It seems that Hatsune Miku, arguably the world’s first completely synthetic international pop star, is five today. There’s a staggering collection of tributes to mark the day here, including 20 minutes of video from what’s apparently her special anniversary performance in Yokohama:

I looked back a bit and found that my first post about her was just a few weeks less than five years ago. If you search this blog for leek you’ll find a few other mentions. read more

Okay, so, I’ve been thinking about this backlog of stuff I have to blog, since I’ve not been blogging much at all in recent times (what? you noticed?), and I was going to put up a photo of a big modular origami project I completed some time ago, but now I can’t find the stoopid photos of the thing. So here, instead, is a neat timelapse video which Chris brought to my attention–watch it fullscreen if you can:

NightFall from Colin Rich on Vimeo.

If you’ve been here before, you’ll now see that I’ve given the site a cosmetic makeover. The main motivation for this was to get rid of the 450-pixel width imposed on photos by the old layout. Naturally I got a little carried away, and ended up with a new layout, a new color scheme, and a new banner photo. (The photo is of the river next to Uji, Japan, as seen from the bridge.) There are also some nifty HTML5 features such as on-the-fly scaling, which means that this site will adjust its size gracefully if you happen to look at it with a cell phone or other small-screened device. Unfortunately I carefully tagged most of the photos and videos I’ve posted in the past to constrain their width to 450 pixels, so they won’t automatically get bigger in the new layout. Henceforth, though, photos will be considerably larger. read more

That is a photo, taken late last night, of the Curiosity Mars rover descending to the planet’s surface, as seen by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Think about that for a moment: NASA sends a robot to land on Mars, and manages to fly it past the field of view of an observatory that’s already orbiting Mars.

That, my friends, is some amazing engineering.

(The photo came from NASA’s site, where you can find coverage of the Curiosity rover and other amazing things.)