Yuri Gagarin is the first human to orbit our planet, he made it around the world in 108 minutes on April 12 1961. To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the event The Attic Room has put together a trip around the planet. This video uses original images as well as new images, they tried much to stay on the same path Yuri took.

So go to firstorbit.org, read more about it, watch it, download it share it.. . Oh by the way, this is released under the Creative Commons license.

It appears that some just want to help out the Libyan people so much that they are willing to help them by surprise.. . It's almost comical how MI6 and SAS officers got caught by some farmers and were then handed of to the rebels.

I can only wonder what were the real motivations for this ? Was it out of pure solidarity, that burning desire to do what you can to help ? Create good relations with the future new controllers of Libyan oil ?

Whatever may be the real motivations, I tend to think that a good way to help the oppressed would be to stop selling weapons to their dictators in the first place.

Pidgin users with MSN accounts may have been experiencing problems connecting. It seems they have changed their certificate. The solution seems to be to manually delete the certificate, either by going to "Menu -> Tools -> Certificates" or by doing something like:

It seemed to work, but then the next day I had to do it again, I checked the certificates and found out the following:

The certificate that expired was valid from Tue Dec 1 22:45:11 2009 till Wed Dec 1 22:45:11 2010. The one I got the other day after moving this one is valid from Wed Jun 23 03:06:48 2010 till Thu Jun 23 03:06:48 2011, and after getting the same issue again and mv again the certificate I received a new one valid from Mon Nov 15 22:28:19 2010 till Wed Nov 14 22:28:19 2012.. .

I am going to guess there is an issue with their servers not using the same key every time, and I am going to guess that the official MSN client uses more than one certificate so it can switch from one to another depending on the server you connect to with giving the user any alert. .. .(yeah this does seem to not fit with the whole idea of the certificate.. . then again what do I know).. anyway, the three certs I got so far have these SHA1 fingerprints:

The one I originally had

f3:1f:2c:78:6a:8f:97:a6:8d:a8:c9:d4:0a:af:64:ae:63:57:88:17

The one I got a couple of days ago

c8:f3:b1:69:52:36:07:33:b5:02:1b:a2:b2:b4:ce:32:b9:68:37:36

The one I just got now

ac:7e:e4:5f:97:b8:7e:f0:0b:ac:a6:51:9f:ba:51:f0:ad:73:17:8b

It almost looks like MSN got a Man In The Middle attack or something strange like that, maybe their private key got leaked so they changed it quickly thinking nobody would notice ? No official information to be found (if someone knows of any official information let me know).

It seems that there is a patch for Ubuntu and it seems their solution was to manually add certs and stuff like that.. All this because MSN has/had an issue with their servers issuing different certificates at the same time.. Or something like that (MITM)..

Lately I've been finding it quite difficult to actually get good results from most search engines, hence after a while I'd often end up back on "do some evil" Google search engine page. After experimenting with other search engines like Ixquick (very good on privacy) and Clusty (they changed their name :/ but I like the idea of clustering results) I was still hungry. And then I found DuckDuckGo, very nice and clean interface, works with https (as the link shows) and gives results in https when possible. It has too many features for me to write about, go and look around in the options and such.

Some images from the OpenNight event last night..

More about King James Hyperfuck.

Get source code, debs and live iso to play din, program software by Jag.

Every so often OpenLab organises an OpenNight where people can try out there work in front of an audience. The works should be produced using open source technologies. There is much creativity to be seen and heard.

More information here.

I'd like to add a word about a program developed by one of the members of Cunbucket (Jag), it's called DIN (Digital INstrument). It's a very intriguing instrument that reminds me of the theremin.

You can get some of the media files from this podcast

I just setup this website for a friend of mine, Roger Woloshyn AKA starman. I met him at the Churchill Northern Studies Centre when I was on my "Subarctic Lifstyle of a Spotted Mind" trip. starman has a few articles on aurora viewing and other Churchill related stuff.. see for yourself at starman.ca

You might have already heard about distributed research, projects like Seti@home and Folding@home, you install some software and your computer works for science. It's a way of passively helping out.

I recently found out about this very nice project called Galaxy Zoo which is a bit the same except that the participants act as active researchers. It seems that with all these new telescopes and probes and things like that, the amount of information that needs to be analyzed is enormous. The idea is to send out images to the participants for them to classify the images, this helps the filtering process by alot, astronomers can work with sorted images.

Results have been published and recently Galaxy Zoo 2 has help publish a paper. The idea is great, people putting together their efforts to do things.. hmm, rings a bell. In all this you get to see rare images and be yourself a part of the findings.

So instead of clicking on sites like "hot or not" in your spare time, do something useful and head to one of the Galaxy Zoo sites, oh yeah I didn't mention, this seems to be very fruitful so there are a few variants, including the new Solar Storm Watch.. (I love a good solar storm!!).

Links:

• Galaxy Zoo 2
• Solar Storm Watch
• Galaxy Mergers
• Super Nova Watch
• Zooniverse -this seems to be the place where all this stuff is centralized

This website is now using HTML5, normally this shouldn't change much, well all except for one thing important to me is the video tag that allows me to publish video content in such a simpler manner.

I re-encoded all my photo/video montages in OGV "format" and it seems the quality is better (this could be just an impression) and mostly it's now using open formats. There should still be a Flash fallback for older browsers for now, however I just noticed IE is broken, any Safari feedback would be nice too although I'm not sure I'll "fix" it.