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.

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).

Above, our tiny moon framed by the buildings around Oxford Circus.

I managed to get through two out of four halls today. Just finished uploading a bunch of photos. Time for sleep.

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.

1. Take one nice and wide elastic band and pull the ends through the venting holes on a Peltor G22 hard hat.
2. From the inside, adjust the size of the elastic loop to fit the player and tie the ends together with a wire tie.
3. 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.

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.

I shot the above photo of the ISS at about 20:49 local time tonight with an exposure time of 50 seconds. The space shuttle Discovery (STS-119) is at the moment docked with the station – according to the plan they will undock on the 25th. There are several visible passes on the 25th and the following few days. Just maybe the timing will be favorable and make it possible to see them as they separate. One pass lasting merely a few minutes, I guess the chances are slim, though.

// add_filter('the_content', 'wpautop');

Thanks to WordPress › Support » Unwanted <p> tags added to pages.

32 bottles of Coopers Real Ale ready for capping and bottle fermentation.

I’ve pushed all code for my projects to GitHub: see kms’s Profile for an overview. Their web interface to Git repositories is really nice and you can use it to browse syntax-highlighted source code as well as history of my projects. What’s better is that you can sign up for a free account and press the ‘fork’ button to create your own copy of the project – history and all. You can then improve the code (shouldn’t be too hard) and tell me to pull your changes back or publish your own version (thanks to the GNU GPL). They’ve also got other nifty stuff like the punch card:

If you are really really interested in what kind of books I have, you can now browse my entire library (almost) over at LibraryThing. A very cool service indeed. They’ve got author clouds, recommendations based on my books and even an RSS feed if you want to keep updated on the expansion of my collection. Importing was a breeze thanks to my Eee and CueCat with USB and encryption disabling modification (not strictly necessary, but still cool).

While waiting for the ferry in Hirtshals last summer, I shot a few photos. Below is a panorama stitched together with Hugin from 29 images. After cropping, the pixel count is ~46M. I think Hugin does a really good job, it is hard to notice any “stitch lines” or artifacts.

Grab the full resolution at Flickr or from my download area.

Apache VirtualHost configuration

<Proxy *>
    Order deny,allow
    Allow from all
</Proxy>
ProxyRequests off
ProxyPass /cc/ http://localhost:3333/
ProxyPassReverse /cc/ http://localhost:3333/

CruiseControl.rb config/environments/production.rb

ActionController::AbstractRequest.relative_url_root = "/cc"

tweez

This is the way to bookmark pages. Just Shift-T, type in a few tags (keywords) and hit enter. Done! I don’t bother with bookmark categories anymore, I just type tag names directly into the AwesomeBar instead of browsing through a hierarchical category system (like, so totally 2007). Unlike categories, multiple tags can also be combined. For example, I add work to anything related to my job which makes it really easy to find later. There are also other tools, such as TagSifter which provides a better way to browse bookmarks by tags.

Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer

If you bookmark pages and use multiple computers, you need this one. Once set up, it is completely transparent.

Greasemonkey

I have this for wikiEd. While wikiEd is really great, and by having it as a Greasemonkey script it is instantly available on all MediaWiki platforms, it is hardly even the tip of the iceberg of what is possible with Greasemonkey. One starting point is userscripts.org.

It’s All Text

Just like the Pragmatic Programmer says: “Use a Single Editor Well. The editor should be an extension of your hand; make sure your editor is configurable, extensible, and programmable.”. How configurable, extensible, and programmable is the default text field? Great book, by the way.

Tabs Open Relative

Makes you wonder why this is not the default way to open tags.

Web Developer

Very useful when working on HTML and CSS. Sometimes slightly useful when browsing the web. Like when you stumble upon a form that should have had its method set to GET.

Flashblock

Nice to have on old or slow computers.

Ubiquity

I use this mostly for doing Google and Amazon searches by highlighting a term or title in the text. Getting an instant preview of the results saves you for first opening up a search page. Like with Greasemonkey above, there are tons of scripts available.