One moon passing another

NASA's Curiosity Rover on Mars, has photographed the two Martian moons passing one another. In the video made of the photos the larger moon Phobos can be seen passing in front of Deimos. I wonder what differences to Terran history and culture there might have been if Earth had two satellites and such a sight was known to humans.

Neptune gains a moon

The Hubble telescope has found a new moon of Neptune, it's 14th (i must update my books on astronomy which lists Neptune as only having 2 moons!) Neptune's latest discovered moon is very small however, being just 12 miles in diameter. The new moon is currently called S/2004 N 1, which does not compare very well to the name of Neptune's largest moon Triton!

A proper name will be chosen for the moon however and will likely be drawn from Greek and Roman mythology. The moon is so dim that Voyager 2 did not see it when it made its flypast of the planet in 1989. This is due to it having a very dark surface like some of its fellow Neptunian moons.

The blue exo-planet

For the first time the colour of a planet outside of our solar system has been measured, and its blue! HD 189733 b is a planet 63 light years away, orbiting the star HD 189733. The planet is Jupiter sized and similarly is a giant ball of gas. The colour of the planet was discerned using a spectrograph onboard the Hubble space telescope. During an eclipse of the planet light reflected off the atmosphere was found to be blue however as the planet is a gas giant that blue colour is unlikely to be due water.

It is thought the blue colour may come from silicon clouds in the atmosphere. Another possibility is light scattering caused by hydrogen in the atmosphere.


Blue planet HD 189733b around its host star (artist’s impression) from HubbleESA on Vimeo.

RIP Doug Englebart

Doug Englebart died yesterday in his sleep. Now he may not be as famous as some other major figures in computing but his impact on computing and the way we live now was profound. Basically if you are looking at this or most computer screens these days you are looking at interfaces and concepts he first devised.

Basically the WYSIWYG concept of computing, use of the mouse and multi-windowed user interfaces,  hyperlinks, video conferencing, multimedia documents, instant messaging, keyword searches... Why not just see the demo he made in 1968 of these concepts, it really did change everything.

The Altair 8800 Clone

If you want to try out the very start of home computing then a clone of the iconic Altair 8800 is now available! The Altair 8800 emerged in 1975 powered by the Intel 8080 microprocessor (the clone emulates the 8080 which is no longer in production) and sold in the thousands (surprising everyone including the inventors!) Microsoft's first ever product was BASIC for the Altair. I don't think that is included with the clone though you can probably get it from somewhere.

In search of Valentina Tereshkova

The BBC have an interesting article and audio slideshow on the first female cosmonaut (and first civilian in space) Valentina Tereshkova. She is apparently reluctant to say much about her pioneering mission aboard Vostok 6 herself so the BBC reporter goes to her hometown and try and find out more about her.

Vostok 6 was the final mission in the programme, the first manned (or womanned) spacecraft. Tereshkova made 48 orbits of the Earth, staying in space for 3 days.

Photo from RIA Novosti archive

Working Apple 1 demo

Only 6 Apple 1s are thought to be still be working and 1 of those is going to be auctioned for what is expected to be a heap of cash! Last year another working Apple 1 also went up for auction and this video was made of it in action. Update : it sold for $671,000!

Another satellite hit by space debris?

It is feared the nano-satellite Pegaso (NEE-01 Pegaso), the first satellite owned by Ecuador, could have been damaged by space debris. It passed very close to the remains of a Soviet rocket still in orbit but it will take up to 48 hours to find out if the satellite has been damaged by the collision, any collision may have been a glancing blow.

The debris was from the upper stage of a Tsyklon-3 rocket.

The changes to Flickr

Flickr is my favourite social media site (though i think it firstly as a photo archiving and sharing site) so obviously the major redesign as unveiled yesterday was of interest. The changes have not gone down with long-time users of the site with thousands registering their dismay of the changes on the official forum (the news media didn't bother checking this on the whole, they just regurgitated the Yahoo press release about it being "awesome").

I don't like the changes that much but will adapt, hopefully feedback will be listened to and the changes can be tweaked though i do not expect there to be too much in the way of change. The main thing would be a bit more white space restored, the overall feel of the site is a bit oppressive and heavy now. I suspect the vision Yahoo have for Flickr differs somewhat from that of long-time users and pro users (the pro accounts are being phased out in any event).

No Flickr is not aimed at the pro anymore but will become yet another social photography sharing site. That is a shame as many users (including myself) have invested a lot of time and effort cataloging and curating our photography collections, sorting them into sets and collections, geotagging and labelling them. The new user interface either hides or does away with much of this organisation.

