Shoes

via xkcd.com http://xkcd.com/1065/

But how do you keep track of everything?

Here's an interesting paradox for you: Despite the fact that there's a slow and steady pull away from RSS and Atom news feeds, it seems that there's more people than ever who are actually reading 'feeds' in one form or another. People who, just a few years ago, you'd never expect to be scrolling through a river of news, can't wait to log in to Twitter or Facebook, scrolling and clicking on links shared by their friends or pushed by custom news 'apps' right into their stream (which they then turn around and share with all their friends). Mobile apps like Flipboard or Pulse then collect all these social links, plus custom feeds from magazines and newspapers and create a good-looking booklet full of current news. It's all so seamless and amazing. Honestly, it's the most efficient way possible to see the latest amusing cat videos ever invented.

But here's the thing, what if you actually want to keep track of important information without relying on your social network to find it for you? What happens if you want to see EVERYTHING? It seems right now there's very few options - mostly just Google Reader, really, which relies on ever-harder-to-find RSS feeds to keep it going.

I mean, imagine you're at one of the analyst firms, or at Engadget, or in the marketing department of a large multinational corporation - technical or not - and your job is to keep track of all the news, all the conversations and anything else that happens in your particular area of interest, how do you do it? Flipboard, as pretty as it is, really isn't going to help a manager of a large dentist's office keep track of the latest amazing developments in the world of oral hygiene, and a business analyst isn't going to use Google Reader to keep track of the news concerning the various Fortune 500 companies in their watch list. Well, I hope not, anyways.

How do people keep track of everything? Are there any tools that I don't know about? Do they pay the thousands of dollars a month for those custom 'news tracking' services which send market summaries of every product or brand mention? Is there such a thing as a Bloomberg Terminal for tech and industry news? Is there something else I'm missing?

You know what I think? I think the vast majority of information workers out there are simply winging it. I think they browse the web randomly, read Yahoo's home page (in secret of course) or browse Google News, maybe check out a newspaper every other day, a magazine now and then, have 5,375 unread items in their Google Reader, and otherwise hope someone emails them interesting links, or pray they happen to be online at the right time when one of their Twitter contacts posts a relevant link to what they do for a living.

Because unless I'm missing something, and I'm pretty sure I'm not (as I do, in fact, read everything) they really don't have many other options.

Over the past several years, I've been continually developing and tweaking a personal news reader web app for exactly this reason. At first it was just hosted under /feeds on this site but eventually I decided to give it it's own domain, which was flip.io first (before Flipboard launched) and has wavered between xs.io, maven.io and the latest, magnet.io since. If you've ever seen one of those three domains in your server logs and wondered WTF it was, that was me.

Now this is one of those projects that is simply about scratching an itch. Though I'm always thinking about ways to transform it into some sort of money-making commercial effort, it really is simply an app that I want for my own use. I'm continually tweaking it and have a list of things I need to polish here and there, but even in it's continual work-in-progress state it's surprisingly effective at what it's supposed to do. At first, what I wanted a web-based news-reader that was cross platform, mobile-enabled and was not Google Reader for various reasons. But as soon as I had written the basic crawler, database and river of news pages, I immediately started adding features to help me deal with a deluge of information out there.

Here's just a few features:

24 hour expiration of news items. Why was I constantly going in and marking a huge list of backlogged items as 'read'? You know that massive number of articles and posts that you'll never, ever, ever get to? Why give myself an ulcer. If I'm not able to get to it, then they're just automatically out of my main feed. They're not deleted, or marked read, they just sort of fall off the end. I've adjusted the hours back and forth from 12 hours back to a week, but decided that, for me, 24 hours is good. It's not the exact number that's important, it's just the functionality.

Duplicate detection. Oh, I'd love to tell you I found some magic way of grouping and deleting items from multiple blogs that are basically the same summary of a news item in yet another site, but I haven't done that. I tried various ways, but none seemed to work for me. I know it's possible (look at Techmeme), but I haven't been able to get it yet. Some day. What I *did* do was stupid, basic and *incredibly* noticeable - which is simply look for the same exact damn item title and wack the second or third version in a day. You know how Engadget or TechCrunch have their mobile-focused sub-blogs? But then they end up linking to the same thing half the time? Well, they always use the same title, so I just filter that crap out. Simple, yet oh-so-effective.

