It’s Music Monday and I really need something cheerful, so Meri Amber to the rescue! The self-described Australian geek songstress has just released her next album, the six-plus-one-track Super EP, last weekend and while I sadly don’t have the energy right now to write up a full review, I can only highly recommend it for groovy and catchy tunes with quirky and thoughtful lyrics and meticulous musical arrangements. Meri is so generous to let everybody listen to her songs for free on her music streaming page and several other streaming services, but you can also buy all of her stuff at very reasonable prices in her own online shop in the form of actual CDs (remember those?) and digital downloads, which are also available almost everywhere like on Itunes and Amazon. I really recommend the higher-bitrate MP3s, because they sound so much better than the streaming versions and it’s after all the best way to support her musical endeavours!

Embedded below is the very funny and creative video to the album’s title track My Superman and there’s also an album trailer and even a mini-documentary about the making of the Super EP!

Perhaps some visitors have already noticed those snazzy new icons in the top right sidebar – I put them there last week on all three websites because I thought the links to my social media profiles should be a bit more prominent now that I’m getting more and more involved in those. While my own websites are still my main headquarters and all the important content I post off-site will always appear here too, I’m not scoffing at social media any more and have actually found it enormeously fun and useful. So where can I be found except around here?

Google+ has rapidly become my favourite place on the web to connect to other people and share my content. My main focus there is on photography, but I always share all the links to my other blog postings too. The community and interaction is absolutely astonishing, wonderful and friendly – I’ve met some great people all over the world there. Rumours presist that Google+ is dead or dying, but after almost two years I now have over 4000 followers and over three million views on my posts and if that is not alive, I don’t know what is! Interaction is the key – writing comments, having conversations, joining and sharing circles and taking part in communities is what Google+ is all about. If you circle me on Google+, I will most probably circle you back if you post something interesting in your stream and perhaps give your posts some +1’s or comments.

Twitter was actually one of the first social media sites I mainly joined for fun back in 2011 and I haven’t really done much with it from my side except that I regularly tweet the updates from my websites by way of WordPress and only occasionally talk with people. 140 characters are simply not my thing, but in the other direction it’s almost entirely different – I follow over 300 people and enjoy my daily dose of tweets very much to keep up with everybody. I’m just not very good at this kind of high-frequency sharing myself, although I can certainly see the use of it as a communications tool. I actually have two different Twitter accounts: @guidobibra has the updates from all the websites, while I use @dvdlogger only as a legacy account for the DVDLog website.

Facebook has become more of a necessity than anything else. I have a few followers over there, but those are mainly family and friends who are not on Google+ and I exclusively post my website updates automatically from WordPress – although I sometimes write comments if I have something to say and will answer comments from others. This is mainly because I really don’t like Facebook from a technical standpoint – I hate the web interface, the official Android app is completely unusable and if it wasn’t for some third-party clients I would hardly look at my Facebook feed at all. I don’t intend to get involved into Facebook any more than I have to, so if you really want to interact with me, I would suggest Google+ instead – although I certainly won’t deny any Facebook friend requests or commenting.

Instagram is just a bit of fun for me than anything else. I actually installed the Android app to follow some other people, but because I’ve had a tablet with a very basic camera since last year, I have been posting the occasional crappy tabletcam shot there. It’s nothing really serious, I consider this throwaway stuff and the “real” photography will always appear on my websites. I actually like the Android app, but I have no idea if I will keep this up further because the tablet camera is a bit cumbersome. Although once I get a smartphone with a decent camera perhaps later this year, there could be more silly Instagram shots from me, so even if it’s still boring in my stream there, feel free to add me :-).

The first icon in the row is, of course, the RSS Feed which WordPress is still generating automatically and as long as the software supports it, I will continue to provide a feed. Even with the untimely death of the Google Reader last year, the format is stronger than ever and other services like Feedly have risen to the occasion and filled the gap perfectly. If you add my blogs to your feed, you’ll always get my articles as soon as they’re published here!

Okay, that’s enough self-promotion for now. I’m actually not really good at this sort of thing and I almost threw this article away, but sometimes you just have to toot your own horn :-).

About the Icons: Credit where credit is due – the four in the post logo are from Brainleaf Communications, I just loved that retro look and had to use this free icon pack in this article. The icons in the sidebar are based on a collection called Socialtograms put together by Steffen Norgard Andersen – I was trying to find something simple and was already half through creating some from the app icons, but these really hit the spot and I think they fit well into the websites.

Recently, my provider had updated the server my webspace is hosted on to PHP 5 and while at first I didn’t notice anything wrong, there actually was a creeping background problem: all WordPress installations refused to send out any emails and in some cases even timeout error messages appeared from the PHPMailer module.

After some unsuccessful digging, I found a post on the bugtracker of PHPMailer regarding an incompatibility with PHP 5.2 – apparently there is a problem with this particular PHP version related to the Regex function. So if you suddenly have those error messages, like a timeout in class-phpmailer.php on line 879 in the case of WordPress, check what PHP version your webserver is running. In my case, the server defaults to 5.2, but I was able to switch it with the line AddHandler php55-cgi .php in the .htaccess file to 5.5 and then everything worked again.

If your webhost supports this method of switching to different PHP versions, this will fix the problem – if not, you have to ask your webspace hoster to switch versions or install a higher version yourself. Reportedly anything above 5.3 works, but I only tested it with 5.5 and it works fine with WordPress 3.9.2 and the release candidate of 4.0.

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