Vladimir Sobolev - Web Development & Design Est. 1997

Curiosity Rover on Track for Monday Landing

NEW: RAW images from Curiosity
Live video translation available on Ustream.com.
Mission details and highlights – Nasa.gov.
3D mission preview (live, JAVA required)

Ustream Nasa Live

With Mars looming ever larger in front of it, NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory spacecraft and its Curiosity rover are in the final stages of preparing for entry, descent and landing on the Red Planet at 10:31 p.m. PDT Aug. 5 (1:31 a.m. EDT Aug. 6). Curiosity remains in good health with all systems operating as expected. Today, the flight team uplinked and confirmed commands to make minor corrections to the spacecraft’s navigation reference point parameters. This afternoon, as part of the onboard sequence of autonomous activities leading to the landing, catalyst bed heaters are being turned on to prepare the eight Mars Lander Engines that are part of MSL’s descent propulsion system. As of 2:25 p.m. PDT (5:25 p.m. EDT), MSL was approximately 261,000 miles (420,039 kilometers) from Mars, closing in at a little more than 8,000 mph (about 3,600 meters per second).

Pheasant Run Resort

Pheasant Run – my first DATA:URI project. 2009.

The data URI scheme is a URI scheme (Uniform Resource Identifier scheme) that provides a way to include data in-line in web pages as if they were external resources. This technique allows normally separate elements such as images and style sheets to be fetched in a single HTTP request rather than multiple HTTP requests, which can be more efficient.

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Field & Stream

Field and Stream – my first project in HeBS. May 2009.

Development: Vladimir Sobolev
Design: Tim Sklyarov

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Nexus 7

Nexus 7: powerful, portable and designed for Google Play

All of this great Google Play content comes to life on Nexus 7, a powerful new tablet with a vibrant, 7” 1280×800 HD display. The Tegra-3 chipset, with a quad-core CPU and 12-core GPU, makes everything, including games, extremely fast. And best of all, it’s only 340 grams, lighter than most tablets out there. Nexus 7 was built to bring you the best of Google in the palm of your hand. Hang out with up to 10 friends on Google+ using the front-facing camera, browse the web blazingly fast with Chrome and, of course, crank through your emails with Gmail.

Nexus Q

Nexus Q: It’s a sphere!

It’s great to be able to take your entertainment with you wherever you go, but sometimes you want to ditch the headphones and enjoy music with friends and family. So we’re introducing Nexus Q, which combines the power of Android and Google Play to easily stream music and video in your home—all controlled by an Android phone or tablet. Designed and engineered by Google, Nexus Q is a small sphere that plugs into the best speakers and TV in your house. It’s the first-ever social streaming device—like a cloud-connected jukebox where everyone brings their own music to the party. Available first in the U.S., you can preorder Nexus Q today from Google Play for $299, and it will ship mid-July.

Adobe Brackets – A New HTML/CSS/JavaScript Open-Source IDE

Brackets is an open-source editor for web design and development built on top of web technologies such as HTML, CSS and JavaScript. The project was created and is maintained by Adobe, and is released under an MIT License.

Among the most interesting aspects to this new IDE project is that:

It’s Adobe Systems Inc.
It’s 100% Open Source
It’s being developed in entirely the open, a new approach by Adobe and means everyone is invited to join the team (and release party)
Its written entirely in HTML, CSS and JavaScript itself

Brackets is still in the oven and needs to bake a little longer before it’s a full-featured code editor. The milestone builds available on GitHub are there for contributors and those special kind of crazy designers and developers who like to live on the edge. Performance, stability and features are all in flux. Use at your own risk.
However, if you like living on the bleeding edge, just view the wiki for info on how to download and run Brackets.

Fork it on GitHub!

The New MacBook Pro

The new 15.4″ Retina-ready, 2.3 GHz quad-core i7, 8 GB RAM, 256 GB flash next generation MacBook Pro ships today at $2199. The higher-end version with 2.6 GHz quad-core Intel Core i7 processor, Turbo Boost speeds up to 3.6 GHz, 8GB of memory and 512GB of flash storage starts at $2799. Configure-to-order options include faster quad-core processors up to 2.7 GHz, up to 16GB of memory and flash storage up to 768GB.

Starting today, customers who purchase a Mac will also get a free copy of Mountain Lion when it ships later this summer.

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Introducing Google Drive… yes, finally!

With Google Drive, you can:

Create and collaborate. Google Docs is built right into Google Drive, so you can work with others in real time on documents, spreadsheets and presentations. Once you choose to share content with others, you can add and reply to comments on anything (PDF, image, video file, etc.) and receive notifications when other people comment on shared items.
Store everything safely and access it anywhere (especially while on the go). All your stuff is just… there. You can access your stuff from anywhere—on the web, in your home, at the office, while running errands and from all of your devices. You can install Drive on your Mac or PC and can download the Drive app to your Android phone or tablet. We’re also working hard on a Drive app for your iOS devices. And regardless of platform, blind users can access Drive with a screen reader.
Search everything. Search by keyword and filter by file type, owner and more. Drive can even recognize text in scanned documents using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology. Let’s say you upload a scanned image of an old newspaper clipping. You can search for a word from the text of the actual article. We also use image recognition so that if you drag and drop photos from your Grand Canyon trip into Drive, you can later search for [grand canyon] and photos of its gorges should pop up. This technology is still in its early stages, and we expect it to get better over time.

You can get started with 5GB of storage for free—that’s enough to store the high-res photos of your trip to the Mt. Everest, scanned copies of your grandparents’ love letters or a career’s worth of business proposals, and still have space for the novel you’re working on. You can choose to upgrade to 25GB for $2.49/month, 100GB for $4.99/month or even 1TB for $49.99/month. When you upgrade to a paid account, your Gmail account storage will also expand to 25GB.

Get started with Drive today at drive.google.com/start — and keep looking for Nessie…

Google Dtive available for download for Mac and PC.

Win a Nikon D800 or Canon 5D Mark III

Great contest from Fstoppers and SLR Lounge! Don’t miss your chance of winning!

Project Google Glass

Google unveiled a YouTube video teasing its augmented reality eyeglasses, a pair of spectacles that interacts with what you’re seeing and acts as a smartphone, day planner, turn-by-turn navigation system, camera and more.

For up-to-the-minute information on the new specs, you can follow Project Glass and its major players on Google+