Merry Two Days After Christmas, Here Are Holiday Tech Things From The Week

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Hello queermos! Did you know I write Queer Your Tech two days in advance most weeks? That means I’m coming to you from Christmas Day. So even though it’s two days after Christmas, the holiday cheer is alive in my soul. This week, Neil deGrasse Tyson tweeted some fun photos of the Macy’s Christmas windows:

Alex & his dog float in space above Jupiter & Saturn. Joyriding with Santa in @Macys #ChristmasWindows pic.twitter.com/dlhDJlFHaA

— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) December 23, 2014

Alex visits Olympus Mons on Mars, aboard Santa's interplanetary Sleigh. @Macys #ChristmasWindows. pic.twitter.com/DNOC6pVQce

— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) December 23, 2014

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Little boy Alex travels aboard Santa's interplanetary sleigh. @Macys, New York City #ChristmasWindows pic.twitter.com/pJKgqTQw5I

— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) December 23, 2014

And my fiancée surprised me with a trip to the American Museum of Natural History. So I’m in a very space mood and all of this reminded me of the wonderful new photos of Saturn’s moons we’re getting from Cassini. This is in comparison to our former photos of Saturn’s moons that we got from Voyager. Check it. This one’s from Voyager:

And this one’s from Cassini:

mimasmap_cassini_warped

You can see the whole lot of them compared at NASA’s site.

Nasa also put out a video called Holiday Lights on the Sun. It’s a video of various solar flares:

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Then we have Christmas robots from the lovelies over at Autonomous Systems Lab, ETH Zurich. They do this every year, just FYI.

And lastly, thanks to Gizmodo, we know that the biggest threat in the technology world this week isn’t a kinda bad but really controversial movie or the Christmas hackers that hate video games. Nay. It’s Dad’s with Drones. Apparently many many fathers received drones this Christmas. My mother got my father one last year, which he is incredibly good at flying. Not so, though, for most dads. Which is especially bad for dogs and trees. And dads:

My dad already hurt himself with his drone

— Chase Gunther (@GuntherChase) December 25, 2014

https://twitter.com/adamenglebright/status/547802769932169216

https://twitter.com/mbass_0/status/548165226915299328

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This has been the one-hundred-tenth installment of Queer Your Tech with Fun, Autostraddle’s nerdy tech column. Not everything we cover is queer per se, but we talk about customizing this awesome technology you’ve got. Having it our way, expressing our appy selves just like we do with our identities. Here we can talk about anything from app recommendations to choosing a wireless printer to web sites you have to favorite to any other fun shit we can do with technology. Header by Rory Midhani.

Feature image via Extreme Tech.

A.E. Osworth

A.E. Osworth is part-time Faculty at The New School, where they teach undergraduates the art of digital storytelling. Their novel, We Are Watching Eliza Bright, about a game developer dealing with harassment (and narrated collectively by a fictional subreddit), is forthcoming from Grand Central Publishing (April 2021) and is available for pre-order now. They have an eight-year freelancing career and you can find their work on Autostraddle (where they used to be the Geekery Editor), Guernica, Quartz, Electric Lit, Paper Darts, Mashable, and drDoctor, among others.