Is it a contrail from an alien spaceship? No. This ribbon in the sky was caught by the Hubble telescope a couple months ago and is simply a thin section of a supernova remnant over a thousand years ago.

Head on over to NASA’s mission pages to read all the details of this glorious Stars and Stripes.

Thar she blows!  Alright ye scurvy dogs, listen up.  Tomorrow (Sept. 19th) be “Talk Like A Pirate Day“, and yer expected to heave to tha poop deck, and show yer colors.  This not be a request, ya scallywags!  Show yer spirit and speak to everyone with yer inner pirate

Talk Like A Pirate Day is an original concept created in a moment of temporary insanity by John Baur and Mark Summers.

Let tha festivities commence!

Even Google is participating in Talk Like A Pirate Day!  Go check it out!

Magnify.net is a video publishing platform that makes it easy for you to integrate user-generated video, video that you produce, or video that you discover into your website. They provide a platform for you to tell your story through video and according to a recent press release:

…in less than 18 months they’ve become the largest provide of site-specific video aggregation solutions for publishers, brands, and Web-based communities. The results can be seen in the dramatic increase of Magnify-powered channels (now over 42,000), Magnify-hosted page views (approaching 1 million per day) and videos posted by the Magnify platform (now more than 5 million per month).

They’re in the news this week because they’re opening up their API to free the content in their ecosystem of 50M videos and enabling the content created, discovered and published in Magnify to be taken anywhere.

You can see the API in action here:

• http://phpapidemo.magnify.net/
• http://phpapidemo.magnify.net/more.php
• http://phpapidemo.magnify.net/playlists.php

This is essentially the same API in service today for 15 of the web’s most popular video hosting services included in Magnify’s service such as: YouTube, Metacafe, Dailymotion, Vimeo, Veoh, Hulu, MySpace, Blip.tv, Google Video, Revver, Yahoo Video, AOL Video, ClipSyndicate, MTV, CollegeHumor, Redlasso, and Howcast.

Imagine what’s possible when the community of web developers gets their hands on the API? I can hardly wait!

Software update 3.0 has been released to Zune. For me and my v1 30G Brown Zune, among the more interesting new features enabled in this update are:

- More Audiobook support. For instance via Audible.com and Overdrive.com, 2 of the more popular public libraries of audiobooks. You can get a free audiobook and a 30 day trial from Audible.

- Games Enabled! Several games are installed by default, the wife is already addicted to Helix, XNA Studio has now been released in beta and will allow you to load more Zune games

- Download selected TV episodes for free. As part of an NBC promotion this includes the following shows: The Office, 30 Rock, Battlestar Galactica, Psych, Monk, In Plain Sight, Heroes, Eureka, and Top Design.

For much more information check out zunerama and their report from Day 1.

Here’s a quick update on some recent Geeknews activity.

Lately, we’ve been inquiring with several well known product manufacturers to receive some items for review here on the blog.  So far, we’ve gotten some pretty good responses, such as the QPAD Mousemat.  Today, I received a prime item from the great folks over at Ironkey.  They sent us a 2gb Ironkey flash drive for review!

Over the next few days I’m going to put this unit through its paces, and give it a run for it’s money.  Afterwards, I’ll compose a complete write-up on it’s features and performance in everyday (and not so ordinary) use.  Look for it next week

Keep an eye out for new reviews, as Andy and I are pounding on the doors of many different innovative product manufacturers for goodies!

Are you an inventor, or have a gadget you’ve developed and want some prime exposure?  Shoot us an email, and we’ll be happy to chat with you.  We look forward to hearing from all of you!