Just FYI: if you tried to access my websites last night sometime beginning at 1:15am UTC, you might have gotten nothing in return. I found an email in my inbox this morning from my webspace provider that the server my sites are hosted on developed a sudden hardware fault and had to be swapped out, causing a downtime of a couple of hours. But everything is fixed now, running smoothly and no data was lost! Normal service (i.e. more images over at the Photography Blog) will resume later this afternoon :-).

So, big props to the folks at All-Inkl.com, where I’ve been a customer for ten years now – I’ve never had a problem and the few times I really had to ask the customer support about something, they were always enormeously helpful. And it’s not even terribly expensive – I consider about €86 per year for 100 gigabyte space, five domains and a lot more extras a very generous price!

I almost forgot to write this blog post this year, mainly because our curse of the Perseid Meteor Shower seems to be creeping in again this year. Last night was semi-clear sometimes, but very hazy with occasional clouds coming through – I was lucky to have caught the “Supermoon” on camera, which is another reason the Perseids are hard to see this year. I don’t think the next few days are going to be better, so the usual date from August 10 to 13 with the evening of the 12th being the best chance, do not look good for us. It’s also unreasonably cold with barely 15°C at night or less, so sitting on the balcony to watch meteors might not be a clever idea.

But if you have better weather in your location, here are some links from last year: If you want to know more about the Perseids, Universe Today has a really good Observer’s Guide written by David Dickinson and Fraser Cain has made a great short explainer video about meteors in general. In short, if you have a reasonably clear view of the sky to the east and northeast, you are all set to go!

Please note that this is an outdated version of this article as of 1/1/2015. If you arrive here, please go to the new page.

This is an index with the schedules some of the science, space and astronomy themed Google+ Hangouts I’ve been writing about in the Hangout and Podcast Recommendations before, only this will be updated more frequently. This is now the main hangout index after the version in the WSH Crew Community was retired in favour of a static list and the Google Calendar which now has all the dates. I will still try to keep this index updated as timely as possible and in sync with the calendar, but I cannot guarantee that I will always be able to catch all the updates. For corrections or suggestions, please use the comments here or on the related community post!

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 :-).

The first of six new episodes of The Infinite Monkey Cage, the amazing science comedy radio show from Brian Cox and Robin Ince is now online on the podcast website of the series! And for Music Monday, here’s Eric Idle singing their new title song in best George Formby style, with support from Jeff Lynne on Ukulele and, of course, by Brian and Robin themselves – all in puppet form! :-)

Last year, the Curiosity Rover celebrated its first Earth year on Mars, but on Monday the Mars Science Laboratory actually completed its first Martian year – has it really been that long already? It feels like it was yesterday when the rover performed a hair-raising landing perfectly, but since then Curiosity has been hard at work learning about the planet, discovering, amongst many other amazing things, without a doubt that there was once flowing water on Mars. The prime mission is now over after 669 Mars days, at least on paper – but the rover is still healthy despite being a little dusty and having some holes in its wheels. Curiosity’s great exploration adventure on Mars will continue together with its smaller relative Opportunity, which has already been on the planet for a decade!

When the Curiosity Rover arrived on Mars in 2012, I had put together a collection of useful links about the Mars missions, which I still frequently use. The reason for the list was to provide all the information without having to write constantly about the Mars missions myself, something which others are doing in a much better way. I have occasionally written articles about NASA and the Mars missions since then, but even today most of these links are still valid and absolutely essential if you want to keep up with what’s going on on Mars. This is the third edition of the link list, this time a little more compact and streamlined because I removed some non-essential and defunct links.

