Moonshots Beyond the Cloud

On December 1, 2020, an uncrewed vehicle of the Chinese Chang'e 5 sample return mission was about to land on the Moon. There was a lot of excitement. As an astronomy and space enthusiast, I shared the interest and anticipation. These fields are a major part of my creative endeavours. An opportunity Space experts, scientists, enthusiasts, and reporters were sharing online a lot of information on the mission and the vehicles. But they were hardly talking about Mons Rümker (Latin for mount Rümker), the spacecraft's landing area. The Mons Rümker area is of great scientific interest. However, it's a subtle lunar feature that may be difficult to locate even if you know where to look for. So I played with Google Maps a bit to explore this area of the Moon and get a refresher ahead of the landing. Mons Rümker looked great in Google Maps. Therefore, the night before the landing I made a video to share and contribute to the online mission coverage and conversation. It's a simp...

Google discontinued Hangouts on Air on August 1, 2019. The StreamYard video streaming platform is the best replacement I found among the alternatives . I'm going to tell how I tested StreamYard in a demanding situation and what I've learned. StreamYard can livestream video feeds from up to 6 participants and save a recording to YouTube or other video platforms. It works fully in the cloud, a huge plus for a Chrome OS user like me. And it’s even better than Hangouts on Air as it has additional useful features such as showing user comments in the YouTube chat of a livestream and banners , i.e. text cards. It also provides a few preset layouts for arranging on the screen the camera feeds of the participants. A key feature is the ability to screenshare a desktop window or browser tab as well as any audio playing there. This allows, for example, to stream a YouTube video along with its soundtrack. The product has a free tier that overlays StreamYard’s logo in livestreams and ...

This post to WeVideo’s blog introduces how to start publishing gameplay video content or live streaming to YouTube and reviews the major genres:  Getting paid to play: 6 steps to becoming a YouTube gamer . It's a good, well-researched overview of the big gaming video business, with practical advice and tips. Although I'm not into gaming, this introduction is useful to understand the business of YouTube content production also in other genres. WeVideo is my favorite cloud video editor. I used it to make a trailer of one of my Google+ collections .