Some of the First Apple I Photos

by Harry McCracken from Technologizer

via @newsycombinator

Nine Giga-pixel Image of the Milky Way

From The Verge.

Using images from the ESO's Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA), researchers have stitched together a massive nine-gigapixel image of the Milky Way galaxy. The 108,200 x 81,500 image consists of nearly nine billion pixels, and was used to create a catalog of 84 million stars. Researchers claim that this is the largest image of its kind — the first to catalog the entire bulge of the Milky Way galaxy — and contains ten times more stars than any previous study.

My favorite part is where it says “Click to Enlarge.”

Disney Buys Lucasfilm

From The Verge:  Disney buys Lucasfilm, plans to release 'Star Wars: Episode 7' in 2015.

The Ultimate Original Series Star Trek Poster

RT @GuyKawasaki

In the fandom hall of fame, a special place is held by Star Trek devotees and Dusty Abel has earned himself a seat at the right hand of Spock for this incredible poster that includes an element for every episode of the original series.

California Meteorite Update

From Bad Astronomy.   It's a meteorite, no it's not, yes it is.

No real change in the 00z NAM

RT @spann 

 Hit on the NJ coast after midnight Mon night. Effects begin much earlier #sandy pic.twitter.com/IXEMPbaO

Nice loop but scary scenario

of the NAM4 model for #Sandy. RT @wxbrad.

http://weatherbellmodels.com/weather/hires_uv900_slp_east_anim.gif

Fireball - Meteorite Hits House in California

From Space.com.

Homeowner Lisa Webber, …found the space rock Saturday (Oct. 20)…. She recalled hearing a sound on her roof the night the meteor was reported and went searching behind her house, where she found a 2.2 ounce (63 grams) stone.

Amazon Glacier

Archival Storage for One Penny Per GB Per Month

D-Wave uses quantum method to solve protein folding problem

RT @physorg_com

Report by Lisa Zyga

The study, “Finding low-energy conformations of lattice protein models by quantum annealing,” is published in a recent issue of Nature’s Scientific Reports. The computer used quantum annealing to find the lowest-energy protein configuration by solving for the configuration as an optimization problem, where the optimal state was the lowest-energy state. Proteins can be folded in a large number of ways because they’re made up of many chains of amino acids. Yet somehow, proteins almost always manage to fold themselves in the correct configuration (when they don’t fold correctly, they can cause misfolded-protein diseases such as Alzheimer's, Huntington's, and Parkinson's). Scientists think that proteins fold themselves correctly because the correct configuration is also the state of lowest energy, the state at which the protein becomes stable.

How One Person was Hacked via iCloud

Via @thatdrew

Mat Honan tells a detailed story of how someone got into his accounts.

“someone gained entry to my iCloud account, used it to remote wipe all of my devices, and get entry into other accounts too.”

Trouble with OAuth 2.0

RT @newsycombinator

Eran Hammer writes about resigning from the OAuth working group as the lead author and editor of the standard.

Why I Have My Own Web Site

RT @kevinmarks @xtof_fr


Focusing on the Positives, from One Big Fluke.

Ubuntu Releases, Versions, and Names

I suppose it's time to post an update on the current Ubuntu zoo.  Apparently it was 2008 when I last did this.

http://releases.ubuntu.com/

• 8.04.4 LTS (Hardy Heron)
• 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex)

• 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope)
• 9.10 (Karmic Koala)

• 10.04.4 LTS (Lucid Lynx)
• 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat)

• 11.04 (Natty Narwhal)
• 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot)

• 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin)

Previous Post

Google Colossus File System

via Wired.

But Google no longer uses GFS. Two years ago, the company moved its search to a new software foundation based on a revamped file system known as Colossus, and Urs Hölzle — the man who oversees Google’s worldwide network of data centers — tells Wired that Colossus now underpins virtually all of Google’s web services, from Gmail, Google Docs, and YouTube to the Google Cloud Storage service the company offers to third-party developers.

Google Compute Engine

via Wired.

Gigaom's Four Part Series on North Carolina Data Centers

RT @gigaom

Article by Katie Fehrenbacher.

