylan604 wrote:
| It is filtered and reused as drinking water.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| It's recycled as drinking water on ISS. For the shuttle, it was
| dumped creating an ice cloud that was visible from the ground
| with the sun in the right position.
|
| https://www.space.com/7274-mystery-explained-glow-night-sky-...
| fghorow wrote:
| For all the potential US Vice presidents in here[1] this NEEDS to
| have a temperature reading too! Not to mention volume conversions
| to buckets.
|
| [1] Hey, it _could_ happen. Look at Elon!
| lanewinfield wrote:
| so this means if the % is actively increasing, we could also have
| a isSomeoneCurrentlyPISSSing boolean
| lostlogin wrote:
| A live stream stream!
| amelius wrote:
| If the % increases in small steps, then the hasProblemsVoiding
| boolean is set.
| perching_aix wrote:
| Great for competitions.
| jaennaet wrote:
| What... uh, what sort of competitions are we talking about
| here, exactly?
| hyhconito wrote:
| That is absolutely hilarious and amazing. I love the effort
| people put into things like this.
| jaennaet wrote:
| This is _exactly_ the sort of reaction I was hoping to inspire.
|
| Like I said in my Show HN story, this is clearly a ridiculous
| and more or less completely useless application (probably even
| if you work for ISS Environmental Control and Life Support
| System), but it really is kind of amazing that this is possible
| in the first place, and didn't even involve all that much
| effort apart from the obvious newbie hurdles like "how in the
| hell am I supposed to do XYZ in Xcode?"
| kirubakaran wrote:
| Good example of stream processing
| 94b45eb4 wrote:
| At least it's got tests ... oh, wait ...
| mrcwinn wrote:
| Thank you. Humanity's not done yet!
| thomasjudge wrote:
| Merry Christmas to you too
| _-_-__-_-_- wrote:
| I do hope someone can port this to gnome extensions.
| freedomben wrote:
| My thoughts exactly. Surely somebody will take on this
| important work
| nom wrote:
| Awesome, was just looking for sth like this, perfect timing
| highwaylights wrote:
| If you're looking at this post and thinking to yourself "but..
| why?" that means it's currently functioning correctly.
| simonw wrote:
| Here's a web port of this:
| https://gistpreview.github.io/?76f03f49be58344bfa64c9d5d9f0e...
| (source code here:
| https://gist.github.com/simonw/76f03f49be58344bfa64c9d5d9f0e... )
|
| Created by pasting the entire Swift GitHub repo into Gemini 2.0
| and asking it to port it to a web page:
| https://gist.github.com/simonw/b4aec4e879e50ac74f6f9cc6e1cdc...
| jaennaet wrote:
| The bastard even added rudimentary error handling
| fragmede wrote:
| Interesting. I asked Claude and ChatGPT-4o similar things and
| got quite a bit of variance. Using Aider and giving it your
| prompt, "Output a single HTML page with included JavaScript and
| CSS that fetches the latest levels of the urine tank on the ISS
| and displays it appropriately - it should be mobile friendly"
| and adding "use the same api as the swift code" worked in one
| shot. However, Claude could not one-shot it If I just asked for
| a "web page", and it took a couple more prompts to get it
| working. ChatGPT-4o kinda failed at the task. It hallucinated a
| URL to load lightstream.js from, but didn't realize that and I
| had to _gasp_ debug the problem myself. I also tried with
| Copilot in VSCode since that 's now free and got similar
| results.
|
| With such variance though, it now becomes much easier for me to
| see why the question of if LLMs are any good at coding is so
| contentious every time it comes up on HN. If, even for such a
| small, well defined task, there's such variance in behavior
| from seemingly small prompt changes, it's now easier for me to
| see why some people see it as the second coming and others
| think LLM-assisted program is all hot air.
| gloflo wrote:
| Ethical usage would include thankful attribution.
| simonw wrote:
| Yeah, that's fair - added "Adapted from pISSStream by Jannat"
| just now.
| layer8 wrote:
| Maybe one of the crew members will start to urinate in Morse
| code.
