February 9, 2015 - One of the coolest new devices has just started its crowdfunding campaign. The Voltera V1 is a new type of printer that can take a circuit board design from any computer and print it onto a physical circuit board. The user just has to add the SMD components. If they are successful, they plan to start shipping one year from now with a price of $1499 per device. UPDATE: Apparently quite a few people agreed with my praise of the V!, because they met their Kickstarter goal in just under 40 minutes! Congratulations to the Voltera team!
January 10, 2015 - If you think your photo collections takes up a lot of hard drive space, NASA has just released a single photo of the Andromeda galaxy, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, that is composed of 1.5 Billion pixels and over 100 million stars. It is too big to view on a normal screen, but an interactive zoomable photo can be viewed here and a Youtube video of it here.
January 9, 2015 - I have been getting reports from some European users of my website that they are being confronted with a CAPTCHA code challenge before they can access my site. This is not something that I have added or approved of, but I will try to find out why it is happening. At this point I suspect it is a network issue somewhere between the site and the user's computer, rather than a malicious intruder, but I would advise users to be cautious anyway.
January 8, 2015 - Another quick reminder that sometime in the next two weeks or so Comet Lovejoy 2015 will be at its peak brightness. This is a recently discovered comet that is visible to the naked eye in most area with low light pollution, and will be visible for most of the month.
January 1, 2015 - HAPPY NEW YEAR!!
December 25, 2014 - MERRY CHRISTMAS!!
December 15, 2014 - Just in time for Christmas, Kaggle has announced a new contest to develop an algorithm for Santa to produce presents in time for Christmas. I am not sure if Santa actually hired them to do this or if they are doing it on their own, but programmers can get more details and enter the contest here.
December 13, 2014 - For those who are experiencing clear skies tonight, this will be the annual peak of the Geminid meteor showers. Viewers can expect up to 150 meteors per hour, and they should be quite bright. Just remember to bundle up warm, because it is very cold out tonight!
December 11, 2014 - NASA has just announced a new challenge for the Maker community, called the Cube Quest Challenge. There are multiple components to this challenge, but the basic summary is that anyone who can produce a small, cheap satellite to orbit the moon or to travel out of the solar system while remaining in contact with Earth will be eligible for up to $5,000,000 in prize money as well as the admiration of amateur engineers everywhere.
December 9, 2014 - After several delays, I have finally restarted my word-a-day twitter feed based on the Grandiloquent Dictionary website. The twitter feed itself can be found and followed here.
December 6, 2014 - Another exciting day for the astronomy/astrophysics people - today the New Horizons probe will be awoken and prepared for its final journey to Pluto. Hopefully this one goes better than the last long range probe...
November 28, 2014 - With classes winding down for the term and final exams starting, I have been receiving a few requests for tutoring. If anyone wants to assemble a group of students and organize a meeting place, let me know and I will try to setup a group tutorial session (I find these to be more efficient in general than one-on-one tutoring, although I can do that as well if someone wishes). As always, I am happy to offer assistance in any level of physics or mathematics, and I have some background as well in programming, electronics, robotics, and various other subjects.
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