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?

Now it has finally happened, and I thought it would never come to this: last week, I finally bought my first smartphone! After using a Nokia 3410 for more than a decade, the low smartphone prices finally were no argument anymore against getting one and after some considerable deliberation and searching, I finally found the Huawei Ascend G610, the ideal phone for me. It’s not the latest and newest model, but the advantage of this was that I was able to get it for a price of only €114, which is incredible for an Android smartphone with a 5″ display. Specification-wise, this phone is definitively on the lower end, but it still has a lot to offer and is as much value for money as you will ever be getting. The phone has some small drawbacks and weaknesses, but they far outweigh the more than reasonable price and the otherwise very good quality.

It was not entirely unexpected, but in the end you always tend to think that bright minds like Terry Pratchett will live forever. Yesterday, the creator of the Discworld and so much more passed away much too early after a fierce battle with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. He had talked about and even documented the effects of his illness openly and advocated assisted suicide, but in the end the tall skeleton with the scythe seems to have come without an appointment. He leaves behind a huge legacy of a whole universe with innumerable stories and characters, who are now in the capable hands of his wife Lyn and his daughter Rhianna. The last posts on his Twitter stream, written by his daughter, could not be more fitting, but only time will tell if this is really The End.

There is certainly nobody else who could fill Sir Terry’s shoes, but there is one more unpublished book scheduled for this fall – The Sheperd’s Crown will be the 41st Discworld novel and the fifth one featuring the young witch Tiffany Aiching. There are not many other open plotlines – in his last few books Terry Pratchett already seemed to have worked on a kind of closure of the Discworld universe without shutting any doors completely. But it is highly doubtful that someone else could continue the Discworld. Even Pratchett’s daughter, who is a writer herself, has often said that she would not be able to continue her father’s works, although she is working on a coming television series based on the Ankh-Morpork City Watch. This is where the Discworld could live on – in adaptations of all forms and shapes.

What remains is a world without Terry Pratchett himself and that is a sad fact to get used to. To say that he will be missed may be an understatement, but all of his books and other works still make this world a better place. This other flat world traveling though space on the backs of four elephants standing on a giant turtle will continue to exist in our imagination…

Note: Author photo respectfully borrowed from his sadly defunct site here. Turtle drawing by Paul Kidby, scanned from the cover of The Discworld Mapp.

This is another edition of my now regular articles about the crew changes on the International Space Station – it’s Spring again and that means some astronauts will be leaving soon while others will be arriving later this month. A very successful and exciting Expedition 42 is soon coming to an end, but Expedition 43 is promising to be even more interesting with the arrival of the first two-astronaut crew who will be staying for a whole year instead of just six month on the station. As usual, I just like to keep an overview of who is up in space and I hope to continue these articles with the next one probably due in autumn.

Google Chrome has really become my favourite browser after Opera completely abandoned its former self and just became a Chrome clone, but not everything’s great and sometimes Google does some incredibly annoying things, like recently… In the last few days, there have been a smatter of complaints about the overhauled and simplyfied bookmarks, ironically called the Enhanced Bookmarks Experiment, which seem to have been switched on after some users upgraded to version 40.

But don’t panic if you are suddenly confronted with a square-y, colourful mess where your good, old bookmarks manager used to be – there is an easy way to go back to the old system. Just go to chrome://flags and search for “bookmarks” – or copy & paste or click the link below:

» chrome://flags/#enhanced-bookmarks-experiment

Here you can set the switch to disabled and bring the experiment to a swift end – if it doesn’t work right away, close all Chrome instances and restart the browser. The “Enhanced Bookmarks” were also previously available as an extension but now seem to have been merged directly into Chrome – if you had the extension installed sometime previously, this flag also switches back to the old bookmarks manager. Your bookmarks will not be deleted or compromised, even if you chose not to sync them with the cloud.

There’s no guarantee that this will work forever, but there has been a pretty strong backlash against the new bookmarks manager and hopefully Google will listen to the users and throw this sorry attempt at modernization away or at least make it usable.

I can’t believe I missed this again – Brian Cox and Robin Ince have been back on air since last Monday with their brilliant science-comedy radio show The Infinite Monkey Cage! Two episode have already aired and are available in their much better extended versions on the series’ podcast website in freely downloadable MP3 files. They’re up to 58 episodes including a wonderful Christmas romp from the end of last year and the two new episodes. The show is also going on a live tour in the USA  beginning in March on both the east and west coast and last year, Eric Idle even recorded a brilliantly funny title song for the series!

