![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I completed 3,700 words today, and there's no reason to go overboard.
My amateur radio renewal came in the mail, so I'm good for another 10 years.
I took Thumper along with me to the Humane Society's shelter today, and picked up some additional tips.
In light of tomorrow's eclipse, I'm looking back at some Flickr uploads I made on August 1, 2008, while I was supporting a launch campaign in Kazakhstan. We were nowhere near the path of totality (which passed through Novosibirsk and Barnaul, I seem to recall), but we were within range to "see" a partial eclipse.
You don't really see an eclipse, unless it's the total kind, because even when there's only a few percent of the sun left uncovered (as will be the case during tomorrow's annular eclipse), it's still several thousand times brighter than the full moon and hazardous to look at directly.
About the easiest (and cheapest) way to view an eclipse is to let sunlight pass through a small hole, say, in a piece of cardboard, so that the beam of light passing through the hole is projected onto a flat, white surface.
It turns out that, if the hole is small enough, what you'll see projected on that surface is an image of whatever is on the other ("out") side of that hole. It's the principle behind the pinhole camera, where the hole acts like a lens, but without any glass required. The trick here is that if the hole is too big, the image will be too washed out to form, and if it's too small, the image will be too faint to see.
In any event, back in 2008, I was counting on using a small (1/8-inch) hole in the roof of a grape arbor in the yard in front of our hotel in Kazakhstan to project the sun's image onto a piece of copy paper. When I got to the arbor, was I in for a surprise!
It turned out that every little gap between the leaves that let sunlight through was acting as a lens, so that wherever beams of sunlight fell, you'd see a crescent shape, which was a projection of the moon partially obscuring the sun.
With any luck, the weather will be clear tomorrow. Yesterday was a "red flag" day, which meant potentially hazardous conditions due to high wind and low humidity (which, combined with the massive amount of dead and dying timber on the mountains created by recent pine beetle infestations, bodes little good for the long term). But even without any fire, in practical terms, the dust raised by the wind yesterday was enough to obscure the mountains.
The Roku box is definitely superior to the Boxee box. And for a fan of old movies like me, it's particularly attractive (although Cthulhu only knows when I'll ever find the time to watch any of them!)
Speaking of which, why I am still sitting in front of my computer?
Cheers...
My amateur radio renewal came in the mail, so I'm good for another 10 years.
I took Thumper along with me to the Humane Society's shelter today, and picked up some additional tips.
In light of tomorrow's eclipse, I'm looking back at some Flickr uploads I made on August 1, 2008, while I was supporting a launch campaign in Kazakhstan. We were nowhere near the path of totality (which passed through Novosibirsk and Barnaul, I seem to recall), but we were within range to "see" a partial eclipse.
You don't really see an eclipse, unless it's the total kind, because even when there's only a few percent of the sun left uncovered (as will be the case during tomorrow's annular eclipse), it's still several thousand times brighter than the full moon and hazardous to look at directly.
About the easiest (and cheapest) way to view an eclipse is to let sunlight pass through a small hole, say, in a piece of cardboard, so that the beam of light passing through the hole is projected onto a flat, white surface.
It turns out that, if the hole is small enough, what you'll see projected on that surface is an image of whatever is on the other ("out") side of that hole. It's the principle behind the pinhole camera, where the hole acts like a lens, but without any glass required. The trick here is that if the hole is too big, the image will be too washed out to form, and if it's too small, the image will be too faint to see.
In any event, back in 2008, I was counting on using a small (1/8-inch) hole in the roof of a grape arbor in the yard in front of our hotel in Kazakhstan to project the sun's image onto a piece of copy paper. When I got to the arbor, was I in for a surprise!
It turned out that every little gap between the leaves that let sunlight through was acting as a lens, so that wherever beams of sunlight fell, you'd see a crescent shape, which was a projection of the moon partially obscuring the sun.
With any luck, the weather will be clear tomorrow. Yesterday was a "red flag" day, which meant potentially hazardous conditions due to high wind and low humidity (which, combined with the massive amount of dead and dying timber on the mountains created by recent pine beetle infestations, bodes little good for the long term). But even without any fire, in practical terms, the dust raised by the wind yesterday was enough to obscure the mountains.
The Roku box is definitely superior to the Boxee box. And for a fan of old movies like me, it's particularly attractive (although Cthulhu only knows when I'll ever find the time to watch any of them!)
Speaking of which, why I am still sitting in front of my computer?
Cheers...
