HR 8799 Image Animated With Hot Jupiters January 28, 2017
Posted by stuffilikenet in Awesome, Geek Stuff, Photography, Science.add a comment
Scientists have detected thousands of exoplanets in recent years, by watching varying brightness as they occlude their stars. This animation comes from direct imaging methods (not radio telescopes), meaning that the telescopes saw the Jupiter-sized planets directly (hot Jupiters are young planets that still glow in the infrared portion of the spectrum).
Jason Wang at the University of California, Berkeley has combined several observations of HR 8799 into the delightful GIF below. This is years of optical data, folks. “In this video you’re seeing real data,” he told Gizmodo[1] of the video above. “I smoothed out the orbits so that it’s as if we’re watching [the planets] constantly in real time.”
1. I stole the picture from Giz. I feel no shame at all. Follow that link, though; there’s much more!
Getting There, One Piece at a Time January 24, 2017
Posted by stuffilikenet in Awesome, Geek Stuff, Star Trek Technology, Toys.add a comment
Open the Alexa app on your phone.
Use the More icon (the hamburger) in the upper left corner.
Select Settings.
Select the device whose wake word you wish to change.
Tap the Wake Word setting.
Select Computer from the drop-down.
You are done.
I would like to point out that Star Trek has so influenced culture that the United Federation of Planets is likely to happen any time now…we just need more planets. We already have Majel Barret’s voice phonemes. Now we need Google to sync up, a bit better response to voice meaning (the voice vector thing should help), a truthiness evaluator and bingo! Star Trek in your phone/home/office/laboratory/dungeon/whatever.
Amazon Moto G Play Phone January 19, 2017
Posted by stuffilikenet in Applications, Geek Stuff, Science, Star Trek Technology, Toys.add a comment
People in the know (i. e., my readers) are aware that I take my phones seriously, and have for three smart phones now. Well, smart-enough phones, I guess. I mean I had an HTC 8125 ancient creaking phone with one of Microsoft’s many, many failed phone operating systems (are they really up to FOUR commercially-failed systems, and about to go for FIVE?), which did some things I needed in a phone: calculator (never used it, but could have), texting (would have used it but did not…not sure that it could, now that I think on it), took [execrable] photographs (look back in this blog far enough and you will find them, along with scathing reviews of the image quality) but at least ran the flash card app I wrote for it, among others (my writing them would not have been necessary if MS has anything like an app store. Just sayin’), and played my beloved audio books during my [endless] commute.1
Still, it was not the optimum device. My next phone (Samsung Galaxy S3 i9250) was a considerable improvement, in that the camera focused closely enough to copy text. It ran Android apps mostly without complaint (even ones I had written myself), texted my children and played Bluetooth music and audio books without complaint, even after having survived several cracked glass incidents (to be fair, I never did repair the glass. It looked like a vandalized cathedral when it finally died). It was a vast improvement, and I cried bitter tears indeed2 when it suddenly stopped letting me make telephone calls.
Now I have the aforementioned Amazon Moto G Play phone, and I must say it is an improvement on my previous experiences (except for the annoying notifications. How the #$%^&* do I turn them off?) in speed, in reception and in sound clarity (although not volume). The camera is much better (see recent postings about the weather, blue jay invasion, etc.) and the Android version is 6.0, which is 1.7 better than previous. And it was cheap: $99 for the phone with advertising, $149 without. I have been unable to figure out how to replace the bootloader to get rid of the advertisements (which would violate my agreement and would be Bad And Wrong), but it works so well I don’t care at all.
EXCITING, HORRIBLE UPDATE: can’t root the phone to use adb wireless. This is totally bogus.
EXCITING, HORRIBLE UPDATE 2: phone has taken to dying suddenly for no apparent reason. Motorola “service” has extensive threads about this, with no resolution other than to mark the incident “closed”–which sets off a bunch of complaints. This would be a publicity disaster if Motorola cared. Me, I’m going to find a different manufacturer. I like Samsung phones, but they seem to be going to non-removable batteries, which I will not tolerate.
1Not sure that’s the longest run-on sentence I have ever written, but Baron Bulwer-Lytton must feel somewhat threatened in his cozy grave.
2Mostly because I had spent a fortune on it. Don’t fear; this story DOES have a happy ending.
Stuffilike.net 