Last year I wrote about the new, faster and more comfortable launch approach the Soyuz spaceships have been taking since the end of 2012 to reach the International Space Station, which just takes six hours instead of almost two days as before. Last night, in a picture-perfect night launch, three astronauts, Aleksandr Skvortsov and Oleg Artemyev from Roscosmos and Steven R. Swanson from NASA went up from Baikonur and originally were again scheduled to arrive only six hours later, but this time there was a slight navigation problem which prompted the onboard computer to break off the final approach. Instead, the Soyuz will now take the old 34-orbit journey, which unfortunately takes about two days, but is actually just a completely normal procedure.

The media is, of course, really freaking out about this, especially here in Germany because the German ESA astronaut Alexander Gerst is going up with the next flight in May. Headlines like “Serious computer glitch prevents astronauts from reaching ISS” or “Space docking maneuver failed” are making the rounds, but as usual Spiegel Online has the best fearmongering going with “Flight to the ISS: Russians and Americans stuck in space”. No, the docking didn’t fail and the final approach also didn’t fail because the flight computer didn’t even attempt to do it. What apparently went wrong was that the last burn before the final one resulted in a slightly wrong orbit, which is not surprising because the faster approach requires much more precision than the standard, long flight. The crew is okay, they have enough provisions to last even longer than the two days it takes them to reach now and while this is certainly uncomfortable, it was actually completely normal until the end of 2012. And the engine is working and nobody is “stuck” – they’re actually flying right now and performing regular burns to sneak up on the ISS in the old-fashioned way.

I shouldn’t even complain about this, because it’s always the same each time something out of the ordinary happens during these launches – if everything goes according to plan, the media basically just ignores it, but if there’s only the slightest problem everybody jumps on it like a bloodhound. What I especially dislike about the current reporting is that many journalists want to make this all about politics because of the Ukraine and Crimea tensions. Do the Russian astronauts even talk with the Americans anymore? Are the Americans stranded on the ISS because Russia won’t let them use their Soyuz capsules anymore? These are only some of the outrageous questions that are asked and often very inaccurately answered. What many people don’t realize is that the daily operations of the space station and the flights up to it are largely independent of any short-term political decisions – even Roscosmos is not as close to the Kremlin as you might think. There are scientists and engineers at work, not politicians and long-term contracts like NASA has with Roscosmos to buy seats on the Soyuz cannot be cancelled just like that.

The bottom line is, in the words of Douglas Adams, Don’t Panic. A minor problem with the flight computer means that the astronauts will arrive a little later on the station. If not and something more serious happens, I stand corrected – but the chance of this happening are astronomically small.

Because this article has turned out to be longer than originally intended, I’ll write another one with a little breakdown who is actually up on the space station, who will be coming and who will be going for tomorrow when the Astronauts actually arrive.

A recent post of a fellow photographer over on Google+ got me thinking about the dynamic of circles and plusses. If a couple of thousand people have you in their circles, you should get an equal amount of plusses, right? It turns out that it doesn’t really work that way and the amount of users who have you circled often stands in absolutely no relation to the amount of plusses you get.

I’m not complaining, quite the contrary – but sometimes I wonder why some of my posts seem to attract no attention at all while others are surprising hits. While it’s not really all about the plusses, each one means a little more motivation. My experiences can be humorously summed up in this way:

• Post a series about 30-year-old computers: land on the What’s Hot list for the first few articles and get more than 400 plusses, but then further articles get almost nothing.

• Post a photo of a 30-year-old computer mainboard: get more than 50 plusses.

• Post your usual photos: get between 10-20 plusses, sometimes a bit more.

• Post a link to a movie review you’ve worked on for a couple of evenings: one or two plusses maximum.

• Reshare posts of science stuff like awesome hangouts that really matter to me: <crickets>

The last two are actually not surprising, since most of the users who have circled me care about photography, but less about science and movies. I just haven’t found the right crowd yet for this, but there are already some signs of improvement lately.

