…in Estonia. Still, you’ve got to start somewhere.

The Cassini spacecraft, currently in orbit around Saturn, will be taking a picture of Earth in July. Everybody be ready to smile!

Cassini’s images of Earth to be included in the mosaic – both wide angle and narrow angle – will be acquired between 21:27 and 21:42 GMT (17:27 and 17:42 EDT) on 19 July. During these times, North America and part of the Atlantic Ocean will be in sunlight. The illuminated parts of the Earth and the Moon will each be no more than one pixel across in the final image.

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All The Way Home, by The EVT Band - www.theevtband.com - Rock Show permalink - Subscribe in iTunes

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The Lion The Beast The Beat, by Grace Potter and the Nocturnals - www.gracepotter.com - Rock Show permalink - Subscribe in iTunes

It is with great pleasure we reveal that the next LEGO CUUSOO set will be the Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity Rover, based upon the LEGO CUUSOO project by Perijove.

Squee!

Tom Scott demonstrates the lossy compression of a jpg image using the text of William Shakespear’s Romeo and Juliet.

That’s the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet, compressed at “maximum” quality in Photoshop: I loaded the text as a RAW, then outputted the compressed file back to plain text.

Even on ‘maximum’ quality, almost all the characters are replaced by their neighbours in the alphabet. On an image, that would be a minuscule change in colour, undetectable to the eye: but rearranged into a different form, even ‘maximum’ quality is enough to render the text a significant challenge to decipher.

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Faster and Faster, by BugGirl – www.buggirl.net - Rock Show permalink - Subscribe in iTunes

What did you want to do when you were five years old? I wanted to be a driver of a big red London bus. I thought that would be the best job in the world. As I got older my thoughts changed slightly.

I’ve heard Sue talk about her life a couple of times, and I’m really glad she’s written it down in her blog. Like all great stories it has a happy ending, do keep that in mind.

Chris and Cherie (and Kiki) live on a bus in America. It drives everywhere, and stays online as much as possible. Now they’ve written a book about it, and if you’re at all interested in how a converted Greyhound bus can get on the internet around America, head to Amazon as quickly as possible.

Stuart Kelly’s final interview with Iain Banks us up on The Guardian, and Banks’ thoughts on the cause of his cancer:

As we walk to the door, Banks pulls one final, left-field surprise. “Do you know that I know what caused the cancer? …cosmic ray,” he says. “I won’t brook any contradiction; it was a high-energy particle. A star exploded hundreds or thousands of years ago and ever since there’s been a cosmic ray – a bad-magic bullet with my name on it, to quote Ken – heading towards the moment where it hit one of my cells and mutated it. That’s an SF author’s way to bow out; none of this banal transcription error stuff.

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Blindsided by Love, by Hollow Horse - www.hollowhorse.com  - Rock Show permalink - Subscribe in iTunes

Over on Forbes, I’ve taken a look at the opportunity presented to iOS developers with the new UI changes in System 7 iOS 7:

Technically they’ve avoided doing a compatibly break with the code base, but for any iOS application to stay relevant it’s going to have to be re-coded for the new UI. Because of that process these apps will look fresh and new to everyone using the. There will be some hold-out applications, but in the main the top tier applications that everyone will be exposed to will all have been updated in the six months leading up to Christmas.

Tim Cook has led not just a refresh of the iOS platform through the new UI, but it forces all the third party applications to update their apps ahead of the presumed launch of the iPhone 6 at the end of September.

Well played, Cook.

Over on Wired, Moxie Marlinspike addresses the cliched question of  ’nothing to hide, nothing to fear’ when discussing security issues. It might be focused on America, but the principles still stand, and the view is especially relevant in the current climate.

If the federal government had access to every email you’ve ever written and every phone call you’ve ever made, it’s almost certain that they could find something you’ve done which violates a provision in the 27,000 pages of federal statues or 10,000 administrative regulations. You probably do have something to hide, you just don’t know it yet.

Horace Deidu looks at the average spend of an Apple user, which is dropping as the user base increases (with my emphasis).

This can be read as: “Each of the current 575 million accounts generates about half the revenue of the 100 million accounts of 2009.” One would expect such a decline as an user base expands and this approximate 50% decline in revenues per account seems reasonable for a six-fold base increase. In absolute terms the graph shows that an iTunes account generates about $3.2/month in transactions.  Put another way, during the last year, an average of $40/yr of economic value is generated by every iTunes account.

As Apple continues to push iOS devices to the lower end of the markets, the user base is changing and that will impact on the average spend. There’s a huge difference between selling to the geekerati of the world, and shifting as many handsets out of the door of the Carphone Warehouse on a £10 a month contract .

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Tear, by Holy Esque - Holy Esque on Facebook  - Rock Show permalink - Subscribe in iTunes