| laxd wrote:
| It's too hard to pull of. We need an RFC for a Urination
| Communication Protocol.
| JodieBenitez wrote:
| _Spot_ on variable names. static let
| pissYellowLight = Color(red: 0.95, green: 0.85, blue: 0.2)
| static let pissYellowDark = Color(red: 0.7, green: 0.6, blue:
| 0.1)
| jaennaet wrote:
| Heh yeah I was meaning to change background & foreground
| colours on the menu bar item, but apparently SwiftUI's
| MenuBarExtra labels don't actually support changing the colors
| - at least not in any way that I found immediately obvious. I
| naturally forgot to remove the unused enum after I gave up
| trying to customise the label.
| jaennaet wrote:
| Heh, I follow a Bluesky bot that posts HN stories that have gone
| over 50 points and unexpectedly saw a very familiar Github link.
| I'd made a Show HN story about this ~5 days ago
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42464454) and I was like
| "huh, how'd that suddenly get more traction" but turns out it
| wasn't even my post!
|
| I'm so delighted that this is easily my most popular OSS project
| over the past 15 or so years (I have my "serious" stuff
| elsewhere), and I'm not being sarcastic here.
|
| I'll happily answer any questions folks have (expect some reply
| lag because holiday season). I figure the most popular question
| is probably going to be "... but why?" though, and the honest-to-
| the-gods answer is "because I thought it was funny"; I was trying
| to come up with a nice and simple 1st project to do with Swift
| (holy crap that language's concurrency story is confusing), and
| once I ran into iss-mimic I knew what I had to do.
| yen223 wrote:
| Are you planning to add AI and monetize this?
| jaennaet wrote:
| Absolutely! Realtime data will require a subscription, which
| will also include an LLM analysis of the past week's data. I
| think one of the VCs funding my upcoming disruptive space
| station piss tank telemetry platform requested that.
|
| I'm pretty sure I can also shove a blockchain in there
| somewhere too even though they're a bit passe.
| kylecazar wrote:
| More agile
| mgsouth wrote:
| You don't really want an agile toilet interface. This is
| more a waterfall project.
| readyplayernull wrote:
| Make sure there's plenty of space to output those logs.
| roland35 wrote:
| Boooo :)
| gruturo wrote:
| Waterfall in a zero-g environment? I don't think so sir,
| Agile all the way.
| VTimofeenko wrote:
| Why not kanban? Stuff floats in the air on its own
| anyway.
| juahan wrote:
| Finally a real 3D kanban.
| wayvey wrote:
| Thank you, this response made my day:)
| borski wrote:
| Thank you for this holiday gift of laughter <3
| KaiserPro wrote:
| Will you release the piss dataset for commercial use?
|
| or will you consider a piss left license?
| charles_f wrote:
| Will it be called the piss+ or the piss-pro?
| throwup238 wrote:
| Piss+ ofcourse. It sets up the zero-G defecation market
| for the much more profitable piss+poop product.
|
| But the real money is in piss+poop enterprise which comes
| with SSO (single shit to orbit).
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Can you elaborate on where quantum computing can fit in? We
| want this thing future-proofed.
| keyle wrote:
| Have you considered making this a library? I think every Swift
| application needs this important metric on the about panel.
| jaennaet wrote:
| It actually started life as a Swift library package + cli
| tool without any sort of Xcode project, but somehow when I
| tried to add it to an Xcode GUI project I just kept getting
| weird-ass linker errors and gave up after a while (nobody ask
| what those errors were, it's been a week and I can barely
| remember what happened yesterday)
| bingo-bongo wrote:
| Hah! This is great!
|
| I've done something like this, but also used the location of
| ISS to figure out which country was "getting pissed on the
| most" by the astronauts.
|
| I'm fairly sure I got a working script somewhere for the data,
| but unfortunately never got around to create a leaderboard
| website for it :/
| llm_trw wrote:
| Now I'm thinking doing it for constellations, which zodiac is
| the most celestially pissy.