Somewhat puzzling is also the difference between the amount of image views and the plusses – for example, a recent picture of two daffodil blossoms just got 19 plusses, but over 3000 views. One of the photos of a C64 I’ve used to illustrate a Vintage Computing article almost has 200000 views, but then the post itself also got over 400 pluses. Mostly my photos seem to get between 100 and 300 views, but a couple go into the thousands and don’t have more plusses than the others. One problem is that nobody seems to know how the image views are counted – does a view mean a user really clicked on an image and viewed it large or just that it appeared in his stream?

The best method to get noticed on Google+ is, of course, to actually talk to people by having conversations in the comments – if you get to know someone better, you’re also bound to give them a plus or two occasionally. While I give out plusses quite liberally for a group of selected people just because I like what they post on Google+, I do not automatically expect them to do the same with my posts. It’s not a “I plus you and you plus me” game, but when someone gives me a plus, I almost always take a look at their profile and may also give them some plusses if I like their work. Google+ is all about discovering other people and this is often only the first step. Of course there’s a lot more, but I won’t even go into the use of hashtags and all the photography themes, because then this article would never end!

Again, I’m not complaining, just observing and noticing, because despite the sometimes erratic feedback, Google+ is a lot of fun and I’ve learned to know many fascinating people from all over the world whom I would never have met otherwise!

I haven’t done a Music Monday in ages and I think it’s time to share some music once in a while again. And today I need something really funny. There’s only one musician who can fit knickers and economy into one song: the great Neil Innes, also sometimes known as the seventh Monty Python because he often worked with them. He’s an amazing satirical songwriter who has parodied just about anything – this one originally came about as a project for the Rutles (which are a whole other story!), but later he recorded it as a part of his television series The Innes Book of Records, where he did amazing music videos for many of his songs.

I post this every year, but this time I’ll write it in English for a change: I don’t want to spoil anyone’s fun, but please leave me alone with the German carnival – I just don’t like it and I don’t want to be any part of it. My websites are, and always will be a Carnival Free Zone – Karnevalfreie Zone! Two years ago, I already had uploaded my selfmade “traffic sign” as a SVG vector graphics file for free use and this year I’ve also added a PDF version. If anyone wants to print it out and hang it somewhere as a warning, please feel free to do so. Once again – party if you want to, but please don’t expect me to join in. It’s just not my thing, but some people around here don’t seem to understand that and with the media bombarding everyone with endless carneval for weeks, it can be somewhat overbearing.

Well, that went more quickly than I expected. On Sunday, the graphics card of my big computer died, but I found a replacement on Ebay soon. I actually snagged up the first ATI Radeon 9600 from a good seller I could find, but I think it was a good choice since it has an original ATI cooler and heatsink. It’s a little louder than the Arctic Cooling sink I had put on the previous card, but if it cools better then I can stand the additional noise. And it’s got a pretty snazzy artwork on the heatsink, which is actually the reason why I’m posting this article (you can click on the image to enlarge it) :-).

Yes, I could have gotten a more powerful card, like the Radeon 9800 I’ve got in another computer, but this one is really enough for what I’m doing with the computer and it only has an old AGP graphics port, so I’m rather limited in my choices. The most important feature is not really the graphics chip, but the two monitor outputs – I’ve really gotten used to working with two displays especially when post-processing photos and I’ve really missed it in the last few days. Now both monitors are back in action and so am I.

The Commodore 64 was one of the best 8-bit gaming home computers of the 1980s and although I had never used it exclusively for playing games, I certainly made no effort to avoid them. There was a huge amount of garbage out there and the old preconception that computer games were only violent and nothing else was at least a little true, but there were also a lot of exceptions. Of course everybody back then traded some games via the schoolyard exchange and while I had a lot of original games, some others were only available via slightly illicit means because at the end of the 1980s many older games were already out of print for a long time. I tried many of the different genres and while there were a lot disappointments, I still found some real jewels in the relatively short  time the C64 was my main computer between 1989 and 1990. Here are some of these games, which continue to be my favourites until today. I’m really happy that the games themselves and even the hardware to play them on still exists.

