Today’s spotlight is on the Paleo Future blog. If you’re interested in topics like the Jetsons, science fiction, robots, rocket ships, monorail, in home technology, world’s fairs of the past and more then you should subscribe to the Paleo Future blog. Clearly I’m interested in those kinds of topics The monorail, retro robot and rocket ship photos in this blog post are mine.

Currently in it’s 3rd iteration, Paleo Future blog was initially on Blogspot, then all the content was moved to paleofuture.com. This is where it continued until late 2011 when the Smithsonian employed it’s curator Matt Novak to blog for them at blogs.smithsonianmag.com/paleofuture. The previous 5 years writing remains at paleofuture.com.

Matt said he started the Paleofuture blog in 2007 as part of a writing class he was taking at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Little did he realise that writing about the history of the future would become such a huge part of his life. This is how he described what prompted him to collect and share a history of the future that never was:

‘I first came across the word “Paleo-Future” in a Flickr group of the same name. However, the topic first sparked my interest when I visited Walt Disney World’s EPCOT Center, (now Epcot), and realized that Disney’s version of the future was based upon what they thought the future would look like in the 1980s. As is important when depicting the future, your opinions must change with the times, unless you happen to be omnipotent, which means you have no need to revise your vision of the future and have probably used your powers for such noble endeavors as guessing my weight at the local carnival or writing horoscopes that tell me, “you should find time for yourself tonight.”‘

‘While I might poke fun at the outlandish ideas of 1950s America, corporate puffery, or Jules Verne I do it with an admiration for the idealism we seem to be losing in our post-modern society. The belief that technology has the potential to improve the lives of everyone on Earth seems rare. Just remember that an optimism for the future and the attempt to better the world for all humanity is hidden somewhere within each sarcastic comment about flying cars and space farms. In that same vein, I will always remember that the dystopian societies depicted by George Orwell or Alan Moore are just as plausible if we surrender freedom in the name of security. Here’s to a “great big beautiful tomorrow.”‘
- Paleo Future blog curator Matt Novak

The Internet is like panning for gold in a stream, you’ll find a lot more dross (worthless, commonplace, or trivial matter) than gold nuggets. That’s why I’m asking for your help – please suggest quality sites for me to spotlight in the future, in the comments area of this article, via social media or by emailing me.

Rambling Thoughts Blog - Paleo Future: Spotlight on Quality Blogs

For thousands of years mankind has gazed at the starry night sky, wondering what lies out there in our solar system and beyond. As a youngster I obsessively read many of the classic space and exploration science fiction books by authors like Isaac Asimov, Arthur C Clarke and Jules Verne. Space is the final frontier for mankind, as less travelled a path as you can get.

Fans of the popular series Star Trek which first debuted onscreen in the mid 1960’s would have hoped that by now almost 50 years later we’d be star trekkin across the universe. Sadly this is not possible except in your imagination by watching modern science fiction entertainment like the newly released film Star Trek: Into the Darkness.

Unfortunately space flight and civil aviation standards have regressed during the last few decades. The last manned mission to the moon Apollo 17 was in late 1972, the final supersonic flight for Concorde landed in 2003 and NASA’s final space shuttle flight mission STS135 launched on July 8th 2011.

The hopes and dreams of scifi fans may seem overly optimistic now but you have to remember their context in the second half of the 20th century which saw the invention of satellite technology, giant rockets sending people in orbit around the earth, on missions to the moon as well as the spectacular growth of commercial aviation after World War II and the supersonic Concorde which had a cruising speed of Mach 2.04 (2,170 kilometres per hour).

Yet the future of manned space flight to the moon and beyond is far from certain, with world leaders like President Obama focused on urgent earthly issues such as cutting the US budget deficit.

The ISS (successor to Salut, Skylab and Mir) whose construction was barely completed before the Space shuttle fleet was grounded won’t last forever either. The NASA budget signed into law by President Obama in late 2010 extends the mission of the ISS until 2020. There is speculation that this could be extended until 2028 but nothing is certain.

The next big project for Russian space agency ROSCOSMOS is the new Vostochny cosmodrome to be built in far Eastern Russia, which will reduce their reliance on using the old Baikonur cosmodrome located in ex-Soviet state Kazakhstan for manned space flight launches.

NASA Belt Tightening

We are at a key juncture point for the future of human aviation and space flight.

William Gerstenmaier, NASA’s chief of human exploration recently told members of a US Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation subcommittee that if planned NASA budget cuts for 2014 go ahead then “we can’t deliver the programs that we committed to you that we would deliver … This is really going to be tough for us moving forward”.

In early February 2013 NASA Administrator Charles Bolden told Senate Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Barbara Mikulski that due to NASA’s budget being cut so much, funding for private partners like SpaceX and “overall availability of commercial crew transportation services would be significantly delayed, thereby extending our reliance on foreign providers for crew transportation to the International Space Station”.

