It’s Towel Day again today, the annual celebration of all things Douglas Adams and Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy! This year, I don’t have anything new, but over on DVDLog there are still the long and comprehensive reviews of both the 1981 television series and the 2005 movie which I had updated and translated into English a while ago.

Something which I’ve always neglected to mention before is the devilishly difficult Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Infocom Adventure, which is available online from the BBC. It’s one of the most frustrating and difficult text adventures out there, partly because of its convoluted development history. This has been extensively chronicled by Jimmy ‘The Digital Antiquarian‘ Maher in his 2013 article – he has also written a great post about Douglas Adams himself.

Meanwhile, the radio broadcast of the Hitchhiker’s Guide Live Show from 2014 has unfortunately disappeared from Youtube and has apparently never been commercially released anywhere, so all that’s left is a trailer. But the Hitchhiker’s Guide on Radio does have a future – I only found out recently that the BBC has commissioned a sixth radio series which still seems to be in the planning stage, but will reportedly be based on Eoin Colfer’s sequel And Another Thing… and feature the original actors. I haven’t heard anything recent about it, but with Dirk Maggs involved, this will be amazing.

There’s also my old Youtube Playlist with some great Douglas Adams treasures, but now it’s unfortunately missing the rare South Bank Show documentary, which has sadly been deleted for a copyright claim – fortunately, there’s still another upload on Dailymotion available! I had  originally seen this in a dubbed version sometime in the early 1990s on German television. And of course, you can actually find the television and radio series themselves somewhere on Youtube if you search for them, but I’m not linking to them because the Youtube uploads have actually a really degraded image quality compared to the DVD and, of course, because of copyright reasons. Buy the DVD, it’s awesome! And it’s not like it still costs 30 bucks like it did twelve years ago.

Happy Towel Day, everyone!

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.

Well, this happened yesterday… it was actually even a little bit hotter. I can’t remember when we last went over 35°C, but the 36 to 37 were really a surprise. Fortunately it was still dry and later last night we got a much needed thunderstorm which cooled things down considerably. Today it’s “only” about 30°C which feels comparatively cool to yesterday, but for tomorrow the forecasts say somethingf about 36°C again.  So I’m taking thinks veeeeeeeery slowly at the moment and thanks to having both a solid new tablet (more about that later!) and a smartphone at hand, I really have no reason to even think of switching on a computer in this sort of temperature.

I also managed to figure out how to get a smartphone photo right into the blog without having to go through the computer, so making quick article thumbmails like this one are not a problem anymore even though the quality is not the best and I obviously can’t do the round edges I usually do with a pictue frame mask in PSP. Photo processing except for quick smartphone shots is also not really comfortable (yet?) under Android because getting the photos off my camera is somewhat difficult and there are simply no mobile photo editors that really fit my needs. But since I have a LOT of already finished photos ready to post and I’m not in any danger of running out, that doesn’t really matter and the photo posting will continue as usual over on the Photography Blog – and I even might have a movie/dvd-review coming soon over on DVDLog later when the temperatures are a bit more normal again.

So stay tuned, keep as cool as possible and I hope everyone can beat the second mid-European heatwave of this summer!

A couple of days ago, we were still freezing out butts off and it was so cold at night that we had to turn on the heating – and now the first mini-heatwave of the year has arrived. The temperatures in the image are not exaggerated, the outside balcony thermometer even shows 32°C and compared to the barely over 20°C in the last few days,  this is really warm. So don’t expect any major stuff from me, but I’ll be posting the usual round of photos and I even have an article over on DVDLog ready for the weekend I’ve totally forgotten about later this weekend.

I’ve also had a sort of computer meltdown in the last week when the harddrive of my work notebook began to die slowly. This is an old laptop with IDE interface, so getting replacements is very tricky and the 160GB drive I’ve been using for two years or so was already a used one given to me by a friend as a gift. Now I’m down to two 40GB drives, and that does not leave much harddrive space for photos and other stuff, which I now have to keep on the big computer. The downside in this kind of weather is that I don’t like to switch the computers any more than I have to and the smartphone and tablet are not really good for working on photos – but I have a big enough stash to last for at least two weeks to post anyway.

My plan is to get a slightly newer work notebook this fall – I’m eyeing a Thinkpad T60, which has the advantage that it already supports SATA drives, making the hardddrive situation much less problematic. This notebook is now already in the sub-€100 price range on eBay and I think it will be a nice replacement for my aging Compaq N610C.

I’m actually finishing this post with my tablet on the balcony and it’s actually quite nice with a bit of wind right now – have fun everyone with the nice weather (if you have it too)! :-)

It’s Towel Day again today, the annual celebration of all things Douglas Adams and Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. This year, I’ll do a repost of last year’s articles with some additions – head over to DVDLog to read the painstakingly translated review of the 1981 Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy televisison series, which was actually a lot of fun to revisit and update, because it’s not only a disc review, but partly the history of the Hitchhiker’s Guide itself. And this year I even have the translated article about the 2005 movie incarnation ready, which was still missing last time because I wasn’t able to get it readyyet.

