How a Swedish engineer saved a once-in-a-lifetime mission to Saturn's mysterious moon

Fascinating story about how a flaw in a space probe was detected and worked around so that the $300 million, seven-year mission won't be partly wasted.

(From RISKS Digest 23.65.)

Silence

Germany's Ministry of the Interior has suggested that all Germans observe three minutes of silence at 12:00 today on behalf of the victims of the tsunami.

LJ Archive

Random useful posts for backing up your journal:

• a thread in lj_maintenance mentioning jbackup.pl and LJ Archive
• The community ljarchive
• Userpics info plugin for ljArchive by tinyjo

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¿ʇı̣ əsnqɐ ʇ,uɐɔ noʎ ɟı̣ əpoɔı̣un sı̣ pooɓ ʇɐɥʍ

New card reader

Today, I bought an external flash card reader since our internal one is unreliable and tends to be unavailable whenever I need it (the drives simply don't appear in Explorer).

So of course, when Stella switched off the computer tonight, it decided to bluescreen—and when I switched off the power at the back and restarted it, the internal card reader worked, as it tends to do after a hard restart after a bluescreen. Gah.

On the other hand, tricking it by turning off the power at the power supply and turning it back on doesn't tend to make it reappear when it's gone AWOL again, so I think I'll keep the external drive. Either the internal one will go wonky again in a week or so, as it did the past several times, or the mere presence (threat?) of the external one will make it work properly. Either way, it'll be €9 well spent, I'd say.

Still, vaguely annoyed.