Administrator Bolden was referring to the post STS135 situation where NASA is faced with the humiliating prospect of paying the Russian space agency millions for use of Soyuz spacecraft seats going roundtrip to the ISS, until the SpaceX Dragon or another American commercial spacecraft is ready for astronaut transportation duty full time.

A few days ago on April 30th Bolden was even more direct, telling the media that

“Since the end of our Space Shuttle Program in 2011, NASA has relied on the Russian Space Agency (Roscosmos) for the launch and safe return of astronauts to and from the International Space Station (ISS) aboard its Soyuz spacecraft. While our Russian counterparts have been good partners, it is unacceptable that we don’t currently have an American capability to launch our own astronauts.”

“That’s why the Obama Administration has placed such a high priority on correcting this situation. Three years ago, the Administration put forward a public-private partnership plan, the Commercial Crew Program (CCP), to ensure that American companies would be launching our astronauts from U.S. soil by 2015. It’s a plan that supports the U.S. human spaceflight program, boosts our economy, and helps create good-paying American jobs. If NASA had received the President’s requested funding for this plan, we would not have been forced to recently sign a new contract with Roscosmos for Soyuz transportation flights”.

“Because the funding for the President’s plan has been significantly reduced, we now won’t be able to support American launches until 2017. Even this delayed availability will be in question if Congress does not fully support the President’s fiscal year 2014 request for our Commercial Crew Program, forcing us once again to extend our contract with the Russians. Further delays in our Commercial Crew Program and its impact on our human spaceflight program are unacceptable”.

One thing NASA does very well, at a relatively low cost is science education and outreach to explain the value of space exploration. A recent internal NASA memo from late March 2013 shows just how poorly thought out long term space policy in the USA is at the moment, stating that “effective immediately, all education and public outreach activities should be suspended, pending further review”.

The current ISS Commander, Canadian Astronaut Chris Hadfield has shown through his stellar social media efforts that a huge audience is interested in what NASA is up to. What many are not aware of is that his social media updates are a personal effort assisted by his son Evan on Earth, without any NASA assistance.

In the midst of all this gloom and doom enter Elon Musk and Richard Branson. These two entrepreneurs are putting millions of their own dollars on the line in a bid to reignite sparks of innovation and enthusiasm in manned space flight.

SpaceX Astronaut & Cargo Transport

Elon Musk is the co-founder of PayPal and electric car company Tesla Motors. Musk gained his fortune from selling Paypal and has since invested large portions of it in Tesla Motors and SpaceX along with venture capital partners. The character of Tony Stark in the Iron Man trilogy of superhero movies may have been partly inspired by him.

Under President Obama’s bold and controversial new space policy NASA abandoned the troubled Constellation program to develop the next generation of spacecraft and booster vehicles which would have replaced the aging space Space Shuttle fleet.

Instead it offered seed funding and the possibility of lucrative service contracts to entrepreneurial commercial spaceship manufacturers such as SpaceX to provide workhorse vessels for transport to and from the ISS so NASA could focus on flying to Mars and so-called “near-Earth objects.

While several private companies competed to build NASA’s next heavy lift vehicles to carry cargo and astronauts to the ISS, SpaceX is in the lead position followed by Orbital Sciences.

Virgin Galactic Joyrides

Virgin Galactic has its roots in Scaled Composite’s SpaceShipOne concept team headed by Burt Rutan, which won the $US 10 million dollar Ansari X Prize for the first non-government organisation to launch a reusable manned spacecraft into space twice within two weeks.

Richard Branson partnered with Scaled Composites to build two Five SpaceShipTwos (the first pair of which will be called Enterprise and Voyager in homage to Star trek) and 2 WhiteKnightTwos . His Virgin galactic company has been taking deposits from aspiring rich joyriders for several years to go towards the full ticket price of approximately $US 200,000.

For this princely sum a ticket holder will get to experience a flight to about 110km above Earth including a 6 minute period of weightlessness at the apogee (highest point of the flight’s orbit).

The 110km altitude was not chosen arbitrarily but because the Kármán line internationally recognised as the boundary between the Earth’s atmosphere and space lies at an altitude of 100 kilometres (62.1 miles).

In reality the atmosphere simply gets thinner the higher you go above Earth so there is no actual visible line at 100km, the reason it was chosen is because above that altitude a spacecraft would have to fly faster than orbital velocity in order to derive sufficient aerodynamic lift from the atmosphere to support itself.

Virgin Galactic is not expected to have its maiden passenger flight until early-mid 2014 at the earliest.

Private Sector Flights To Infinity and Beyond?

