Moonshots Beyond the Cloud

Eclipse Calculator 2 is the best Android app for eclipses and planetary transits. It calculates and simulates solar and lunar eclipses as well as transits of Mercury and Venus across the Sun. It’s the best because it provides all the information to visualize the circumstances of the events and plan the observations . In addition, it presents this information through highly effective charts, data, and maps. The 14 Dec 2020 total solar eclipse simulated by Eclipse Calculator 2 on my Pixel 2 XL. You start by quickly searching for the events you’re interested in, such as by type or observing location, and drilling down to the ones you want to know more about. Then the app summarizes all sorts of details and information. For a total solar eclipse, for example, you get a map of the lunar shadow on the Earth, a view of the solar disk, a map of the sky with the visible stars, and even the lunar limb profile with Baily’s beads . Letting time run or interactively adjusting it shows ...

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 ...

Leanpub announced the Leanpub Conference Purchase Program , which allows conference and event organizers to buy at steep discounts multiple copies of ebooks to give away to attendees. The eligible ebooks for sale at Leanpub are the ones the authors enroll in the program. If you are an organizer see the instructions for buying ebooks to give away to attendees . Leanpub authors can learn more about the opportunities and risks of the Conference Purchase Program . Leanpub is a self-publishing platform with a storefront. It supports the Lean Publishing process for publishing works in progress. It’s a perfect fit for the way I work and I use Leanpub for publishing and selling my book Space Apps for Android . The Conference Purchase Program offers to organizers very low prices, such as $1.25 per book copy for 400 planned attendees, and Leanpub’s large selection of technical books on software development and tools, science and technology, and more. For authors the program is an opport...

From July 2013 to September 2015 ESA astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti posted to her Google+ profile hundreds of entries of the Logbook , a mostly daily journal of the training and space flight for her first mission to space. The Logbook is a unique resource and public outreach project, likely the most extensive such account by any astronaut. For example, on launch day she shared her thoughts just hours before riding a rocket and blasting into space. No astronaut had ever done that. Samantha Cristoforetti on the International Space Station. Original image: astrosamantha photostream . Credit: ESA/NASA. Samantha is an European astronaut and, although her home country is Italy, she wrote the Logbook in English for reaching a wider audience. I had the privilege and opportunity of providing the official Italian translation of all the Logbook entries , which were published to the AstronautiNEWS website and later also to ESA’s Avamposto 42 mission website. Following so closely Sa...

The tech press is finally starting to question some hyped and ugly smartphone design choices such as the notch, cutouts, and bezel-less designs. Now, as Google teases more and more features of the upcoming Pixel 4, Ben Schoon over at 9to5Google finally says loud and clear the bezel is more than justified by the technology it packs . In the Pixel 4 the bezel can not only improve the design of the device, but provides a home for a lot of valuable sensors and technology.

I love the book The History of the Web, Volume I by Jay Hoffmann. It’s a collection of essays from the author’s newsletter The History of the Web . The cover of The History of the Web, Volume I by Jay Hoffmann in Google Play Books on my Pixel 2 XL. Although I’ve been using and closely following the web since its early days, and used or visited several of the tools and sites Jay tells about, I’ve found many things and projects in the book I wasn’t aware of back then. It covers the history of the web from many angles such as the technology, the software, the infrastructure, the protocols, the communities, the spirit of experimentation, and more. The book is based on solid, in-depth research and gives a concise but complete account of the projects and events it discusses.

These days ad blockers are used mostly for improving privacy, security, performance, and resource control. But, when it comes to their primary purpose of blocking ads and advertising content, I don’t need these tools. I have been using the web since the early 1990s, when the first annoying and disruptive ads started spreading. And I’ve been doing such a deliberate effort to ignore them it eventually became second nature. When I visit a web page, my brain instinctively forces my eyes to tune out any areas with anything resembling advertising content, especially animations. This avoidance is so effective I don’t notice ads even on the sites I want to support by checking anything to click I’m genuinely interested in. I invariably forget and move to the next site. Although I don’t have true ad blockers, I do occasionally use a tool for reading pages with highly distracting or disruptive content, including ads. It’s the Mercury Reader Chrome extension, a reader mode option that ref...