.oO Tailwind

I just received an email from PayPal telling me that “We’ve made PayPal easier to use – just our way of saying thanks for choosing us.”

Thanks for that.

Couldn’t you put more effort into your shockingly bad password retrieval process. It sucks and I always have to use it when I’m in the throws of a closing eBay auction.

Google’s mission? To organise the world’s information. Maybe it’s now trying the Universe’s as Google Earth fans can now look upwards towards the heavens with the release of Google Sky. Part of the new 4.2 update Sky allows the user to explore the heavens and constellations across more than 1 million images.

Download the latest Google Earth here.

The 4.2 download has some other cool features but I haven’t played with these yet so let’s just talk space.

Anyone want to look at some 100 million stars and 200 million galaxies? Browse Orion?Images, not surprisingly, come from NASA and the Hubble Space Telescope. How awesome is that?

As a kid growing up, one of my favorite television programs was Tomorrows World on BBC 1. Imagine Maggie Philbin telling us how we can pan, drag and zoom through the heavens as we like..!

I wonder if today’s kids will get excited by this?

Apparently there are some other services around already that allow you to explore space in a similar way; Celestia, Stellarium and of course World Wind from NASA.

Accessing the ‘Sky’ mode requires pressing a button (look hard now). It’s a shame you just ouldn’t look-up, but the layers sound fairly interesting and you can even take tours of famous spacey-type locations such as the Andromeda Galaxy.

Apparently the sky that you see is appropriate to the day and time that you access it from but of course you’re location would matter too so I’m not sure how this works yet.