NASA’s InSight Mars lander successfully launched this morning from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. As expected, the weather was quite a mess – very foggy – and once the Atlas V RD-180 engine ignited there wasn’t too much more than steam and an orange glow to be seen in the launch video. Of course, […]
Category: Thoughts and Rants
How I Grew To Enjoy Star Wars
NASA InSight Mission Launch Profile
No One Cares What You Think Is A “Better Idea”
Bits And Bytes – Program 12: What Next?
This is it – the final episode of the 1983 TV Ontario series “Bits and Bytes.” It’s been 11 episodes introducing the basic concepts of computer usage in 1983. This is an interesting one – it focuses on the future of computing, both logistically and practically. Things like people sitting for far too long at […]
Angry Video Game Nerd Episode 34: Fester’s Quest – Episode Review
As promised in the Nintendo Power episode, the next video James did for the Angry Video Game Nerd covered the NES game Fester’s Quest, a rather unique video game adaptation of the classic Addams Family franchise. The entire episode is really a tribute to the Addams Family, with James playing all the members of the […]
The Leonard Nimoy “Magnavision” LaserDisc Promotional Video
Those of you who are fans of vintage technology will certainly have at least heard of LaserDisc, a video format very similar yet oh so different to CD, DVD, Blu-Ray, and the like – formats we well know today. In fact, LaserDisc was the predecessor to optical disc formats. Yep, they all got their start […]
The Chernobyl Disaster – Calls To The Pripyat Fire Dispatch
Today marks 32 years since the explosion at Reactor 4 of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station in the Ukraine. While there isn’t too much to say today that I haven’t said in many previous articles on the disaster, I do have a few things to share. EDIT 6/13/2019: Wow, this entry is getting rather popular. […]
The Apollo 11 “Full Mission” Trailer
July 2019 will mark 50 years since the Apollo 11 mission, certainly one of the greatest achievements of humanity. While many fans of space history may be planning their own little anniversary events and the like, YouTube user lunarmodule5 has something a little better in store: a video series covering the entire mission, from pre-launch […]
28 Years Ago, The Launch Of The Hubble Space Telescope
Today marks an amazing 28 years since the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope, one of the premier tools in our study of the origins of the universe. Orbiting the Earth well above the light altering effects of the bulk of the atmosphere, Hubble was placed in a unique position to spend days, weeks, months, […]
Disc Manufacturing, Inc. Compact Disc Production Plant Tour – Circa 1995
Here’s a pretty awesome video I found a little while back and just now am getting to covering – a tour of the Disc Manufacturing Inc. compact disc production plant, showing the process by which CD’s were actually made in their facilities per customer requests. The video is of course a promotional one designed to […]
Mind The Gaps – An Update
As you can tell, my previous statements about getting back to normal article writing rates on Xadara haven’t fully come to pass as I hoped they would. Thankfully much of this has actually been intentional, if the root cause hasn’t been something I expected or planned for. Just about a month ago, coinciding with a […]
The Beginning Of The End Of 32 Bit Application Support In MacOS
A few days ago, users of MacOS High Sierra version 10.13.4 (the current release version as of this writing) have started being met with a message upon running a 32 bit application, explaining that the application “is not optimized for your Mac” and states that the developer should update the application to improve compatibility. This […]
There Are Now Game Console Setup Services. Wait, What?
This isn’t something that actually surprises me, given the nature of capitalism and the ability for marketing to make people pay for damn near anything, but seeing that it’s actually a thing now amazes me. There are now services you can pay for that will set up video game consoles. Yes, seriously. And yes, they […]
Bits And Bytes – Program 11: Computers At Work
Since their inception computers have been business tools, machines designed to assist their user in efficiently doing work. It’s not a foreign concept to most of us – we all certainly use computers in some form in our day to day lives, some of us more in-depth than others. While the same was true in […]