Here’s a service that will send a Twitter tweet when the ISS is coming by. The Satellite Notifier Twitter Bot by Shingo will send you a tweet when the ISS is near you (you’ll have to follow the appropriate account). Pretty cool!
X-Geek
Extreme geekiness
There are 699 posts filed in X-Geek (this is page 40 of 70).
Space station spotting
International Space Station
I’ve been having fun tracking the International Space Station using the free Linux satellite tracking package Gnome Predict. This morning’s pass was exceptionally good, with the space station sailing almost directly over my home in Raleigh.
I took a series of long-exposure photographs to try to capture the station’s path across the sky but the station’s high path presented a problem. My 18mm lens was not nearly as wide as it needed to be to capture the almost 180 degree arc the station traveled in. Thus, I had to hastily reposition my camera and tripod in the dark as the station progressed through the sky and simply hope for the best.
The truth is, I should have gotten up about 10 minutes sooner in order to get things set up, but I misremembered the approach time.
If I get into this hobby further (and I think I will) I will have to get one of those equatorial mounts in order to keep the stars from blurring as the Earth rotates. Time to start saving up, I guess!
For those of you who have not yet discovered Linux, you can also track the ISS at the legendary site Heavens Above or at SightSpaceStation.
Stuxnet – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Fascinating. This reminds me a of a hacker attack the CIA allegedly pulled on a Soviet gas pipeline way back in 1982.
Stuxnet is a computer worm targeted at industrial equipment that was first discovered in July 2010 by VirusBlokAda, a security firm based in Belarus. While it is not the first time that hackers have targeted industrial systems, it is the first discovered worm that spies on and reprograms industrial systems, and the first to include a programmable logic controller (PLC) rootkit.It was specifically written to attack Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems used to control and monitor industrial processes. Stuxnet includes the capability to reprogram the PLCs and hide its changes.
The worm’s probable target is said to have been high value infrastructures in Iran using Siemens control systems. According to news reports the infestation by this worm might have damaged Iran’s nuclear facilities in Natanz and eventually delayed the start up of Iran’s Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant. Although Siemens initially had stated that the worm had not caused any damage, on November 29, Iran confirmed that its nuclear program had indeed been damaged by Stuxnet.
Facebook backups
One of the knocks I had against Facebook when I first started using it is that it’s a walled garden: it’s fun to play inside but there’s little sharing with the outside world. I didn’t want to invest all this time in Facebook without being able to take my work (or, um … should I say “play”) with me should I one day decide to part ways with Facebook.
It used to be that there was no good way to do this, but not any more! On a recent scan of my Facebook settings I discovered a feature I hadn’t seen before: a way to download Facebook information!
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Open source streaming
As you may know, I’ve been streaming my monthly East CAC meetings through Livestream.Com. This is less than ideal because of all the advertisements that get tacked on to my videos. For a year now I’ve been looking for an open source solution to replace Livestream and I think I found it.
The solution is called Red5. It’s an open source implementation of a Adobe Flash server, written in Java. It’s capable of streaming Flash video out to clients from a Linux server and seems pretty battle-tested.
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Thunderstorms Shoot Antimatter Beams Into Space
Thunderstorms can shoot beams of antimatter into space—and the beams are so intense they can be spotted by spacecraft thousands of miles away, scientists have announced.
Most so-called normal matter is made of subatomic particles such as electrons and protons. Antimatter, on the other hand, is made of particles that have the same masses and spins as their counterparts but with opposite charges and magnetic properties.
Amazon Video on Demand
Now that I’ve played around with the Roku for a few weeks I decided to check out the Amazon Video on Demand (or VOD) store. Amazon offers fairly new movies for “rental” or “purchase,” and through the magic of Roku these rentals get automatically billed to your Amazon account. They have content for standard-definition as well as high-definition. I checked out a few of their free offerings (an HD promo for The Office) and was impressed by the quality.
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Highlights of 2010: break-in
This year brought an unwanted visitor when our home was broken into while we were away for Thanksgiving. Miraculously, we knew about it the instant it happened. It had only been hours since I completed my alarm script, which meant our alarm panel called our cellphones the second the burglar opened the window.
While we in the dark about what was really going on at home, we soon learned that the damage and impact was actually very, very minimal. We didn’t even cut our vacation short. What we did do was add a few more components to our alarm system and a few more security enhancements to our windows.
Later we even got video of the suspect leaving the scene, which was distributed to all the downtown police officers.
I look at the incident this way: the break-in was in reality a free evaluation from a seasoned security professional. A man who makes a living breaking into homes showed us just how he would approach our home. He showed us where the weak spots are. This guy gave it his best shot, and ultimately he failed. He failed!
So now that I know how a pro would approach our home, I have made our home even stronger. We’re now better off as a result.
Why does Paul Allen hate the Internet?
Billionaire Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen is one of the top twenty richest Americans, and life gets hard when you’re at the top. Those megayachts aren’t exactly easy on the gas pump, if you know what I mean. So what’s a poor billionaire to do, you say? Why not sue the biggest companies on the Internet by claiming patent infringement!?
Yes, Paul Allen – a man who once did some cool things with his Microsoft money – has become a lowly patent troll, claiming his company invented a number of web technologies. His claims are absurd, in my view, and strike me as being a money grab. Allen’s reputation has dived deeper than the submarines he keeps on his yacht.
See Engadget, Ars Technica, or the FOSS Patents site for the techie nitty gritty, or ABCNews for the non-geek version:
Interval Licensing LLC, a company owned by billionaire Microsoft Corp. co-founder Paul Allen, has filed an amended lawsuit against Facebook, Google Inc. and nine other companies, claiming they infringed on patented Web technology.
Interval Licensing, based in Seattle, owns the rights to information systems, computer science and communications technology developed in Silicon Valley by Interval Research, which Allen co-founded in the 1990s. Interval Research no longer exists.
The filing is a revision of the lawsuit Interval Licensing filed in August against Facebook, Google, Google’s video site YouTube, AOL Inc., Apple Inc., Yahoo Inc., Netflix Inc., eBay Inc., Office Depot, OfficeMax, and Staples.
via Paul Allen Refiles Suit Against Internet Giants – ABC News.
I’m Dreaming of a Blue Sunset
Martian sunset
It’s not exactly a Christmas song but you can take a peek at what a Martian sunset looks like this time of year, courtesy of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Opportunity rover, still humming along on the surface of Mars.
There’s something comforting to me about seeing our sun set from the vantage point of a different planet.