Thumbnails. I've had this for years, and I'm starting to see that some of the iPad news reader apps are starting to get the idea. Every tech blog out there - including the best like Ars Technica - seems to REQUIRE that they have some obnoxious, huge, usually stolen, image accompanying every single item they post. I'd say 75% of the time, the image has absolutely nothing to do with the article and is usually nothing more than some stupid clip art, web meme, or upside-down brand logo (WHY?!??). It's very annoying. So the easiest thing to do is find the first image in every blog post and make a thumbnail out of it. If it's valuable, I'll be able to click and expand it, if not I can easily ignore it.

Summaries. Here's another one that some iPad readers are starting to grasp just now. Google Reader - like pretty much every other reader ever made - has two views: Titles or Full Posts. That's it. You either have to slog through every single massive image and lengthy text, or you get the bare information and usually a favicon (which I've decided are nothing but visual noise). What I do is detect the first paragraph (or a reasonable number of words) and use that in my main view - it allows you to fly through items, still grasping the main idea of each post, without having to slog forever. I also have the option of marking some feeds as 'default full', which I do for some link feeds like from Reddit, which don't have useful summaries. This is a no-brainer feature, that I don't understand why Readers don't have.

Visual Sparseness. There's no reason to have 'chrome', buttons, favicons, outlines, shading, colors, etc. bombarding your eyes as you're trying to work through a few thousand news items every day. As time has gone by, I've continually stripped down what my main stream shows me so that I can suck in as much information as possible without having to deal with a lot of crap. The side-benefit of this is there's nothing you have to worry about when you adapt the same interface to the phone, tablet or web, without a lot of extraneous crap in the middle of your feed, it makes an incredibly useful and light interface.

Logical and prioritized grouping. This isn't much of an innovation, just a note that after playing with various ways of sorting the items, I decided that having them organized into folders, and displayed in the by their published date, but within the order of the folders, was the most efficient. I keep the 'work' stuff up top, like my feeds for mobile-specific news items, and then I have the news, and link feeds like Y-Combinator down at the bottom. If I've made it down there, I'm most likely looking for novelty by that point. :-)

Integrated bookmarks. At one point I thought, "Why re-create the wheel? Use Delicious, or Pinboard to keep track of your links...", but the speed and efficiency of keeping stuff I want to read later in the same interface is worth the loss of the extra features a full-fledged link tracking app would give me. Also, to make sure I don't ignore the links I've saved, I automatically forward the main feed to the Links page once I'm done with my daily feeds. You know how it is, sometimes you save links that you think you should read, though you never seem to be in the mood to actually read it. Getting reminded of it every time you're jonesing for another good thing to read is quite useful.

Social Network Grouping. I subscribe to Twitter and Facebook by using their APIs in a different script than the main RSS crawler (which just uses SimplePie to grab the feed into my database before I process it). I don't just dump the entries from social feeds directly into my feeds though, as they'd overwhelm the rest of the links, or be so disorganized as to be incomprehensible. I'd say 90% of the people who post links and thoughts to Twitter or Facebook, do so in bursts. So, I run the scripts every hour, collect all the tweets, and then group them together by poster. Four or five tweets together looks, and reads, pretty much like a short blog post. It makes keeping track of everyone in your social network muuuuuch easier. Note, I used to actually keep appending tweets until I got around to reading them, but that was too much. The current system I have now means I still end up missing a few tweets now and then that hit the expiration limit, but chopping everything up is a bit more manageable - and can also lets me respond within a reasonable time as well.

Filters. This is a biggie, and not really finished yet. But the general idea is that I want to be able to 'mute' certain keywords for 24 hours if I've seen way too frigin' much of that topic that day. For example, today is E3 and it also seems to be a slow news day, so I've seen the same news about the XBox 30 times. If I thought this was going to continue (as it sometimes does when Apple launches something), I'd mute it. Also, I want to be able to auto-expand items that have keywords I want to keep track of.

But here's a lesson I learned from this so far about filtering - there's no magic. The corpus just isn't big enough. What I mean is, I've yet to find a way to train the news reader to highlight things I'm interested in. The total number of news items and the signals that you give the app (both positive and negative) never seem to make enough of a difference to actually hone future results. I absolutely *suck* at this sort of thing (aka 'math'), so I could be, and probably am incredibly wrong, but I've tried and tried again to get something working. In my reader, in addition to the links that I can explicitly mark with a star, *every* link I click on is recorded. So if I click on a link in the middle of an post, I record that URL, link title, and the parent item's full text in a history table. I've then used that and my explicit favorites to try and train a Bayesian filter, but even with thousands of clicks and hundreds of thousands of example items (which is about 6 months or so of feeds), I can't seem to get the damn thing to give any sort of reliable results. My goal was sort of a reverse SPAM filter - items that matched the Bayesian training would get marked - either displayed as a full post (instead of a summary) or getting a colored title bar, or whatever. But I've yet to get it working.

