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! :-)

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 seem to be writing a lot about spaceflight and space exploration here at the moment, but that’s mainly because there are so many exciting things happening at once right now. Tomorrow there’s going to be another premiere in spaceflight: NASA is going to launch its Orion Spacecraft for the first time in a test flight! So, why is this so exciting if everyone is already flying to space all the time? Mainly because it is the first human-rated spacecraft commissioned directly by NASA since the Space Shuttle and it has quite a history behind it that reaches back more than a decade.

Originally a part of the Constellation program that had been developed under the US Bush administration since 2004 and was subsequently cancelled in 2011 to be replaced by the Space Launch System and the Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle, the basic concept actually goes back all the way to the late 1960s. Launched on top of a multi-stage rocket, the spacecraft consists of a command and service module exactly like the Apollo missions, with only the command module returning to earth. The now completed Orion Crew Module is being built by Lockeed-Martin and the subject of Thursday’s test flight, while the actual Orion Service Module is still in development and will be built by ESA and Airbus on the basis of the ATV transporter, launching in 2017 or 2018 on the Exploration Mission 1 on a flight all the way around the Moon.

But first, the Exploration Flight Test 1 has to bring the Orion Spaceship into orbit, two times around the Earth and then land safely again. This is going to happen tomorrow, December 4th, from about 12:00 to 16:30 UTC – Jason Davis from the Planetary Society has compiled a detailed flight timeline derived from the press kit, which will be very handy to coordinate your day if you want to watch the launch on NASA TV or follow what’s happening around the web. Although this is still an early, uncrewed test flight without the complete spacecraft configuration on top of a Delta IV Heavy rocket supplied by United Launch Alliance instead of the still in development SLS, the importance of this first step should not be underestimated – everything has to start somewhere! Speaking of starting, or launching – NASA has replaced the famous countdown clock at the Kennedy Space Center with an updated version just in time for the Orion launch. This was mainly done because it was too hard to find replacement parts for the old clock, which had been in place since Apollo 12 – and the new clock actually looks very nice.

[Update 12/4: First it was a boat in the launch range, then the wind and finally a problem with some valves on the rocket that prevented today’s launch… but it appears that there will be another attempt tomorrow!]

[Update 12/5: Today’s launch was succcessful on the first attempt without any problems! Orion is currently in Earth orbit, but the mission is not over yet with the second boost for the higher orbit still coming. Unfortunately, there were some massive problems with the NASA TV online streams – the UStream channel went offline right before launch and NASA’s own stream only buffered like crazy, so many people weren’t actually able to watch the launch itself live. At the moment everything’s watchable again, though and there’s already a video of the launch on Youtube!]

[Update 12/5, 6pm: Splashdown! After a picture-perfect flight, the Orion spaceship has returned to earth and is currently floating peacefully in the Pacific near the Californian coast waiting for recovery! Videos from the flight will probably be up soon on the NASA Youtube channel. (Actually, the NASAKennedy channel has some videos this time, including the amazing splashdown!)]

Last, but not least, there is a little bit of irony in naming the spacecraft Orion, because 48 years ago, even before the first Apollo flight, the Spaceship Orion launched on German television screens! With a predecessor like that, the “new” Orion will surely be a great success, although most of the press just seem to be interested in the costs and even say the launch is overshadowed by the recent failure of the Orbital Sciences Antares rocket and the crash of Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo – which, as usual, is absolute nonsense and a really irresponsible thing to say.

And in somewhat related news, the next comet investigator Hayabusa 2 has launched earlier today. It’s a cooperation between Japan, Germany and France and will arrive in four years at an asteroid to collect samples and even drop a small lander (which is the German-French contribution) on it, basically Rosetta-Philae style. But that’s all still four years and more in the future – stay tuned, more about this in 2018!

I already posted the November edition of Shift Change in Space at the beginning of the month, but yesterdays Soyuz launch to the International Space Station was so amazing that it warrants at least a little article of its own. The absolutely flawless launch from Baikonur and the later docking was so well-timed that there was an uninterrupted video stream throughout, showing especially the rendezvous with the station like it had rarely been seen before – with amazing views from both the station’s and the Soyuz’ cameras broadcast live from space. Fascinating highlights – like the Soyuz bathed in a golden glow from the setting sun – are already available of the launch, the docking and the wonderful welcoming ceremony on Youtube.

The three new stations occupants Samantha Cristoforetti, Anton Shkaplerov and Terry W. Virts already seem to be quite at home in their new environments, but there have, of course, been no tweets or other social media posts from them – yet! All three of them are on Twitter (click on the link for my now updated list of tweeting Astronauts in space!) and Samantha Cristoforetti had been writing her Logbook on Google+ almost until shortly before launch – and she already mentioned that she will begin chronicling her Futura mission in exactly the same way as soon as possible. [Update 11/25 – which she did with a first posting from orbit!]

The media’s reaction was, as usual, mainly lukewarm and not really interested – if it wasn’t for the fact that the Soyuz is also carrying a zero-g capable espresso machine called ISSpresso. The machine was developed by Lavazza and the italian company Argotec, which had already supplied food for the missions of Luca Parmitano and Alexander Gerst before, which is certainly interesting – but suddenly only the espresso and the kilo of caviar this launch also seems to be carrying are all over the press. [Edit: only the Guardian does it right by publishing an interesting in-depth article about the ISSPresso!] This already led to silly comments that there is too much luxury abroad the space station and that this is supposedly wasted taxpayer money – but who else can make space travel more comfortable with good food and drink if not the astronauts themselves? This is part of scientific research like everything else, which unfortunately gets mentioned not nearly often enough.

There is also the somewhat belittled fact that Samantha Cristoforetti is the first female Italian astronaut going to the ISS, which should be really important and a completely normal at the same time. This time she also joins Yelena Serova, making the crew of the station 2/3rds female for the first time since Expedition 24 in 2010, when NASA astronauts Tracy Caldwell Dyson and Shannon Walker were part of the station’s crew. I shudder at the thought what the press would make of the fact that Cristoforetti and Serova are both on their first spaceflight, while Barry Wilmore, Terry Virts, Aleksandr Samokutyayev and Anton Shkaplerov are all on their second flight… but hopefully nobody is going there except to mention that the two women on the station are spaceflight pioneers in the best sense of the word.

I think Expedition 42 is going to be amazing, whatever the press is going to make of it. Social media is playing a huge role in popularizing and supporting space space travel, and with the three new arrivals on the station it’s only going to be more interesting and fascinating.