Moonshots Beyond the Cloud

Five years ago these days I bought my first Chromebook, an Acer C720. It was an impulse buy I planned for months. My first Chromebook, an Acer C720. Chrome OS had always intrigued me. Back then, I felt the need for a secondary computer besides my primary desktop PC running Ubuntu Linux. I was living in Chrome and the Google ecosystem anyway most of the time, so getting a Chromebook was an easy decision. Chrome OS immediately felt natural. That humble device, the Acer C720, had enough performance for my typical needs. There’s another reason I wanted to give Chrome OS a go: I had had enough with maintaining Linux . When I got the Chromebook, I had been using Linux only for the previous decade and a half. After trying several distributions, I settled on Ubuntu. I dreaded the Russian roulette of system updates. All went well most of the time but, once every few weeks, a version mismatch between the kernel and some device drivers or kernel modules would dump me into a text

The March 1, 2020 update of my book Space Apps for Android: Discover the Best Astronomy and Space Apps is out. If you purchased the book, the latest version is available for free download in ePub, Mobi, and PDF format in your Leanpub library . The cover of Space Apps for Android in the Google Play Books app on my Lenovo Tab E7 tablet. In chapter Introduction , I moved the description of my blog to the new subsection Learn more and mentioned my newsletter there, too. Chapter Ephemeris and Astronomical Phenomena has a new entry for the app Nightshift: Stargazing & Astronomy . Finally, the new appendix Release Notes lists the changes in all the versions of the book. I updated the book because I’m self-publishing it as a work in-progress with the Lean Publishing process. Therefore, I constantly revise and expand it.