Tonight was the first opportunity I’ve had with a fully clear sky to test out my telescope since I made some adjustments to it recently. The conclusion? The knobs are now much earlier to turn and the scope more stable, even without the vibration suspension pads. This makes the polar alignment a lot easier. Setup and aligned accurately in 15 mins. Having better polar alignment means that tracking and goto’s are more accurate. Tracking was Read more
Went to Mullingar last night to see Syrys, the lead singer is a friend of a friend. Unlike most ‘friend of a friend’ bands, Syrys were actually good! Nice loud Rock, with a hint of Gothiness. http://www.syrys.com/ has a couple of mp3’s. They are playing a couple of gigs this month in Dublin and Dundalk and are well worth checking out. Read more
A few weeks back I started talking to a friend about something. He stopped me before I finished the first sentence to tell me that he knew already, he had read about it in my girlfriends blog. Tonight my girlfriend went out drinking with some folks. We usually agree to at least let each other know when we are going out, so I was a little surprised when I txt’d her around midnight to find Read more
Downloaded the SunRay3 software for linux on Friday night with the intention of getting it working over the weekend. It didn’t work straight out of the box on my SuSE 9 machine so I thought I’d upgrade to 9.1 with the online update tool in yast2. Now I have never done this before. And it’s only recently that I’ve started using Live Upgrade to update a solaris box, I have an automated lab to test Read more
I own an LXD55 10″SN telescope from Meade Instruments. It’s a fine telescope, big mirror, decent enough mount (just), goto, tracking… However it is on the cheaper end of their catalogue thanks to the Schmidt Newtonian design – spherical primary mirror with a corrector plate at the front, this is cheaper to manufacture than their more popular (and expensive) Schmidt Cassegarians. However the cost cutting didn’t end there. The gears backlash a bit, one is Read more
A friends blog mentions a NewScientist article relating to a tribe that apparently cannot understand numbers beyond three. The conclusion by the researchers is that language determines thought. Although i don’t have training in this field, I don’t believe the conclusion for three reasons: 1.The tribes understand three. So their thought works on “one, two, three, many” even though their language only describes “one, two, many”. 2.If language determines thought, how does language evolve? These Read more
Today I went on a customer visit, a very rare thing for me. A few years ago Sun Ireland gave out some hardware to computer societies in various Universities around the country. As one of the first members of such a societiy (timf was a founding member) let me tell you a little about it. In 1995 our university (www.ucd.ie) had no email for students. It had web access for students for about a month Read more
Finally got around to taking my new car to work today. Its a 2000 Nissan Almera Hatchback. Described as “boringly reliable” by Top Gear, which suits me just fine. However, I should have been driving it all week, but that didnt hapen due to a clutch failure on the way to a wedding on Saturday. But now with a new clutch its fine! So how was my first drive? Well the accelerator now does what Read more
Dublin played host to the 17th International Conference on General Relativity and Gravitation. Up until a few days before the event only the professionals and amateur astronomers were aware of the event. What was organised well in advance were the public lectures, on the opening day of the conference, Kip Thorne, best known publicly for his book on black holes and the conference ended with a talk from Roger Penrose, probably best known for his Read more
This post was about editing pkg-get since sunfreware does not have packages for s10, however it seems that the blastwave resourse supplies s10 packages, so I’ll just use that. Read more