SSD upgrade

Feb07
by catz on February 7, 2019 at 09:28 and modified on February 7, 2019. at 09:33
Posted In: tech

Wow. This is for any imagers in particular out there, with a desktop of laptop computer with a spinning hard drive.
Replace it with a Solid State Drive (SSD). Now! The prices have dropped in half in the last 8 months.

Many laptops these days are coming with a 120GB SSD but if you image at all, you know that it can and will fill up quickly. I routinely fill up the unused 80GB in the space of an hour or two. Last May (2018) we upgraded Kims laptop from a 120GB to a 480 GB for $184Can
This was a Kingston Digital 480GB UV400 SSD C2C 2.5″

Today I just received one for my laptop, a Kingston Digital A400 SSD 480GB SATA 3 2.5”, not exactly the same model as above but certainly good enough… for only $75Can, both through amazon.ca Wow! Again, a huge price drop in less than 9 months.

You will benefit from this:
Much faster read/write response! Less heat generated inside the laptop. Better timetofailure. Faster startup! Faster program load. Faster data save. More impact resistance (either dropping on ground or pounding on in frustration). Better laptop battery life. Less susceptible to extremes of hot or cold (like out in an observatory).
Absolutely recommended!

I ran through the upgrade process last night and was done in about 90 minutes.
My first method failed, using macrium reflect to make a disk image stored on a network file server, then booting from a macrium reflect recvoery cd and restoring the image… the software was too old and could not see the drive image.

Working process:
1. Clean laptop Drive to free up more space; remove restore points, and have less to clone.
2. Shut down, remove 120GB drive, install 480GB drive.
3. Connected 120GB SSD to an external USB3 enclosure, and booted a clonezilla cdrom.
Cloned the 120gb to 480gb in about 1.5 hours. Disconnected the external 120gb SSD and test reboot the new drive. OK! A couple of reboots by windows later and it was up and running and showing a 110GB partition.
Now lets try to extend the 100GB partition, failed. The Windows recovery partition is in the way, and Windows would not delete it.
OK. Run aomei partition manager software, delete last two partitions. Worked! Then extend main c: drive partition into the rest of the drive.
Reboot. Works! Now showing 446GB with 369GB free!

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Snowbound

Jan30
by catz on January 30, 2019 at 16:21 and modified on January 30, 2019. at 16:29
Posted In: life the universe and everything, weather


What do we do when stuck inside for the winter? Revisit some classic video.

  • We started with the Lord of the Rings Extended Edition Trilogy, which took a little over 14 hours. It was great! Have to wait a bit before trying that much again for the Hobbit, in three parts!
  • Next was the one and only season of what could have gone on for many season, Firefly with Nathan Filion.
  • We dove into the Doctor Who spinoff series called Torchwood, with John Barrowman and Eve Myles. It was a little uneven, and very dark at times, but we powered through four seasons of that!
  • The latest series is something with one of our fave actors, Jason Momoa (Game of Thrones, Stargate Atlantis), called Frontier. A great historic drama about the founding days of Canada, the Hudson Bay Company and the Fur Trade. We have gone through the first two seasons and have just started the third and last (so far) season.

    There are still some old series that we have not yet seen but will schedule for the next blizzard… Breaking Bad, Lost and a few others. Competing with that are two that we have seen before but is time to watch again, namely Babylon 5 and Battlestar Galactica.

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    Linux Fedora 29

    Jan30
    by catz on January 30, 2019 at 14:41 and modified on January 30, 2019. at 14:42
    Posted In: tech

    This website has been running on linux fedora forever… at least 15 years if not more. Back in the day we started with 32 bit linux, as that is all we had. Over the years, the hardware has been changed out, failed, upgraded, etc. Here in 2019, the hardware is much newer 64 bit CPU architecture but still only running a 32 bit operating system. This had a number of drawbacks, like only being able to see 3GB of RAM and not the 6GB on the system.
    Three weeks ago, the issue became critical as new updates to Fedora 29 caused the system to become unstable, manifested by resource allocation issues and crashes and lockups.
    So yesterday, we took the plunge… wiped the drive and reinstalled a fresh copy of fedora 29 server 64 bit. It’s taken until now to get most everything back up and running, the hardest part being the mysql database and its interface to wordpress.
    So far so good!
    The system is stable again, showing none of the issues and failures of the last three weeks.
    Let’s hope for clear sailing ahead!

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    video finder

    Jan28
    by catz on January 28, 2019 at 09:18 and modified on January 28, 2019. at 09:24
    Posted In: astronomy

    We’ve recently taken these two items and put them together to create a usb digital webcam finder, as opposed to the traditional video camera with an Analog to Digital converter and software to run it as well. The intent here is to allow the telescope to find objects better and faster when it is not pointing well. This mostly will be when hunting for stars to do a two star alignment, but also for more mobile objects like planets 🙂

    Just waiting for the blizzards to die down, get some warmer temperatures and it can be mounted and tested.

