Japan's New Satellite Captures an Image of Earth Every 10 Minutes

July 10, 2015 by Joel Housman

Derek Watkins writing for the New York Times's Science Blog:

A sense of perspective is unavoidable from 22,000 miles out. Looking down at Earth from that distance — almost three times farther than the diameter of the planet itself — allows a view of the globe as a massive organic system, pulsing with continuous movement.

Check out the crazy beautiful video and images the recently launched satellite has produced. According to Watkins:

NOAA and NASA aim to launch a similar advanced weather satellite, GOES-R, next March. The satellite will hover over either the eastern Pacific or the Caribbean and will track weather systems moving toward the United States.

Ye Olde Roman Map

June 18, 2015 by Joel Housman

If you're a regular listener to just about any podcast on the planet, then you've probably heard of Fracture. They've been advertising for a long time on many prominent podcasts I listen to, and Marco Arment is well known (within the Apple developer community) to have used Fracture to make physical icons that he can hang on the wall of his apps. Fracture is a service that prints your digital images directly on glass. No need for framing or matting - the print comes with a backing that allows you to hang it on the wall without a frame. Oh, and they look beautiful.

Several weeks ago, I finally bit the bullet and committed to buying a Fracture print for myself. For my first Fracture, I chose an old map of the Roman Empire that was made in 1811 by William Darton, a London English cartographer. I found a wonderfully high resolution version of this map using the David Rumsey Map Collection which is a wonderful database of very old maps. I have no idea the exact time period this map depicts, but based on the map itself, it would be somewhere in the late 1st century or early to middle 2nd century.

If you like the idea of a Fracture and want to order one for yourself, they gave me a coupon code you can use for 5$ off.

Referral Code: 

RFR78386

Here are some more pictures of the print I had made:

Sunset over Lake Ashby

June 16, 2015 by Joel Housman

I was watering flowers in the front yard this evening when I noticed the sky to the west and I quickly ran down to the lake to take these photos.

Calbuco Eruption Timelapse

June 16, 2015 by Joel Housman

Do yourself a favor and open this in fullscreen in HD and just watch. So beautiful.

Volcano Calbuco erupted on April 22, 2015, for the first time in four decades. Located close to the cities of Puerto Varas and Puerto Montt in southern Chile. We spend the prior couple of days on the neighboring volcano Osorno (~20km linear distance) shooting timelapses.

From the website of the videographer, Martin Heck:

Volcano Calbuco erupted on April 22, 2015, for the first time in four decades. Located close to the cities of Puerto Varas and Puerto Montt in southern Chile. We spend the prior couple of days on the neighboring volcano Osorno (~20km linear distance) shooting timelapses. After an amazing night under the nightsky we took the cable car downwards after a delay caused by repairs. Already late we headed south to catch the ferry on Routa 7 down to Patagonia. After 10min on the ferry we noticed a massive, almost nuclear looking cloud boiling upwards just were we left a few hours ago. Frenetically looking for a good outlook we then rushed to the only non-forested place to get a decent view of the show. We quickly put every bit of camera-equipment we could find on the constantly growing mushroom-cloud. We shot timelapses in 8K and 4K with a Pentax 645Z and Canon 6D. On the A7s we shot 4K video to the Shogun. We filled almost all of our memory cards in the prior night so I had to do backups while shooting all this stuff.

This was for sure the most incredible show I've ever seen. I think this is a one in a lifetime event and I am so happy that we were able to capture it in all its glory.

We will also release a timelapse video of our 6 weeks trip to Patagonia soon.

Star Wars Battlefront E3 Trailer

June 15, 2015 by Joel Housman

I think this is the first Star Wars game to come out in years that I'm legitimately excited about. This is the game that 1996, 14 year old Joel always dreamed of playing.

The colors on this photo aren't great because it was shot through tinted glass, but this gives a good idea of what the track looks like with all of the vehicles on it driving.

BMW's Performance Driving Experience

June 13, 2015 by Joel Housman

BMW offers a "Performance Driving School" in several locations around the world, which is a one or two day course, involving instruction and then high performance driving on closed courses as well as other intense driving maneuver training. My wife and I both want to go do this, but we just haven't had the spare cash to commit to doing it (its a few thousands $$).

