* This morning Windows 7 service pack 1 came along and installed without issue on a 2 year old HP laptop.
It did take a couple of reboots and the better part of an hour but it did come back up!
* WordPress upgraded today as well from 3.0.5 to 3.1 No issues.
* Our new 1tb WD Caviar Green SATA drive arrived last night.. only $60! Will be used as a live daily backup inside the file server, replacing two older 500gb IDE drives that run hotter and noisier.
We were notified that we are joining the throngs of Ontario Hydro One Time of Use power users next month.
It has been a long time coming but they appear to have their ducks in a row. We signed up to our online monitoring account and could see data back to 2011 Jan 4th.
The data is a nice display, but not in all of the useful formats I could think of. Namely a daily total kwh usage across time. Being able to download a spreadsheet file is a nice touch.
Our first order of business was to look at what we are doing right now and examine it for potential savings.
Never do dishes until the low rates, after 9pm or weekends.
Never do laundry until the low rates. Cooking will be a bit of a challenge, what with winter high rates starting when one normally gets home.
We’ve added two programmable timers for our baseboard heat and will slightly reprogram those to our advantage. Some of our baseboards have manual controls right on the units themselves and as far as we can tell, do not lend themselves at all to upgrading to a timer.
We were able to pop into our very first meeting of the Bath Garden Club on Monday Feb 21st (2011) as it was a holiday for us. Having a 2pm afternoon meeting is good only for those who don’t work. We had to search around a bit as well to find the place but when we did it was quite a nice facility.. a very large church community hall. One of the items on the agenda was the thought of creating a website. Bravo!
Put clear directions to our meetings on it! Agendas of meetings! Project list of historical stuff. Etc.
You’ll get the idea!
We collect and grow out heritage/heirloom seeds. We believe that commercial big retail fruits and veg are optimized/chosen for transport and “prettiness” and not for taste, freshness or health.
So we inventory our seeds each winter and prepare for the spring plantings.
Here is our 2010 Seed inventory. Please note that these are not for sale publically, but rather are posted here for information only.
We’ve noticed for the last few months that the images coming out of the allsky camera were dimmer and lower contrast than previous images. So after a couple of hours researching and testing I discovered that the netpbm collection of software is under constant modification and upgrade. I suspect along the way that some default settings had changed with our fitstopnm and pnmtojpeg programs.
Our processing scripts look something like this:
old
/usr/bin/fitstopnm $i | pnmtojpeg -quality=95 > 1-$i.jpg
convert -interlace NONE -noise 1 1-$i.jpg 2-$i.jpg
new
/usr/bin/fitstopnm $i | ppmbrighten -v 300 | pnmtojpeg -quality=100 > 1-$i.jpg
convert -interlace NONE -noise 1 1-$i.jpg 2-$i.jpg
basically this takes the fits image and brightens up each pixel 300% and now we save the jpg at 100% and not 95%
We reran the processing scripts on the original .FITs images from the last run and got these results:
It makes a real difference. One of the problems is that we would have to reprocess maybe three months of images and just doing the one day took approx 20 minutes on our old amd athon XP 2200+ 1.8GHz 1gb server. That works out to about 90*1/3 or 30 hours.
The whole point behind this camera system is to detect fireballs (very bright meteors), showing local cloud cover and lastly gathering pretty pictures of the night sky.
Our Kidde Carbon Monoxide Detector was making noises every 30 seconds last night when we got home.
Checked the three AA batteries and they were a little low but not bad. So we replaced them with three new, tested ones in any event and the *(&$!@^ still kept on beeping. The sticker on it said it was made in 2003 March, making it 8 years old. Probably time to get a new one in any event.
But first, let’s try to find a manual to see exactly what the 30 second noises mean. How to you find a manual from 8 years ago? Turns out, not easily at home at all. But google does help… typing in the make: Kidde, model number: KN-COB-B and the word manual, we found a 10 page PDF online that described the error as “unit error”.
We tried cycling the batteries, resetting the unit over and over and still the same problem.
Sounds like it is toast.
The February meeting of the Lennox and Addington Horticultural Society was last night, Wednesday Feb 16th.
Too bad it conflicted with the new season of Survivor and the finale of the New Computer Overlord Watson vs the humans in Jeopardy!
Our guest speaker Joanne Chamberlain was from Willowbrook Farms CSA. She described their Community Shared Agriculture operation near Bath Ontario, in great detail.
We also chatted about record keeping with the membership, asking them to keep records this year of the last light and heavy frost of the spring and the first light and heavy frost of the fall. I intend to take that info and plot it on a local map to ge a feel for local microclimates.
Our cooperative project with the Napanee District High School and their greenhouse is going ahead again this year.
No known local bus tours are being held for the Peterborough Garden Show or Canada Blooms, as have happened in years past.
The seti@home project has been quite a lot the last few weeks and as a result we went out and added in a 2nd project to most of the computers processing away, keeping the house warm in this cold season. SETI@home is a scientific experiment that uses Internet-connected computers in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). You can participate by running a free program that downloads and analyzes radio telescope data.
Einstein@home is a program that uses your computer’s idle time to search for gravitational waves from spinning neutron stars (also called pulsars) using data from the LIGO gravitational wave detector.
2011 Get a breath of Spring air at Greenhouse Open House
Kingstonians anxious for spring can get a taste of it at the City’s greenhouse which will open on a number of upcoming Sunday afternoons.
The greenhouse, located at 111 Norman Rogers Dr. (across from Centennial Public School), will be open to the public from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. on Feb. 13, 20 and 27 and March 6 and 13.
Spring bulbs and tropical plants are on display, including daffodils, tulips, and hyacinths. Greenhouse staff will be on hand to answer questions.
It’s been busy the last couple of weeks:
* Snow and more snow. The Great Groundhog Day Blizzard hit on Feb 2nd and left us with a pile.
* WordPress (the software behind this blog) was upgraded again.
* The Kingston Gardening Festival is coming up, the first Friday, Saturday and Sunday in March (4,5,6) at the Portsmouth Olympic Harbour.
* Income Tax software has hit the markets with Intuit changing the name of the Canadian Brand from Quicktax to Turbotax
* Lowes Home Improvement Warehouse has opened its doors in Kingston
* The SCO Allsky camera workstation (laptop) continues to work at 100%. It was recently raised up off the floor onto a custom built shelf in the observatory and seems to be liking it.
old processing
new processing