I suspect though, it might not be me. I think the amount of effort you'd need to make to mark items as like/dislike, and the amount of items you'd need to have as an example to compare against aren't practical. For SPAM, for which there are already massive examples of both, and highly tuned keyword filters, etc., it works (though for anyone who's managed their own SpamAssassin server, not always particularly well), but the meager numbers a personal news reader pulls in? I don't think it's going to happen. Then again, I visit Techmeme, and see all the automatically grouped, prioritized and filtered articles and I think I must be doing something wrong - even with the human editors, there's a lot of automated categorization as well. That's basically the same problem I'm trying to solve, so it must be possible with the same sort of inputs, or at least more feasible than I think.

Okay, so that's just some of the stuff. There's more: Full-text search, a JSON-based API and Javascript front-end with infinite scrolling which works on pretty much every smartphone I've tried it on, auto-marking read-items in batches, so when the iPad's Safari crashes (as it does quite often) or I'm on my phone and reading an item and get interrupted, I never actually lose those items as they're not marked read until they've scrolled well past that spot.

Anyways, the end result to all this is a custom-focused web application which allows me to keep track of hundreds of news feeds, social items, and even 'firehose' feeds without losing my mind or dedicating 20 hours a day to reading. My 24 hour timeout rarely gets used, as I'm able to zip through the feeds very efficiently - but I also don't have to fear opening up my reader after I spend a weekend out and about with my kid either. I can happily say it's the perfect news reader for me (because of course I made it for me.).

I think the next steps will probably be more focus on the filters - I imagine a full set of "If This, Then That" style item filters like you can create using an email client. Figuring out how to enable more intelligence - not necessarily magic, but at least automation - to the filtering process is key. Also, I see a time shortly when web scraping, rather than just feed parsing, will be something I'll need to add, as well as more API integration, as it's pretty obvious RSS is going away. (Though I'd love to see it replaced with something like a JSON version, that had added bits for requesting deltas - sort of like PubsubHubbub, but easier.).

Could this ever be a business? It depends - I'm not sure it'd be a consumer-level offering, but I bet there'd be a lot of info worker professionals who'd be willing to pay a few bucks - Pinboard.in style - to leave Google Reader behind for something more customizable and efficient. We might be coming full circle on a cycle of feed aggregators. It started with the original ones like Amphetameme and Radio Userland, then Newsgator and FeedDemon and Bloglines, then Google Reader came and seemed to suck the air out of the whole area. Now maybe after a break, there's another wave coming. Honestly, it doesn't seem like anyone has ever figured out how to make any real money from a feed reader though, which is probably why they all seem to fade away over time. This makes sense in a way, as the core focus of an aggregator is someone else's content. Even if you think of a feed reader as akin to a full web browser in its functionality, again, when's the last time anyone made any money making a web browser? Still, there's value there, you can feel it. It's just a matter of figuring out what it is.

So if you made it this far, now you know what I do in my spare time. I'm either reading everything I can, or figuring out ways I can read more. (Yes, I probably need help... Is there an info-junkie's anonymous? Sign me up.)

-Russ

via Russell Beattie http://www.russellbeattie.com/blog/but-how-do-you-keep-track-of-everything

Is Pluto a Planet? An Animated Explanation Sets the Record Straight

A brief history of why the word “planet” isn’t very helpful.

Since the dawn of time, mankind has sought to order the heavens, our models for the universe and the Solar System constantly evolving. The latest celestial body to ride the roller coaster of categorization is Pluto, which seems to fall in and out of planetary favor far too frequently for anyone to understand — or remember — whether or not it is indeed a planet. From the invariably edutaining C. G. P. Gray, whose fast-paced animations have previously set the record straight on everything from why the color pink doesn’t exist to the difference between the United Kingdom, Great Britain and England to several historical misconceptions, comes this short illuminator on what to make of Pluto after all:

As we increase our knowledge of the universe, the category of “planet” will probably continue to evolve or, possibly, fall out of favor entirely.

