The radar images are great, but they're definitely not conventional photos - the viewpoint-from-Earth is actually from the 'top' of the image, looking down. They're constructed from a combination of distance measurements and Doppler shifts, the latter thanks to the rotation of the asteroid.

So basically it means a single transmitter and single receiver can figure out a two-dimensional image from a vast distance - and it's nice that these images quite closely match the conventional, optical images taken by the Chang'e probe!

IMAX (!) video from inside the Russian Mir space station. Dark, cramped and most likely very smelly - still an incredible achievement. International Space Station? Some kind of progress!

At the utterly fascinating Georgetown Steam Plant Museum in Seattle, I learned of the difficulties in getting a (somewhat elderly) generator in sync with the grid. Apparently, get it right and all the other power stations will pull it into the exact frequency - get it wrong, and you'd snap the turbine shaft.

As for the mains hum, in an undergraduate experiment at Jodrell Bank Radio Observatory, I detected intelligent life - on Earth, unfortunately. While running an FFT on a recording of a pulsar, we not only uncovered the spinning neutron star's rotation - we also discovered some not-exactly-mysterious peaks at multiples of 50Hz.

We're just clueless pikers and you geniuses north of us are obviously our superiors in every way. Thank god for Canada, or we'd all be lost. It's called throwing you a bone, the least you could do is show gratitude instead of acting like you lot actually did something, because you didn't.

For failing to comprehend the True Cosmological Glory that is Canada, you are hereby sentenced to be (appropriately enough) torn limb from limb by the newest Canadian space-robot, Dextre the Magnificent.

so far the best way is to edit code/configs/scripts on a local desktop/laptop then ftp it them over, cause even basic text editors bring the PI to a slow crawl.

If you're running 'pico', you're getting 'nano' instead, and it's nano's syntax highlighting that's the problem. Switch it off with Meta-Y and the editor becomes positively speedy. I'm SSH'ed into a Pi right now, and for basic shell stuff it's pretty indistinguishable from any other machine. There's probably something up if it's gratuitously slow.

(I'm on an up-to-date Raspbian, and I've overclocked things slightly. Software has improved loads the past few months!)

I was gonna use the PI as a network storage device, chaining 3 or 4 external usb hard drives to it via powered usb hub, and it worked and all but the PI is soooooo slow the transfer rate would dip down to 5K-10K/sec over LAN when trying to save a large file or copy a large file from it to desktop.

USB support is now merely 'not very good', while it used to be 'downright terrible'. I get ~3MB/s SCP-ing a large file to the Pi's (slow) SD card, so network performance shouldn't be an issue. Try again with recently updated firmware? Although it's unlikely to make a terribly good NAS anyway, with both disks and ethernet hanging off a slow USB connection...

It's apparently a port of Minecraft Pocket Edition, which is already on Android and iOS. No idea as to the programming language, but I fully imagine it's something with less of a footprint than a full-sized JVM.

Some time last year I'd vaguely heard about the Raspberry Pi, and how it was a super-cheap, super-basic ARM board. I'd really not been paying much attention when I happened to click on a YouTube link apparently showing the Raspberry Pi running 'Quake'.

That's nice, I thought - expecting a 320x200 software-rendered Quake 1 running at an abysmal framerate, in a let's-try-one-up-from-Doom kind of way.

Shitting heck, it was Quake 3 - running at an anti-aliased 1080p at quite a speed.

Having owned multiple, expensive generations of PCs incapable of that kind of graphical performance - nostalgia's awful. Can't they just run Doom and be happy? Stop this relentless, amazing progress, please!

The point is that the Raspberry Pi is much too slow to do anything with the video except storing it, viewing it unmodified or sending it somewhere else.

... and the MSL Curiosity Mars rover is positively bristling with different cameras, and a 200MHz processor behind it all.

The Raspberry Pi definitely isn't speedy, but all kinds of things are possible with it. Where an Arduino has difficulty doing any image processing at all, a Pi will run OpenCV and do plenty of things deeply appropriate to robotics and assorted other hackery.

Zuckerborg would be a hero in my book if he would redirect all of facebook to /dev/null.

Actually, he'd probably get it the wrong way round and redirect that howling infinite void of /dev/null out to the entire populace of Facebook - instantly terminating, unending nothingness piped through smartphones and laptops and desktop computers, straight into the uncomprehending, newly-obliterated minds of the social networking masses.

Still, everyone would find it an improvement over the previous service.

Here's one!

Greetings from Europe, where I hope we finally stop listening to crazy people over the big pond.

Greetings from a European who has been shouted at by Polish military police for taking photos of their vital security apparatus!

(Also, some of the locations I've been caught in may not have been public places...)

I had this device discovered in my backpack during a TSA extra-gropey our-explosives-detector-machine-has-beeped secondary inspection. It was powered down, but it actually is a hacked-together, home-made gadget for triggering an external unit.

The TSA agents responsible were grumbling about having to work next to the ineffectual backscatter X-ray scanners (I'd opted out), and were interested in what camera equipment I had and what I'd recommend for a beginner. Many of the agents are human, and sick to death of the security theatre they have to work with.

(As a photographer who likes taking pictures of weird bits of crumbling infrastructure, I've had plenty of run-ins with security guards and the like. Oddly, I've never been arrested.)

Wondering what else I could do with the stuff I assembled in Hugin, I put together a quick interactive version of the panorama. Requires a recent browser with WebGL support - uses the open-source Pannellum as the viewer.

You can see shadows from the turret on the end of the arm in a couple of the raw images. Whoever planned the arm manoeuvres did an incredible job - not only did the arm itself almost completely disappear in final stitched versions, the images have very little parallax despite the arm very much not being a proper panoramic camera mount.

Of note - there was a second set of images taken - very similar to the first, but with a small horizontal offset. Likely result? 3D versions of the panorama!

The only thing I want now is, perhaps in a year or so, a full 360-degrees spherical panorama of the rover parked near some interesting cliffs or other geography. Go on, NASA - do it! ;-)

Top-left here.

(Of note - the raw images got released quite a few hours before the official stitched version did. So a bunch of amateurs including myself and others used various panorama-assembling software to assemble our own, unofficial stitched versions. Seeing Curiosity like this before pretty much everyone else was great...)