Every year, before E3 Microsoft seems to really get behind on some of their monthly videos – in this case, the “Games with Gold” videos at the end of each month which show you what next months games are going to be. At least, I want to say E3 preparation is the cause of the […]
Something I’ve never once understood over the past decade or so of being online has been the absolute love that people have for Google — not just the “oh, they have neat services” aspect, but the fact that people will go out of their way to ignore their constant begging for user data (as the […]
It seems like every year now we’re getting another major malware scare of some kind. Last year it was WannaCrypt. This year it’s VPNFilter, a piece of malware designed to infect routers. The malware apparently is designed to capture data transferred over the network for whatever use it may be to those behind the malware, […]
Last night I fired up one of my Xbox 360’s for a little bit of gaming before bed. I was rather surprised when I did turn the console on to discover I had a system update waiting. This would be the first update in 2 years, to a console that’s well past end of life […]
The first manned mission to Skylab launched on May 25th 1973, carrying astronauts Pete Conrad, Joe Kerwin, and Paul Weitz on a planned 28 day stay on the United States first space station. The first thing the crew would need to do, however, was make Skylab livable. Skylab was heavily damaged during its launch on […]
Yesterday new data privacy laws took hold in the European Union. These laws, known as the “General Data Protection Regulation” or, GDPR, very basically, and I do mean in a very basic form allow European Union residents to demand a company they have data with get rid of said data at that users request (or […]
On May 25th, 1973, the first manned mission to the United States first space station, Skylab, launched from Launch Complex 39-B at Kennedy Space Center. Originally scheduled to launch 10 days earlier, on May 15th, the launch was delayed when it was discovered that Skylab had suffered major damage on its way to orbit; the […]
No, seriously, I didn’t have anything prepared for today, but wanted to get out an article, so, I thought I would share this – one of the best photos I’ve ever seen of my favorite satellite launch vehicle ever, the Titan IV. In this case, a Titan IV-B. This is the same type of vehicle […]
Time to take another break from the usual, and take a look at the next Game Player’s Game Tape, this being tape 8 of the series. For those of you new to these tapes, they were produced in the late 80’s and early 90’s by the company responsible for the then new “Game Player’s” magazine […]
For 10 days in May of 1973, the world waited as NASA worked hard to prepare a fix to the damaged Skylab space station. Based on the information available, they knew what kind of damage had happened to the station during launch, but without being up there to see it, no one knew quite for […]
When the United States first space station, Skylab, was launched on May 14th, 1973, it suffered major damage – the micro meteoroid shield intended to protect the station from space debris and the heat of the Sun was torn off, causing temperatures in the station to rise far beyond what the vehicle was designed for. […]
Today we take for granted just how Memory (in a sense, raw working space) systems are being shipped with, or how much is available to a custom machine builder. 8, 16, 32, even 64 gigabytes of RAM are easily available in most any system you could buy or build today. Just a decade ago, 4 […]
When Skylab launched on May 14th, 1973 things looked good from the ground. The Saturn V 1st stage ignited, and like the Apollo launches before it, the vehicle began its flight – Americas first space station was off to what looked like a perfect beginning to its mission. After about 50 seconds or so the […]
45 years ago today, the final Saturn V to fly launched from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center, carrying on it the first (and only) space station for the United States: Skylab (often stylized as “SkyLab”) I absolutely love Skylab. The station itself, how it came to be, and the dramatic story of its […]
Over the past year I took some time to cover every episode of the 1983 Canadian TV series “Bits and Bytes.” This was a television program designed to give its viewers some insight into the then-new home computer scene, covering basic principles of computing, showing some things you can do with various computers of the […]