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    L&A Hort met this week

    Jan18
    by catz on January 18, 2019 at 10:22 and modified on January 18, 2019. at 10:23
    Posted In: gardening


    The Lennox and Addington Horticultural Society met this week, on Wednesday, 2019 January 16th 7pm at our new location for the year: – Meeting, the Morning Star Mission, 59 Water St., Napanee.
    Guest Speaker – Dr. Allan Good “GMO”

    He gave an hour long talk on Genetically Modified Organisms, and their history over the last few decades.

    The next meeting will be on Wednesday February 20th, 7:00pm, at the Morning Star Mission, Napanee
    Guest Speaker: Alice Smith – Paint Your Garden “The Poppy”

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    365 Days of Astronomy

    Jan14
    by catz on January 14, 2019 at 11:26 and modified on January 14, 2019. at 18:51
    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
    This will be updated on an ongoing basis.

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    Friday Night imaging

    Jan05
    by catz on January 5, 2019 at 15:00 and modified on January 5, 2019. at 15:06
    Posted In: astronomy

    A nice night for a change, Friday evening.
    Maybe a little hazy (what? why with a forecast of freezing fog?

    Took out the old DSLR on a tripod and did a run of 60 second exposures of Orion Rising.  Too bad the focus at infinity was not in focus   The old display screen is so small and poor that you cannot judge focus at all.  So now will have to experiment with moving the lens to focus at infinity and then move it back a “smidge”.  Size of smidge to be determined.

    Then moved over to the northern skies in the hopes of aurora, but in reality the lens was fogging over and the red cell tower lights were lighting up the lens face, so mostly nothing there.

    And the built in battery also was almost dead after an hour in the cold.

    So… find a bigger external power source.. work on a dew heater strap.. work on a camera bag (cause the camera was covered in frosties), and experiment with infinity.

    Also opened  up the Serenity observatory with the Centres 20cm LX200gps.  The last session it had a twostar alignment and then was parked.  The theory is when you next power it up, it should still be aligned.  Told it to go to Betelguese.. ended up 30-50 degrees away. Argh!  drove it to Betelguese and sync’d.  Then told it to find Polaris.  20-40 degrees away Argh! Drove it to Polaris and sync’d .  OK.. lets try Mars!

    5-10 degrees away.  To be expected I guess with a bad alignment model and only two syncs to attempt to correct it.  Methinks Syncs are only to fine tune an existing good alignment model, not build a new model from scratch.

    Still commissioning the new ZWO ASI290MC camera.. got it to work with Firecapture and also tried some autoalign and autoguiding with Firecapture.  Surprise surprise it worked on the 2nd attempt.

    Firecapture autoguides on the actual single camera image you are taking in realtime.  It only works on planetary objects, not stars, moon or sun, by using the “centre of mass” of a planetary image on the screen.  I left it taking 180 second exposures at 3ms for a total of around 24k frames in a file size of about 18GB.

    Went inside the house and brought up chrome remote desktop to see what was going on and  saw that it successfully tracked and guided Mars for the entire run!

    Also saw that the 120GB SSD drive that started with 90GB free, filled up after only 5 runs and it aborted the rest of the runs.

    I have a script to move images off the drive onto the house file server but neglected to start it up.  Will have to put that on a win10 scheduled task next time.

    Still no progress on adding a wider field finder camera, so that I do not have to crawl inside the observatory, remove the camera, insert an eyepiece and try to get a two star alignment done.  That is such a pain!  Even with a small 4’x4′ platform that I had thought I overbuilt, when I step inside with my 100kg, the pointing of the scope does in fact move!

    This morning (Saturday, astro 2019 day 5/5!) we were out in the freezing fog and haze and caught the ISS pass at 05:26.  Very nice!

    The rest of the day is trying to remember and adjust the process process for the Mars imagery.

    Seeing was poor, transparency was poor.  Even with autoalign (the camera capture software move the image around to try and minimize jitter, kind of like image stabilization in cameras and binoculars), and then PIPP to crop and centre the planet, the resulting image still jumps around in 3 dimensions (left-right, up-down, in-out).

    At present we are running with autostakkert! v3 to pull out the best 5,10,25,50% of the images and stack them.  So far only the 5% looks good.  Mars is only 7.2 arcseconds large, which doesn’t help a lot but some surface features are coming out.

    When that is all done, all of the original 100GB of avi files will be moved onto an archive drive to free up space and we will start with Registax for wavelet processing.

    Too bad Saturday night looks cloudy/flurry like.

    Registax v6 was then run to process wavelets to sharpen up the image a bit and then some linux bash scripting to add text annotation. This is one of the end results:

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    oh2019 bindings and coils

    Dec31
    by catz on December 31, 2018 at 15:07 and modified on December 31, 2018. at 15:10
    Posted In: life the universe and everything

    Greetings this penultimate day!

    In any event, we received out RASC Observers Handbook 2019, a backbreaking 352 pages with narrow margins.

    As usual, we take it to Staples to get the binding cut, and a spiral coil installed, such that, as displayed in the attached image, one can lay the book flat. Which we often do whilst observing… lay it flat at the page of interest for reference purposes.