I guess this could be another step in the dumbing down of the internet and life in general. Organisation and choice lost and replaced by something glitzy you can't customise. Care and effort lost to be replaced by passive consumption. What i will probably do is make greater use of blogs to organise images and use Flickr more a repository. Of course that means one is relying on one's blog platform not disappearing, but maybe its time to explore a few other platforms to hedge one's bets...

Astronauts plug ISS leak

Two astronauts on the International Space Station have completed a 5 hour spacewalk in order to fix an ammonia leak which was detected on Thursday. The leak, in part of the station's cooling system to one of its solar arrays, was detected on Thursday when the crew saw white flakes floating away from the station and was fixed by replacing a pump controller with a spare unit. Although the station and crew were not in danger power supply from the array was affected and electricity had to be rerouted from elsewhere to keep all systems operating.

Photo from NASA

London in colour... in 1927

Pioneering British film maker Claude Frisse-Greene made a number of silent films showing life in the UK in the 1920s, one of which in London was filmed using the colour film he and his father William developed called the Friese-Greene Natural Colour process. Claude hoped the film could help publicise the process to Hollywood though in the end Technicolor won that battle. The British Film Institute have now released this film online, after performing computer enhancement to reduce flickering.

The Friese-Greene Natural Colour process grew out of William Frisse-Green's Biocolour. This was an additive colour film process. The subject was filmed using black and white film, the illusion of colour was created by exposing alternate frames of film through two colour filters. Each alternate frame is then stained red or green. Although this did give a passable illusion of true colour the films suffered from flickering and colour fringing especially if there was rapid motion. Additive colour films died out by the Second World War with subtractive colour processes like Kodachrome and Technicolor eventually becoming the norm.

The film shows a fascinating insight into normal everyday life in the capital. Buses, boats and lots of men in hats! The skyline of London is very different to today though at times the scene hardly seems to have changed that much at all.

London in 1927 from Tim Sparke on Vimeo.

Weapon Fail : Project 685 "Mike" submarine

The Soviet Project 685, known as "Mike" to NATO, was a singleton class of submarine which sank 5 years after commissioning and is now a radioactive time bomb under one of the richest fishing areas in the world off the coast of Norway...

The order to design the 685 was made in 1966 but it took nearly 20 years before K-278 (as the boat was numbered) entered service in 1984. The 685 was an experimental submarine designed to test a number of new technologies and design features including a double hull and stronger internal bulkheads. The inner hull being titanium. The 685 could dive notably deeper than any NATO submarine, down to 1250m. The 685 included a personal escape sphere built into the sail to allow the crew to escape if anything happened in the deep sea.

Despite all that 685 came a cropper in relatively shallow waters. On the 7th of April 1989 while at a depth of no more than 335m south west of Bear Island a fire broke out on board. Despite the watertight doors being closed the fire was able to spread via cables. The reactor was shut down and the submarine surfaced and most of the crew abandoned ship though many died of exposure. Several hours later the submarine sunk. In total 42 men died in the accident.

And 685 became a radiological hazard. As well as the reactor the 685 carried 2 torpedos armed with nuclear warheads. If there is a serious radioactive leak then rich fishing grounds off the coast of Norway could be ruined for centuries. Surveys of the wreck have indicated cracks along the hull but as yet no serious radioactive leak. The wreck has a large hole in it's torpedo compartment however. Sea water is said to be corroding the casings of the warheads and the submarine's hull. Some plutonium was detected to have leaked from one of the warheads in 1994.

As raising the wreck would likely be too risky the strategy instead has been to seal cracks in the hull. The hull is now said to be safe for 20 to 30 years. So thats ok then...

The return of Vectrex

Vectrex was one of a multitude of competing consoles in the early days of home video gaming. I vaguely remember the name but not a lot else (i didn't even get a 2600 until the early 21st century, thats how slow i am sometimes!) but Vectrex stood out for a number of reasons. For one it had its own built in screen, not relying on a TV (which means you could keep playing even if Mum wanted to watch her soaps). Vectrex was also vector based though a much simpler level than today's. Simple graphics were augmented by colour screen overlays. In 1984 after the disaster of the video game crash Vectrex disappeared...

To return now as an iOS app. TUAW have the following review and video. The app looks really nice, adding a lot of value to a simple emulator, even including vintage TV ads!

The voice of Alexander Graham Bell

Despite the fact his inventions like the telephone have helped billions of people hear others voices (and record voices) no one knew what Alexander Graham Bell's own voice sounded like (apart from people who knew him of course).

