Hilarious. There are at least five unofficial Star Trek tricorder apps to turn your iPhone or iPod Touch into a fake scanner. Beam me up Jobsie? The developers daren’t mention the name of the TV and film franchise, of course; presumably the word ‘tricorder’ hasn’t been copywrited to Paramount Studios, which is a surprising omission unless someone coined the term before the first series started to air in the 1960s. I don’t know. I bet there are Trek fans out there who do.

Continue Reading »

Last night I was using an app on my iPhone called Star Walk that deploys ‘augmented reality‘ to display the night sky directly in front of wherever you’re pointing the handset. It enables you to easily identify stars, galaxies, planets and constellations. I then started browsing for information on a particularly bright star I’ve been strangely interested in for ages. Vindemiatrix is the name of this giant yellow star, I quickly discovered, or Epsilon Virgo. I’m not an astronomer or an astrologer although I’m interested in both subjects to some degree.

Continue Reading »