Without inspiring stories about space there won’t be any prompts to make people ponder the abandoning of near-term manned space flight plans by the USA, whether China, Russia or Japan might take up the slack and plan their own missions to the Moon and beyond.

Perhaps entrepreneurs like Elon Musk’s SpaceX will make the necessary investments that nation states are unwilling to, with any resulting benefits accruing to his investors rather than the public as a whole.

The decisions made by governments and private corporations in the second decade of the 21st century will decide whether manned spaceflight beyond low earth orbit will be relegated to a display at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum or evolve into serious plans to build a successor to the International Space Station (ISS) as well as sending astronauts to Mars and beyond.

If these attempts fail then mankind’s greatest space achievement will be recorded in the history books as the Voyager I mission launched on September 5th 1977 and still going strong today, soon to enter interstellar space and travel where no man has gone before, or ever will, over 18 billion kilometres from our sun.

This is the original version of a feature article written by me for Business Spectator

Rambling Thoughts Blog - Humanity Stuck On Earth or Private Space Flights To Infinity & Beyond?

If you’re a fan of ebooks and usually read more than 50 of them a year then the new Kobo Aura HD eink ebook reader may be exactly what you need to enhance your reading experience.

Malcolm Neil, Kobo’s Director of Content Acquisition and Publisher Relations for the Asia Pacific told me that the Aura HD was a device with limited availability which was made specifically to fit the needs of the most voracious ebook readers.

According to Neil these readers had told Kobo that an ideal “luxury” eink reader would have a larger screen than 6 inches, a sharper display and larger battery capacity for long trips.

The Aura HD’s 6.8 inch screen offers about 30% more display space than a standard 6 inch ereader so you won’t have to flip pages quite as often. However this comes with a tradeoff of greater weight as the Aura HD is 240gm, compared to the Kobo Glo’s and Kindle Paperwhite which tip the scales at 185gm and 213gm respectively. It also means that reading the Aura HD with one hand is not easy, whereas holding the Kobo Glo on handed is comfortable.

Readers who are night owls or like to read in dark environments such as long haul flights can use the builtin front edge lighting which provides even light distribution across the screen. The light can be turned on and off using a dedicated button next to the top red power slider and it’s intensity can be set at a level that you find comfortable using a slider from 1-100%.

The Aura HD’s 1440×1080 screen resolution is noticeably sharper than the standard 6 inch models which have 1024×768 displays. This will prove useful to readers who wear glasses or contact lenses as the font size can be increased while still remaining sharp and displaying many words on screen.

Since I have only had the Aura HD on loan for 2 weeks I can cannot confirm Kobo’s claim that it’s battery should last 1-2 months if used to read for 30 minutes every day with WiFi off and the light on sometimes. However it is saying 75% battery left at present and as a general rule larger devices which have bigger physical batteries last longer between charges than their smaller competitors.

In terms of connectivity the Aura HD works with to WiFi networks upto and including the most recent N specification but only those running at 2.4Ghz not 5Ghz. As with all other Kobo ereaders the Aura HD is WiFi only and doesn’t have builtin 3G connectivity like the high end 6 inch Kindle ereaders do.

Readers who want to manage their ebook library on their computer can connect it via a USB port at the bottom of the ereader and use the Kobo Desktop App for Windows & Apple Mac OSX.

When the Aura HD is connected to your computer it appears as a USB storage device so you can also slideload any books or files you have in the following formats: EPUB, PDF, JPEG, GIF, PNG, TIFF, TXT, HTML, RFT, CBZ, CBR. Thanks to it’s 1ghz processor the AuraHD is slightly faster at displaying complex PDF’s than other ereaders.

As a premium device the Aura HD has 4GB of onboard storage and a microSD slot next to the USB port so you can add upto 32Gb more storage. In theory this means you could store over 30000 books on the Aura HD though whether you’d be able to read that many in your lifetime is a different question.

The back of the Aura HD has a curious wave effect which is meant to make it easier to hold like a folded book, personally I liked the old quilted back pattern on the Kobo Glo and other previous models.

After using it to read for 2 weeks my verdict is that the Aura HD is evolutionary rather than revolutionary. While it’s superior to the smaller 6 inch Kobo Glo and Kindle Paperwhite ereaders, calling it luxury is a bit much.

However it is true to say that for the moment this is the fastest, largest eInk ereader with the best screen available on the market. Since Amazon controls the majority of the ebook market globally it’s surprising Kobo hasn’t tried to sell a premium ebook reader like this before. If it can attract enough heavy readers who consume an ebook a week or more to the Kobo platform, that could draw a noticeable amount of revenue away from Amazon.

The Kobo Aura HD will be available from Australian retailers such as Collins Books and JB HiFI by early June for RRP $219.99 (probably a bit less actual retail price).