Warning, this is a bit of a rant… It seems my computer hardware doesn’t like me anymore! A couple of days ago I noticed that my printer seems to be packing in and today the graphics card in my big computer went belly-up. Although the computer still works and I can use the on-board graphics adaptor, this means that I lost my dual-monitor setup I always use for processing my photos. So this really put a damper on a peaceful Sunday and although I just bought another Radeon 9600 on eBay, the missing graphics card will mean a definitive slowdown in photograph posting over the next days until the replacement arrives.

I still have a couple of new photos around, but I won’t be doing any major photo processing with a single screen. I also finally wanted to finish my C64 games article today, but it’s still not ready because the computer troubleshooting took too much time. So there you are as far as lame excuses go :-).

I have to admit that I’m hopelessy behind everything at the moment, mainly because that little C64 gaming article ballooned into something a bit bigger which needs a little more time. In the meantime, I’d like to give a huge shout-out to Terry Stewart from New Zealand, who has one of the biggest collection of vintage computers of all sorts, shapes and sizes and shows them all in incredibly detailed videos on his Youtube channel, in articles on Website and also on Google+. I’ve spend a lot of time browsing around and watching his videos, learning a lot about all those other old computer I never knew of.

He even has a Kaypro II, which you can see in the video embedded below – it’s not exactly like a Kaypro 2x, the first computer I ever encountered, but it’s very close.  It sounds a little different than a 2x (there’s a short video here with the distinct floppy drive sounds), but the case and keyboard seem to be largely identical – the only differences are the huge vertical floppy drives of the II while the 2x had two half-height horizontal drives. Terry gives a great overview of the available software live on the machine itself and he also shows some of the huge amounts of manuals you got with the computer back then. He also demonstrates Kaypro IV later in the video, which seems to be closer to the 2X than the II. I distinctly remember the rudimentary graphics capabilities which only a few demos actually used, but we never had this rather sophisticated Space Invaders clone – only two games called Ladder (a sort of Donkey Kong clone) and Catchum (a simple PacMan knockoff), all using only ASCII characters!

The last Vintage Computing post was more about the Commodore 128 in general, but there was more than just the one machine – the C128D variant was even more amazing, transforming the 8-bit-machine into a real personal computer. This is the story about the “big” C128 and how I ended up with not only one, but two of them. Long after I had graduated from the Commodore 64 to the Amiga and even the PC, I discovered that my 1541-II floppy drive was broken, but I almost accidentially found a surprising replacement with one computer I always wanted to have in the C64 era.

I always wanted to write something about Lego here. Last year I missed the 55th anniversary of the Lego brick, a half-finished article written in German is still around somewhere in the blog drafts – but somehow I never got around to finish it. But now I actually have a reason to write about Lego, because today my first Lego set since about 1987 arrived today. It’s, of course, the Lego Cuusoo model of the Mars Curiosity Rover, which had fascinated me since its designer Steven Pakbaz, a real Curiosity engineer, had first unveiled a prototype back in autumn 2012. Now it’s available as a real Lego set and since it wasn’t too expensive, I just could not resist and ordered it. I didn’t expect it to arrive until mid-February, but surprisingy it came today.

I haven’t even begun to build it yet – I haven’t touched a real-life lego bricks in more than 25 years and I hope I can still work it all out! But what I have done is occasionally build with digital tools like the Lego Digital Designer. So, this post is basically an announcement that there will be Lego in the future of this website – I was originally thinking about writing a little of the Lego I knew in the 1980s, and that’s what I’m going to do soon. But first I have to build a Mars rover! :-)

[Update: Well, I got about half of it built in about an hour. It’s one of the most complex Lego models I’ve ever built, and I had some Technic ones back in the days. But it’s certainly worth the price and it has lots of incredible detail!]

[Update 1.2.: Final result below! That wasn’t actually too complicated, but nevertheless one of the more challenging models because of all the small fiddly bits. The wheel suspension works surprisingly well, this model can really roll over boulders! I’ll take some better photos soon. Update 20.2.: I replaced the first photo with a better shot now!]