Tech talk for wednesday
The day or two after? the allsky camera system captured a great big fireball in the sky it failed to show any images tuesday morning. We use VNC to remote…
spare parts & spring cleaning
After 30 odd years of working with computers, one finds oneself with a large collection of “spare parts”. It is amazing that every box I open up seems to have…
weekend notes
GLOBE at Night: encourages citizen-scientists worldwide to record the brightness of the night sky. During 2 weeks of moonless evenings, children and adults match the appearance of a constellation (Leo…
page hit counter
We added a page hit counter down the right hand column near the bottom (just above the moon phase widget) on March 1st, 2011. The numbers seem to be increasing…
Time of Use Power
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…
CO Detector failure
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…
seti@home issues
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…
catching up
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…
allsky laptop2
The original 7 year old laptop suffered a complete hard drive failure some days back and we have just acquired another, slightly newer laptop, only 6 years old :).. hmm…
outdoor laptop
There seems to be a fine line of what exactly you can do with a laptop in the outdoors in the winter. The replacement allsky computer was outside the first…
the story of moving an imaging system
Tuesday night we spent about 3 hours transferring the allsky camera workstation setup from a desktop machine to an old laptop machine. One reason was that a desktop machine was…
Allsky down for upgrades
The allsky camera workstation has been removed from service and a new replacement system is being setup using a laptop. The old workstation was an AMD Athlon XP 2500+ running…
Logitech HD C270 webcam
This webcam is our latest (2010 Dec 10) acquisition and is nice in its combined audio and video in one usb package. The resolution comes up as 1280×720 and looks…
roboscope moves
The RASC-KC roboscope project has been in the works for a few years and has run into technical stumbling blocks too numerous to list. So we have dismantled the telescope,…