Every time I write about The Infinite Monkey Cage, the brilliant science-comedy radio show from Brian Cox and Robin Ince, I begin with “I can’t believe I missed it again!” and this time will be no exception because I really hadn’t noticed that the first new episode has already been online since Monday! Those are the live shows that were recorded earlier this spring during their US tour, so they are going to be even livelier and sillier than before. There will be five more episodes, broadcast each Monday on BBC Radio 4 and afterwards the extended versions will be available on the web as usual – which is the better way to listen to the episodes.

Note that the podcast website has been completely revamped and although the runtime always says 30 minutes, these are still the extended podcast versions and not the truncated half-hour radio broadcasts. The archives have also now been extended to the previously unavailable series 1 and 2, so now you can download all the episodes from the beginning on or catch them with your favourite podcasting software on your phone or tablet. And of course there’s also the wonderfully funny title song for the series that Eric Idle recorded some time ago!

I can only highly recommend this show – Brian Cox and Robin ince are utterly funny and their guests are always fantastic. Besides, it’s even educational, despite most shows ending up somewhere completely different than they originally started – but that’s just the fun of it. As usual, major English listening skills and a healthy curiosity about science are required, but it’s actually quite easy to listen to. And, of course, if you like Brian Cox and/or Robin Ince, you’re in for a very special treat. (Note: I wrote the last paragraph for the previous posts about the series, but why write something new when there’s something perfectly okay available to recycle?)

I feel somewhat obligated to at least post one article about the New Horizons mission, because next to the Rosetta and Philae comet landing the Pluto flyby is easily the most exciting thing happening in space exploration this year. I’m not even going to attempt reporting about the mission in detail because I’m not a journalist, but instead I will try to make some recommendations where you can find the best journalism and information about New Horizons.

But what’s so exciting about Pluto? It isn’t even a planet anymore! That’s what I often hear from people not really familiar with what’s going on in space exploration. The answer is relatively easy: because we (as in humanity) have not been there yet! The Grand Tour of the solar system, which was proposed in the mid-1960s, could have gone to all the planets and much more, but politics slashed the budgets to such an extend that this one-in-a-lifetime planetary alignment opportunity fell to the Voyager Program, which amounted only to a light version of the tour. When it came to decide whether to send Voyager 1 to Pluto or to Titan, the decision was made in favour of the former – and Pluto remained unexplored for almost 40 years. In the meantime, Pluto has even lost its planethood status due to all the new discoveries in its vicinity…

Enter New Horizons – which has a quite a history itself. I recommend the very good Wikipedia Page of the mission for further details, but now on to a collection of links and tips where to get all the current and always up-to-date information about the flyby, which will happen next Tuesday, July 14th, at exactly 11:49:57 UTC. The first brief transmission after the flyby will be only happen late Tuesday and the first new images will be downlinked on Wednesday – Emily Lakdawalla has a must-read, detailed article about what to expect before and after the flyby. But New Horizons has already been busy observing Pluto sending back lots of amazing photos – and had even almost given the scientific community a heart attack by going into safe mode briefly. But everything is fine now and Tuesday’s historic encounter will happen no matter what. Here are the most important links and people to follow:

• New Horizons Main Site – This is the official mission website.
• New Horizons NASA Site – The NASA website for the mission.
• New Horizons Press Kit – An extensive 42-page press kit from NASA
• New Horizons LORRI Images – All images from the Long Range Reconnaisance Imager
• New Horizons Youtube Channel – All the video series and hangouts of the mission.
• DSN Now – Realtime activity data of the Deep Space Network, useful for checking if NH is transmitting
• Emily Lakdawalla from the Planetary Society is one of the best sources for NH.
• Universe Today has less breaking news, but more in-depth articles.

