The actor who voiced The Robot from classic 1960s TV show Lost In Space has died at the age of 85.

Character actor Dick Tufeld passed away at a Los Angeles hospital on Sunday after a battle with Parkinson’s disease.

Very sad; I grew up on re-runs of Lost In Space, and always held out hope they’d try another movie, only this time one that didn’t suck.

I want one. Might need to do something about air-conditioning the back yard so the poor snow leopard doesn’t die of heat stroke, but it’d be worth it.

Millionaire game developer Garriott – aka Lord British in Ultima and General British in Tabula Rasa – shot the film during his 10-day tourist jaunt up to the ISS, while performing his other orbital duties. Without giving too much of the plot away, it involves a mysterious passenger who sneaks aboard the ISS for their own reasons, and it contains knowing nods to many of the greats of the science fiction genre. An audience’s-heads-in-frame bootleg can be seen here.

Pure awesome.

Moderate levels of alcohol delivered an increase in longevity among test subjects in a recent study that Steven Clarke, UCLA professor of chemistry and biochemistry and senior author on a study published yesterday in the journal PLoS One, described as “shocking”.

After the conference I was at last weekend, I think I’m going to live forever.

NASA has switched off a heater on a part of the Voyager 1 probe, plunging the temperature of its one functioning instrument to below minus 110° Fahrenheit (minus 79°C) – well below the minimum temps of minus 31° Fahrenheit (minus 35° C) at which it was designed to operate.

And now the countdown until the events of “Star Trek: The Motion Picture” come to pass. Be on the look out for V’Ger.

A care provider with offices in the Isle of Man and Northern Ireland has committed to improving its data protection standards after losing a memory stick containing unencrypted patient data.

The charity, Praxis Care, lost the memory stick in August 2011.

The device held personal information relating to 107 Isle of Man residents and 53 individuals from Northern Ireland, which in some cases related to their mental health and care. It has not been recovered, according to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).

It’s amazing that this kind of thing continues to happen. Encryption guys – it’s not difficult or expensive (especially compared to the cost of losing it!).

More interestingly, why was this data walking around on a USB stick in the first place? As well as encrypting data, people need to start looking at containing it. Why is someone trying to copy patient data? Are they authorised to do so? Is the device an authorised destination? DLP doesn’t have to be difficult or onerous to implement.

Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals NHS Trust told Out-Law.com that hard drives containing patient data had been sold on the auction website by a contractor it employed to destroy them. A spokesperson for the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) said the watchdog had proposed fining the Trust £375,000 over the incident. The Trust has challenged the suggested penalty. “We were the victims of a crime,” Duncan Selbie, chief executive of Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals NHS Trust said in a statement. “We subcontracted the destruction of these hard drives to a registered contractor who subsequently sold them on eBay.

If you want something done right, do it yourself.

Sure, securely erasing hard drives can be time consuming… but it’s a lot better than a 375k fine and the loss of reputation and good will.

With Google Sync for iOS, the default setting when you delete email in your iOS Mail app is that Gmail will archive the message and not delete it.

A new option “Delete Email As Trash” is now available. When you Enable “Delete Email As Trash” for this device, pressing Delete in your iOS Mail app will delete that email from your device and send it to your Gmail Trash.

Finally!

My biggest complaint with using Gmail with an external client (eg Mail on an iPhone) is that delete doesn’t really delete – it archives. I don’t want it to archive, I want it to delete!

Sure, using the Gmail app or the browser view works around this, but that really doesn’t solve the problem.

Now, finally, you can configure the action from the Google Sync settings page on your mobile device.