After multiple delays, eventually resulting in a scrub for the original planned August 11th launch date, the Parker Solar Probe successfully began its mission mission to “touch the Sun” this morning at 3:31 AM . Yeah, quite early, but early enough that I could easily just stay awake to watch it, and I’m glad I […]
I didn’t get much sleep last night. I, of course, stayed awake to watch the launch of the Parker Solar Probe. Sadly, that launch didn’t happen this morning as planned. The original launch time of 3:33AM Eastern was pushed back by 20 minutes to accommodate some issues experienced in the countdown. Those issues were resolved, […]
Here we have the third video I wanted to share today regarding the Parker Solar Probe. This video is titled “It’s Surprisingly Hard to Go to the Sun” and covers, in pretty simple terms, the actual difficult faced in going to the Sun from Earth. Orbital mechanics is a funny thing – to go higher […]
Next up in my pre-launch sharing of content related to the Parker Solar Probe mission is this United Launch Alliance video on the launch vehicle for this mission – the Delta IV Heavy – and the flight plan that will put the Parker Solar Probe on a course for the Sun. Delta IV Heavy is […]
It’s time for another historic NASA mission to begin. This time, it isn’t to another world – this isn’t a Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Venus, or even a Pluto probe. Oh no, this is something much more intense. Tonight or, more correctly, early this Saturday Morning, August 11th 2018 a Delta IV Heavy booster will launch […]
I shot several hours of video last August during the 2017 Solar Eclipse. While most of it just shows the sun slowly getting more and more covered by the Moon (we had, I believe, 94% totality in my area) until it’s nothing but a crescent, a few frames from the video proved better than normal, […]
It took over a year to do, but the episode reviews for AVGN Season 2 are complete. I’ve covered all 24 episodes and it’s a strange thing to do – going back over these videos somewhat nostalgically and taking a slightly different look at them, trying to figure out just what makes them work, for […]
I swear this website has become at least 30% updates about the website itself, but I enjoy sharing updates as I work to make Xadara something better than it has been, and today I made some progress towards that cleanup which I mentioned in a previous update. I cleaned out all of the old articles […]
Here’s a video that kind of showed up out of nowhere but is too perfect not to share; an EEVBlog video – number 1111 to be precise – which happens to be a quick tear down of the Merlin handheld game from 1978. It’s interesting because of a fact I didn’t know – the core […]
Time to finish off Season 2 of The Angry Video Game Nerd, and we have quite the review to go out on – Rambo, on the NES! Now, this is a game I actually had for my NES when I was a kid. I have vague memories of playing it and not having a good […]
As I said I wanted to do in a previous update, comments here on Xadara are now open to whomever – no registration required, unlike how things had been for the past, oh, 5 years or more. It is my hope that this will spawn healthy discussion and fun conversation about the subject of the […]
We have another odd Nerd episode here – one discussing the timeline for “The Legend of Zelda” game series, at least as it was in 2006. This comes off the previous “Movie and Video Game sequels” video, but was shelved, only to be tweaked a bit and released in January 2008, making it out of […]
Oh boy, finally getting around to these. Now, I know I normally try to get these out in the last week of the previous month, when they get announced officially by Microsoft, and a few times I’ve been late to getting these articles written. Well, in this case, Microsoft themselves dropped the ball, and didn’t […]
July was a much better month. We’ve been through over half of 2018 with somewhat lackluster article rates, but the past week has been much better and, barring a small gap, July was actually a better month than previous for “getting things back to normal around here.” This is one of those times I kind […]
As I mentioned in a pair of previous articles, I’m beginning a slight cleanup of Xadara. By slight, I mean probably 50 articles being deleted, and a shift to the general structure of the site. Of course, this is all for the better. Regarding articles, I want to clear up some of the more negative […]