In astrophotography the combination of a goto mount, a camera and plate-solving is a powerful one. It allows you to do all kind of neat things, like polar-alignment without having a clear view of the south, extremely accurate goto functionality, and automated capture of multiple predefined targets.
There are roughly …
I, like many people, thought that lower ISO means less noise. However this isn't true, at least not for modern camera. As a first order approximation, my understanding is that the signal path looks something like this:
I recently tried my hands at implementing motion event support for canvas widgets in Toga on Linux, which uses GTK3 as its GUI back end. In the process I had learn to navigate GDK's event handling mechanics and documentation. This post is a summary of notes I made during the …
I recently got a iOptron SmartEQ Pro+ mount and while setting it up I was confused over the time. Should it be local time and then I set the UTC offset in minutes? What do I do with the DST setting?
One way I found of checking whether my settings …
I have been using SpiderOak One since Edward Snowden recommended it in 2013, almost a decade ago. I have over 1.5T of deduplicated data spread across 6 or so devices. This year, in 2022, I will not be renewing my subscriptions.
The main issues:
On an ASUS E203M
Installed fine but kernel (4.9?) would immediately shutdown after decrypting the root volume due to incorrect thermal readings. Was not able to disable this via thermal.nocrt=1 boot param
Live system did not have working mouse. Did not proceed to …
I finally got my own 3D printer, a FlashForge Creator Pro, during the EOFY sale. My choices were between the Creator Pro or the Up Mini 2 ES with the build volume of the Creator Pro being the deciding factor.
Had bit of a rocky start with …
On the 12th of November 2019, Nationals MP Barnaby Joyce said on TV that:
I acknowledge that the two people who died were most likely people who voted for the Green party, so I am not going to start attacking them. That's the last thing I want to do.
Why …
That resistor on the data line? Yeah you need it. Otherwise you might blow an LED which renders the entire rest of the strip useless. If that happens cut out the first LED and solder the power and data lines directly to the second LED.
T102HAAS.303 Breaks SuspendAfter upgrading my Asus Transformer Mini's BIOS to T102HAAS.303 suspend was completely broken. Closing the "lid" would cause some kind of suspend that cannot be disabled in software and from which Linux 4.15.0 cannot successfully resume from (actually it does resume but the …
Create a USB drive with a single FAT32 partition then extract the installation ISO into it using 7z:
7z x /path/to/ISO -o/path/to/usb
Note that there is no space between -o and the following path.
Plug in the USB drive then turn on the …
I needed to read Lecroy binary waveforms files recently, and the one python script I had found didn't read them properly due to improper handling of 16 bit samples.
I wrote an alternative lecroy.py that should be a drop-in replacement. It handles 16 bit waveforms and exports a LecroyBinaryWaveform …
Arduino-Makefile needed coaxing to in order to compile code targeting the SparkFun Pro Micro 3.3V. A major source of headache is the requirement for BOARD_SUB which isn't documented and required diving into the source code, and also the fact the Pro Micro has 2 PIDs for each variant (5V …
A common pitfall of trying to use message forwarding in Objective-C is forgetting to implement
- (NSMethodSignature *)methodSignatureForSelector:(SEL)aSelector
in addition to
- (void)forwardInvocation:(NSInvocation *)anInvocation
Another problem is that sometimes calling objects will use
- (BOOL)respondsToSelector:(SEL)aSelector
to determine if your proxy object can respond to a particular …
I recently started having trouble with Arduino 1.6.x not being able to program Arduino Micro or SparkFun Pro Micro, with avrdude complaining about permission denied when trying to open /dev/ACM0.
The usual solutions to this is to add oneself to the dialup group, or mess around in …
Some issues I ran into when trying to move a Linux install from a 500 GB drive to a smaller 120 G SSD:
I recently acquired a used Lenovo X220 for use as a linux laptop, and needed the following in my openbox configuration XML to make the hardware speaker and mic mute buttons work:
<!-- Modified for X220 -->
<keybind key="XF86AudioMute">
<action name="Execute">
<command>pactl set-sink-mute 0 toggle</command>
</action>
</keybind>
<keybind …