 Apple, Google, Facebook and other Internet giants have chosen a several hundred-mile stretch of land north of Charlotte, North Carolina to build their mega east coast data centers. These are some of the largest data centers in the world for some of the most powerful Internet and tech companies on the planet. Why here? Will this continue in the future? And what’s been the affect on the local communities? Check out the 4-part series I published this week on North Carolina’s mega data center cluster, the resources that go into these things, and why one, in particular, is betting on clean power.

Yahoo Passwords Leak

I've found it really difficult to find good, responsible news reports on this event.  I'm sure Steve Gibson (grc.com) will report on it on this week's upcoming Security Now.

Here's a pretty good article on this event at Cnet.

In this case, you're password would only have been compromised if you'd logged into the Yahoo Contributor Network, apparently also known as Yahoo Voices, and previous to Yahoo,  Associated Content which Yahoo acquired.

Here's the main, important advice which has been true for a long time, maybe always.  Please don't use the same password for more than one site.  I like the recommendation to use LastPass at lastpass.com.  It gives you a secure way to keep up with and use your passwords.

The only reason you need to change your password on other sites than Yahoo is if you (ever) used the same passwords on them.

Pournelle Quote

From Jerry Pournelle's new site (via pournelle.com)


“I have always been a generalist meaning I know less and less about more and more until eventually at the limit I know nothing at all about everything.”

What Is SPDY?

RT @hackernewsbot

from Lincoln Loop posted by Graham King.

The 50 Greatest Matte Drawings of all Time

RT @ebertchicago: … And glory be! *Not* a slide show!

Beyond The Rule of Thirds: Advanced Composition With David Brommer

In this B&H Event Space seminar, David Brommer takes you “Beyond The Rule of Thirds” by discussing many different aspects of photographic composition. The entire seminar will take about two hours to watch from start to finish, but the information Brommer covers — from positive and negative space,...

via Flipboard

The Lost Beatles Photos

Rare Shots From 1964-1966

Photos of the Fab Four by photographer Bob Bonis from Rolling Stone.

10 reasons Apple, Facebook & Google chose North Carolina for their mega data centers

RT @gigaom  by Katie Fehrenbacher

Facebook isn’t the only Internet giant that chose the so-called North Carolina data center corridor as home for one of its most important server farms. Within a couple-hundred-mile radius, Google and Apple have also built mega data centers, as have Wipro, Disney, AT&T and others.

Image credit:   kubais/pond5.com

Seesmic

FlipBoard is beautiful.  I've been using it since about the first day it became available on Android for general users.  Maybe three weeks?

However, in the past couple of days I've gone back to reading Twitter, meaning news in general, on Seesmic on my phone.  It's just faster to read down through the tweets without having to flip over the images.

Again, the experience of using FlipBoard, the fonts and the look are a joy to use.  I'll probably use FlipBoard when I want to be entertained a bit more by my news reading experience than simply getting the information.

I do have one complaint.  Some web sites rendered on FlipBoard are a little hard to use.  I find myself fighting with the (already annoying) Android pinch-zoom-scroll feature to get the text zoomed and placed in the FlipBoard version.  I finally adopted the practice of just tapping the drop down and selecting View On Web to go to Chrome.  Note this is on web sites that FlipBoard renders in their usual web view and not in a FlipBoard-optimized version.  I think.

Why is Clojure so slow?

RT @newsycombinator

From Martin's Computer Programming Blog.

What we can see it that Java itself accounts for 0.35s of the startup time, but unfortunately Clojure adds another second(!) on top of that. This 1.3s pause before main gets called is why Clojure is unsuitable for "terminal scripts". The running time of any scripts (like lein or starting the REPL) will be totally dominated by the startup time. Most Clojure developers will not notice this too much to, since they spend almost all their time in the REPL itself, but users of those Clojure programs will!

My summary is that it spends 95% of the startup-time loading the clojure.core namespace (the clojure.lang.RT class in particular) and filling out all the metadata/docstrings etc for the methods. This process stresses the GC quite a bit, some 130k objects are allocated and 90k free-d during multiple invokes of the GC (3-6 times), the building up of meta data is one big source of this massive object churn.