However, BMW also does 8-12 remote events around the country each year, billed as the BMW Driving Experience (instead of a school). These events offer either a free 2 hour session or a paid (couple hundred $$) all day session. Steffanie and I jumped at the opportunity to take part in the free session, which was held today at the local Washington DC NFL statdium, FedEx Field. They set the courses up in the parking lots around the stadium.

We had a lot of fun. We got to see a lot of neat cars that aren't always available to see at the local dealerships. We also were allowed to drive BMW's 2015 cars in a way that I would never abuse my own car if I were driving it.

Todays event has either BMW 3 Series or BMW X4s to chose from. Because we own an X3 ourself (very very similar to an X4), we chose the X4 so it would seem almost like driving our own vehicle.

Below are two videos, one of which was for my first driving session, in which I was still learnging the course and learning what the instructor had taught us. The second video is of my second session, where I actually had begun to improve and had my fastest lap.

BMW's Performance Driving Experience at FedEx Field

Uploaded by Joel Housman on 2015-06-14.

Here are the photos from the event below:

L'Hermione

June 13, 2015 by Joel Housman

I've been looking forward to this for months. The most authetnically built replica Tall Ship built within the past 150 years, the Hermione, arrived in Alexandria this week. This ship is a replica of the Hermione which sailed in the late 1700s to bring the Marquis de Lafayette to the United States, then the 13 colonies still. This is essentially a working, 34-gun frigate.

One of the other last working frigates in existence, the USS Constitution (American's only still-working frigate from that era), was a decidely more "modern" 44-gun frigate. Back then it was called a "heavy frigate" and made frigates like the Hermione obsolete. Frigates like Hermione were special though -- during the revolutionary and napoleanic wars, (1770s - 1810s) the 28-36 gun frigates were the real workshorses of the fleet. They were the fastest ships floating, and would serve as scouts for the main fleet or as independent commands by the most daring and ambitious captains. Every sailor, whether you served before the mast or on the quarterdeck, wanted to serve on a frigate.

Content Blocking Safari Extensions Coming In iOS 9

June 12, 2015 by Joel Housman

Announced at WWDC as a part of iOS 9, Apple revealed the new "Content Blocking Safari Extensions". If you're unsure of why you would want to do this, look no further than the image example that Apple uses:

Essentially this would allow built-in ad blocking within Mobile Safari on iOS for the first time. And as, you would expect, all the usual suspects are screaming bloody murder about this new feature:

The potential impact of “Content Blocking Safari Extensions” even goes beyond blocked ads. Apple is explicitly allowing the blocking of cookies on a site-by-site basis. For example, you could build an extension that blocked the cookies that allow a newspaper paywall to work. The Yourtown Times allows you 10 stories free a month? It’s probably using a cookie to keep track of that count. Block that cookie and the paywall comes tumbling down — you’re a fresh visitor every time. Imagine being able to download an extension that blocked paywall cookies on the top 50 paid news sites. It wouldn’t even be particularly hard to code; unless Apple chooses to prevent it, someone will do it. News sites would be able to build workarounds — changing cookie IDs regularly, requiring user login from article 1 — but winning that sort of cat-and-mouse game is something publishers are unlikely to be good at.

Why would Apple do this?

An Apple partisan might argue it just wants to give users control of their iPhone experience, and having debuted extensions in the last version of iOS, allowing them to alter web content is a natural next step.

Apple partisan? Clearly you get an idea of where this guy's bread is buttered from. Partisan? How about any normal, rational, sane person.

A friend of mine, Brian Vargas, tweeted this today:

Maybe I wouldn’t be so happy for built-in ad blocking on a mobile Safari if publishers weren’t such dicks with their ads.
— Brian Vargas (@Ardvaark) June 12, 2015

I'm sympathetic to those who use advertising to earn their living. Sites like Daring Fireball, The Loop, or Six Colors that use limited, tasteful, audience relevant ads that aren't user and content hostile -- those are great. I specifically set my AdBlock software on my desktop to not run when visiting their domains.

But when I don't run AdBlock software, my typical browsing experience looks something like this:

The user cannot even see the first line of the article for all of the ads they have to scroll through first. Why do they even bother laying our or designing their web pages? Why not just display 2 or 3 ads first to make you scroll through before you arrive at the headline and article? The effect would be the same.

That publishers allow their content to be prostituted to this atrociously vile degree completely washes away any guilt I have about using AdBlock software on their sites. If they continue to treat my time and attention wish such distain and disrespect, I'll continue to care about them not being able to show me ads in the same way.