The Solar storm slamming into the upper atmosphere is creating some amazing aurora viewing conditions tonight. These displays will be visible as far south as Virginia according to Accuweather. They put together a very nice map showing what kind of viewing conditions you will have in the US and Canada which you can see at that link. Of course, it may also disrupt the power grid and interfere with satellite communications, but the solar flare is causing an amazing visual display across the northern sky. If you live in any of the places marked as fair or good viewing, head outside and look to the sky.
Portable Apps has updated themselves to version 12.0.5, which has some minor bug fixes, but Portable Apps 12 has a huge array of new features and functionality. This program suite is a lot like the Live Disc Linux builds I love, which allow you to launch a full OS from a disc with a huge range of software. If you don’t already use it, Portable Apps is a platform that runs like a program in any Windows computer off of a thumb drive, external hard drive, cloud drive, smart phone, iPod, or anything else the computer recognizes as a storage device. I actually installed it to a MicroSD chip which I use in my camera to save photos and video to, and when I plug the camera into the computer I can run it off of that. It doesn’t have its own OS like the Live Discs do, but it certainly has the huge range of software. Also like a Live Disc, you never install any software on the computer you are using, it all runs straight from the media source.
When you launch Portable Apps, it opens a menu with whatever collection of software you installed on the device, ready to run on the computer you plugged it into. All the software has your settings included, so Firefox (or Chrome, or Lynx, or Opera, or SeaMonkey; I am not going to go through the list for each kind of program mentioned, but you get the idea) remembers your homepage and has all your bookmarks, Thunderbird has your mail server config and downloaded messages for offline reading/responding, Filezilla has all the connectivity info for uploading to your web servers or downloading from file repositories you like to visit, and so forth. They have over 300 programs organized in 10 categories, each of which has 5 to 10 subcategories covering anything from graphics/audio/video creation and processing to a portable web server with Apache, PHP, MySQL, and CGI-BIN, and a lot more besides. And yes, you can install WordPress to that server, or anything else you would want to have as part of a XAMP/LAMP installation. And the list of apps goes on.
The other way it resembles a Live Disc is that when you are through using your software on whatever computer you walked up to, you shut the computer down, unplug your media source, and when the computer is rebooted it has no trace of your personal settings or information, everything was saved to the Portable Apps media source. That means whatever new bookmarks you saved, files you downloaded, etc, all goes with you; you never lose it. If you are not already a major fan, download it and install it on something and try it out. I am betting you become a big fan of the project once you have seen just how powerful it is. All of the software is free, legal, and open source, and if you enjoy the freedom of never having to leave your favorite software behind, you might consider offering them a donation.
Maven is the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN spacecraft, and it arrives in Mars orbit in just a few weeks. It’s purpose is to collect data that will allow researchers to figure out how Mars went from a warm wet world just like Earth to the cold, dry globe it is today. This could be very useful knowledge if we want to keep the same thing from happening to our planet. The non-NASA home page for this project is the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
You can jump over to Nickelodeon if you want to watch the next episode of the new animated version of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles before it airs on Friday on their cable channel. I don’t know if they plan on doing this on a regular basis, or if it is just the A Chinatown Ghost Story episode that gets to be seen early on their site. Thanks to the folks at Comic Book Movies for the heads up on this one.
There are a couple of choices, but I don’t know how many screens they are going to be on as neither film is spending a lot of money on publicity. Alas Shrugged: Who Is John Galt? is the third film in the series and finishes the story with the romantic bits. The Ayn Rand book was too big to do as just one movie, it seems. Bird People is a French fantasy romantic drama/comedy that looks pretty interesting, but it may not get a lot of screens because many audience members don’t like to read subtitles.
Movies lead off with Captain America: The Winter Soldier which is the second movie in its franchise, and it is even better than The First Avenger. In fact, Marvel movies as a whole just seem to be getting better and better. Their TV offering is doing nicely too, and we get Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.: The Complete First Season this week. Which is appropriate, since the new season starts on September 23rd.
Also in TV, The Vampire Diaries: The Complete Fifth Season and Supernatural: The Complete Ninth Season are both out from the CW. I generally only mention series, but for those who like to collect their TV one episode at a time, be aware that Doctor Who: Deep Breath is out this week as well. Interestingly enough, they had to cut out the same sex kiss from the episode before it could air in Asia.
Sadly, there is no genre Anime this week,, just the slice-of-life drama/comedies Listen to Me, Girls. I Am Your Father! and Tamako Market: Complete Collection.