Last Spring, I missed something great – the cast of the Hitchhiker’s Guide Radio Series had been on tour with a live show, but there was a 75-minute live radio broadcast on BBC4 from the whole gang. I was really disappointed that I missed it, but recently it surfaced on Youtube in somewhat suboptimal quality, but it’s still immensly enjoyable.

Last year I’ve been poking around Youtube and foundsome great Douglas Adams treasures out there, which I have put together in a little playlist (which only suffered one minor deletion casualty in the last year). There are several great documentaries and even the rare South Bank show which I originally saw in dubbed version somewhen in the early 1990s on German television. You can actually find the television and radio series somewhere if you search for them, but I’m not linking to it because the Youtube uploads have a really bad image quality compared to the DVD and, of course, because of copyright reasons. Buy the DVD! It’s not like it still costs 30 bucks like it did twelve years ago.

And last year there was something which Douglas Adams would have really liked: ISS Expedition 42 was wishing everybody a Happy Towel Day – and  “thanks” to a failed Progress freighter launch, Samantha Cristoforetti, Terry Wirts and Anton Shklaperov are actually still on the ISS right now because their stay has been extended a couple of weeks. Will they remember Towel Day? Yes, the did! Samantha Cristoforetti has taken the time read a couple of pages from the first book on the ISS! Also, you can always check Samantha Cristoforetti’s Google+ Stream or my Twitter List of Astronauts currently on the space station for more.

So, Happy Towel Day everyone – it’s a very special one with Expedition 42 still in space!

Well, that was fast. It feels like Christmas was just last week and now suddenly it’s Easter again – how did that happen? It doesn’t help much that Easter is very early this year and the weather has been less like early spring and more like late winter, so it really doesn’t feel like the season with the eggs and the bunnies! But at least it’s not as bad as 2013 when we actually had snow on Good Friday. I hope everyone’s having a nice Easter holiday weekend – this year, I don’t have much of a program except some recycled content and some pretty pictures, but I’d still I’d like to wish everyone a nice Easter holiday! This post is just a little roundup of what I’ve been doing lately on the web – so what has everybody else been up to?

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! Myself, 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 you prefer.

Last year I basically skipped the year-end retrospective I usually write at this point because I wasn’t feeling very well, but this year I’m a lot better and I’ll do at least a little roundup. Let’s just say that 2014 was a lot better than 2013 – it has been very busy and while I only got around to do a fraction of what I had originally planned to do with the websites, it’s been a lot of fun and especially the interaction over the social networks has reached a whole new dimension.

The Photography Blog, now renamed at least temporarily to GB Photography to give it a proper name, is actually the only one of the three websites I’m regularly active on at the moment. I usually post several photos per day, mainly because I built up such a huge backlog especially of flower photos that I have still enough to go even if I don’t take another photo for weeks. But that’s not going to happen, because I finally managed to snag a new camera on Ebay in November – I wanted a little upgrade ever since I found out in Spring that the camera I bought the previous year has some lens sharpness issues. Next year is going to be even better with the photography and maybe I’ll finally get around to redesign the photography blog and the galleries. But posting the photos on Google+ has been almost as important, because the feedback there has been absolutely phenomenal and the photography community is amazing to say the least.

In contrast to the photography, the movie and DVD reviewing over on DVDLog has been on a bit of a backburner this year, mostly because there was not so much to write about and I didn’t get around to do as many translations of older reviews as I wanted. But I did get some reviews done including a  television five-parter in the fall about Brian Cox’ new series – and I still have a couple of unreviewed discs lying around which I will get to next year. I have to admit that I really can’t keep the one-review-per-week rhythm up any longer, but I will try do get the site going more next year. I’ve also finished switching over everything into English including a new review index, but there is still a triple digit amount of great material to be properly translated – so this site will never die and I’ve never really thought about shutting it down. Just be patient, once in a while I will have something interesting.

This Blog here has also been subject of a slow transformation – it’s still my go-to outlet for everything that is not related to photography, movies and television, but the focus has been mainly on science and astronomy in 2014 because so much exciting things have happened. I usually leave the science reporting to the real reporters, but some things I just had to write about and I’ve made a kind of series out of the postings about the comings and goings on the International Space Station. I have also been very busy supporting CosmoQuest and there is also the Hangouts Schedule which I’ve kept updated ever since August – this will get a slight makeover and a move to a proper page in the new year. I’m also considering moving the whole site to the spiffy new bibra.eu domain I registered this year and there’s also the small, but important matter of making the theme compatible for mobile devices, but I will come to that when I really have some time.

As usual, I will not go completely offline over the holidays, but instead put DVDLog on a winter hiatus until February and slow down the Photo Blog a little bit to maybe two posts per day plus perhaps some collected galleries. Between Christmas and the new year I’ll maybe share some of my circles over on Google+ again like I did last year and then put them in a blog post – it’s certainly time for an update! But other than that, I’ll take a well deserved break and will not be much online until early next year.