Amazing Star Trails

RT @matthiasrascher

Star trails over the Australian Outback by photographer Lincoln Harrison. http://t.co/4xqLJQun #photography #space

10 Very Sensible Commandments of Grilling

RT @bonappetit from @GrillGirl and @HillCountryNY chef Elizabeth Karmel.

Why Did Borland Fail?

I loved Turbo Pascal.  Here's one person's explanation of what happened at Borland.

via Flipboard on Android.

Leap Second Problems

RT @arstechnica

“Almost exactly 24 hours ago, the Internet faced the most recent one. It didn't go so well. Headlines have varied—calling the incident "Y2K 2.0," declaring that the "Internet died," or simply saying it, "Gave the Internet a Really Bad Headache." Hyperbolic? Sure, but the following sites did confirm leap second-related outages…”

Google and the Leap Second

Soon after the advent of ticking clocks, scientists observed that the time told by them (and now, much more accurate clocks), and the time told by the Earth's position were rarely exactly the same. It turns out that being on a revolving imperfect sphere floating in space, being reshaped by earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, and being dragged around by gravitational forces makes your rotation somewhat irregular. Who knew?

These fluctuations in Earth’s rotational speed mean that even very accurate clocks, like the atomic clocks used by global timekeeping services, occasionally have to be adjusted slightly to bring them in line with “solar time.” There have been 24 such adjustments, called “leap seconds,” since they were introduced in 1972. Their effect on technology has become more and more profound as people come to rely on fast, accurate and reliable technology.

Image credit: gunnar3000/Pond5.com

Caffeine How-To

RT @lifehacker

Caffeine can be tasty, but how can you use it to boost your brain? Easy question for a neuroscientist.


Image: from Life Hacker

Giant Hot Wheels Track

RT @wiredplaybook.

with double loop-the-loop AND life-size cars!  Warning:  This is a preview, the event is supposed to happen 30 June.


Image credit:  Artist rendering from Mattel

Apollo 17 at Shorty Crater

RT @hackernewsbot

[APOD Picture].

Man, was it really 1972?!


Image credit:  NASA

Introduction to Python descriptors

RT @NewsOfLinux

From IBM Developer Works.

This is Python's version of getters and setters.

Re-Tweeting Part 2

Whew!  Okay, that Twisted Light post just now took forever to do!  That's complex.  I don't know if I'll keep this up.

'Twisted light' carries 2.5 terabits of data per second

RT @LanceUlanoff

From BBC News.

Researchers have clocked light beams made of “twisted” waves carrying 2.5 terabits of data - the capacity of more than 66 DVDs - per second.

The technique relies on manipulating what is known as the orbital angular momentum of the waves.

Recent work suggests that the trick could vastly boost the data-carrying capacity in wi-fi and optical fibres.

Image credit:  Nature Photonics

Re-Tweeting

Who do I recommend following on Twitter?  Recently I was talking to a co-worker about how I had switched from using RSS to Twitter for reading news a few years ago (meaning at least two, I'm not sure without checking).  That leads to the question, who would I recommend following.

In the past I would have said to just look at my re-tweets to gather a recommended list.  However, most recently I've taken to writing blog posts here instead of re-tweeting most of the time, though I'll still re-tweet short items of interest.   When I post, I usually just link back to the original article so there's not any mention of who I got the article link from on Twitter.

I'm going to experiment with ways to acknowledge the original tweets and Twitter account, starting with a classic RT at the beginning of the post.  However, if that's just too repulsive to look at on an otherwise nice looking blog post, the next idea will be some other Twitter acknowledgement, maybe at the bottom.

The nice thing about an RT is that it will show up in the Twitter feed that's reduced from my blog in the traditional way.  We'll see how this goes.

Why we owe it all to Alan Turing

by Dan Crow on Gigaom.

…he, more than anyone, can be said to be the father of the computer. So what was his great insight? What is it he did that shaped our world so profoundly?