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’ve been using Google Hangouts as a text chat communications tool for a while now on both computer and tablet and despite some limitations, it really works great – IF it works, that is. That was unfortunately not the case when Google released an update of the Android Hangouts App – version 2.5.x – in mid-December, which seems to have completely broken the background push notifications and message synchronization of the app. Notifications only arrived when the app was actually in the foreground and messages appeared in the wrong order and often only when scrolling down manually. Notifications from all other apps including the Facebook Messenger worked perfectly, so it was not a general system problem and on my older tablet under Android 4.0.3 the problem did not even occur, so the Jellybean 4.1.1 of my current tablet didn’t seem at fault.

In short, the app became completely unusuable, and from the Play Store reviews it looked like I wasn’t the only one with this problem. There were various approaches to fixing the broken notifications, but from setting the notification sounds back and forth to switching notifications on and off in both the app and the system settings to several complete reinstalls, nothing worked. Then I read somewhere about the unlikely radical approach of removing and re-adding the Google account in the system settings, which surprisingly worked! It seems that something fundamental in the synchronization of the account was broken and only this drastic step fixed it.

The full steps that fixed the problem on my tablet were:
• Uninstall the Hangouts App. If it’s a system app on your device, uninstall all updates.
• Remove the Google account – if there are more than one, remove them all just in case.
• Re-Add all the Google accounts one by one. This might take some time because there will by a lot of synchronization in the background.
• Re-install the Google Hangouts app from the Play Store.
• Test the background notifications and make your preferred settings in the app.
• Rebooting with the Google accounts removed should be avoided, because some apps may not like it and could stop working, making reinstalls necessary. Other Google apps like Google+ did not notice the temporary removal of the Google accounts.

This should work in the more stubborn cases of broken Hangouts notifications – if this doesn’t fix it, only a  What I noticed is that the process com.android.smspush was not running when the problem occured, but appeared afterwards – obviously this service is the one handling all the notifications for the Hangouts app and for some reason it breaks on certain systems when the new 2.5.x version is installed.

One other peculiarity I noticed is that you are not getting any sort of notifications anymore on your mobile devices while you have a chat window open on a computer in the browser or in the Chrome hangouts extension. This especially happens when you use the older 2014.1119 version, which pops up the chat window as soon as a message arrives, while the newer 2014.1204 doesn’t open windows automatically and instead shows the messages as notifications on the app icon first, only marking notifications as read when a chat window is actually open.

I hope this article is going to be some help for those who encounter the same problems, as there don’t seem to many solutions out there.

You have to hand it to Tim Schafer, former LucasArts games developer now gone independent with Double Fine Productions – he really loves his old classics. At the beginning of December, there was the amazing announcement that his company would not only remaster Grim Fandango, but also Day of the Tentacle, the 1993 sequel of Lucasfilm Games’ adventure debut Maniac Mansion. Those news made me all nostalgic because I really love those games and while I completely agree that Day of the Tentacle will really benefit from a remaster especially in the graphics department, I’m not completely convinced about Grim Fandango.

I hate to be the voice of criticism here, but when I pulled out Grim Fandango a couple of days ago for the first time in maybe ten years or more, it still looked impressive to me, especially considering the game is over fifteen years old today and used only a resolution of 640×480 pixels – it might not be enough for a huge television set, but the OpenGL rendering of ResidualVM with an anti-aliasing filter on the 3D models makes the game appear very smooth. Upscaled on a 17″ 1280×1024 monitor (that’s about the same height as a 22″ 16:9 display) it still looks nothing short of amazing and only a little bit pixelated.

For the first post of 2015, here’s a reminder that I’m still regularly updating the Science & Astronomy Hangouts Schedule in collaboration with the WSH Crew Google+ Community. I have now migrated the original blog post from August onto its own page, but all the old adresses still work and just redirect to the newly improved version, which will always be updated like before in tandem with the WSH Crew Google Calendar. The new edition also has more links to Google+ pages, websites, Youtube channels and video playlists to gather all the hangouts together especially for visitors who might be unfamiliar with them and want to have a look around.