NASA Websites – The official sources
• Mars Science Laboratory @ JPL – The most important, always up-to-date site
• Mars Science Laboratory Raw Images – Everything the rover cameras deliver
• Mars Science Laboratory @ NASA – NASAs Curiosity website with sometimes different content
• NASA Main Page – Not only Mars news, but still a great resource
• NASA Television – Live stream of the current program
• NASA Television @ Youtube – NTV’s video archive

Other Websites – The inofficial ones often do it much better
• Universe Today – Simply the best resource not only for Mars, but all things space
• Universe Today @ Youtube – All the videos from UT including the hangouts
• Planetary Society Blog – Emily Lakdawalla’s detailed reporting
• Curiosity Rover Images – Better overview of the raw images including an RSS-Feed
• Midnight Planets – Another browser for the raw images of both rovers
• Mars Ogler – Another browser for the raw images
• HiRISE Image Catalog – High resolution images from orbit (also with an RSS-Feed)

Twitter Streams – Because it’s often much faster
• Curiosity-Rover – NASA’s official account of the rover
• Mars Rovers – Spirit and Opportunity’s account
• NASA JPL – Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s account
• Curiosity Log – A drive logbook of the rover
• Universe Today – Announcements from the website
• Emily Lakdawalla – Planetary Society Space Evangelist & Mars Writer

Updates:
27.09.12 » Added HiRISE and Curiosity Raw Images Browser
03.10.12 » Added Mars Ogler
08.08.13 » English version posted, slightly updated & improved
26.06.14 » Cleaned up and improved 2014 version posted

Two weeks ago, I posted a somewhat angry rant about what had transpired with the Google+ Android App on my tablet, but I think I have to write a kind of retraction as I already mentioned in an update of the original article. After things went really bad, they got a lot better – there were a couple of updates of the Google+ App in the last two weeks and the current version runs practically perfect now. Has Google really listened to the bug reports and fixed the fatal problem with the edit box? It seems so, because I can now post again without problems with the app and it seems it has become even faster than before. So, kudos to Google for making the Google+ app really useful again – I forgive them, they’re not perfect and make mistakes, but they are always relatively quick fixing them.

The Google+ App in action – the two top bars seem huge, but they scroll away if you swipe down!
(No, I actually don’t use the app in landscape mode all the time, it just fits the article better.)

There is still one aspect of the Android App and its mobile web counterpart that puzzles me, though: if you start a post from the main screen, you can choose a photo – but only from the highlights or local storage, not from your albums. For that, you have to go to the photo section of the app, choose the image and share it from there . This is not a very big deal, but surprisingly counter-intuitive to the openness of the app from which you should be able to access all of your Google+ content from everywhere. The exclusion of the Albums from the “quick share” option has been in the app from the beginning and seems like a glaring omission – this is, after all, a great tool for photographers who want to share their content and having to make a detour like this feels a little strange, especially because the option is there in the desktop version.

Apart from these slight imperfections, the Google+ App has improved so much over the last few months and using it even on a small 7″ tablet is extremely comfortable. Are there other improvements on the way? We’ll have to see – Wednesday and Thursday is the Google I/O conference and there are usually a lot of updates around the corner. It’s entirely possible that the web interface of Google+ gets revamped again like it happened last year. Stay tuned, and don’t panic if something looks different :-).

It’s almost summer and that means there will be new radio shenanigans from Brian Cox and Robin Ince – their brilliant science-comedy radio show The Infinite Monkey Cage will return to the airwaves starting on July 7th via BBC Radio 4 and, as usual, also in the shape of freely available podcasts published on the series’ website in mp3 fomat. There are already 48 past episodes available plus a special from this March called Brian and Robin’s Infinite Inbox in which the duo answers some of the mail the show has been getting!

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 post about the series, but why write something new when there’s something perfectly okay available to recycle?)

I think it’s time to put up these signs. Football, or Soccer as it’s known in America, is like Carnival: it’s a matter of taste and believe it or not, there are some people that don’t like it and other people who cannot understand it that some people don’t like it. That is why signs like these are unfortunately necessary. By all means have fun watching the games and cheering for your team, but do not expect me to partake in any of this. If you have use for these signs, you can download them as printable PDFs in both English and German versions. Thank you for reading :-).