Last night, the final episode of The Weekly Space Hangout went live on Youtube – after eleven years and hundreds of shows Fraser Cain and Producer Nancy Graziano have decided to call it a day. It came as a surprise, but it was not entirely unexpected – the show was born eleven years ago in a completely different time and in the last few years it became more and more difficult to get the journalists and guests together each week. The final show had Fraser, his fellow partner-in-science Dr. Pamela Gay and long-time WSH journalists Dr. Kimberly Cartier and Dr. Morgan Rehnberg talking about the news and reminiscing about the past decade of Weekly Space Hangouts.

Two weeks ago, I had a bit of an accident – a glass full of hot tea broke while I was carrying it to my desk and it spilled on my laptop. That’s the relatively new Thinkpad T61 which I got in September 2015 and only recently upgraded with new memory… but Thinkpads are supposed to be fairly liquid-resistant, right? I thought so too, but before I could shut it down, it shut itself off… and stayed off. It was as dead as a dodo, even after partly disassembling and cleaning it – or so I thought at the time. This was my fastest computer with which I do everything nowadays, because my “big” machines are now to old to even browse the web… and I needed a replacement fast. Thankfully I have a little bit of emergency money for exactly this purpose to spend and after a quick look on eBay I found a nice Thinkpad T510 from the same seller I already got my T61 and my Compaq all the way back ten years ago. I can really recommend IT-Mixx for used notebooks because even what they call B-Ware looks like brand new.

Two thousand and eighteen, let’s let that sink in for a moment – a year count that sounds straight out of science fiction, it’s now really the future we’re living in! I’m happy to report that the now ancient-sounding year of 2017 was quite a lot better than 2016 at least for myself, even though opinions may differ for the rest of the world. I’m quite late with my traditional end-of-the-year post once again, but that happened mainly because I just want to take it easy and do everything without too much pressure this year. 2018 actually started for me far away from home because I was visiting my family in Berlin, so I didn’t even return until the year was already a couple of days old. And of course it took me a while to arrived back home properly, but now that I’ve got everything sorted it’s finally time for the yearly recap and outlook!

I’d like to wish all family, friends, regular readers, commenters and all other visitors Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas, A Happy New Year or any other Holiday Greetings you prefer! As you know, I prefer Happy Newtonmas because Isaac Newton was born on December 25th, but I’m very democratic in that respect and let everyone celebrate the the holiday they like.

2017 was definitively a better year for me personally than 2016, but I’ll still postpone the longer end-of-year roundup until mid-January again this time – I’m actually not at home right now but with my relatives in Berlin and haven’t even started to write anything! I’ll still post the usual daily dose of photos over on my Photography Blog especially because I already have lots and lots of stuff from Berlin coming up and I’ll probably have enough time to post even over the holidays. As usual, you can follow me over on  Google+, Twitter or Facebook to get everything from me in one place, but I’m probably going to be very slow with answering comments in the next couple of days.

Have a nice end-of-year holiday, everyone – I’ll see you all around the Internets at some point or other! :-)

MERRY NEWTONMAS AND A HAPPY NEW YEAR!

I hadn’t planned on a special Easter post this year, but this one has been lying around for a while, so I’d just like to say Happy Easter to everyone with this little update. Althought there might not be happening too much right here at the moment, I’m still posting photos daily over on the Photograpghy Blog and I’m posting some spacey news regularly over on Google+ too, so I’m definitively not out of the loop. But now on to the news…

A couple of weeks ago, I finally moved the blog to the new Bibra.eu domain, something I wanted to do since sometime last year, but I never got around to it. This actually involved creating a complete copy of the site and putting a redirector in place of the old address, so I wouldn’t have to change every graphics url and all files are still in both locations – luckily, I have plenty enough webspace for that. On the surface, the address switch changes nothing because all old urls are still valid and will be simply redirected to the new domain if they’re visited, so there will be hopefully no dead links. The other two websites, DVDLog and my Photography Blog are not affected by this and still remain at their current addresses.

The other change under the hood is a slightly optimized and updated template, which actually looks mostly the same, but has some rewritten and improved CSS code. It also has an experimental mobile template, which kicks in when you open the website on a tablet or phone in portrait orientation – this is extremely beta, if not alpha, because the re-jiggered menu is still not functional and there’s currently no way to call up more menu items or the sidebar. I’m still figuring out how to implement a popup or slide-out menu for touch displays, which isn’t all that easy because the CSS hover property doesn’t work on touch devices and I’m not good enough with Javascript to write something from scratch. But I’ll figure it out and in the meantime I’ll think of an in-between solution soon.