↬ The Dish

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via Brain Pickings http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/06/04/is-pluto-a-planet/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+brainpickings%2Frss+%28Brain+Pickings%29

Die Fassade des Bremer Rathaus wird 400 Jahre alt!

Lüder von Bentheim schuf zu Beginn des 17. Jahrhunderts diesen üppigen Fassadenschmuck. Die Arbeiten waren 1612 beendet. Im Jubiläumsjahr würdigt die Stadt den damaligen Umbau. Bürgermeister Jens Böhrnsen: “Dieses Jubiläum ist ein wunderbarer Anlass, unser Weltkulturerbe wieder einmal gebührend zu würdigen und es in all seiner Schönheit noch einmal ganz neu wahrzunehmen.”

Zahlreiche Veranstaltungen finden rund um das Jubiläum statt. Zunächst lädt die Lange Shopping-Nacht am 2. Juni zum Bummeln und Einkaufen ein. Wer einen Blick hinter die Rathausfassede werfen möchte, kann am 3. Juni 2012, dem UNESCO Welterbetag, das Rathaus besichtigen. Am 9. September 2012 widmet dann die Stiftung Deutsche Denkmalspflege den Tag des Offenen Denkmals zu Ehren des Bremer Rathauses.

via nessiblog http://blog.nessipictures.com/?p=1750

Thomas Edison’s To-Do List, 1888

What ink for the blind has to do with marine telegraphy and electrical pianos.

The to-do list might be the secret to willpower, and it is certainly an essential tool of creativity, as anyone from Leonardo da Vinci to John Lennon can attest. After peeking at the notebooks and sketchbooks of some of history’s greatest creators, here comes a rare glimpse of 41-year-old Thomas Edison’s to-do list circa 1888, found in The Papers of Thomas E. Edison: Losses and Loyalties — the seventh volume of Rutgers University’s digitized Edison papers.

Among Edison’s “things doing and to be done,” while he wasn’t busy inventing and scandalizing cinema, were:

• Cotton picker


• New standard phonograph


• Hand turning phonograph


• Deaf apparatus


• Electrical piano


• New expansion pyromagnetic dynamo


• Artificial silk


• Phonographic clock


• Marine telegraphy


• Chalk battery


• Ink for blind

So: What are you doing today?

Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter and people say it’s cool. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.

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via Brain Pickings http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/06/01/thomas-edison-to-do-list-1888/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+brainpickings%2Frss+%28Brain+Pickings%29

Enthüllung über Stuxnet-Virus: Obamas Cyber-Angriff auf Irans Atomanlagen

Wer zerstörte Irans Uranzentrifugen? Der Washington-Korrespondent der "New York Times" will nachgewiesen haben, dass der Stuxnet-Virus unter der Führung der USA in Kooperation mit Israel entstand. Ist Barack Obama der erste Cyber-Feldherr der Geschichte?



via SPIEGEL ONLINE - Schlagzeilen http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/netzpolitik/usa-und-israel-sollen-stuxnet-virus-gegen-iran-entwickelt-haben-a-836401.html

Comic for June 1, 2012

via Dilbert Daily Strip http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2012-06-01/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+dilbert%2Fdaily_strip+%28Dilbert+Daily+Strip+-+UU%29

EST

via xkcd.com http://xkcd.com/1061/

Comic for May 27, 2012

via Dilbert Daily Strip http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2012-05-27/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+dilbert%2Fdaily_strip+%28Dilbert+Daily+Strip+-+UU%29

"Dragon": ISS-Astronauten fangen private Raumkapsel ein

Premiere im Orbit: Erstmals hat eine private Raumkapsel an der Internationalen Raumstation angedockt. Astronauten an Bord der ISS fingen die "Dragon" mit einem Roboterarm ein. Das historische Manöver dauerte etwas länger als geplant - weil sich offenbar ein Lasermessgerät im Ziel irrte.



via SPIEGEL ONLINE - Schlagzeilen http://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/weltall/iss-astronauten-fangen-raumtransporter-dragon-mit-roboterarm-ein-a-835285.html

How We Measure the Universe, Animated

How to determine the distance of stars using standard candles.