    We have asked that RASC print a small number with this coil binding but that was rejected.

    So we do it ourselves and it used to be around $5 per book. Today it is now over $10. That and the fact that the margins are so narrow, when the binding is cut and the holes punched for the coil, they are so close to the edge that now I have pages coming loose.

    Loose pages is a dealbreaker, so this may be the last year for this concept.

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    linux fedora grub

    Dec19
    by catz on December 19, 2018 at 12:56 and modified on December 19, 2018. at 15:51
    Posted In: tech

    For many years now, one linux fedora server I maintain had issues with every dnf upgrade that involved a new kernel. It would not place configuration information into boot/grub2/grub.cfg and would not boot into the new kernel. One had to run this command to make it work:

    root@S888:/n # grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg
    Generating grub configuration file …
    Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-4.19.9-300.fc29.i686
    Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-4.19.8-300.fc29.i686
    Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-4.19.6-300.fc29.i686
    Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-4.19.5-300.fc29.i686
    Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-4.19.4-300.fc29.i686
    Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-0-rescue-25947e2761f2405084e99e0c2a4ea14f
    Found initrd image: /boot/initramfs-0-rescue-25947e2761f2405084e99e0c2a4ea14f.img
    device-mapper: reload ioctl on osprober-linux-sda3 failed: Device or resource busy
    Command failed.
    Even though the command failed, it did work and would reboot on command into the new kernel. The issue seemed to be with /dev/sda3 which is the root directory.

    [root@S888 etc]$ cat fstab
    # device-spec mount-point fs-type options dump pass
    #dump seldom used=0 pass 0=donotcheck 1=1st 2=2nd
    /dev/sda1 /boot ext4 defaults 0 1
    /dev/sda2 swap swap defaults 0 0
    /dev/sda3 / ext4 defaults 0 1
    #sda4 is extended partition
    /dev/sda5 /home ext4 defaults 0 2
    /dev/sda6 /web ext4 defaults 0 2
    #
    /dev/sdb1 /mnt/backup ext4 defaults 0 2

    I think today we may have fixed this.

    root@S888:/etc # os-prober
    device-mapper: reload ioctl on osprober-linux-sda3 failed: Device or resource busy
    Command failed.

    vi /etc/default/grub and add line
    GRUB_DISABLE_OS_PROBER=true
    root@S888:/etc/default # grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg
    Generating grub configuration file …
    Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-4.19.9-300.fc29.i686
    Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-4.19.8-300.fc29.i686
    Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-4.19.6-300.fc29.i686
    Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-4.19.5-300.fc29.i686
    Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-4.19.4-300.fc29.i686
    Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-0-rescue-25947e2761f2405084e99e0c2a4ea14f
    Found initrd image: /boot/initramfs-0-rescue-25947e2761f2405084e99e0c2a4ea14f.img
    done
    No errors! Should be fixed!
    reboot

    It rebooted correctly.  The true test will be the next kernel update…

    In the meantime we can manually remove some of the older kernels:

    root@S888:/boot # dnf remove kernel-core-4.19.4

    root@S888:/boot # dnf remove kernel-core-4.19.5

    After this, an inspection of grub.cfg shows that these two entries have indeed been removed!

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    ISS Pass

    Dec17
    by catz on December 17, 2018 at 16:04 and modified on December 17, 2018. at 16:05
    Posted In: astronomy
    International Space Station

    This is a 15 sec exposure of the International Space Station on Monday evening, 2018 December 10 at 18:44 EST

    This was a 71 deg pass overhead, coming from the NNW, moving from down to up.

    Aboard is David Saint-Jacques.  He  is the third Canadian to complete a long-duration mission aboard the Station. He flew to space in December 2018 to spend six and a half months in orbit as a member of Expedition 58.

    We tried to image the station while another spacecraft was approaching it to dock, but we have had cloud for months now and this was one of the only opportunities we have had since September.

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    Pi backup

    Nov28
    by catz on November 28, 2018 at 12:01 and modified on April 15, 2019. at 09:36
    Posted In: alternative power, tech


    MFLASH 5000mAh Rubberized Power Bank – has been added to a raspberry pi as an uninterruptible power supply (UPS). It was on a Black Friday sale for $10, down from $25 and is connected to the Pi that died during our last power events (off, on, off, off, on). The Pi operating system had to be reinstalled from scratch and it would have been fine if the power had not cycled like it did.
    It looks like it can simultaneous be charged from the pi power supply and power the pi through its 2.1 amps out port. Both connections are microUSB.
    Update:
    Two weeks later the battery is showing a full charge and the Pi has run continuously without issue.
    Several months later.. still working without issue. Truly format and forget.

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    fireball

    Nov22
    by catz on November 22, 2018 at 14:44 and modified on November 22, 2018. at 14:45
    Posted In: astronomy

    A nice bright meteor went through our local skies this morning (Thursday 2018 November 22) at 05:09:38 EST (10:09:38 UTC). If you were outside early this morning you would also be freezing (-18C) but you would have seen a nice sight! The apparent path was starting in our south and ended in our southeast.

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