Category: My Own Words

2024 Solar Eclipse

Today was the second total eclipse in North America in my lifetime. I wasn’t able to get to totality in 2017 or today, but I did bring out my solar telescope for both events. In 2017, I took the scope up to an elementary school and had a great time showing the kids the moon crossing in front of the sun. Today, my youngest kid was home to view the eclipse with me.

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Weather Like it's 1999

I’ve put together a system that allows me to use an old (1980s) CRT TV to display a 1990s version of The Weather Channel for my location. I have some plans to add additional channels consisting of my front door camera, home videos, etc.

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Jupiter, Saturn, & Mars

While updating some old blog posts to use my new gallery setup, I remembered I never posted some planetary images I had taken back in September of 2020. I had been wanting to get into astrophotography for a while and had even attempted it with my micro 4/3 camera with pretty poor results. After being bored during quarantine, I got a webcam-based imager and my god.

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Hosting My Own Things, part 4

Well, it hasn’t been six years! It’s been a little less than a year since my last blog post, and I finally spent some time figuring out a decent way to get image galleries working. I’ve gone back and edited the posts that should have had image galleries to add them. Hugo has some pretty sweet image resizing tricks up it’s sleeve. A big thanks to Christian Specht’s post for getting me going in the right direction.

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Hosting My Own Things, part 3

It’s been a little over six years since my last “Hosting My Own Things” post. In that time, my home network and hosting setup has changed drastically multiple times. When I posted last, this blog was a WordPress site running inside VirtualBox on my 2009 Mac Pro. The first large change was from VirtualBox to VMware ESXi later in 2016 since I was working more with VMware during my day job at the time.

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Things That Outlive Their Owners

I stumbled across this article today about a software developer that bought an Apple Watch and actually ended up buying a mechanical watch to replace it. The article ends thusly: As software creeps into ever more objects in my daily life and makes them more capable yet more disposable and less reliable than ever, it’s nice to have something that does less, always works, never needs a software update, requires no cables, doesn’t need to be charged, and whose useful life will probably be longer than mine.

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Trip to Kaua’i

These photographs document the Scott family trip to Kaua’i.

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Hosting My Own Things, part 2.5

Okay, so it’s not really hosting my own things, since I’m paying Microsoft $4 a month, but I’ve set up a new Exchange Online account and am liking the control I have over it vs. iCloud or Gmail. It was trivially easy to set up and link to my domain that I own. I’ll be transitioning over to it over the next few weeks.

Hosting My Own Things, part 2

When I initially set up this blog, I had to it set up using https instead of http since my ISP blocks regular http traffic to my server. No big deal, except I had to use my own certificate which meant anyone viewing my blog had to click through a big “THIS SITE MAY NOT BE SECURE” warning. But good news! A new certificate authority is granting legit certs for free.

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2015 Lunar Perigee Eclipse

Last night, there was an interesting celestial event: the Earth eclipsed the Sun, casting it’s shadow on the Moon. This happened during lunar perigee (the Moon’s closest point to the Earth in it’s elliptical orbit), which resulted in a negligible increase in the Moon’s apparent size: about 14% larger than normal. I had worked earlier in the year to get my astronomy gear into a workable state. I de-mounted my telescope from it’s crappy factory mount and slapped it onto a much nicer and sturdier mount I bought around the beginning of summer.

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