This week we mourn the passing of Satoru Iwata, who had been head of Nintendo for 13 years and we celebrate the success of New Horizons. But we start with Prime Day.

Amazon’s Prime Day

Did you know that today is Prime Day? No, I’m not talking about math, I’m talking about the Amazon membership service.

I’ve been a Prime member for a couple of years, and for an annual fee of $79, I get free two-day shipping on lots of my purchases from Amazon. I could also get unlimited photo storage with Amazon’s Cloud Drive as a Prime member.

I purchase sufficient items from Amazon that I more than earn back my annual fee in shipping charges (or time and fuel, if I was going to source things from local retailers).

And to encourage non-members to join Prime, Amazon invented Prime Day, which they say has “more deals than Black Friday”.

Yes, it’s a consumer event to drive people to buy things. But there are some great deals to be had, and I won’t have to pay for anything to be sent directly to my door.

Everything from home appliances and tools to pet supplies. Movies and games, as well as headphones, mobile accessories, and home theatre systems.

Many of those were timed specials that were available throughout the day, but there are 12 deals of the day that are up until the sale ends

• There’s a decent 2 TB external hard drive from Seagate for $100, which is 44% off.
• There are product bundles from GoPro, PS4, and Xbox One.
• There’s a 55-inch HD TV for only $600 (the brand is Proscan, which I cannot speak to).
• The best of the bunch is the complete Breaking Bad series on Blu-ray, which comes in a limited edition meth barrel.

You have until midnight, Pacific time. Hie thee to Amazon.

Nintendo chief executive Satoru Iwata has died

Japanese video game company Nintendo announced on the weekend that its CEO, Satoru Iwata, had died of cancer at the age of 55.

For those of you who aren’t gamers, think of it like this. Iwata’s impact was much the same as Steve Jobs, and his loss is being felt as deeply by fans around the world.

In a presentation at the Game Developer’s Conference in 2005, he said, “On my business card, I am a corporate president. In my mind, I am a game developer. In my heart I am a gamer.”

Iwata was responsible for Nintendo’s Wii game system, which was released in 2006 to compete with the PS3 and Xbox 360. While the competing consoles were high-powered with amazing graphical fidelity, the Wii instead featured motion-sensing controllers with family-friendly game titles and became one of the best selling game consoles in history.

He also directed the development of the Nintendo DS, a disruptive gaming console that helped establish gaming as a portable entertainment.

Tributes are everywhere, but the best is this one from game developer Simogo, in the form of a simple game experience that honours Iwata’s game, Balloon Fight, which he made in 1985.

News from Pluto

We know more about Pluto — and its moon, Charon — than ever before, thanks to the
New Horizons spacecraft which Tuesday completed a flyby past the planet.

We’ve learned that Pluto has:

• an atmosphere
• a red tinge to its colouring
• geographical features including ice mountains that are as high as 3,400 metres (twice as tall as Mount Seymour, on a planetoid which is only as wide as the distance between Vancouver and San Diego), which means it’s geologically active
• no impact craters, which tells us it’s young (less than 100 million years)
• at least five moons.

We’re going to learn a lot more, too. But it will take 16 months for the rest of the data from New Horizons to reach Earth.

It took nine years for New Horizons to travel the nearly 5 billion km to Pluto. To put this in context, if we were to lay out the solar system on the ground of a big field, we could hop from Mercury to Earth. And we’d have to walk across the entire field to reach Pluto.

New Horizons passed extremely close to Pluto, too, only an Earth’s diameter away. Being able to get that close to an object so far away is an extraordinary feat, described by astronomers, including administrator Charles Bolden, as being equivalent to hitting a golf ball from New York and getting a hole in one in Los Angeles.

Just check out the images. These are high-resolution photos of a world we’ve never seen up close before.

Next, New Horizons heads further out, hopefully to get data on other objects in the Kuiper Belt, a region similar to an asteroid belt but which consist of bigger objects composed of ices, as opposed to the rocks and metals most asteroids consist of.

The video below, part of the Pluto in a Minute series from NASA, shows us some of the images of the worlds in our solar system, the first of which was of Mars, taken by Mariner 4 on July 14, 1965.