Flickr’s Down For a Kip

Flick is down contestI like a place that when there is an outage they make it into a contest:

Just print out this page and colour in the dots. When the site’s back up, take a photo of your creation and post it to Flickr, tagged with "flickrcolourcontest".
Team Flickr will pick a winner in the next couple of days, and that lucky duck will get a free year of Pro.

The Flickr blog says that they lost a temporary storage facility so some of the older photos, some 20 TB worth(!), are being restored from another location. Nothing was lost but it might be a little bit until things are back to normal in Flickr land. Until then I’m breaking out the crayons!

Flickr’s Down

Bigelow Inflatable Space Hotel Test A Success

 Bigelow hotel

This will be very cool if it proves to be safe and reliable. So far the test unit is about eight feet in diameter and is iintended to bring back data on deployment and durability of the structure. The craft deployed its solar cells perfectly and is charging the batteries, a sure sign that that all is going well. If you head on over to the Bigelow page you can see some video taken from cameras located outside and inside the ship. The insides are a little cluttered with photos and whatnot that people paid to have flown on the mission. You have to fund this somehow, space ain’t cheap!. Mission controllers are working on reducing the air flow inside so it isn’t as chaotic in there.

Inflatable spacecraft releases new images

Real time tracking of the Genesis-I 

Salvage 1

Salvage 1Now this brings back fond memories. What would happen if an owner of a junk yard decided to fly to the moon and salvage the space junk that had been left up there? You would get a TV series from the late 70’s that captures the spirit of non government funded space exploration. While this show was on I remember being obsessed with the notion that just about anyone that had enough parts in their junkyard could fly into space. Now I realize that its a bit harder than that but with dedication it’s true. No one is quite up to a run to the moon just yet but maybe someday soon. Go have a look at the stills and listen to the audio clips, heck if you have time you can even build the paper model of the Vulture. I can see a new TV series based on this idea being quite popular in a few years. As soon as commercial ventures like Virgin Galactic start flying people might have a renewed interest in space. We can only hope they will.

Salvage 1 fan page 

No iPod? No Problem!

iTunes Agent I recently started using my Viewsonic V36 PDA as an MP3 player. Yeah, I know, Earth shaking news ain’t it. Well as I use iTunes as my music orginizer I knew that I’d be jumping through hoops to get music on to the PDA. You don’t know how happy I was when I found this app.

iTunes is a great music player and organizer. Unfortunately iTunes is made to only synchronize with iPods. Not everyone own an iPod, though Apple certainly would have loved that. How great would it not be if you could synchronize your non-iPod MP3 player, your Playstation Portable and your Walkman phone with your iTunes Library? Enter: iTunes Agent!

It works great, heck I told a guy at work about it and he’s using it to sync his phone to his library.

iTunes Agent

Automating Bit Torrent Downloads

Azureus Not that I’d ever suggest that one should infringe on a copyrighted work, but if your going to do it you might as well do it with gusto. This is a short tutorial on how to set up your favorite bit torrent down loader to automatically grab torrents that are hit by a filtered feed of a servers RSS feed. This is aimed at getting anime shows but I think you could adapt it to your tracker of choice. I bet if you did this and left home on a long weekend your computer would run out of drive space. That’s just a guess.

How to: Automate Anime Downloads with Azureus and RSS Feeds