Rambling Thoughts Blog - Kobo Aura HD eBook Reader (Review)

GUEST ARTICLE: I love when a new shiny device arrives in the mail. For some reason an Aston Martin DB9 doesn’t fit in the mail box, so a new smartphone will just have to do. This time it was the LG Optimus G, which is the “street name”, whereas LG E975 is the device name.

A beautiful 4.7” 1280×768-pixel resolution (WXGA) screen greets you as open the box. Not quite as black as the Tycho Magnetic Anomaly-1, still it draws you in, wanting to lift the device and see what secrets it holds inside.

Being the owner of Samsung Galaxy SII, I did the simple thing Android owners do. I plugged it to charge. No worries about new custom power adaptors, just use my existing Micro USB chargers and I am away.

Of course switching from one Android phone to another shouldn’t be that much of a problem, should it. Punch in my Google username and horribly long WIFI key and I am away. At this point I would just back up a whole bunch of my apps to the phones micro SD card, swap the card to the new phone and I am back getting three stars on Angry Birds before you know it.

But I can’t. Taking a leaf out of Apples book the back of the phone is bolted down so that user can’t access the battery or add storage. Further from Apples book is the “redesigned” paperclip for accessing the sim card on the side. My #headdesk moments have started and the phone hasn’t really been on for more than a minute.

So off to my computer I go, expecting the phone to have its own software for connecting, isn’t that new, but Android should just drop back to MTP so I can drag and drop from my Win7 machine. But no, the phone taking a leaf out of my old HTC Desire’s connection settings has 4 settings when you plug in USB. Why, for the love of all that is good, why. So I install the drivers as the phone thinks it is a CD drive, once again #headdesk.

Now this isn’t that much of a problem at home, because once the drivers are installed the phone works just fine via MTP. But in a corporate environment Win7 locked down with no option to install drivers this becomes a problem. I’ve yet to get my work computer to see this phone via MTP ( works fine via PTP ( Camera Mode ). The corporate environment sees the phone as a portable drive wanting to install the software. This may well prove to be a major issue for a number of people, it is for me.

Now, this isn’t just an LG issue, but a number of Android phones do it, and it is a little thing that just makes me want to cry. Why is the back button swapped with the home button, compared to my SII. Two years of using a phone means muscle memory. This is just plain silly, frustrating and well to put it bluntly, not something Apple would do. Why is scrolling images in the camera different as well. Sure these are little things, but lots of little irksome things start to add up quickly.

The power of the 1.5GHz quad-core Snapdragon S4 processor is something that is simply stunning. Seamlessly shuffling a 2gb bluray rip I made on the 1280×768 screen is amazing. Then adding LG’s zoom mode to this video as it is playing is a show off trick to amaze most people. Zooming in to and shuffling a video file that is 2gb in size on a device that fits in one hand is still in this day amazing.

The camera is very good for a mobile phone sensor. I carry a DSLR with me at all times, and the phone is just a backup. In going for the more megapixels are better theory, a 13megapixel shooter is onboard. Interesting to note however was that on first use the camera is only in 8megapixel mode. Outdoor shots are sharp, crisp and with a good richness of colour. Indoor shots get very noisy very quickly. Once again, megapixels don’t make up for sensor size. Leaving the camera on 8megapixel mode also seems to make autofocus faster. I found trying to get shots of children on playground equipment ( daylight and shade ) a bit hit and miss at times, with more blurry than sharp shots. The ability to grab still shots whilst taking HD Video is very nice, and is a feature I do use myself a lot, especially with my children.

I have found the battery life very good, especially when you take into account the power of the device. My old SII battery was dying and in need of replacing, something you can’t do with this device though. However, if you were to buy this phone, you would be replacing it within a year anyway.

If this phone was released in Australia at the same time it hit Korea (August 2012), not April 2013, it would be easy to say, despite its faults, buy it.

However it is no longer August 2012, with the HTC One X, Sony Xperia Z and of course the Samsung Galaxy S4, this phone isn’t the breakthrough device it once was. LG have shown they can make good hardware, their software needs a lot more TLC. The next iteration of this device I will at least give more than a passing look at.

I’m not the buy a phone and use it as is kind of audience. I am looking forward to stripping LG out of the phone, putting on a custom launcher at least, if not rooting it and going native Android, just to fix some of the issues I have. It is a stunning phone and for those on a budget looking for a 4G phone put it in your look at list, but check the price of the competition, you might regret not spending that little bit more.

This guest article has been written by my friend Wolf Cocklin (@wolfcat on Twitter). Wolf is interested in photography, mobile, GPS, tech stuff and what the future holds in all of these.

Rambling Thoughts Blog - LG Optimus G Android Phone Review