The real action will happen on Twitter, though – here are the important accounts to follow:

• New Horizons – The official NH Twitter feed directly from Alan Stern.
• New Horizons NASA – NH Twitter feed from NASA, mainly retweets from other accounts.
• Alan Stern –  NH’s Principal investigator.
• Joel Parker – NH’s Co-investigator.
• Kimberly Ennico Smith – Deputy Project Scientist
• Cathy Olkin – Deputy Project Scientist
• Alex Parker – Planetary astronomer working on the NH mission
• Kelsi Singer – Postdoc on the NH team
• Simon Porter – Scientist working on the NH mission
• Jason Cook – Planetary astronomer working on the NH mission
• Amy Shira Teitel – Embedded in the NH media team and making Pluto in a Minute!
• Emily Lakdawalla – Breaking news from the Planetary Society writer and blogger.
• New Horizons Bot – Automatically tweets new images from New Horizons.

I put all of the above into a Twitter List and I also recommend my larger Science & Astronomy and Spaceflight lists, which will probably full of Pluto and New Horizons soon. And because the Weekly Space Hangout and Astronomy Cast are both on summer break right now, have a look at the WSH Crew Google+ Community, where we will discuss and post the latest space and science news! And I think that’s all for now – good luck New Horizons!

At the end of May, Google had unveiled its new Google Photos service at the I/O conference. This came as no great surprise, since there had long been rumours and hints that the photo section of Google+ would be spun off into a separate product as a competitor to Flickr, Facebook & Co – and the results are okay, but the spiffy new web interface and mobile app are still a long way from being perfect. I’ve been using Google Photos in the last couple of weeks a lot because I post my photos not only on my own website, but also over on Google+ as well and while I’m overall somewhat impressed, there are still some minor problems and limitations. Here are some observations, complaints and tips how to make the best out of it.

More than 25 years ago, they made great adventure games for Lucasfilm Games. Now they’re getting the band back together.

That’s right – Ron Gilbert, Gary Winnick and David Fox of Maniac Mansion, Zak McKracken and Monkey Island fame are making a new game called Thimbleweed Park – but it’s not just any game. Reminded of their good time they had at Lucasfilm Games, later LucasArts, in the late 1980s when they revolutionized and practically invented the genre of the Point & Click Adventure, Gilbert and Winnick decided to make a “new old game” in the classic style, like a lost Lucasfilm adventure that was never released. Because time is money and creating something like this just as a hobby would be problematic at best, Gilbert and Winnick decided to fund their project with Kickstarter and were greeted with a phenomenal response – a budget of over half a million dollars enabled them to start working on the game in earnest. The kickstarter video trailer was already amazing and it’s only going to get better…

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!

After so many successful launches, it was particularly sad to see a SpaceX rocket blow up. That is what unfortunately happened yesterday about two and a half minutes after the Falcon 9 with the Dragon transporter on board had initially launched successfully, but shortly before the first stage separation something went catastrophically wrong and the rocket exploded in a huge cloud of smoke. This would have been the eighth successful launch of a Dragon transporter to the International Space Station by SpaceX and a complete failure is what nobody had really expected at this point. The video of the launch is actually hard to watch because it seemed like a picture-perfect liftoff in the beginning.

This is another edition of my now regular articles about the crew changes on the International Space Station – this one comes a bit sooner than expected because there has been some slight reshuffling and delays of the crew rotation. After the failed launch of a Progress transporter at the end of April all plans were off, but soon after the situation somewhat stabilized and apart from an actually very welcome extension of Expedition 42/43 everything seems to be back on track now. Tomorrow three Astronauts will return to Earth after a surprisingly long stay of six and a half months, while their replacements will only arrive about six weeks later. As usual, I just like to keep an overview of who is up in space and I hope to continue these articles – the next one may be due in Autumn, but who knows what will happen next!

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)! :-)

Hooray, it’s the end of May and that means another round of the Google I/O software developer’s conference is happening right now. Or, as I like to call it nowadays, Don’t Panic Time, because there are always a lot of new and exciting things being announced which almost inevitably will get lots of people annoyed, angry or both So, let’s see what’s going on this year from my humble perspective – which means that this is part observation and part rant. Of course you can also watch the recording of the whole keynote address on Youtube, including the very astronomy-themed intro animation.

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!