You can also join us the WSH Crew Google+ Community (named for the Weekly Space Hangout) which has been growing a lot since we created it earlier last year – if you’re interested what’s new in space and astronomy you might feel right at home there. It’s much smaller than the big Space Community on Google+ and relatively low-noise, but filled with a great group of people who have been following and supporting what CosmoQuest, Universe Today & Co are doing. Some of the journalists and scientists involved in the Weekly Space Hangout have also joined and hangout organizer and host Fraser Cain has asked the community to contribute news stories to the hangout by posting them in the news section. This has been very successful in the last couple of hangouts, making them even more lively than usual in the last half. So you can join in and be a part of it if you want!

Continue to the Science & Astronomy Hangouts Schedule Page »

For the last blog post of 2013, I did something unusual by posting a collection of Google+ circles and for the end of 2014 I wanted to repeat this and make it a regular feature in the future. This is not as easy as it sounds because most of my circles are utter chaos, but once again I chose some of my most important circles to share at the end of this year to highlight and thank all the amazing people I’ve met there. I originally shared the circles yesterday directly on Google+ and this is just a blog article collecting those posts together, but in addition I also included a few of my Twitter lists here in this year’s post because this medium has also become a great source of information and interaction. But before we go on…

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Google+ Circles

Photography Essentials – This first one is my “small” Photography circle of people I mainly found in the beginning over two years ago, although the size of this circle has doubled in the last twelve months. These are people whose posts I don’t want to miss even when I don’t have time to look at all the other circles. Don’t be disappointed if you’re not in there – there are two more much bigger photo circles coming up after this!

Photography One – This is the first part of my “big” hand-picked Photographer circles. Everybody from the Essentials circle is also in here, plus everyone I noticed in other circles, who plussed or commented on my posts or who I learned to know through other people. If you’re not in there, either I haven’t noticed you yet or you don’t fulfil my one requirement: you have to post your own work. There are only original photography content creators in here.

Photography Two – The second part of my “big” Photographers circle. I had to split it to be able to share it because of the 500 user limit. This one has already grown almost up to the limit and there will be a Photography Three circle in the future.

Science, Space & Astronomy – One of the other things I try to get involved in, or at least promote, is everything about these three fields and for this reason I have a hand-picked circle with everything about science, spaceflight and exploration and astronomy around. It’s a relatively low-noise group, but everyone from space journalists and scientists from the CosmoQuest & Universe Today crowd, many astronauts and a lot more people are in here. If you want even more, have a look at Fraser Cain’s Super Science Circle, on which my circle was originally partly based on – but it has taken on a kind of life of its own during the last year.

CosmoQuest, Universe Today & Co – This is a slightly more condensed circle and could be called “Friends of”, because in addition to the scientists and journalists working for CosmoQuest, Universe Today, The Planetary Society and Astronomers Without Borders, it also contains all those people who have or have had some connection to them. Most of those people are in the previous circle, too.

Astrophotographers – There is some overlap with the Science circle, but I chose use a separate circle for astrophotography to see all the beautiful images in one place. Credit where credit is due, though: this circle is also based, but not completely similar, to one with the same name originally shared by Fraser Cain.

Twitter Lists

Science & Astronomy – The first three lists are the Twitter companions to the Google+ lists of the same name, only with more and sometimes different people. This is where the conversation and often breaking science news happens – if a supernova goes off, a meteor comes down or something exciting happens in space exploration and science, this is often where you can hear about it first.

CosmoQuest – A further condensed science circle only with scientists, journalists and other people loosely affiliated with CosmoQuest, Universe Today and related organizations.

Astrophotographers – Even more semi-professional Astrophotographers are active on Twitter and that is where they often post their photos

Astromomers – This is actually a link to a Twitter list from Fraser Cain, who put together a great collection of astronomers who are active there.

Astronauts – There are a lot of future, active and retired astronauts on Twitter and I’ve tried to collect them all in this list, which I’m sure is still incomplete.

Astronauts on the ISS – This list has only the Twitter-using astronauts which are currently on the International Space Station – as of late December 2014, half of the crew is actively tweeting!

Spaceflight – Everybody and everyone related to spaceflight in all its forms, from the various NASA accounts to mission project leaders and the private space companies.

And this is the end of 2014 – let’s see what 2015 will bring! :-)