The Insider News

Justin Dunham's journal about making things[^]:

One wonderful thing about do-it-yourself, as a movement, is that it is a powerful way of creating more skilled technicians, lowering the cost of a repair. Also, because it’s fun, you’re realizing value that is difficult to capture in an economic analysis – conservation, thrift, self-reliance, and, if you’re doing a project with other people, community and social interaction. In this case, the repair was easily justified by the value of my time (low), and this is true in many other cases, too. But these reasons are why do-it-yourself is important culturally, not just from a purely monetary standpoint.

TechPresident[^]:

During the early and mid 1960s – about a half a century ago – computers were physically very big. Only big companies, universities and governments had computers, storing them in special air-conditioned rooms. And they were expensive. On IBM’s flagship mainframe computer, the IBM 7094, the memory unit – what you would now call the RAM – held one megabit, i.e. about 128KB, and cost about one million dollars in the early 1960s. That’s about five million dollars in today’s terms. Each computer was also the center of its own universe. There were a few experiments and special projects to connect computers together, but nothing common or easy. Here’s how the government changed all of that.

Letters of Note[^]:

In 1970, a Zambia-based nun named Sister Mary Jucunda wrote to Dr. Ernst Stuhlinger, then-associate director of science at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, in response to his ongoing research into a piloted mission to Mars. Specifically, she asked how he could suggest spending billions of dollars on such a project at a time when so many children were starving on Earth. Stuhlinger soon sent the following letter of explanation to Sister Jucunda, along with a copy of "Earthrise," the iconic photograph of Earth taken in 1968 by astronaut William Anders, from the Moon (also embedded in the transcript). His thoughtful reply was later published by NASA, and titled, "Why Explore Space?"

YouTube[^]:

Team members at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory share the challenges of the Curiosity Mars rover's final minutes to landing on the surface of Mars. From entry to sky crane to landing, here are the details and the perils of mission.

about-robots.com[^]:

The Curiosity Rover Nuclear Battery is one of the best feature of the latest Mars Rover. It is a huge and necessary upgrade compared the previous generation of Mars Exploration Rovers Spirit and Opportunity. It contains about 5kg (10 pounds) of plutonium-238 (non explosive), and can power the rover for at least 14 years. This motor will supply energy to the Mars Science Laboratory night and day for as long as it can move.

ExtremeTech[^]:

The first photos from Curiosity are starting to trickle in, and very soon we’ll start to see scientific data gathered by Curiosity’s on-board science lab, so I thought it would be a good time to discuss the hardware and software that actually makes MSL Curiosity possible.

Ars Technica[^]:

It's no surprise that Mars was an exploration target from the very beginning of spaceflight. The first missions sent to Mars by the Soviet Union began in 1960, a scant three years after Sputnik. The first successful flyby came in 1965 with NASA's Mariner 4, and the first successful landing was the Soviet Mars 3 in 1971. The many failures make the successful landings look even more amazing. With the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) rover, known as Curiosity, arriving on-planet August 6, we're going to take a look back at the landers and rovers that brought us to today.

ExtremeTech[^]

Bad news: With less than $50 of off-the-shelf hardware and a little bit of programming, it’s possible for a hacker to gain instant, untraceable access to millions of key card-protected hotel rooms.

Eric Ligman[^]

Large collection of Free Microsoft eBooks for you, including: SharePoint, Visual Studio, Windows Phone, Windows 8, Office 365, Office 2010, SQL Server 2012, Azure, and more.