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Crappy Wireless Internet? Bring Your Own

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​Chilling with the Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 (10.1"), a great tablet with mobile wifi to boot.

​Chilling with the Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 (10.1"), a great tablet with mobile wifi to boot.

Starbucks. Amtrak. Barnes & Noble.  All of these place offer the promise of free WiFi so that customers can freely browse questionable internet sites at their leisure. However, what always happens? The signal is crappy! Too many people are on it! It's too slooowwwww.

One way to get around this is to carry around your own WiFi signal. Most cell phone and tablet devices such as the Apple iPad or the Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 (10.1") pictured above contain an option that allows the device to broadcast its own WiFi signal. Confusingly, this can be called different things - Apple calls it Personal Hotspot, Verizon calls it Mobile Hotspot, and Windows Phone calls it Internet Sharing. 

This may be an additional charge to enable mobile WiFi - AT&T charges me an extra $20/mo for my iPhone to share a WiFi signal. The price is worth it when I'm stuck somewhere with a crappy WiFi signal and I need to get work done. However, it WILL eat up your battery and drive up your data usage and potentially cost even more, especially if you're connecting using your laptop and visiting data heavy sites such as YouTube and Netflix. I've definitely been hit up with a bill that was significantly higher than I was used to because I didn't watch my data consumption.

BrothaTech also has a great piece on mobile hotspots last year - check that out by clicking here.

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Photos of Successful SpaceX Dragon - ISS Docking

The SpaceX Dragon launch on Friday had a few issues - namely, the solar panels that power the spacecraft did not deploy as planned due to an oxidizer tank malfunction. After the geniuses at NASA and Space X banged their heads together, they were able to get back on track and dock with the International Space Station (ISS) early Sunday morning.

Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, who's currently on the ISS, has posted some amazing pics of the Dragon spacecraft on his Google+ account - check them out!

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The Sequester & Captain Caveman: Bad For Science

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The Sequester & Captain Caveman: Bad For Science

The good old USA has decided to enact legislation that no one wanted to enact. In awesome doomsday terms, it's known as the sequester. It doesn't really make sense to me - but apparently our government couldn't decide whether to focus budget cuts on entitlement programs or revenues, so they just decided to cut everything! Unfortunately, that everything includes science and tech. 

One of my favorite quotes is from Dr. Elias Zerhouni, the former director of the National Institute of Health. He states that the sequester will set back medical science for a generation.  He answers one common defense of the sequester, which is that scientists can just go work for private industry.​

That’s ridiculous. That’s the most ridiculous, caveman statement I’ve ever heard. That’s not the way science works. Science works with bright young people who are attracted to science. David Baltimore had the Nobel prize at 35 for a discovery at 27. Today he wouldn’t even get a grant from NIH. The average age for grant recipients is 38 or 39. Research is an investment, it’s not an expense.​

Research institutions will get less money, which means less research being done. Charles Bolden of NASA has outlined how the cuts will affect the U.S. space program with a loss of $51 million, which includes delaying and/or canceling several projects that will lead to the return of manned spaceflight. 

My hope is that we get our house in order and squash all of the politics and beef between the House and the Senate. Until we do, our country will continue to suffer.​

Source: Scientific American, via Slashdot

SpaceX Dragon Launch Friday Morning

The SpaceX Dragon spacecraft is set to launch at 10:10am on the second of 12 missions to resupply the International Space Station. If successful, this trip will mark another step toward private industry proving that they can handle trips into space.  Eventually, manned space travel will return to the US for the first time since the shuttle program was disbanded.​

I wasn't able to make the trip down to Kennedy Space Center to witness the launch in person, but I'll be following the #NASASocial hashtag. You should too! I've embedded some of my favorite tweets below.

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Russian Boom Bap: Details on the Meteor

Details on the Feb 15th meteor that exploded above Chelyabinsk in Russia are in. Why didn't we see it? It flew in from the direction of the sun, where our telescopes couldn't  see it until it was too late.  The meteor lasted about 30 seconds within our atmosphere before it exploded with the force of about 20 nuclear bombs.  

 Check out the video below from ScienceCasts for more details. If you can't see the video below, please click here.​

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