Now one of the earliest wax disc recordings from 1885 which comes complete with a written transcript by Bell has been scanned using a non-invasive optical sound recovery process and audio extracted by calculating how a stylus would move through the grooves of the disc. More details of the optical scanning can be seen here.

My Micro Life (5) : Amstrad PPC512DD

We have now reached 1990 in the story of my microcomputers growing up and by now i was a student at Birmingham Polytechnic. More importantly I now had money (you see back in the past we actually got paid to be students and got all of our course fees paid!) and of course i wanted my own computer after using and abusing my Dad's computers up until now. I saw an advert for Morgan Computers where they were selling Amstrad PPC512DD portable computers with a free external monitor. I fancied the idea of having a laptop as a rich guy on my course had one. So i went along and bought it...

If you are not familiar with the PPC512 then it was an unusual portable computer. It had a full-size proper keyboard (so was fairly big) though it had a small black & white (and non-backlit) LCD screen. This was rather hard to see anything on though so i tended to use the Sinclair black & white monitor instead (until it overheated which was usually by the time the PPC had booted). It had twin 3.5" floppy disc drives and not a great deal else. It was not what you would call a laptop though to be fair it was not a heavy computer. It ran reasonably well, with an NEC V30 chip (a clone of the 8086) and 512K of RAM.

I can't remember a great deal about the PPC to be honest because i sold it within a couple of months. I only lost about 20 quid on it, selling it to a fellow student, he didn't come back to me for a refund so i assume he got some good use out of it! I wanted a proper laptop and that is where i thought i was going next...

10 years of the iTunes Music Store

The i-devices helped restore Apple's fortunes and eventually made them the juggernaut they are today (even if they have dipped a bit lately). After the iMac steadied the ship it was the divergence into the iPod music player and later the iPhone and iPad that set Apple's fortunes soaring. The Apple strategy was to produce the devices for people to be able to live a digital media lifestyle and the iTunes Store, which is 10 years old today, is a key cornerstone of that strategy.

There had been music stores before but Apple packaged it all up with a price-per-song ($0.99) that broke such things out of the geek niche and into the mainstream. The iTunes Store has become a huge success, making billions of dollars for Apple, diversifying into movies and books, and is now the biggest music retailer in the world.

Personally i don't buy many songs from it, i prefer to buy CDs and rip to iTunes that way but for the odd song and digital only release it works very well. Part of the success of the store has been to help encourage and tie many customers to Apple's hardware too and with over 25 billion songs sold to date there are a lot of people now tied into the system. 

Ancient computers in use today

Technology and computing in particular has a rapid cycle of innovation and obsolescence. However in some cases old computing equipment remains in use decades after it went obsolete. PC World covers a few systems still in use including a warehouse inventory system still running on an Apple IIe, PDPs still in use by defence establishments and most amazingly an IBM 402 accounting machine from 1948 which is apparently still in use by a Texan chemical filter company. The IBM 1401 Restoration Project have more photos of the system in use, which is the last one in service in the world, and are trying to get it into a museum.

Many older computers are perfectly fine for certain tasks, though a 402 is probably pushing it a bit. However as one of the commenters in the PC World article says, at least the operators don't have to worry about malware and endless software updates.

My Micro Life (4) : Amstrad PC1640DD

After the BBC Micro expired, due to mysterious circumstances, we were in search of a new computer. It was by now the late 1980s and Amstrad had recently launched the PC revolution in the UK with IBM PC compatibles within the price range of mere mortals. Thus it was decided it was time to jump on that bandwagon and get a proper grown-up computer so we could do proper stuff like word processing and spreadsheets (yawn).

The PC1640DD was an early IBM XT compatible though it did have a few strange foibles such as the power supply unit being in the monitor and a non-standard mouse. Ours had the full 640K of RAM, it came with twin 5.25" floppy drives and... a GUI! That GUI was GEM Desktop and it wasn't very useful on that PC to be honest, especially as we only had CGA graphics, and we had no GUI applications so it had limited use to us, so we mostly stuck to DOS. The most useful software that came with the Amstrad was a business software pack of WordStar, Supercalc and a database i can't remember the name of now mostly because it was rubbish.

For the next few years that PC was our workhorse and my Dad was keen to upgrade it as much as possible. Over the years we got a 32MB hard drive (though because of the idiosyncratic Amstrad PC architecture the hard drive came on an extension card... thus a hard card) and an external 3.5" floppy drive. I also bought MS-DOS 4.01 for it just because i could.

