Archive for April, 2019

9 results.

Spring has sprung

Apr26
by catz on April 26, 2019 at 12:51 and modified on April 30, 2019. at 13:57
Posted In: gardening, tech, weather

You know spring has sprung when you plant peas and clean out eavestroughs… well at least the planting peas part.
Seeds from 2013, 2015 and 2017? or 2018? were planted into our Vegbed #4 alongside a shed that will shade them in the afternoon and evening.
The ground is still cold, and in places still frozen only 6″ down. Even the garlic raised beds seem to be frozen 6-10″ down.


The eavestroughs had to be cleaned out as we are supposed to be getting 25-50mm of rain today and into Saturday morning. They were pretty packed solid of detritus. The Davis Vantage Vue weather station is down again and for the foreseeable future, as yet another brand new lithium 3vdc battery went dead, within just a few days. We are now looking to connect and external power supply to it and see if it is working at all anymore.
Getting a replacement Davis Vantage Vue is out of the question, mainly because of the outrageous prices.
as seen on amazon.ca
Davis Instruments 6250 Vantage Vue Wireless Weather Station with LCD Console by Davis Instruments
Price: CDN$ 529.20 FREE SHIPPING.
Well at least there is free shipping!
But wait.. there’s more! This model does not connect to a PC for data logging purposes. For that you need
Davis Instruments WeatherLinkIP Data Logger and Software for Vantage Weather Stations by Davis Instruments
Price: CDN$ 329.58 & FREE Shipping. Details

Well at least there is free shipping!

This is unbelievable in this day and age of microelectronics and USB everywhere.
There are alternatives out there and if the external power supply repair does not work out, those alternatives will be closely looked at.

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Another Imac Transplant

Apr26
by catz on April 26, 2019 at 12:38 and modified on May 2, 2019. at 12:01
Posted In: tech

Just completed a second Spinning hard drive (Seagate 500GB 7200rpm) to Solid State Drive transplant in an older Imac. This time it was a 21.5″ mid2011 Imac, and it was different from the 21.5″ late2015 model I did first.
All in all it took about 35 minutes and the next one will go faster.
The machine was powered down, unplugged and left to cool for a time. The screen cover was attached by magnets this time, not double sided adhesive… so it came off quite quickly. The screen itself had nine Torx10 screws holding it in. I had only a Torx9 bit but it worked well. The supermagnets that held the screen cover on did attract both bit and screw a lot.
The display came out of the case enough to start disconnecting four ribbon cables, only one of which had a latch mechanism. The Drive itself came out with only two torx8 screws, the sata power and data cables removed.
The 240GB SSD went in, connected to the cables and just left in the cavity unsecured and with no special temperature sensor for fan control that many articlse write about.
The four ribbon cables went back in without issue, the display reinserted and screwed in and the screen cover clipped on without issue.
Power up ran normally if maybe just a little faster.
Previously the 240GB SSD drive was in an external USB3 case (upto 5Gbps), now it is connected internally to a SATA3 connection (upto 6Gbps)… so if anything, it might be just a little bit faster.
powerup sound to logo 20seconds
powerup sound to login 30 seconds.
Not bad at all.

This should give the Imac a longer life, especially since it will now run cooler without the spinning drive inside, and use less power.
Now we can start looking at another half dozen machines in the near future.
* updated 2019 May 02 * completed two more mid-2011 21.5″ Imacs with the magnets without any issues, both in under 30 minutes each.

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cloudy april

Apr25
by catz on April 25, 2019 at 10:47 and modified on April 25, 2019. at 10:51
Posted In: astronomy


So far this April, we have managed only 9 days out of 25 to do some type of astronomy related activities.
This image is of the moon and Jupiter two mornings ago and helps to illustrate why… CLOUD!
In general we have windows of opportunity of about 1 hour in the morning, maybe a 1/2 hour after work and then maybe 2 hours in the evening. Funny how the cloud seems to follow a lot of that same pattern!

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windows 10 bah!

Apr19
by catz on April 19, 2019 at 08:25 and modified on April 19, 2019. at 08:39
Posted In: tech


I installed this 120GB SSD in place of the older larger spinning harddrive in my primary laptop workstation some time ago. 120GB is a little tight for space so I uninstalled all of the Crapware that Microsoft brings along with windows 10.
Today I was particularly low on space and decided to dig a little deeper… and found several more GB of files that were supposed to have been gone. Namely the Candy Crush Saga game located in c:\program files\windowsapps\
wow. Hard to get to.. had to take onwership of the files, change permissions and propogate those down. but it is paying off.. 5GB of files gone so far.
Amazing how much space those programs have, and even more so.. that they were not deleted when told to do so.
Zune. Xbox, solitare, and many many more. Looks like about 7GB in all.
Now using the disk cleanup tool in win10.. another 10GB in the update cleanup!
Now we are talking about serious disk space recovery!

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big wind

Apr15
by catz on April 15, 2019 at 09:43
Posted In: gardening

Another big wind storm went through over the weekend… and this fairly new Lee Valley hoop house had it grommet tore out of the structure, picked up and tossed against the fence.