Somewhere between Fibonacci’s invention of arithmetic, which changed the world of numbers as we know it, and scientists’ ambitious visualizations of the scale of the universe lies a daunting fundamental question: How do we actually use these numbers to measure the universe? That’s precisely what the Royal Observatory Greenwich answers in this wonderful short animation, a teaser for a new exhibition titled Measuring the Universe: from the transit of Venus to the edge of the cosmos .

In a nod to this morning’s affirmation of the additive nature of scientific discovery, narrator Dr. Olivia Johnson observes:

What’s most incredible to me is how all these measurements build on each other. It’s only by knowing the scale of our Solar System — the distance between the Earth and Sun — that we’re able to measure the distances to nearby stars using parallax.

The charming animation was done by Robert Milne, Ross Phillips, and Kwok Fung Lam.

↬ Laughing Squid

Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter and people say it’s cool. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.

Brain Pickings takes 450+ hours a month to curate and edit across the different platforms, and remains banner-free. If it brings you any joy and inspiration, please consider a modest donation – it lets me know I'm doing something right.

via Brain Pickings http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/05/25/measuring-the-universe/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+brainpickings%2Frss+%28Brain+Pickings%29

Crowdsourcing

via xkcd.com http://xkcd.com/1060/

A tribute to Bob Moog, sonic doodler

In the mid-1960s, Dr. Robert Moog unleashed a new universe of sounds into musicdom with his invention of the electronic analog Moog Synthesizer. The timbre and tones of these keyboard instruments (true works of art in and of themselves) would come to define a generation of music, featuring heavily in songs by The Beatles, The Doors, Stevie Wonder, Kraftwerk and many others.



When people hear the word “synthesizer” they often think “synthetic”—fake, manufactured, unnatural. In contrast, Bob Moog’s synthesizers produce beautiful, organic and rich sounds that are, nearly 50 years later, regarded by many professional musicians as the epitome of an electronic instrument. “Synthesizer,” it turns out, refers to the synthesis embedded in Moog’s instruments: a network of electronic components working together to create a whole greater than the sum of the parts.



With his passion for high-tech toolmaking in the service of creativity, Bob Moog is something of a patron saint of the nerdy arts and a hero to many of us here. So for the next 24 hours on our homepage, you’ll find an interactive, playable logo inspired by the instruments with which Moog brought musical performance into the electronic age. You can use your mouse or computer keyboard to control the mini-synthesizer’s keys and knobs to make nearly limitless sounds. Keeping with the theme of 1960s music technology, we’ve patched the keyboard into a 4-track tape recorder so you can record, play back and share songs via short links or Google+.

Much like the musical machines Bob Moog created, this doodle was synthesized from a number of smaller components to form a unique instrument. When experienced with Google Chrome, sound is generated natively using the Web Audio API—a doodle first (for other browsers the Flash plugin is used). This doodle also takes advantage of JavaScript, Closure libraries, CSS3 and tools like Google Web Fonts, the Google+ API, the Google URL Shortener and App Engine.



Special thanks to engineers Reinaldo Aguiar and Rui Lopes and doodle team lead Ryan Germick for their work, as well as the Bob Moog Foundation and Moog Music for their blessing. Now give those knobs a spin and compose a tune that would make Dr. Moog smile!



Posted by Joey Hurst, Software Engineer

via The Official Google Blog http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/05/tribute-to-bob-moog-sonic-doodler.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+blogspot%2FMKuf+%28Official+Google+Blog%29

Private Raumfahrt: SpaceX erfolgreich gestartet

Der erste kommerzielle Flug zur Weltraumstation ISS ist erfolgreich gestartet. In einem Bilderbuchstart hob die Falcon-9-Rakete vom Weltraumbahnhof in Cape Canaveral ab.



via heise online News http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Private-Raumfahrt-SpaceX-erfolgreich-gestartet-1581529.html

Rattenexperiment: Chemikalie ändert Verhalten späterer Generationen

Eine Dosis eines Pflanzenschutzmittels beeinträchtigt nicht nur trächtige Ratten - sondern auch deren Urenkel. Ein Experiment mit den Nagern zeigt, was für weitreichende Folgen giftige Chemikalien haben können.



via SPIEGEL ONLINE - Schlagzeilen http://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/natur/epigenetik-bei-ratten-fungizid-veraendert-verhalten-folgender-generationen-a-834420.html

Rhododendronpark Bremen

Der Rhododendronpark in Bremen bietet auf einer Fläche von 46 Hektar eine einzigartige Sammlung an Rhododendron und Azaleen. Von den weltweit 1000 verschiedenen Rhododendronwildarten wachsen hier und in der botanika 500. Daneben werden den jährlich ca. 300.000 Besuchern 2000 gezüchtete Sorten präsentiert.