The Church-Turing Thesis has two very important implications.

First, it recognized the fundamental limitations of the system — for example, that there are some programs that are not computable by any machine.

But it was the second implication that was most profound: within its limitations, a Turing Machine can be programmed to run any piece of software. In fact, one of the programs that can be run on a Turing Machine is a simulation of a Turing Machine. And the simulated Turing Machine can itself run any program that a Turing Machine can run.

This is the genius of Turing’s work, his key insight. He has defined a “Universal Machine” — one that can run simulations so powerful they are themselves universal machines.

Are Bitcoins Becoming Europe's New Safe Haven Currency?

from Daily Finance.

 “Bitcoin is in some senses a financial island removed from the vicissitudes and consequences of a traditional banking system. It's neither controlled by central banks nor governments, and thus not vulnerable to larger-scale shifts like changing interest rates or the rampant inflation of countries in decline.”

A Bit More on Bradbury

One of my favorite writers, Jerry Pournelle, wrote on his blog, “At one time the whole genre was dominated by ‘ABC’, Asimov, Bradbury, and Clarke, although usually someone would quickly add Robert Heinlein. Now the Big Four are gone. They will all be missed.”

Verified by Visa?

I was submitting an order on-line for refurbished electronics from a site I normally don't use.  A window popped up for Verified by Visa asking for the CVV code again, also the last four digits of my social security number and asking me to create a password.  It has our bank's logo on it.

Of course I was suspicious.  I poked around the web and found the actual Visa site as well as this article which pretty much explains what happened to me along with the program.

I also went to my bank's web site and found a discussion of the program there.

The bottom line:  This is a good thing.  It essentially adds a password to your credit card.  You have to supply this password when you use your card on-line.

I would have appreciated more warning but maybe there was something from the bank that I ignored.

Weatherbrains!

After James Spann appeared on this week's TWiG, I was delighted to have learned about Weatherbrains, “The official netcast for people who love weather.” I'm subscribing to the audio podcast and the quality is quite good. Recommended!

Note:  Here's the RSS link for subscribing to the podcast, which I only found by a Google search.

James Spann

Images credit:  From weatherbrains.com

So Long Ray Bradbury

I enjoyed many of his short stories, particularly in high school.  This is a very nice video of him at JPL on the eve of Mariner 9 entering Mars orbit in 1971.  He's sitting next to Arthur C. Clarke.  There's a quick shot of Carl Sagan, too, who was on stage.   Good grief, Bradbury was younger than me there.

My Favorite Venus Transit Video

It's pretty clear that NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) has stolen the show, at least on Youtube and Twitter, with it's videos of the recent Venus transit.  However, my favorite video is not the popular, creepy (yet beautiful!) extreme ultraviolet images of a flat-looking black circle moving across amazing prominences and other features in the hot solar corona.  

My favorite is this video in orange light where you can clearly see sunlight scattered around Venus' atmosphere as it moves in front of the Sun.  The limb of the Sun also seems to be refracted by the planet's atmosphere.

These images were made by the SDO's Heliocentric and Magnetic Imager (HMI) which observes at a wavelength of an Fe I (unionized iron) absorption line at λ6173.

Live Stream of Venus Transit

There are several live streams of the Venus transit.  Here's one from Mt. Wilson.

http://sunearthday.nasa.gov/webcasts/mtwilson/

Melancholia Misses the Physics

Melancholia was a dark and slightly depressing movie but with some interesting special effects.  I watched it on a recommendation from Hal.  However, they got the science wrong on a couple of basic accounts and I think I know why.

If a terrestrial planet (dirt and rock) came that close to the Earth, there would be two major effects.  First, the tidal force on the Earth would be extreme.  The Moon's diameter is more like the size of the United States and look at it's tidal force.  Such an approaching big planet as the fictional Melancholia would basically put the Earth's surface through a food processor before any collision ever occurred.  I'm not sure if the tidal force would be enough to completely destroy the Earth, but anything and anyone on or near the Earth wouldn't know the difference.

