Well, almost two years later, and the display is broken again. The same symptoms. Just died overnight. Matrix/cable issue. Last time, the whole lid assembly was repaired under warranty. This time the warranty is over. The new display costs $760 in Ukraine; delivery time is 2-6 weeks (logistics is a little bit struggling these days). Not a huge deal since it's works perfectly with an external display and I have 4 other computers to work, but still a bummer. The elegance and subtlety of the devices kill them.

My last few posts have predictably attracted the attention of random moral freaks and people who need to use a VPN to post here. Had to extend the ban list a little bit. X is a special place; it's kinda curious to observe humanity's great progress and regression at the same time. Same planet, multiple different worlds and realities. I think many books will be written in the future.

To finish off the day, Kyiv was struck by ballistic and cruise missiles. The first missiles hit the city at around 2:30 a.m. The Zircon anti-ship missiles were especially loud. I managed to get to the basement between waves and saw people there with their kids. Looking at these children, I thought about how they don’t really know any other reality. For most of their conscious lives, there have been air raid alerts, missiles, drones, and shelters. Today is September 1st. In just a few hours, children across the city are supposed to have their first day of school. Most likely, many of them will spend that first school day and many other school days attending classes underground. This is unfortunate.

Regarding the food and goods situation: yes, in addition to the Human Safari in Kherson and the flattening of cities across the Donbas, a permanent member of the @UN Security Council apparently decided that destroying grocery and appliance warehouses around Kyiv was also a great idea. Many facilities have been destroyed or damaged - that’s no secret. Also, they openly announced plans to destroy energy infrastructure in the upcoming winter (again). For now, there are some delivery delays and certain items are missing, but overall the situation in stores is fine. Sure, there are always people who suddenly decide they need 100 packs of pasta and a strategic reserve of toilet paper, but in general there’s no panic or anything like that. My favorite grocery store still has everything. Anyway, businesses will adapt and rebuild their supply chains. What I find noteworthy is that I haven’t seen any decisive - or even particularly indecisive - condemnations of this from such wonderful organizations as the @UN, @hrw, and so on. Not that condemnations are especially effective against an aggressor, of course, but it’s still nice to get one condemnation a month. Even a weak one.

Kyiv has been under attack by jet-powered drones for four days now. Unlike the “scooters,” these drones are practically inaudible. We’re currently getting dozens of air raid alerts a day. The all-clear sounds, and soon afterward more drones arrive and another alert is declared. The goal seems obvious: to paralyze the city. The drones themselves are targeting grocery supermarket warehouses and large businesses. One was just shot down almost directly overhead, at high altitude. All that remains is a black cloud in the sky. These drones are reportedly loaded with metal pellets designed to hit as many people as possible, so altitude and distance are our best friends. Still, the shock wave from the explosion was noticeable, it felt like a blow to the chest. I know everyone will say, “Take care of yourself,” “Stay in a shelter,” and so on. But when the alerts and attacks continue around the clock, it’s simply unrealistic to spend your entire life in a shelter.

One of the biggest issues with the Starlink Mini panda_prod2 and newer revisions (older revisions were fine!) is poor soldering of the GPS module shield. It appears to be a cold-joint issue. The shield can easily come loose under vibration - for example, when the terminal is mounted on a car. Once detached, the shield can cause short circuits on the Mini PCB, potentially destroying the voltage regulators. There are many known cases of this issue. cc @michaelnicollsx

Since last night’s ballistic attack, we’ve had seven air raid alerts. Drones have been attacking the city throughout the day. As soon as one long air raid alert ends, another is declared just a few minutes later. At this point, everyone is so exhausted that people barely react anymore. Me too. There’s an air raid alert right now, but I still need groceries, so I’m heading to the store anyway.

North Korean missiles are known for their "precision," with circular deviation up to 5 km. My night run from a parking lot was an easy walk compared to what happened in another neighborhood. They heavily damaged apartment buildings, a school, and a hospital. Again.

Testing Starlink V5 in Kyiv, Ukraine. Solid results! Speed (21 tests, best run) Download: 89–388 Mbps (median 257) Upload: 22–48 Mbps (median 40) Bufferbloat (RRUL, 300s full-duplex saturating load) Latency: 49–66 ms, only +4 ms under full load vs idle Jitter: median 1.5 ms Packet loss: 0.4% Throughput swings, but this is expected for LEO. Latency stays flat even when the link is saturated in both directions. Basically, no bufferbloat. #starlink# #starlinkv5# #ukraine#

Kyiv is under ballistic attack. I was in the middle of testing the Starlink V5 and filming in an open parking lot when the attack started. This is what it looked and felt like from the front row… Ballistic missiles are fast. After the first round of explosions, I ran to a nearby basement (about 200 meters) before the next explosion. I guess that’s it for testing today. I did manage to collect the data, though, and I’ll share the results later.

Some people have been asking how I collected this data with a Fluke 115. It was an outdoor test, and I didn't have a proper multimeter data logger with me. I did, however, have my Fluke 115 measuring the current. So here's what I did: I recorded a reasonably steady video of the Fluke's display with my phone while commenting on what was happening at each stage of the test. Then I fed the video to @grok and asked it to extract the readings from the display, along with my voice comments, and put everything into a three-column CSV file (timestamp, reading, comment). Finally, I used the generated CSV data to create this plot.