Recent content on Scott Labs
I’ve been hosting my own things for over 10 years, and a requirement for nearly any hardware I buy is that I can keep using it if the company behind it disappears or worse. I also have a slight obsession with e-ink, so when I discovered that reMarkable tablets give you root SSH access out of the box and that there’s a project called rmfakecloud for self-hosting the cloud sync, I had to…
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.
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.
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 .
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…
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…
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.
These photographs document the Scott family trip to Kaua’i.
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.
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.
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…
I think this every time I get the OS X update pop-up.
Lately, I have been interested in seeing how much of what I do online could be hosted by myself, on my own server, in my house. It’s also a good excuse to play with virtual machines and generally be nerdy. To that end, I have imported my entire Tumblr blog to this WordPress site that I built and am hosting myself. Hooray.
ilovecharts : sign at The Eagle & Child, pub in Oxford where C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and their friends would hang out. – diplosanti
jtotheizzoe : Just picked up my daily planner for 2014. It’s a Le Petit Prince special edition. Can’t wait to see what I fill it with.
Santa at nearly the speed of light jtotheizzoe : This time of year, children who know their physics may start to question if Santa could possibly be real. Luckily, Fermilab’s got ya covered! Very enjoyable look at the physics of Santa’s delivery schedule. Fun fact: If Santa travels at 99.999999% the speed of light, not only does he finish his route in 500 seconds and never age thanks to time…
kiggor : If other planets were at the same distance as our moon
jtotheizzoe : Science, Religion, and the Big Bang Here’s a look at the history of intellectual and religious conflict surrounding the beginning of everything, and why the “Big Bang” should really be called the “Everywhere Stretch”, from minutephysics . The idea of infinity really breaks the human mind, and that’s been a source of spiritual angst since we started thinking about it. New science…
thefrogman : Biddy the Hedgehog [ instagram ] I had a hedgehog named Rachel once.
colchrishadfield : Good morning! Perspective – how big is our Moon?
The cutest kitten gifs ever on tumblr
Every atom in the universe is created equal. Or, I suppose more accurately: Everything in the universe is created of equal atoms. None of them really have a leg up on any other, unless having more or less electrons is considered an advantage, and I’m not in a position to judge such things. Yet one day, there happens a particularly curious arrangement of those atoms, on a planet called Earth, which…
We walk past wonders in the sky all the time, ignoring them. The Sun, a million miles wide, performing stellar alchemy in its core. The Moon, battered and airless, a 4-billion-year history laid out for all to see. Saturn, a billion miles away, ringed and gaseous and attended by dozens of icy moons, a jewel of the solar system. Countless stars scattered across the Universe. If all that can be just…
Biology’s cruel joke goes something like this: As a teenage body goes through puberty, its circadian rhythm essentially shifts three hours backward. Suddenly, going to bed at nine or ten o’clock at night isn’t just a drag, but close to a biological impossibility. Studies of teenagers around the globe have found that adolescent brains do not start releasing melatonin until around eleven o’clock at…
shockofthelightning : ( Via Huffington Post ) “Supermoon” in an nutshell
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpZmIiIXuZ0 minimalmac : Intention (by Apple ) Very nice. ( Source: http://www.youtube.com/ )
One downside to many flow visualization techniques, like those using dye, smoke, or particles, is the difficulty of dealing with their aftermath. You can only introduce so much of them into a wind or water tunnel before it’s necessary to shutdown and clean everything. One alternative is to use temperature, as shown in the video above. By simply introducing a warmer fluid and using an IR camera,…
Adulting: A pre-trip checklist adulting : Have you … 1.) Made a packing list, and then packed all of it? 2.) Put up an out-of-office email message, and sent a brief note to people who regularly contact you (read: your mom) to let them know you’re away? 3.) Made sure you’ve done everything necessary at work and/or laid out ground rules for how much contact you’ll be in while you’re gone? 4.)…
elizabeth-swanson : alcoholicgifts : I would wear this everywhere Reblog for R. Mitchell Scott
engineeringisawesome : One of the most curious buildings in Japan is the Gate Tower Building in Osaka, Japan . This building is the result of an unusual compromise between the land owner and the Japanese government. The 5th, 6th and 7th floors of this 16-story office building is occupied by an express highway – passing right through the building. On the building’s floor information board on the…
minimalmac : Yep. Pretty much sums it up. (via W&CIE )
jtotheizzoe : infinity-imagined : The actual distance between the Earth and the Moon. Perspective. The moon is much further away than most people think. That makes the fact that people have flown there even cooler.
jtotheizzoe : This is the adorable way that a physicist proposed to his girlfriend, who is also a physicist :) “Taking these results into account, the author proposes to Christie the indefinite continuation of the study. The subject’s response to this proposal should be indicated below” I trust this was peer reviewed, and passed with flying colors …
spaceplasma : Today…
jtotheizzoe : A Simulated Heart This elegant, powerful, nearly tireless organ fascinates us so deeply that we have attributed to it (scientifically and not-so-scientifically) everything from love to life itself. Its woven fibers of muscle and intricate electrochemistry are still incompletely understood. This simulation from the Barcelona Supercomputing Center uses the power of 10,000 computer…
Through the eyepiece of an optical telescope, you see something right in front of you, and your brain says, there it is : a jellybean, four feet away. Of course, Neptune is 17 times the mass of Earth and far-flung as it gets, but that doesn’t compute. It might be the farthest thing you’ll ever see, but it looks so close, and in the absence of contextual clues, the ordinary functioning of…
The concept of an embryo is a staggering one, and forming an embryo is the hardest thing you will ever do. To become an Embryo, you had to build yourself from a single cell. You had to respire before you had lungs, digest before you had a gut, build bones when you were pulpy, and form orderly arrays of neurons before you knew how to think. One of the critical differences between you and a machine…
itsfullofstars : xkcd
I think we’ve all felt like this on a Monday, right? This little hummingbird has just reserved a spot in my list of Top 10 Cutest Things I’ve Ever Seen , thanks to its snoozy little snore. Of course, hummingbirds don’t really snore, do they? Maybe … sort of … but not for the same reasons we do. When humans (or my dogs) snore, it’s usually an obstruction l vibrating the back of the throat when we…
jtotheizzoe : How many people have ever been born? You’ve wondered this. No matter how down you feel sometimes, take solace in the fact that you are one of the lucky 6.5% (or really a bit more, since this only goes through 2011) of people who are still alive.
jtotheizzoe : buzzfeedceleb : gifsfln : **Seth Meyers ** on the Steroid Era of storms . From last night’s Late Night filmed during Sandy, with no audience members. At least someone in New York is hitting home runs in October. Bravo, Seth Meyers!
Texts from Elizabeth’s mom as she watched the Red Bull Stratos jump.
thedailywhat : It’s Caturday! [ fluffingtonpost ] I showed my cat Genevieve this, and she pressed “Reblog” with her nose.
jtotheizzoe : Superstring! Must catch red dot! I die from the laughs.
So you’re drinking, and you deliberately delay the evening’s first visit to the toilet, because you know that subsequent visits will be much more frequent. That first pee “breaks the seal.” Sound familiar?
Here Is A Video Of A Baby Hedgehog of the Day: Belly scratches should be a Sunday afternoon mandate.
tastefullyoffensive : [ box guide I ] [ simonscat ]
Solar System Travel Posters
n-a-s-a : Space Shuttle Rising Credit: NASA