Thermal imaging for fun and profit
Hedy the cat.
This weekend I got the chance to borrow the thermographic camera from work. The idea was to do an inspection of the house insulation, but it’s also a fun tool to just play around with. Above, my cat. The coldest spot? The moist nose.
Cold draft from a pair of doors.
Galileoscope arrives
Finally! The Galileoscope arrived today! I’ve never used a telescope before and have been looking forward to trying out this very affordable ($15) product. I’ve uploaded a few photos from the unboxing to flickr.
Assembly was very easy and I had no problem locating Jupiter and spotting four of its moons with the 25x magnification. Using the 50x magnification was a lot harder and probably needs some more practice. Below: getting a shot of Jupiter with a compact camera through the telescope turned out to be next to impossible, so I used Stellarium to create a simulated image of approximately how Jupiter looked through the Galileoscope (the second object from the right is no moon).
40th anniversary of the moon landing
Above, our tiny moon framed by the buildings around Oxford Circus.
Ham Radio 2009: Day 1
I managed to get through two out of four halls today. Just finished uploading a bunch of photos. Time for sleep.
Ham Radio 2009: Day 0
Tonight, Friedrichshafen is full of cars with mag-mounted antennas, people wearing t-shirts and hats with their callsign printed on and there is even the occasional RFI on the hotel television. I’ve uploaded a few photos to my Ham Radio 2009 flickr set. Tomorrow we are leaving early for the exhibition.
I’m going to Ham Radio 2009
Tomorrow I’m leaving for Ham Radio 2009 in Friedrichshafen. This is the largest amateur radio convention in Europe and attracts tens of thousands of visitors every year. I’ll post photos to my Flickr account and maybe some updates here on the blog. So, stay tuned!
New camera: Canon IXUS 100 IS
A sample photo shot with my new Canon IXUS 100 IS camera:
Attaching an MP3 player to a hard hat
- Take one nice and wide elastic band and pull the ends through the venting holes on a Peltor G22 hard hat.
- From the inside, adjust the size of the elastic loop to fit the player and tie the ends together with a wire tie.
- If you want, add some friction between the player and hat surface by attaching a big furniture feet pad. I used a felt pad, rubber would be better.
Soldering PCB enclosures
When soldering enclosures out of copper-clad PCBs, two hex keys and a few small clamps come in real handy.
Auto-compacting folders in Thunderbird
I often use an SE K610i mobile phone to check my email over IMAP. However, I’ve got Thunderbird at home and when I delete or move messages out of the inbox it doesn’t delete them for real immediately. SquirreMail handles these semi-deleted messages fine, but the phone displays them. This has been pretty annoying and I’ve become almost obsessed with manually forcing Thunderbird to compact the folder whenever I delete or move messages out of the inbox. The proper solution is much simpler:
If Tools -> Account Settings -> Server Settings -> “When I delete a message” is set to “Move it to the Trash folder” and you set mail.imap.expunge_after_delete to true using the Config editor Thunderbird will compact the folder immediately after you delete or move a message. Note: Thunderbird ignores the modified mail.imap.expunge_after_delete setting until after you have exited and restarted Thunderbird.
Thanks to MozillaZine: Compacting folders.