| bingo-bongo wrote:
| The sky's the limi.. no wait :D
| Dilettante_ wrote:
| Knowing which star sign 'causes' people to pee would be
| invaluable information to astrologists!
| jaennaet wrote:
| I would like to remind everyone that the "New pull request"
| button is like _right there_ on
| https://github.com/jaennaet/piSSStream/pulls
|
| It'd be fantastic to have the flag of the country last pissed
| on in the menu bar item.
|
| Ie. when the tank level increased last I guess? The value
| doesn't always seem to just monotonically increase though,
| but I could be wrong - frankly I haven't paid that close
| attention to the value. Could also be something like
| microgravity causing a bit of... uh... slosh making the
| sensor reading slightly inaccurate, or something along those
| lines?
| N3cr0ph4g1st wrote:
| link the bluesky bot?
| slater wrote:
| Not OP, but maybe this?
|
| https://bsky.app/profile/hnews.southla.social
| jaennaet wrote:
| https://bsky.app/profile/betterhn50.bsky.social
|
| No AI woo-woo which I consider a huge plus
| shepardrtc wrote:
| I know they're working on ways to recycle the urine into water.
| Can you add a display of water levels and somehow show when it
| transfers between the two?
| KaiserPro wrote:
| I suspect I need to combine that datasource with this indicator
| that I made: https://www.secretbatcave.co.uk/electronics/shart-
| o-meter/
| onionisafruit wrote:
| Just in time for "Merry Christmas, shitter's full"
| egypturnash wrote:
| Now this. This is the kind of quality hacking I come to this site
| for.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Why not the poop tank, dueces per hour. Not too hard to do
| engineering wise
| jaennaet wrote:
| Oh believe me I would have used that metric if there was one,
| but apparently there is no fecal storage tank as such; your
| poop is collected in a bag by the Universal Waste Management
| System or UWMS (which is what you call a space toilet when
| you're NASA and don't want to say "space toilet"), and those
| bags are stashed in a "removable fecal storage canister". Some
| of those canisters are returned to Earth "for evaluation"
| ("yup, it's poop"), but most are loaded onto a cargo ship that
| is then burned up on re-entry. Couldn't see any obvious
| telemetry for the UWMS' urine / feces separatator fan system
| kajigger either (the "Dual Fan Separator" + sort of gearbox,
| because apparently a space toilet needs a gearbox.)
|
| This is not knowledge I ever expected to have.
|
| https://www.nasa.gov/humans-in-space/boldly-go-nasas-new-spa...
| Dilettante_ wrote:
| >because apparently a space toilet needs a gearbox
|
| For when you need to shi(f)t into maximum overdrive?
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Yeah it makes more sense to not have feces plumbing on the
| ship.
| wasabinator wrote:
| The perfect DevOops tool
| sugabush wrote:
| Urine trouble if I see this on your screen
| userbinator wrote:
| ...and it's almost 6MB. For a little widget that just reads some
| data from the network and displays it. That's what really takes
| the piss.
|
| Relevant quote: "We flew to the moon on 4KB of RAM."
| drooby wrote:
| That's great thank you. Can we please get this as an on the iOS
| Lock Screen app. Thanks.
| jaennaet wrote:
| Leave a feature request issue! I might actually get around to
| it one beautiful day, and if we're very lucky that might even
| happen before the heat death of the universe.
| khaledh wrote:
| I don't see a "urine test" in the test suite.
| jaennaet wrote:
| 100% probability that there will be a test with a name along
| those lines if I ever do end up actually writing tests
| yosito wrote:
| Great! Now I just need a way to see the menu bar items that get
| pushed behind the notch.
| amanda99 wrote:
| The finns strike again.
| AIorNot wrote:
| Ok I was the the tech lead and a flight controller at NASA with
| the team that released this telemetry as part of Isslive which
| this api (used by ISS mimic) used - we spent a number of years
| educating the public about the space station program
|
| https://youtu.be/xAhw_8B25N0?si=OZXH9sZ0bY_iX40V
|
| And now 12 years later we have PissStream.. haha
|
| lol that is a bit funny.. good to see our livestream server is
| being put to good use - lots of other good telemetry though :)
|
| I love ISSMimic
| jaennaet wrote:
| I am not sorry and I will do it again.
