Falcon 9 v1.1 Maiden Launch!

Wanted to watch this live to get booster info but was someplace with no reception. 
Vid here:

Also this article is pretty cool. Here's the bit about the attempt at recovering the first stage:

Once it was back in the atmosphere, it lit its central engine to slow itself further. That's where things went wrong, though, as the booster started spinning. According to Musk, this "centrifuged the propellant"—spun it to the tank's walls and kept it from feeding into the engine. As a result, it hit the water hard, leaving the company's employees with pieces to recover. (This rocket didn't have landing gear anyway, and Musk said that the added hardware would act like fins to stabilize the spin.)
With the information they gained from this flight, however, Musk said that SpaceX has "all the pieces to do full recovery of the boost phase," which he expects to be attempted early next year. In the intervening time, the company plans to gather data on re-entry during two more flights.
Recovery won't be cheap. In response to a question, Musk estimated that saving the fuel to perform a controlled landing on water requires sacrificing 15 percent of the potential payload; returning to land will take a 30 percent cut. But Musk said the boost stage is about three-quarters of the total cost of the rocket, so being able to reuse it would provide a substantial net gain.
Beyond these findings, not everything was rosy about today's launch. SpaceX also tried to restart its second stage engine (which is necessary on some flight trajectories but not for today's launch). The engine "encountered a condition it didn't like during repressurization," though, and the process was shut down. Musk said that the company has a good idea of what went wrong, and will address it before the next flight.

Valve and AMD reveals

So Valve has revealed their SteamOS a couple of days ago which is based on Linux, so it's pretty much a Linux distro. It will be a living room entertainment OS, so think console+xbmc combined. It is also free and open source!
Today, they also revealed SteamBox, and are offering 300 beta units for testers to be randomly selected, as long as you earn the Steam Hardware badge level 2.Unfortunately, actual specs are not disclosed, although they are saying the system is open, and you can upgrade individual components (like a PC!), as well as being free to install any OS on it or turn it into a robot! Gotta love Valve and their open/hacker/community culture. First open console since the PC =P. They are also claiming to have different boxes available in 2014 from different vendors, so PC and linux gaming seems to be ever on fire and advancing, thanks in no small part to Valve! [S2] (companion cube). It's great to see games like Dota 2, L4D2, Kerbal Space Program, X3: Albion Prelude and Guns of Icarus Online (and hopefully the Crytek 3 Engine soon) on Linux!
In a couple of days, Valve will reveal something else. Using symbols 'O' as the SteamOS reveal, and '[O ]' as the SteamBox reveal, they are revealing something along the lines of 'O+O'. They've already suggested streaming video from your gaming PC to the steambox via LAN, and family sharing for games, but it could be something different. Check the reveal here below in 33 hours:



AMD has revealed their newest line of GPUs at every price point, and personally I'm rooting for them as they are actually supporting open source linux driver development. Unlike a certain competitor which only releases binary blobs, although they run alright. In the livestream other game devs were also featured as were a lot of audio technology.
Check out Star Citizen's Chris Roberts at 1hr 44minutes of the livestream and some new hangar module features! (And an Aurora take off sequence in the new trailer demo!). It's also set to break 20 million in crowdfunding within 24 hours. See you in the 'verse!

Watch live streaming video from amdlivestream at livestream.com

KSP update 0.22

Kerbal Space Program is one of the funnest games ever, superseding The Sims and will probably take 2nd place in my all-time favourite game list, after Tribes 1. That is, until Star Citizen comes out and dominates the list. I love the open and mod-able, community driven aspects of this game. =)

This most recent update finally gives the option of inserting sub-assemblies to new designs, so you can finally import 2 assemblies/designs from different saved designs without having to build from scratch! Kind of like importing parts into a CAD assembly. I have no more excuse to not play this game (it's on Linux! via Unity =D) ... although uni study beckons Dx



Also, an abridged list of stupid things that I have done (a full list would be way too long). These are rookie mistakes which experience, if not proper systems engineering would (hopefully) have mitigated.

