Partial Solar Eclipse
Went out to see the partial solar eclipse this evening… Quite a lot of other people were out and about with their cars parked on the sides of the roads in the countryside, presumably doing the same thing.
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Evoworks Evo80 Mechanical Keyboard mini-Review
I recently bought an Evoworks Evo80 mechanical keyboard following a recommendation to me after I was looking for a new decent keyboard, having been using a very cheap / budget Kensington one I got as a ‘placeholder’ since needing a new desktop keyboard after I got back to the UK (I actually didn’t need one until December, as I was only using my laptops until then). I was after a UK / ISO one, as…
Custom UK live Train Times webpage
Now that I’m commuting regularly again using UK public transport, given the occasional (at least so far for me on the days I commute!) delays and cancellations to services that tend to happen, I was looking for a simple iOS app or website that would allow me to very easily see at a glance what the trains for the next hour or so looked like in terms of possible delays or cancellations. There are a…
(Approx.) Great Britain Electricity Generation charts
Since I got back to the UK, I’ve been trying to understand and take more of an interest in what’s going on here again (although unfortunately, that’s often somewhat depressing across the political spectrum), and one area I’ve been looking into is Electricity generation (and prices!) for Great Britain. There’s a large amount of renewable electricity generation from Solar and Wind these days, but…
ThinkPad T14s Gen 6 AMD mini-Review
This is mostly a post to try and get me to start blogging a bit more again, but I will try and make it potentially useful… When I returned to the United Kingdom from New Zealand last year, I had four laptops (and some other smaller electronic gear) in total I ideally wanted to bring back with me in some way or another. One of the laptops was my then-replaced and barely-used older Intel MacBook Pro…
Lighthouses of the United Kingdom and Ireland map visualisation
Another attempt of my spin on a map visualisation I spotted online. This early iteration is pretty basic, and is a visualisation of lighthouse positions in the United Kingdom and Ireland as light points illuminating the surface underneath them. It’s not the most accurate map of the lighthouses, because the projection is a bit squished, and I decided to remove some of the inland (canals and other…
http-test.com - An HTTP Test Website
For the past four years, as a background side-project I’ve been (more slowly and sporadically recently) working on developing sitemon3 , a re-design and re-write of sitemon2 as a distributed system (rather than the monolith the previous version was), whilst also writing it in Rust as another vehicle to help learn and get better at Rust - but also to try and (re-)learn some of the workings of…
Back in the UK
Essentially this is a post to try and prompt me to start blogging a bit again with a bit of an update… I’ve been back in the United Kingdom for a few months now after deciding earlier this year that almost 10 years in New Zealand was enough, and that it was time for a change in terms of life and work. I had never really planned to stay as long as I did there, but COVID-19 partly got in the way (I…
RAW file Quick Look broken in MacOS 15.4
It looks like Apple MacOS 15.4 (even the .1 patch) has broken Quick Look (using the Space key in Finder) for some RAW files from cameras, as the previews for .cr2 files from (somewhat) more recent cameras like my Canon EOS 5D Mk IV and my previous Canon EOS 5D Mk III now just show a black image with Quick Look, but using the main Preview app to preview them still works correctly. Interestingly,…
Camera Lens Fixed
This week I got my Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8L II USM lens back from Canon Service after it being fixed by them. The replaced part was the “Power Diaphragm Assembly”. So this morning I went for a brief stroll around Wellington to test it out, and it seems as good as new now, which is great - and even the occasional focus issues I had been having within the past eight months didn’t seem to obviously…
Camera Lens Issue
Last weekend my Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8L II USM lens developed a fault whereby my DSLR camera would show an “Err 01”, “Communication between the camera and lens is faulty.” error when trying to take a picture. Stopping down the aperture to f/2.8 prevented it from happening, and with that aperture I could still take pictures with the lens - and it only happened with this particular lens, other…
Further Average Cloud Cover Satellite Imagery
Ever since I previously generated median average images from multiple days of satellite imagery, I’ve wanted to try and generate newer higher-resolution versions, as well as to do so for other areas of the Earth’s surface, and also to try generating per-month versions, rather than just whole-year and per-quarter versions as I did previously. So over the past few weeks I’ve been attempting this…