Another feature I’ve recently added is SSL encryption for all my sites – I discovered that my provider All-Inkl.com has added easy support for Let’s Encrypt certificates a while ago and of course I took advantage of that. This is mostly a way for myself to encrypt the WordPress backend, but all three websites are available with SSL encryption now. Although keep in mind that parts of the sites, especially some of the graphics, will still be loaded over unencrypted connections, so this is only a half-secure solution from a visitor’s perspective and I’m aware that Let’s Encrypt certificates aren’t really worth that much. For that reason, I haven’t made the SSL encryption mandantory, but you can put a https:// in front of my websites and they will be fully working.

That’s all for now – as usual, everything here is more or less constantly under construction and if something is broken, please don’t hesitate to tell me here in the comments.

I finally did it – I got my Internet line upgraded! For the last eight-ish years, I’ve been on a DSL-6000, which meant about 6 mbit/s downstream and only about 0.5 mbit/s upstream. That was not really an issue years ago when there were no video chats or huge files to upload, but nowadays, such a slow upstream really becomes a terrible bottleneck as file sizes increase and bandwidth for live video is necessary. In addition to that, my internet provider, the German Telekom, had been bugging me to upgrade from the old ADSL and the analogue phone line to VDSL and VoIP telephony, so I finally decided to take the plunge and make the change – even though the last upgrade eight years ago resulted in a two week outage and an odyssey through the call centers. But I’m happy to report that nothing blew up and for the last two weeks I’ve been finally enjoying really fast internet.

So, the first two weeks of the new year are almost now over and maybe it’s time to get going here again – but with what? I have to admit that I made absolutely no preparations for a new year’s posting at all and I’m really not in the mood for a look back at the dreadful last year that saw me losing my mother and almost my home. So I’m just going to wing it and pick the few best bits of 2016 and how they’re going to continue in the new year. Of course, after I finished this introduction and wrote the actual article, it did turn out to be the typical recap I post every year, but with more of an outlook to the near future. So, let’s have a look at what 2017 has in store, because this year can only get better than the last!

I’d like to wish all family, friends, regular readers, commenters and all other visitors Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas, A Happy New Year or any other Holiday Greetings you prefer! As you know, I prefer Happy Newtonmas because Isaac Newton was born on December 25th, but I’m very democratic in that respect and let everyone celebrate the the holiday they like.

There’s not really much positive to say about 2016 from my personal perspective and so I’ll postpone the traditional end-of-year roundup to either between the holidays or early next year. I haven’t really decided if I’m going to take a break posting over in the Photography Blog, but I probably will share the usual round of photos all through the holidays. There’s still lots to post and as usual you can also follow me on Google+, Twitter or Facebook to get everything from me in one place, although answering comments and other writing might be a bit light over the next couple of days. But next year I’ll try to get everything rolling again properly around here!

Also, thank you to everyone – you know who you are – who kept me sane in the last half year. I really wouldn’t have made it without you!

MERRY NEWTONMAS AND A HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Yesterday, my mother Angela unexpectedly passed away and we are all very, very sad and miss her terribly. I’ve made another short post over on the photography blog and I’ll say a bit more about my wonderful mother when I’ve recovered from this sudden event. I’d like to thank everyone who already sent me condolences and great words of hope. I’m going to be okay and will continue with everything soon, I may just be a little bit more quiet than usual because I have lots to do in the next days. Angela will stay alive through me and my memories of her and our whole family will never forget her.

I’d like to wish all family, friends, regular readers, commenters and all other visitors Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas, A Happy New Year or any other Holiday Greetings you prefer! Of course, I like Happy Newtonmas because Isaac Newton was born on December 25th, but I’m very democratic in that respect and let everyone celebrate the the holiday they prefer.

This is my traditional end-of-year posting with a roundup of things I’ve been up to this year – which turned out to be a lot in 2015! It was a very busy, productive and relatively peaceful year for myself and especially good in the hardware department because there have been quite a few technology updates around her. In addition to a new tablet, I also got my first smartphone in 2015 and finally replaced my aging laptop with something well, a bit less aging. This means that working on the websites and other related projects has become much more comfortable recently with less holdups due to slow or breaking down computers and other devices.