• Not realising you forgot to put parachutes on your spaceship until you've re-entered the atmosphere
• Using all your fuel to achieve a high orbit and realising your Kerbonauts are now stranded ... hope they're not hungry
• Forgetting to activate solar panels once in orbit so your spacecraft (a planned addition to a collection of spaceships docked together forming a "space station") runs out of electrical charge. It's also unmanned so can no longer be controlled. Recovery mission is being planned (yes, one is also being planned for my stranded Kerbonauts, though admittedly with much lower priority xD)

And there we have our top 3 "oh crap, I'm so stupid" moments so far =)
The game has also prompted learning of orbital mechanics and stuff and is a great companion to: The Basics of Spaceflight - brought to you by JPL, "we do everything cool".

NASA News - September 2013

OK, I'm a bit on the slow side but I blame my travels to Melbourne and having so much fun at a wedding and fellowshipping =)

NASA has finally announced that Voyager 1 has left the solar system!
This, after scientists weren't quite sure how to interpret the data which seemed to indicate that it sometimes was still in the solar system and sometimes not. But now NASA thinks that Voyager 1 has passed the heliopause and is currently travelling through interstellar medium!

I guess we could add one more to the tally at http://xkcd.com/1189/ and hope we don't have to add any more =P

Also NASA news, they have 3 candidate asteroids for potential exploration by bringing it to moon orbit or something like L1/L4 and sending astronauts to do some science on it!

And if you haven't seen this photo bomb yet, something more light-hearted =P
http://www.universetoday.com/104679/absolutely-incredible-photo-frog-launches-with-ladee/

Star Citizen Hangar Module!!! (Patch 3)

Star Citizen, currently at >USD18mil in crowdfunding, getting past the halfway point of the ambitious Ubuntu Edge's goal. I've been screenshot-ing the daily pledge amount graph so analysis can be made later, but currently it's averaged >1mil/month since March, and in the 7 days during Hangar reveal it raised >1mil.

So after reading this forum thread detailing how someone ran Star Citizen's Hangar Module (a pre-pre-alpha) on a DirectX10.1 card, I was totally excited because before I thought I might need an eGPU. Star Citizen runs on CryEngine 3 and officially needs DX11 (and probably some high OpenGL level once Crytek supports Linux - hope they get a good hire). However, now I can wait for later to buy a new rig/Graphics card and get the best bang for buck =D Will probably be using a desktop > laptop to play this intense game though.

The graphics here look amazing!! And I loved the holo-table and being able to sleep in my RSI Aurora! =D I played this on low settings with a resolution of 1280x720 but I'm guessing my FPS was below 10. Maxed my GPU (GT330M) on my Samsung R580-JS02AU with i5-520M and 8GB DDR3.

Originally my GPU was overheating at ~100C and decided to turn my computer off when that happened (although I don't know how I was doing constant 105C while gaming last year before I took apart my laptop and cleaned it, reducing temperatures by ~20C (should make a post about that sometime with all the pics =P).
This time, I opted for the quick airduster into the fan intake, ejecting some dust and that seemed to cool the GPU down 10C so it hovered around 90C during gameplay.
Was doing dual screen 1366x768 and 1280x1024 had Star Citizen windowed at 1280x720 and used Greenshot. Afterwards I realised I could've just used FRAPS and got FPS data. -Facepalm-.

Here is a link to my album, and a slideshow of shots I took:

Star Citizen Hangar Module Test, Patch 3, 8/9/2013

Hand Gesture Design and Visualization

So Elon Musk does it again with this video from SpaceX:


Using the Leap Motion, Oculus Rift, some glass projection thing like in Iron Man apparently. 3D printing gets a mention too.

While this is really wow and pro, I would definitely like to see if they use hand gestures beyond visualising to do some designing work.