Afternoon all,

My Olympic fever gauge is still quite high, big closing w/e to come. But on Monday morning I found myself putting Olympic excitement on the back burner and waking up freakishly early to watch the Curiosity Mars Rover land on Mars and start sending pictures back to Earth.

As a marvel of modern technology you were able to live stream the action and see inside the NASA control room and get footage at the same time as them. A truly momentous occasion and if you are interested in that kind of thing the NASA app is continuing to do live shows about it all.

Here is a glorious shot of a Martian sunrise

Curious to know how the Curiosity got the pic?: A nice piece from Digital Photography Review where they discuss the camera choices (it’s only 2mb) and some of the data constraints involved with beaming pictures 150M miles. Amazingly the data limits on Mars are 4x what O2 customers are offered on the main monthly contract.

Curiosity Tweets: In a really nice move NASA decided to create a 1st person twitter account for the Curiosity Rover

Google Doodles for Olympics:

Seemlessly linking from Mars the Google Doodles (look above the G) during the Olympics have been pretty special. Showing off some nice HTML5 functionality many of the Olympic themed drawings have been mini games. Click here to check them out and have a go. If you can break 40 on the Basketball I want to hear about it and demand a screengrab for proof.

Olympic tech 2012: Gadgets and gizmos of the games Whilst Sir Chris Hoy and co sweep up the medals with their incremental edges due to new technology and covering off the finest of details in the Velodrome the Olympics is also a host to huge amount of tech in its own right. Want to know more about the Timing clocks or how you measure a hit in Taekwondo then scratch your head no more

Bolt photographer: And if you watched the 200m last night you might have seen Bolt take a photographers camera and start snapping away, here are the images if you are interested

And finally... We all spend far to much time in Excel so here is a nice little Excel smile for you to carry you in to the Friday finish line, a music video made entirely in Excel

And here is how it (and all 740 frames) was made

Have a great w/e.

Oli.