|
| But on a more serious note, while my use of live ISS telemetry
| is probably about as maximally frivolous as can get, it's
| nothing short of amazing that this sort of abject silliness is
| not only possible but actually trivial to pull off. So hats off
| to you and the rest of the hard-working folks at NASA (et al)
| who made it possible in the first place.
|
| And yes there's definitely all kinds of interesting telemetry
| available from the ISS. Seeing the dashboard that the ISS mimic
| project has was quite an eye-opener
| matsemann wrote:
| Thousands of people are today learning about these metrics
| thanks to your funny project. And from that, someone else
| will also make something cool and useful.
| jaennaet wrote:
| I'm going to add "science communicator" to my resume.
|
| But yes, the app may be a joke but at least there's
| _something_ there beneath the joke.
| 9dev wrote:
| I was wondering, when the ISS will finally be shut down and
| destroyed, will the telemetry stream run until the very end? In
| that case, I'm going to wait in front of the terminal for that
| last farewell of the station when the time comes...
| magic_smoke_ee wrote:
| ~2030 as of now.
| pyrolux wrote:
| ISS Mimic team member here - I love it. Great work!
|
| And for anyone worried about astronaut privacy, the urine tank
| quantity does not reflect ... direct addition of urine from a
| crew member ;)
| klausa wrote:
| Now I'm genuinely curious -- what _does_ it reflect then?
| zaik wrote:
| Aliens using the ISS toilet confirmed.
| matsemann wrote:
| It might include additional liquid for flushing/cleaning etc?
|
| What I'm curious about is when the levels go down. Does that
| mean it's emptied over some country?
| stragies wrote:
| I thought, that most/all water is recycled into the
| drinking water tank after some processing.
| jaennaet wrote:
| "Great" may be overstating things just a tiny bit especially in
| comparison to ISS Mimic but I'll absolutely take the
| compliment, thank you.
|
| I'm also curious as to what the quantity actually does reflect
| - I clearly haven't peered deep enough into the soul of the
| UWMS.
| pyrolux wrote:
| Oh it definitely does reflect how much astronaut urine is in
| the tank, but the value changes (sadly?) don't indicate
| direct use of the toilet due to how the system is configured.
| futhey wrote:
| Well where exactly are my tax dollars going then? /s
| sys_64738 wrote:
| What type of MCU sensor is on the pee bucket? How would one
| communicate with it?
| noufalibrahim wrote:
| A bit of a drip if you ask me. The whole thing reeks of stale
| body fluids. Why don't you piss off and make something useful?
|
| Seriously though, this is a hits the sweet spot of being useless
| and funny perfectly.
| jaennaet wrote:
| Exactly what I was going for.
|
| I'd rather make something funny (but also kind of interesting)
| than useful any day.
| noufalibrahim wrote:
| I remember David Beazley of SWIG fame saying that he uses
| this as a metric. Include stuff in the course that makes
| people say... " I don't know how that's useful but damn that
| is cool".
| bfeist wrote:
| Creator of apolloinrealtime.org here. I work on the ISS program
| now. Hat's off, sir.
| BuildTheRobots wrote:
| Apollo in Real Time is an overwhelmingly awesome resource.
| Thank you.
| davidblue wrote:
| Thank you.
| toben88 wrote:
| Forked the code and built a windows .net version. I got it to
| bring in telemetry data but failed to get the Urine Tank [%]
| rylan-talerico wrote:
| This readme is hilarious
| hooverd wrote:
| The piss meter IS real. I love this.
| charles_f wrote:
| I love that the project embraces piss as its central theme, the
| name itself, all variables such as "pissAmount"... But then the
| project description modestly calls it "urine".
|
| That's my favorite project of 2024 so far!
| InfiniteVortex wrote:
| What an incredibly specific application!