Tidal force is caused by the difference in gravitational force between the closest and farthest parts of one body caused by another.  This effect of the Moon on the Earth causes it's ocean surface to bulge toward and away from the Moon.  The Earth's crust also does the same but to a lesser and non-catastrophic extent.

Second, the two bodies would move about their mutual center of gravity.  The Earth would be perturbed completely out of it's orbit by the encounter in some crazy way.   It could still involve a single close encounter, again with both planets being destructively disturbed by the tidal forces of each on the other, followed by a later, final impact, but there's no telling what their mutual trajectory would look like.  What is nearly certain is that the Earth would not continue on it's nearly-circular orbital path.

So surely they had a science/astronomical advisor for the movie.  Why such fundamental mistakes?  I propose that when they consulted their expert, they were thinking of a small asteroid collision with a body more the size of a large metropolis or a state.  A small  body wouldn't perturb the Earth from it's orbit and wouldn't have much tidal effect.  However, the impact would be catastrophic.

Later, because they had brilliant ideas about the look and effect of a  giant planet approach and final impact, they changed the threatening body but they didn't go back and consult the expert.  They just kept the path from the previous discussions.

Dragon Spash Down

[VIDEO] from a NASA chase plane.

How to Make Coffee with Minimal Equipment and Maintenance

from Life Hacker.

Image credit:  by ketrin/Pond5.com

Amazon $5 Albums This Month

Alert:   Some of the MP3 albums in this month's Amazon collection of 100 albums for $5 each.

The Definitive Collection - Litter River Band (19 songs, many digitally remastered).
We're An American Band - Grand Funk (1973)  (12 songs, all remastered)
Money Jungle - Duke Ellington (1963)  (15 songs, almost all remastered)
The Classical Summer Collections (29 pieces)

and more.

Air Force's mini space shuttle prepares for landing

by Justin Ray from Spaceflight Now.

Image credit:  US Air Force.

How To Write an Essay

by Ryan Holiday, Huffpost College.

A new look at prolonged radiation exposure

MIT study suggests that at low dose-rate, radiation poses little risk to DNA by Anne Trafton, MIT News Office.

Software Engineer: 2012's Top Job

by Cindy Waxer at Information Week.

Shout Out to the Server Teams

by Steve Streza, a nice acknowledgement.

Behind The Scenes of Back to The Future

This is really neat!  “Geek Tyrant shares a glimpse at what was happening in back of the camera during the making of the Back to the Future triology.”    Posted at Alltop Holy Kaw!

A Deeper Look at Centaurus A

at Astronomy by By ESO, Garching, Germany.

The strange galaxy Centaurus A is pictured in a new image from the European Southern Observatory (ESO). With a total exposure time of more than 50 hours, this is probably the deepest view of this peculiar and spectacular object ever created. The image was produced by the Wide Field Imager (WFI) of the MPG/ESO 2.2-meter telescope at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile.

Image credit:  ESO 

Make mainframes, not war

How Mad Men sold computers in the 1960s and 1970s by Matthew Lasar at Ars Technica.

Image credit:  Computer History Museum

Moog Interview

On the occasion of Robert A. Moog's birthday, here's an excellent interview from The Guardian.  The original interview was by Don Snowden, published in the Los Angeles Times in 1981.

“Emerson, Lake & Palmer performed at Gaelic Park in New York City and it was incredible,” Moog recalled. “There were 10,000 kids standing on a soccer field and here's Keith Emerson sticking knives in a Leslie cabinet. A New York musician who had bought some of my equipment was there and he was in complete shock. He said, ‘This is the end of the world.’”

Emerson's wild-man-of-the-opera stage antics may have shocked some of Moog's more conventional customers but they thrilled many rock fans. ELP quickly became one of rock's most successful attractions and paved the way for other progressive rock bands like Yes and Genesis.

Postponing Retirement

Record Number Of Americans Choosing To Stay At Work by Mary Turner at Huffpost.

SpaceX Dragon Capsule

And Falcon 9 Booster.  Latest news portal at Space.com.

