The Windkey and the Lamplighter

This is the coolest thing I’ve seen all day. I want a metric ruler to wear on my wrist!
It’s the perfect complement to the stainless steel “Brass” rat.
Sadly, they are currently out of stock (and they’re also $40) or I’d be giving them as Christmas (or your winter-holiday-of-choice) presents to all my hardware-hacking and sewing friends.

Dixon's Aerial pencil, with text in a font described by H&FJ as "open Lombardic capitals with terminal lightning bolts"

Wordsplosion! had a link to Hoefler & Frere-Jones’ blog entry about grawlix, which was right next to an entry about the cool typefaces used on pencils. Here’s another one from http://www.brandnamepencils.com/ :

Pencil with reverse leading quotes!

Somehow, my current writing implements just aren’t as beautiful to look at. I wish I worked in a fashion that made pencil a reasonable alternative. I even do my crosswords in pen.

On the other hand, though, I do have a lovely new pen—a Pilot Extra Fine RazorPoint in purple to match my new iPod.

There’s been too much complaining on this blog recently, at least from me. But I have good news! Finally, I can indulge my desire to watch Martian weather.

The Mars Express Visual Monitoring Camera isn’t a scientific instrument—no pointing control, no focus adjustment, only “basic exposure controls”—but it was included on Mars Express to monitor the ejection of the Beagle 2 lander in December 2003. The camera performed well—the lander didn’t. In 2007, ESA turned the camera back on to capture low-resolution images of Mars, including some neat crescent shots and global images that the scientific instruments and other satellites aren’t positioned to capture. They did tests and focusing all throughout 2007, and the “Mars Webcam”, as it’s been nicknamed, went live today.

This is way cool. Also, it’s a live satellite that can be used to train ops engineers:
“VMC activites are unique in that the camera is operated by the Flight Control Team, and not a team of scientists. This gives operations engineers, particularly junior members, a chance to learn and practice command generation, planning, and other skills normally done at the Science Operations Centre.”

This is going right up with the VolcanoCam(1) on my list of things to go in my virtual windowframe(2).

(1) OMG, the VolcanoCam is now in HD! I love the USDA Forest Service.
(2)And thanks to Ryan Hoagland for putting up a website that I could link to when I wanted to explain what I meant by virtual window. Wherever and whomever you are, Ryan, you rock.

One of the things that most planetary spacecraft do, at some point, is swing their cameras around to take a look at home. Emily Lakdawalla of the Planetary Society has collected these pictures here.

Wow. The iconic Apollo picture is here, of course, as are some from the Russian Zond missions of the same era. The Voyager “Pale Blue Dot” picture is here, and there’s even one from the surface of Mars, from Spirit. Take a look.

Earthrise from Kaguya

This is apparently not as high-resolution as Kaguya actually records, but it’s all that is released so far.
Man, is it beautiful.

Thanks to Emily at the Planetary Society Blog!

Edit: Apparently I forgot to post this. Weird. Here you go!