TWIL vol.2 (MV3 delayed, HTTP Codes resource, Mars Insight EOL)
A few things I learned this week.. Google delayed MV3 again; there's a great diagram showing all the HTTP response codes and when to use them; the Insight rover is now retired, but the data is available online
For all the stuff I stumbled on this week that won't fill a post...
Google puts the brakes on MV3... again
I've written about MV3 (manifest version 3) a couple times, seeing as I have a couple small addons that needed to be updated and I was annoyed with the extra work. In case the title of the second post doesn't make that obvious, lol.
When I first wrote about it, the hard stop on all MV2 development was about 2 weeks from now, at the start of 2023. When I wrote about it again, and decided to upgrade my addons, I noticed the hard stop had been pushed out to mid 2023. Revisiting their mv2 support timeline, it seems that the dates have been pushed again, a little more vague this time.

There was an announcement from the Chrome Extensions team too. "Thank you for all the feedback and passionate discussion thus far..." Oh I bet it's been passionate. 😅
Finding the right HTTP response code
Someone at work was looking into the appropriate HTTP response status code that one of our API endpoints should return under a certain condition, and I stumbled on this helpful diagram.
It's interesting to trace the path (start in the lower-left corner), walking through each description to figure out the best response code for any given path. A green arrow means "yes", red means "no".
It's been around for years, but it was new to me.. late to the party as usual, lol.
RIP Insight
The Insight Mars Lander lost power this week after 4 years and was forced into retirement due to its solar panels being covered in dust. Despite the myriad backseat engineers on the web (especially Twitter) suggesting how NASA should better manage the dust, it turns out that space dust is an issue they've looked into. Shocker. It is interesting that Curiosity is still going after 10 years though.. maybe because of its location in a crater, or perhaps it needs less power for core functionality?
You can read more about what was discovered with Insight, view the photos it took, and check the weather it recorded (outdated and irregular and now ceased, but still interesting).
NASA has loads of APIs too, if you want to access anything programmatically. There's one that shows photos from the rovers, but oddly they didn't make the Insight's photos accessible through it. There's also one to access the weather data from Insight, but for obvious reasons that'll have limited use now.
I wrote about the NASA API before, along with several other space-related APIs, which you can check out in the post below.
That's it for this week. Merry Christmas!
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