December 14th and 15th seemed to be just full of internet deaths. If AIM was your friendly grandmother, who was always there for you but you saw less and less in the latter years, Vidme was the baby among the group, born weak with a health issue that you knew might take it away from …
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Category:Technology
AIM Is Dead
Today, December 15th, 2017, marks a pretty dark day for the internet – no, we aren’t talking about Net Neutrality here (although I’m about to get into that, check ahead a few articles,) I’m talking about the death Aol Instant Messenger, or AIM, which had its servers shut down today. I had covered this when …
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Keeping Useless Junk Around For The Future – A Quick Thought
When I think about my hobbies, one common trend I’ve noticed is that much of them involve, for on reason or another, me desiring to keep things that do work doing what they do. Hell, its also my job, actually – much of my day to day game store work is actually repairing old game …
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Why “Flight Proven” Means Nothing To Me
The primary focus that SpaceX has in its endeavours is in re-usability of launch vehicles. The Falcon 9, in current form, is a launch vehicle in which the first stage is capable of making a controlled landing back at the launch site, or on a drone ship in the ocean (as launch needs permit) and …
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The Great Red Spot Plunge
Today NASA released a nice little video simulation of what it would be like to enter Jupiter’s Great Red Spot – a massive storm, larger than the Earth, that has been raging on the planet for at least 300 years! Incidentally, Jupiter is probably my favorite planet in the solar system – As a kid …
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The Dumbest Scammers Of 2017
Been a good long while since I did anything regarding tech support scams. Rather than another typical video of a scam in action, I thought it would be fun to share this compilation by YouTuber Jim Browning, certainly one of the most thorough and mature scambaiters, where he shows what he feels were the dumbest …
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Bits And Bytes – Program 8: Games & Simulations
Wow, we haven’t taken a look at Bits and Bytes since July! Time to get back to it. Bits and Bytes episode 8 deals with Simulation software and games which have an educational lean to them. While being an episode dealing with games, it does touch into some elements of gaming back in the early …
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SpaceX Successfully Static-Fires A Falcon 9 At Launch Complex 40
I wouldn’t normally cover a test firing of a Falcon 9 stage, but this one is kind of important – it marks the first use of Launch Complex 40 since the September 2016 explosion of a Falcon 9 booster destroyed the launch facility. Going back to that explosion, it happened during the same kind of …
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The Computer Chronicles – Mainframes to Minis to Micros (1983)
Let’s take a trip back. All the way back, in this case, to the original episode of “The Computer Chronicles” back in 1983. The idea behind the computer chronicles was to cover the then-new field of personal computers. Just what could you do with these little machines, and what was their future? These machines, some …
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What I Mean When Discuss The “Cult Of SpaceX”
Here we go, the beginning of the articles I’ve been dreading writing for probably a year now. These are things I feel need to be said and no, I don’t think I’m wrong in what I say – opinions can neither be right nor wrong, after all, but I do feel the concept presented – …
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Voyager 1 Fires Thrusters That Haven’t Been Used In 37 Years!
In a bit of space news that nearly made me tear up, it looks like NASA JPL has been able to successfully fire a thruster system on Voyager 1 that hasn’t been used since 1980! These small rocket motors, designed to fire in long-duration burns for course correction, will be used in upcoming years to …
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When Something Is Called “The Future,” It Never Really Is…
Following behind my previous article about hype culture, I wanted to discuss another trend in how upcoming things are discussed. This is something that goes in well with hype culture but deserves its own little bit of discussion: that is, when someone says something is “the future.” You will hear this one all the time …
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I Can’t Stand Hype Culture
Something that I’ve been wanting to discuss for quite some time is the phenomena of hype being built up around seemingly anything and everything new. Whenever you have something new coming up, you hear about it nonstop, and often times, in retrospect, you have to ask: why did anyone care in the first place? It …
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30 Years Ago: The Max Headroom Incident
In case it isn’t obvious, I have an interest in strange things, strange events, and the 1980’s. Well, it doesn’t get much stranger than this. On November 22nd, 1987, the last broadcast signal intrusion of the analog TV era happened in Chicago. Unlike the Captain Midnight incident, to this day we still have no idea …
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JPSS-1 Launch Highlights And Delta II Launch Profile
Last week marked the penultimate launch of the Delta II rocket, carrying the JPSS-1 satellite into a polar orbit to help with weather research and forecasting here in the United States. Today I bring you a pair of videos – the first is the launch highlights clip, produced by United Launch Alliance, showing clips of …
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