I even installed MS Windows 3.0 on it as that did support CGA mode though it was as useless as GEM but intriguing.

The PC coincided with my arrival at Birmingham Polytechnic so some of the software i used during my HND on the Poly's PCs i also used on the Amstrad including a shareware clone of dBase III which i used for my final year project and Turbo Pascal (v4 which i bought myself as the poly was still on v3) to learn how to program.

However by the early 1990s the PC1640 was starting to look tired and had reached its limits, more or less, in terms of expandability. Besides which i now had a grant cheque and decided it was time to buy my own computer at last, though for some reason i bought for my first computer a cut-down portable version of the Amstrad PC, but that is a story for next time...

British Airships 1905-30 (Book Review)

The end of the 19th century saw a great spark of interest in the airship in countries like Germany and France, the British lagged behind somewhat though quickly caught up in the early 20th century. R101 apart not much is often written about British airship developments compared to the likes of the zeppelins which makes Ian Castle's book British Airships 1905-30 in the Osprey New Vanguard series most welcome.

As with all NV books it is a fairly slim tome but packed full of information and well illustrated. The book tells the story of British airships from the first non-rigid ships through to the disaster of the R101 which pretty much ended British interest in the airship (for the time being anyway).

The book describes each Army and Navy airship series in turn and describes their wartime exploits. The book concentrates on the military role of Britain's airships so does not go into great detail about the R101 but that has been amply covered in other books. What is particularly interesting is the coverage of early British non-rigid airships such as the rather lovely looking flying sausage Nulli Secundus.

Nulli Secundus II (Library of Congress photo)

The only flaw in the book is that it is rather short (only 48 pages) but that is a common problem with the Osprey NV series. The structure is also a little illogical, the airships are described first and then the book goes back to cover the war service. It may have flowed better to do this at the same time. These are only minor niggles though, it is a lovely book that is highly recommended.

Transatlantic Airships - An Illustrated History (Book Review)

Airships are one of my obsessions and books on them i hungrily consume. Transatlantic Airships is not a general history of airships though does cover a great deal of their heyday and more recent developments. It concentrates on airships that crossed the Atlantic Ocean, seen as the great barrier in early aviation. Transatlantic passenger flights were seen in the 1920s as the great commercial opportunity for airships like the famous zeppelin, able to take passengers in comfort long distances. This was something the fixed wing aircraft of the time was far beyond being able to match.

In his well written and brilliantly illustrated book John Christopher describes the early history of the airship, both rigid and non-rigid and the advances in technology sparked by the First World War with the German zeppelins gaining longer and longer legs. The first airship to cross the Atlantic non-stop though was British, R34 which crossed from East to West in July 1919. Although the fixed wing aircraft beat it across with Alcock and Brown crossing in the other direction in their former Vimy bomber just 2 weeks beforehand, R34 did make the first return crossing by an aircraft. R34's epic journey is covered in great detail as are a number of other crossings, the book throughout is well illustrated with excellent photographs and period graphics and maps.

Despite the British lead (whose interest in airships was finally destroyed in the R101 crash) it was the German zeppelins who made passenger flights across the Atlantic their own with airships of increasing size and complexity culminating in the Hindenberg. The airship was holding its own in its special niche in the 1930s despite increasing competition by aeroplanes. The level of comfort that could be offered unmatched until the wide-bodied jet airliners of the 1970s (albeit for the rich only). Of course the airship was a lot slower but when you are rich maybe the time to travel  does not matter too much as a smoking room and a grand piano, as the Hindenberg had, does. The Hindenberg disaster killed off the commercial airship business though by then it was largely restricted to the zeppelin Atlantic trade.

If the Hindenberg had not blown up on that dreadful day in May 1937 its interesting to consider for how much longer the zeppelins would have crossed the Atlantic. It is likely they could have continued for a few more years though the disaster and the Second World War killed off the dream. That is not the end of the story the book recounts however as the wartime exploits of the US Navy's blimp squadrons (or blimprons) which on occasion crossed the Atlantic to get to their assignments in Europe are also included. The book ends with a look at recent airship developments including the Zeppelin NT though airships crossing the Atlantic carrying passengers in decadent comfort is probably a dream that will never live again.

Dreams are something the book covers well. Many futuristic (and outlandish) designs for airships were made in both sides of the war, even nuclear powered airships being considered at one stage but all of these dreams came to nothing. But it is good to dream after all, even if the dream is ultimately doomed.