| dbacar wrote:
| pISSStreamUITests -> pISSStreamUrineTests
| grantsh wrote:
| I thought this was really cool so I decided to write a windows
| version :)
|
| https://github.com/grantshandy/WinpISSStream
| heyarviind2 wrote:
| This is cool, when I clicked on the link https://iss-
| mimic.github.io/Mimic/ I was amazed to see a lot more data in the
| public domain.
| 9dev wrote:
| If you like a more practical version of the metrics feed, I
| created a Grafana dashboard once:
|
| https://github.com/Radiergummi/iss-metrics
| Thorrez wrote:
| I don't think that page is using the word "errata" correctly. I
| think it's supposed to be a list of errors, but it doesn't seem
| to list any errors.
| bayindirh wrote:
| It's interesting that the Russian version of the page uses the
| same blue color scheme Russians like to use for their consoles
| and equipment.
|
| It's a neat and considerate detail if you ask me.
| speakspokespok wrote:
| Are there any video games that include the ISS? It would be a
| cool add-on, having live telemetry added to the in-game version.
| orf wrote:
| In space, nobody can hear you piss.
|
| And they don't need to, because they get a notification on their
| desktop when you do.
|
| Add space piss notifications.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Finally the perfect use for the accursed touch bar!
| e-clinton wrote:
| Nothing against the project itself but I gotta say, the amount of
| votes this post has gathered makes me lose faith in HN.
| danbr wrote:
| Found this X account which posts in real-time some of the same
| info, hahaha: https://x.com/isstoiletelem
| KaiserPro wrote:
| When you make a newsletter (so hot right now) can you call it
| "Piss Fax"?
| cute_boi wrote:
| Just checked github and the folder/file names are totally
| unreadable. Even rust project has better folder name like src/
| test/ instead of these pISSStream.xcodeproj pISSStream etc...
|
| Apple please do better.
|
| Thanks.
| riiii wrote:
| Is there a separate tank for solid excrement? Are we missing an
| opportunity for a shit stream?
|
| How is that even released from ISS?
| raminf wrote:
| On semi-related news...
|
| Santa Cruz Wharf's fallen restroom becomes an unlikely tourist
| attraction: https://archive.ph/k1lwt
| g3ol4d0 wrote:
| The internet is amazing
| AzzyHN wrote:
| Finally
| khobragade wrote:
| "but most of all, jaennaet is my hero"
| thr0waway001 wrote:
| What do they do with the urine when the tank is full?
| beaugunderson wrote:
| wanted this but didn't want to run another app when I'm already
| running SwiftBar--here is a version suitable for use with
| SwiftBar/xbar/etc. (error handling left as an exercise for the
| reader): #!/usr/bin/env node var
| Ls = require('lightstreamer-client-node'); var sub1
| = new Ls.Subscription("MERGE",["NODE3000005"],["Value", "Status",
| "TimeStamp"]); sub1.addListener({
| onItemUpdate: function(obj) { const percentage =
| obj.getValue('Value') + '%';
| console.log(`${percentage} `); process.exit(0);
| } }); var client = new Ls.LightstreamerClien
| t("http://push.lightstreamer.com","ISSLIVE");
| client.connect(); client.subscribe(sub1);
| TheGreatAIPurge wrote:
| If all you super-duper intelligent coders would instead spend
| time on making the automated workflows of your myriad faceless,
| supportless /hard-to-reach SF-based ventures you create
| foolproof, mankind would rejoice. Especially travellers on mobile
| / without mobile.
|
| But no, mankind has to know how full some urine tank is. We are
| centimeters away from nuclear fusion it seems!
|
| Seriously, fuck most of you startup founders. You automate all
| away oh so cleverly behind workflows, that won't work when they
| shouldn't.
|
| But hey let's take the credit card money of some dude first after
| making him create some stupid account he'll never use again, make
| it look yiu "confirmed" his booking, and just then tell him he
| has prove himself, his data or his payment methods, right at the
| most unpleasant time. And suspend his account so he can't even
| login, and has to wait if anyone, including the 3rd service
| provider the verification process was outsourced to, feel mercy.
|
| Fuck you code monkeys.
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(page generated 2024-12-25 23:00 UTC)