Image credit:  NASA TV

NASDAQ's Failure

Minute by minute during the Facebook IPO from Business Insider.

Image credit:  Bloomberg

First 35 Years of Star Wars Infographic

As visual as I am, I somehow don't really like infographics.  I'm not sure why.  However, this one is quite fascinating and has a huge amount of information.  It's fascinating to me how many of the actors in episodes I, II and III weren't even born during episodes IV, V, and VI.

Infographic

Big Catch Up

Okay, I've been under the weather for a few weeks.  This is going to be a pretty big dump of articles I've noted over those weeks.

Today's Solar Eclipse

It won't be visible from the Atlanta area, the sun will be setting at about the time of first contact.   It will be visible farther to the west.

Article in Sky and Telescope


Image by NOAA/SEC

The Word “Entity”

I suspect the only reason you see the word “entity” in computer science and such places is that, in school, we're taught not to use the word “thing” because it's not specific enough, it's too ambiguous.

So, I claim that when a person uses the word “entity,” they are trying to be ambiguous without being ambiguous.

Telescope camera - 3.2-Billion Pixels

Is this the most powerful camera in the world? Giant 3.2-billion-pixel device will give us the ”deepest view of the night sky ever seen” from Mail Online.

The Best Statistical Programming Language is

Javascript?  From R-Bloggers by Tony.

Going With the Flow

Google's Secret Switch to the Next Wave of Networking by Steven Levy at Wired.

Anyone else recall when the most complicated sneaker decision was

“Do you want those Converse in hi-top or low, black or white?” RT @Gartenburg

How to stop Facebook apps from sharing your info

from Leslie Meredith , TechNewsDaily.

Remember:  Check your Facebook privacy settings early and often.   (That's from me, not the article).

A Forgotten Principle of Compiler Design

from Programming in the 21st Century.

That a clean system for separately compiled modules appeared in Modula-2, a programming language designed by Niklaus Wirth in 1978, but not in the 2011 C++ standard…hmmm, no further comment needed. But the successor to Modula-2, Oberon, is even more interesting.

Strange Objects Punching Holes Through Saturn’s Outer Ring

From Wired.

Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute

Why Did the Cow Cross the Road?

Ihnatko answers this burning question.

Amazon Will Finally Pass Best Buy

in revenue this year&hellip.   And Apple is in the game at about 1/3.   From Dan Frommer.

Instant Web Server on Amazon (AWS) S3

Well, I just tried it and it worked!  If you needed a quick and easy web server set up, you could grab a micro instance of a virtual machine on Amazon Web Services (AWS)  EC2 service, set up Apache or similar, etc.

However, it's much easier than that.  S3 (Simple Storage Service) lets you serve files, including static web pages, directly.  You create a bucket, upload files, set permissions, set up logging, and you have a web site.  It's free unless your web site has a huge amount of content.

Of course this is static, i.e., there's no PHP or programming, or dynamically generated pages here.  This is just a simple site, but it works quite well.

The Beatles on American Bandstand

When I think of American Bandstand, I always think of watching this very show in 1967 when films (like  videos!) were premiered for Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields.  (From Video Cabinet in Limbo.  It looks like the actual music videos have been removed).

Here are color versions of the videos.  The ones on AB were in black and white.

Penny Lane

Strawberry Fields  (Another B&W version)

So Long Dick Clark

Man Flies a Boeing 737 in His Garage

From Mercury News. “James Price of Pleasanton has built a flight simulator out of the nose of a former Lufthansa fleet Boeing 737…”

Discovery’s last flight sends it to Smithsonian

from The Washington Post.

Your Next Boat

The Adastra super yacht.  From Mail Online.

• The Adastra is so hi-tech that you can even control it with your iPad 
• Its range is 4,000 miles, enough to go from the UK to New York in a single trip without refueling 
• The 42m yacht has a maximum speed of 22.5 knots 

Why Have I Disappeared from Facebook?

Or at least, why am I not responding?

I have a few FB accounts and it seems that FB has decided I need to provide a phone number to keep them active.  Right now I can't log into most of them without providing a cell phone number.  I'm generally put off by this whole development and mostly inclined not to provide any information like that and just leave FB, at least on those accounts, behind.