We managed to put it back together and recover up the lettuces, radishes, etc, hopefully without any harm.

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supersid operational

Apr14
by catz on April 14, 2019 at 16:59 and modified on April 15, 2019. at 09:51
Posted In: astronomy, tech

SuperSID receiver

supersid receiver, basically just an RF preamp


Our supersid system has been operating at the edge of the property for 3 years now, mainly to get as faraway from any house generated RFI as we can. Too bad the wifi was intermittent, even with a relay. The netbook itself also suffered from some issues, like locking up or rebooting and not finding its boot drive.
So we made the decision to bring in the netbook, move the antenna over closer to some other computers with wired connections. The antenna was mounted on a 4×4 post in concrete and after a lot of digging then dragging, the antenna and mount were in their new location.
Attempts to get the supersid receiver working on a windows 10 laptop totally failed. All it required was a 5vdc power supply which it got through a usb jack, and the audio output from the receiver into the laptop. We tried various usb sound adapters, the original multiport audio jack and everything else we could think of. All of it came up with was no audio input.. ever.
So this afternoon, the old netbook came back into service, this time on a wired network, and all is working well. If the netbook itself behaves, we should have the first results sometime after 20:00 EDT tomorrow.
The long term plan remains to replace the data logging netbook with a raspberry pi and some python code. Less power, more reliable…

new location of loop antenna for supersid, aimed east

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Gardening in April

Apr05
by catz on April 5, 2019 at 09:22 and modified on April 5, 2019. at 09:36
Posted In: gardening


It is only April the 5th, but yesterday we were out surveying the gardens and trying to ignore the piles of snow still here and there.
Great plans are being made … and bumping right up against the reality of frozen ground.
The hoop house in VegBed11 seems to be helping… the air temperature inside was much warmer than outside after work yesterday. We will throw in a thermometer shortly to measure the air and ground temperature inside the small Lee Valley hoophouse.
Tomatos will be planted this weekend, and will go into the greenhouse as there is not enough room left in the house… which means the electric heat in the greenhouse will have to come on as well.
It is all hurry up and wait as there is a tremendous amount of outdoor work needed to be done as soon as possible.

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Davis Vantage Vue Weather Station repair

Apr04
by catz on April 4, 2019 at 08:09 and modified on April 19, 2019. at 08:41
Posted In: life the universe and everything, tech

Update: 12 days later the new CR123 lithium battery died as well. No data is logged during the night period, and even if it is really cloudy in the day either. We’ve contacted Davis and are awaiting a reply.

Weather station


We set up the Davis Vantage Vue wireless weather station in 2013 January. For the most part it has been running fine and better than the two previous stations we have had: Oregon WMR968 (2007 Jan – 2012 Dec) – Radioshack WX200 (2002 July – 2006 Dec).
However, back in the fall it started to act up. The symptoms were that it (the ISS/transmitter station package) stopped working at night. It has a CR123A lithium battery as backup to the solar panel which powers it during the day, so we thought it had just died. We purchased a new battery for about $5Can, tested it and installed it. The station startedworking again immediately… and after only a few weeks, it broke again. The new battery was dead.
OK. So maybe it was a bad battery. Install another new, tested battery. Worked fine for a few weeks then stopped again.
Some research said that the onboard “supercapacitor” had probably failed. Something that stores up extra solar panel power during the day to run the instrument package at night.
Last night I took down the ISS and took it apart. Inside was far less then I thought there would be and nowhere to be found was a supercapacitor.
Pictures will come later, but in essence the solar panel connects to the battery and to the instrument package, which is well sealed with goop against moisture. If there is a capacitor inside that package, I don’t want to open it up in fear that it will not be able to be sealed again.
So for the interim, purchase of some new CR123 batteries will happen today and the station will go back outside, to a new location… something more easily accessible (6′ instead of 8′ above ground, and not behind one more garden gate that freezes up in the winter).
After that we will look into larger external power sources and perhaps a newer bigger solar panel to help out.

Another interesting side effect of the outside ISS unit not working correctly… the indoor unit temperature acts very strange. On the image below the left side of the graph with noisy data is with the outdoor ISS unit out of service, the right side smooth data after the ISS is operational again.

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365 days of astronomy – april update

Apr02
by catz on April 2, 2019 at 09:55 and modified on April 2, 2019. at 09:59
Posted In: astronomy

In the theme of 365 Days of Astronomy, we made a New Year Resolution to attempt to observe or image every day possible in 2019.
These are the results:

The numbers are in for March 2019 in the 365 days of astronomy at SCGO

January 23/31
February 16/28
March 22/31

This totals 61/90 of days where one of the other of us has gone outdoors in the morning, afternoon or evening to image or observe.

Upcoming projects in April: recommission Supersid using a raspberry pi as a data logger; move supersid towards north to take advantage of wired ethernet instead of intermittent wifi; installation of a low light aurora camera

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