Category: Tech

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I remember being bowled over when astronomers first detected planets around other stars. Now they’ve actually managed to get pictures!

Of course, they’re about as detailed as pictures of the stars at a science-fiction convention panel taken from the back of the room, or the band on stage from the upper-top-fifth-tier seating (see! that dot there is so-and-so!), but still…it’s a start.

There’s one photo from Hubble of the planetary debris disc around Fomalhaut, with a little dot that apparently has been tracked in other images, consistent with being in orbit around the star. It’s estimated at being about the size of Jupiter and about four times as far out from its star as Neptune is from the sun.

Meanwhile: consider that we can see something the size of Jupiter even though it’s 25 light years away!

Then there’s one from the Gemini North telescope that has actually caught two planets in orbit around a star called HR 8799 — a photo of a planetary system!

Update: Hubblesite has more on Fomalhaut including this image showing Fomalhaut B’s location in 2004 and 2006:

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I found this while looking through a box of old photos, in an envelope marked Lunar Eclipse and developed in June 1994. Most likely the May 25, 1994 eclipse.

I’m not sure, but I think the bright splotch near the bottom is actually the moon, and the clear image of the moon up near the top is a reflection inside the camera. I have no idea whether the ring is an atmospheric phenomenon that got picked up on the film, or just lens flare.

Update: It was most likely taken with a point-and-shoot fixed-focus 35mm camera (though I had an SLR by that time that my grandfather had given me, so I’m not sure why I wouldn’t have used it). But even if it’s a really messed-up picture of an eclipse, it’s still an interesting-looking picture, IMO, which is why I scanned it.

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I’ve been using Twitter for a couple of weeks as an additional update channel and sort of an adjunct to my blog, Speed Force (you can follow it at @SpeedForceOrg), and I’ve actually realized that yes, there is a point to it. It’s good for the random thought that only takes a sentence or two, but seems like it doesn’t quite warrant a full blog post.

So I’ve added a second account for general stuff, (i.e. not just comics & Flash) as an experiment, at @KelsonV, and I’m tying it to this blog using Alex King’s Twitter Tools. Let’s see how this works out…

Update: Okay, so I’ve got K2R announcing posts to Twitter. I’ve got Twitter feeding to Facebook using the Twitter app on Facebook. And I’m building daily digests on K2R using Twitter Tools (which is supposed to handle loops) and to LiveJournal using LoudTwitter (thanks, andrea_wot).

I looked at ping.fm per rialtus’s suggestion, but from what little I can see without signing up, it only does instant updates, and it looks like it’s push only — i.e., I’d post to ping.fm and it would go out to Twitter, LJ, Myspace, Facebook, etc., but I’d still need something else to pull blog headlines.

So, if I’ve got all this set up right:

Twitter → Facebook
Twitter → LJ Daily Digest
Twitter → K2R Daily Digest (except for stuff that came from K2R)
K2R Headlines → Twitter
K2R Headlines → Twitter → Facebook
K2R Headlines → Twitter → LJ Daily Digest

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I was looking up the proper term for a plasma lamp and stumbled upon the Wikipedia entry for the Zeusaphone.

It’s a Tesla Coil that’s set up to modulate its discharges so that they produce specific notes. In other words, it’s a Tesla Coil that plays music using lightning!

Seriously… how can you turn down a description like that?

It’s also been called a “thoremin,” — another lightning-god-based pun, this one on the theramin,

The company that makes them has a couple of video clips on their website, but sadly they’re a little underwhelming on a 200-pixel window with computer speakers. I imagine they’d be seriously impressive in person.

Photo by Dracoswinsauer. Used per Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

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Rather than looking at campaigns for specific browsers, I’m looking at a class of campaigns that are either promoting a group of browsers, or advocating against the current dominant player: Internet Explorer.

Browse Happy — the classic.

  • Goal: Move users away from Internet Explorer.
  • Target Audience: IE users.
  • Promotes: Firefox.  Also Safari, Opera, and… um… Mozilla.  Hmm, someone needs to update that.
  • Pitch: IE is dangerous.
  • Method: Banners

Alternative Browser Alliance

  • Goal: Keep multiple standards-compliant browsers viable.
  • Target Audience: All users
  • Promotes: Opera, Firefox, Safari.  Also Flock, SeaMonkey, K-Meleon, Camino,etc.
  • Pitch: Competition is good for everyone.  See what’s out there.
  • Method: Banners

End 6! (end6.org)

  • Goal: Move people off of IE6
  • Target Audience: IE6 users
  • Promotes: Firefox, Opera, Safari, Flock, IE7
  • Pitch: IE6 is outdated, buggy, and unsafe.  Use something modern instead.
  • Method: Overlay for IE6 visitors

Save the Developers (savethedevelopers.org)

  • Goal: Move people off of IE6
  • Target Audience: IE6 users
  • Promotes: IE7, Firefox, Safari, Opera
  • Pitch: Coding for IE6 is a pain.  Stop putting us through that.
  • Method: Animated drop-down at top of page for IE6 visitors

(Yeah, I’m catching up on old draft posts.)

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