Updated 2003-12-11 with new URL for Balloon 1.0 project report. Balloon v1.0 — “This is the story of how I designed, built, launched, and recovered a high-altitude weather balloon.” This “weather” balloon project is really fascinating. I was especially interested in its ability to take pictures, reminding me of an old bookmark I’ve got for Kite Aerial Photography (Google search). Now if I just had more spare time… [Via Q Daily News]
BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Deep space probe says farewell — “After more than 30 years in space heading away from Earth, Pioneer 10 has sent its last signal home.” The full article is a great summary — launched in March 1972, it’s official mission ended 25 years later in March 1997, but NASA and JPL have continued to receive signals from it. For further reading, it looks like the Pioneer mission home page on Nasa.gov would be a good start. (However, at this time their server is not responding.) Via [Dave]
Thanks to MTOtherBlog by David Raynes, I created a second MT blog for articles. I use the term “articles” loosely here; it’s just a home for things that are slightly longer than a usual weblog posting.
Tax Program Develops An Insulting Approach (Walt Mossberg) — having used TurboTax for many years, I bought my copy this weekend only to learn that Intuit has added product activation and spyware to the installation process. They’ve already got a lucrative product with a guaranteed need to upgrade every year, so why go to the trouble of activation? Is sharing copies of TurboTax such a big problem? I’m already committed this year, but TaxCut is looking better for 2003. Apparently this is a real support issue; their support FAQ page includes almost 40 topics. Thankfully they have finally published an…
Christian Bogen noticed that my modified template for AmphetaDesk exhibited a strange problem with Apple’s new Safari browser. It looks like I missed closing a named anchor tag which caused Safari to display things in a strange manner. This is clearly a bug in my HTML output, but it seems that most (or all) other browsers simply ignored the problem. I’ve updated the template with the correction.