1933 begann das Gartenbauamt Bremen (heute Stadtgrün Bremen) im Bremer Stadtteil Horn-Lehe den Rhododendron-Park anzulegen unter anderem nach Plänen von Gartenbaudirektor Richard Homann. Auf dem Gelände der ehemaligen Landgüter Rickmers und Allmers standen um 1890 als Wildpark gepflanzte Bäume, vor allem Eichen, aber auch Buchen, Eschen und Fichten. Diese Bäume bieten noch heute den Rhododendron Schatten und Windschutz. Günstige klimatische Bedingungen und Standortverhältnisse für Rhododendron und immergrüne Laubgehölze und das nahegelegene Oldenburger Baumschulgebiet, das auf die Anzucht dieser Pflanzen spezialisiert ist, waren günstige Voraussetzungen, um hier einen „Prüfungs- und Sichtungsgarten für Rhododendron“ anzulegen. Im August 1940 wurde die von Ernst Gorsemann geschaffene Bronzeplastik “Wisent” im Rhododendronpark aufgestellt.

Am 7. Juni 2003 wurde im Rhododendron-Park die botanika als Deutschlands größtes Naturerlebnis-Zentrum eröffnet. Im gleichen Jahr wurde das von der Soziologin Witha Winter von Gregory initiierte Projekt Garten der Menschenrechte eingeweiht.

Nach einem Beschluss der in Bremen regierenden großen Koalition verfügte Bausenator Jens Eckhoff Ende 2005, ab dem 1. April 2006 Eintritt zu verlangen. Die Umsetzung führte zur Einzäunung eines Großteils der Parkflächen und zur Aufstellung von Kassenhäuschen. Nach massiven Bürgerprotesten und zahlreichen Spenden wurde die Verfügung am 31. März 2006 außer Kraft gesetzt.

Im Jahr 2007 wurde auf Initiative eines privaten Horner Spenders eine Stiftung gegründet, an der sich auch die Stadtgemeinde Bremen beteiligt. Mit Gründung der Stiftung ging der Rhododendronpark in das Eigentum der Stiftung über, die ab 2009 die Pflege und Fortentwicklung des Rhododendronparks übernahm.

Quelle: Wikipedia

via nessiblog http://blog.nessipictures.com/?p=1730

Evernote

Popular app gets Ice Cream Sarnie treatment

Android App of the Week As a long-time user of Catch Notes it was going to take something quite impressive to get me to jump ship to arch-rival Evernote but a recent update and integration with the latest versions of HTC's Sense have persuaded me to do so.…

via The Register http://www.reghardware.com/2012/05/22/app_of_the_week_android_evernote/

SpaceX Dragon, first private ship to the ISS, launched successfully

Another giant step for Elon Musk's space programme

Pic History is just days away from being made as SpaceX' Dragon cargoship finally blasted off successfully on its Falcon 9 rocket this morning on its way to a rendezvous with the International Space Station.…

via The Register http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/05/22/spacex_launch_successful/

"Dragon": Privater Raumtransporter startet ins All

Der Start lief glatt: "Dragon", der erste private Raumtransporter, ist auf dem Weg zur Internationalen Raumstation. Das Rendezvous im All ist eine Premiere, die mehrfach verschoben worden war. Mit ihr beginnt ein neues Kapitel der Raumfahrt.



via SPIEGEL ONLINE - Schlagzeilen http://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/weltall/dragon-transporter-von-spacex-zur-iss-gestartet-a-833822.html

Nokia N90 Review (MobileBurn)

Nokia N90 Review (MobileBurn)

heise online - Neue DVB-S-Karte mit BDA-Treibern und analogen A/V-Eingängen

Um den Umstieg ins digitale Zeitalter zu erleichtern (und Videomaterial zu retten), gibt es eine neue DVB-S-Karte mit BDA-Treibern und analogen A/V-Eingängen: "Mit der WinTV-NOVA-S-Plus bietet Hauppauge nun für 79 Euro eine neue DVB-S-Empfangskarte an, die analoges Videomaterial im MPEG-1-/MPEG-2-Format digitalisieren kann und mit einer IR-Fernbedienung ausgeliefert wird."