For anyone who wants to read what I have to say, the good news is that I usually only post on FB an echo of what I post here.  You can always see what I have to say by reading this blog.  You always could.

Similarly, I've provided easy and effective ways to contact me.  You can, for example, use those to comment on or follow up on my postings here.

What I am missing out on are some postings and pictures by folks on the locked FB accounts, and even occasional messages.  Right now I can't reply to any of them and can't see many of them.

For most of the time I've not been a fan of FB and I'm less a fan than ever right now.  Who knows, though, they may yet emerge as the preferred way to communicate and stay in touch.  I expect the future holds some interesting surprise that I haven't imagined.

In the mean time, if you're looking for me, I'm still here where I've been the whole time.  That's the nice thing about centering communication, at least the outbound kind, on one's own blog.  You always have control of it and it can persist beyond the limits and misdirections of other services.

New Look

Well, now I've gone and done it.  For the first time in some six years (I think) I've changed the look of the site here.  I may make more changes over the coming days as I sort this out.

The site was looking a little old and, frankly, I didn't really like the current version of the look.   I did like the fonts, colors and general layout.

However, I'm clearly a fan of the lighter and more open looks and this one is an example of that.   I like the days being grouped this way.

I spent some time poking around with the text font.  This is currently Open Sans (I think).

Ting

The new mobile phone service, Ting, looks interesting.

The Twelve Greatest Defunct Tech Magazines

... from Technologizer.   Memories.

Mac OS X Dtrace Scripts

I'm cleaning up my email notes and found this excellent article on Mac OS X Dtrace scripts from Brendan's blog.

Nice Balloon Flight Report

This is a nice balloon flight report and I like the 1/4-wave and yagi antennas.

Andy Ihnatko's Ipad Review

At the Chicago Sun-Times, here's Andy Ihnatko's full review of the iPad.

My favorite line has nothing to do with the iPad:  “Well, look, if you want your mind blown, go and watch the original Star Wars trilogy again while pondering the question ‘Is Artoo Detoo using The Force?’”

Coronal Mas Ejection, Geomagnetic Storm Update

From spaceweather.com:

 A coronal mass ejection (CME) hit Earth's magnetic field on March 8th around 1100 UT. The impact was weaker than expected, sparking only a mild (Kp=5) geomagnetic storm. However, the storm could intensify in the hours ahead depending on electromagnetic conditions in the wake of the CME. High-latitude sky watchers should be alert for auroras

Electric Charges in a Molecule

via the BBC.

Nifty HDTV Antenna

for UHF.

The Bitcoin Story

I wondered where things are now with Bitcoin and went looking for a report.  This story at Wired is pretty good.

Remarkable Employees

I hate integer headlines, but this article at Inc was fascinating.

Smalltalk, Haskell, LISP

by Daniel Lyons.

Raspberry Pi

$35 and $25 mini computers.  The Verge.

Uh, that's “mini” in a new, modern sense, not in the PDP-11 sense.  I used to say that, soon, we'd have computers that you could actually lose. “Did you notice were I put the email server? I can't find it!”

Roku Interview

Jolie O'Dell from Venture Beat interviews Anthony Wood, CEO of Roku.

MIT Launches Android App Inventor

Android and me.

Wallit

Write on walls via augmented reality.  From Venture Beat.

Radar images from the March 2012 tornado outbreak

from United States Tornados. “a collection of a handful of the most gripping radar images of the March 2, 2012 storms as they were occurring.”

Solar Flare

Watch for aurorae!

From Space Weather: “ Big sunspot AR1429 has unleashed another major flare. This one is the strongest yet, an X5-class eruption on March 7th at 00:28 UT. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory recorded the extreme UV flash”

And: “A coronal mass ejection (CME) hit Earth's magnetic field on March 7th at approximately 0400 UT. The impact was not a strong one, but it could stir up polar geomagnetic storms anyway. High-latitude sky watchers should be alert for auroras.”

From 11-Alive News.