Tech

Happy Birthday Space Station!

This is the last project my father worked on in his career with NASA. This year is the 10th birthday of the station, although it continues to grow and be rebuilt. CNET has some great photos.

The space station as it looked in August 2005. For most of its habitable history (about eight years), the ISS has had room for just three crew members. But in just the last few weeks, that capacity has doubled to allow six people at a time to call the space station home. Another recent addition: a water regeneration system that will help produce drinking water out of, among other things, the astronauts’ own urine.

Photo by NASA

Caption by Jonathan Skillings

Testing Smart YouTube

Jun 27th, 2008

by Christian Brady.

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Testing a WordPress plugin called “Smart YouTube” for, you guessed it, adding YouTube videos to the blog with full functionality. (BTW, I have no idea what this song is about, but the video is very cool. Apparently “pikapika” is an onomatopoeia in Japanese for “electric sparkling” hence the images in this video.)

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zp-65Lwmh8

Keeping track of your all your books, digitally

Jun 24th, 2008

by Christian Brady.

2 comments

Library Screenshot My brother put up this post the other day after I was showing him the power of Delicious Library. This is a fantastic app where you simply put your ISBN bar code of a book in front of your Mac’s camera and it reads it, searches Amazon, and reads out to you the title of the book (or game or video, you can even add “tools,” “clothes,” etc.) and adds it to your library shelf. You can imagine how useful this would be. You can create notes and different “shelves” so that you can have one for office and one for home. “Where did I leave that copy of Strack’s Introduction to Talmud and Midrash? Oh, it is at home!” You get the idea.

Well, it is Mac only, hence my brohter’s near miss at Macenvy. He found a free online version called Gurulib (which is currently offline, making the “free” less than useful). I was having a few issues with DL but the update tonight fixed them. Since the online version is free I may well move that direction, assuming that it comes back online and remains free. But I know there are a fair number of unwashed using Windows and therefore do not have the choice of DL so in the spirit of philadelphos I offer this information.

Build your digital Bookshelves at gurulib.com!

June 23rd, 2008
by Steve Brady

Okay, I admit it. I was briefly tempted to get a Mac. The Mac has this really cool software, called “Delicious Library” that takes advantage of the webcam in the computer to read ISBN codes, and build a database of your personal library. Thankfully, that temptation is gone.

Hello, Gurulib.com!

At Gurulib you can enter books from a web interface, which moves you away from a specific OS, and allows for that whole “open community sharing” idea. This free site not only lets you enter books into the online database by scanning the ISBN (or entering by hand, or searching on the title, or… you get the hint.) It also allows you to share, if you wish, your library with others. Both virtually (a “hey, check out what I like to read” sort of sharing) or literally, by allowing others to request to borrow a book, and allowing for a real exchange. This is another great way to have some “social networks” that connects people with like interests, and enables you to share those interests.

Aquanauts Go! (It’s Marine Boy, brave and free!)

Jun 16th, 2008

by Christian Brady.

5 comments

This story is just too cool not to link. Penn State faculty are collaborators on this project and they will be spending 8 days underwater at aquarius, the world’s only underwater research station. This is SO cool! When I was a kid I used to love Marine Boy. I was a swimmer (up until college when I realized that I was getting a little tired of seeing the same *&($ black line on the bottom of every pool and played water polo instead) and MB was the coolest. Imagine being able to stay underwater for hours just by chewing oxygum! I used to get in trouble for chewing gum in the pool all the time…

8-day undersea mission begins experiment to improve coral reef
Friday, June 13, 2008

Scientists have begun an eight-day mission, in which they are living and working at 60 feet below the sea surface, to determine why some species of coral colonies survive transplanting after a disturbance, such as a storm, while other colonies die. Coral reefs worldwide are suffering from the combined effects of hurricanes, global warming and increased boat traffic and pollution. As a result, their restoration has become a priority among those who are concerned. Using as a home base the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Aquarius — an underwater facility for science and diving located in Key Largo, Fla. — a team of “aquanauts” is working to protect coral reefs from this barrage of threats by investigating ways to improve their restoration.

“It’s like living on the space station, except that it’s underwater,” said Iliana Baums, an assistant professor of biology at Penn State and a collaborator on the project. “The job is dangerous because, once the aquanauts descend, their tissues become saturated with nitrogen. If they were to return to the surface quickly, they would get the bends, an often deadly illness in which tiny bubbles form inside the body. As a result, the divers at the end of their mission must spend an entire day depressurizing by making their way to the surface slowly

And they have live webcams down there! Very cool: “A live Webcam for viewing the science team while they are underwater in the Aquarius facility is on the Web at http://www.uncw.edu/aquarius/thumb_cam.htm”

Oh, and It’s Marine Boy!

Categories to tags – Just say “no!”

Jun 16th, 2008

by Christian Brady.

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So a brief post on this because I have wasted too much time already. When v 2.5(?) of WordPress came out they put in a means to “tag” posts. Now, if I understand this correctly and that is a very big “if,” tags will help your posts be searched through the intertubes. Poking around I found that there is an “import” feature allowing you to convert your categories to tags. NB – It destroys your categories! So they are all gone and I am left with 1,300+ posts with no categories! They all have their tags, but they don’t show up with the post, they are however tagged. The “cloud” on the left is now a “tag cloud” so if you want to find, say, my posts with or about comics simply click on that tag.

*sigh* not intuitive at all.