Wishing everyone a nice and relaxing winter holiday – see you in 2015!

I’m not complaining about the weather, but don’t expect anything major coming from me in the next days. I know, 33°C is not really that hot compared to what other countries have to endure, but it’s still enough for us, thank you very much. At least it’s not humid, but we North European softies are just not used to these temperatures because they don’t happen all that often around here. So we do actually moan and complain about the weather,  but only a little bit. Don’t be fooled by the rather silly media labeling it as another dangerous heatwave – if people are not clever enough to keep their houses and apartments cool, you can’t really help them. We also don’t have air conditioning and still managed to keep the inside temperature at about 25°C.

The heat still melts your brain, though – this post is the most you can get out of me in the next few days! But I will continue posting the usual photos over on the Photography Blog (which I finally gave a temporary name in the blog header!) and I also updated the English language review index over on DVDLog, so I haven’t been as lazy as it seems :-).

This year, for a change, I have not forgotten that it’s Towel Day today, the annual celebration of all things Douglas Adams and Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. This time around, I managed to throw together a couple of things – head over to DVDLog to read the painstakingly translated review of the 1981 Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy televisison series, which was actually a lot of fun to revisit and update, because it’s not only a disc review, but partly the history of the Hitchhiker’s Guide itself. I originally wanted to make this a double review together with the 2005 movie, but that has to wait until next week or so because writing the translation took a bit longer than I expected!

Back in March, it seems I missed something great – the cast of the Hitchhiker’s Guide Radio Series had been on tour with a live show, but this spring there was a 75-minute live radio broadcast on BBC4 from the whole gang. And of course it’s now off the iPlayer and I haven’t found a recording of it yet – but hopefully it will materialize somewhere!

Meanwhile I’ve been poking around Youtube and there are some great Douglas Adams treasures out there, which I have put together in a little playlist. There are several great documentaries and even the rare South Bank show which I originally saw in dubbed version somewhen in the early 1990s on German television. You can actually find the television series itself somewhere if you search for it, but I’m not linking to it because the Youtube uploads have a really bad image quality compared to the DVD and, of course, because of copyright reasons. Buy the DVD! It’s not like it still costs 30 bucks like it did twelve years ago.

And there’s something which Douglas Adams would have really liked: ISS Expedition 42 is wishing everybody a happy Towel Day! Samantha Cristoforetti, Terry Wirts and Anton Shklaperov are standing here holding a towel in front of the very Soyuz capsule which will bring Maksim Surayev, Alexander Gerst and  Reid Wiseman to the ISS in only three days – they are the backup crew and are currently together with them in Baikonur.

Have I forgotten something? Maybe, but I can just add it later here in a sneaky after-publishing-edit – I already added the previous paragraph shortly before posting. Happy Towel Day everyone! :-)

What, another Easter, I thought we had that just last year? Oh well, another year has come and gone and 2014 at least brings a little warmer weather than last year, when we even had a little snow on a very early Good Friday. I hope everyone’s having a nice Easter holiday weekend – I’m going to take it very easy this year and although I have several things lined up on my websites, there won’t be tons of new material. So, with this post I’d like to wish everyone a nice Easter holiday!

Over on DVDLog, I’m just going to repost last year’s review of Who Framed Roger Rabbit? later, which I had translated to English for the first time back then. It’s more of a joke than a real easter movie and I really should have prepared another review, but I’m not very good at writing long articles at the moment, so I’m just using the archives a little bit. More Sherlock Holmes will be coming soon and some other random reviews. But contrary to what it may look I’m certainly not giving up the website, just slowing down a little bit. I still have so much great stuff to write about and older articles to translate.

The Photography Blog is where I’m most active at the moment, posting at least four images a day and having a lot of fun interacting via Google+ with other photographers all over the world. I’m posting mainly flowers at the moment, but in addition to the City Views series I have also started a River Views collection with some of my favourite photos from our local waterfront. What I still haven’t done is redesign the blog and the galleries, although I have at least now translated the complete frontend into English. A new design will be coming, I just haven’t found the perfect new look yet, let alone a proper name for the website!

And here on the old main Blog or website or whatever you may call it, I’m still posting a mix of computer geekyness, webdesign and, of course, science and astronomy, of which there will be somewhat more in the next few days because there’s a certain event next weekend I want to promote as much as possible. I will start with that tomorrow and post a couple of articles over the course of the next week. (Also, there’s a SpaceX rocket launch attempt this evening at 21:25 CEST which you can watch live on NASA TV :-). I’m also going to continue the Vintage Computing series at some point, but the next postings still need a lot of preparation and research, so it might be a while until that’s ready.

So, this was this year’s Easter update – not much, but at least a little something. Have a nice Easter, everybody! As usual, you can follow my web exploits on Google+, Facebook or Twitter, although I’d recommend Google+ if you want to interact with me as I’m only really active there.