Milkyway

Milkyway just visible here, ISO1600 though so very speckled, not sure of exposure time, suspect 64 seconds but can't remember and due to the firmware hackery they're always stored as 15 if more than that.

Pandora returning

Aha

My pandora is winging its way back to me thanks to EvilDragon after a touch over 7 weeks with new battery, fixed hinge and new LCD cable, excellent news!

Can get back on developing EUAE and my Elite port then

York & light pollution

Taken at 1AM this morning from 15 miles away from York while failing to capture the Northern lights

ISO400, 64 second exposure

Stars video test (HD if only 2 seconds of it)

Hihi

Initial test of video, 20 minutes of sky, ~2 seconds of video, 18 frames, 10fps, ISO 200/32 second exposures, some processing due to light pollution:



Note that this was cropped to 1920x1080, /not/ resized so might look better if resized tbh, main reason I didn't was the trees (as in the second pic below)

Still, seems to work reasonably well.

The sky at night

Click to embiggen as usual.

Taken with a Canon powershot A720 IS running CHDK firmware

ISO 100, Exposure 64 seconds (resized but otherwise untouched)

Blurring of some stars is caused by rotation of the Earth which sadly I can do little about!

Given that was taken in the middle of York with not inconsiderable light pollution, it's not bad.

And another...

ISO 400, Exposure 64 seconds

Somewhat edited to increase contrast to eliminate massive light pollution that's very apparent at that ISO

Trees inconveniently placed in the only very nearby location good for photographing the sky...

6 weeks...

Yes, it has now been six weeks since I sent off my Pandora for repair, still no sign of it or any information as to when it will be returning...

So still nothing on EUAE, PandElite or AROS as I need the hardware, there's also a new beta of the OS out now, perhaps if I'm lucky it won't have moved to release by the time I get my system back.

Something different

Fact vs Fiction.

Hihi

A message from 30 scientists including Professor Richard Dawkins and David Attenborough re the teaching of fairy tales (creationism) rather than evidence based science (evolution) in our schools:

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Creationism and ‘intelligent design’

Creationism and ‘intelligent design’ are not scientific theories, but they are portrayed as scientific theories by some religious fundamentalists who attempt to have their views promoted in publicly-funded schools. There should be enforceable statutory guidance that they may not be presented as scientific theories in any publicly-funded school of whatever type.

Organisations like ‘Truth in Science’ are encouraging teachers to incorporate ‘intelligent design’ into their science teaching. ‘Truth in Science’ has sent free resources to all Secondary Heads of Science and to school librarians around the country that seek to undermine the theory of evolution and have ‘intelligent design’ ideas portrayed as credible scientific viewpoints. Speakers from Creation Ministries International are touring the UK, presenting themselves as scientists and their creationist views as science at a number of schools.

The current government guidance that creationism and ‘intelligent design’ should not be taught in school science should be made statutory and enforceable. It also needs to be made comprehensive so that it is clear that any portrayal of creationism and ‘intelligent design’ as science (whether it takes place in science lessons or not) is unacceptable.

Evolution

An understanding of evolution is central to understanding all aspects of biology. The teaching of evolution should be included at both primary and secondary levels in the National Curriculum and in all schools.

Currently, the study of evolution does not feature explicitly in the National Curriculum until year 10 (ages 14-15), but the government is overseeing a review of the whole curriculum with the revised National Curriculum for science being introduced in September 2012 to be made compulsory from 2013. Free Schools and Academies are not obliged to teach the National Curriculum and so are under no obligation to teach about evolution at all.

(In 2009, an Ipsos Mori survey found that more than half of British adults think that intelligent design and creationism should be taught alongside evolution in school science lessons – a proportion higher than in the US.)

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This is outrageous, this is not America, why anyone would want to cripple our future doctors, scientists and so on with creationist claptrap I don't know.

Been there, done that, wasn't fun unlearning it all once I realised I'd been lied to on a massive scale for years, heh.

Good news for the moment

Hihi

The Dale Farm eviction has been halted, albeit temporarily (until another hearing on Friday)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-14978942

With the usual arrogance, spin and sour grapes the council are speaking for the judiciary and claiming it'll definitely be back on once they get to put their side forward.

Let's allow the judges to make their own decision!

Not entirely sure why one resident is thanking God for the reprieve, I'm not sure anyone's imaginary superfriend had a thing to do with it, suspect it has more to do with the large number of people there and elsewhere who are working bloody hard to get it stopped.

Additionally...

Bullshit alert.

What more needs to be said? And yes, that says British transport police, it is not an American invention, heh.

Altair mandelbrot

Well, it's not amazingly quick (about 35-40 minutes to calculate) but it does work!

Here's a more recent output zoomed in on a more interesting part of the set

Couple of photos...

Couple of photos from the new camera, note that although it works fine I don't really know what I'm doing so they could be better...

That's just taken normally, no zoom or anything, automatic settings (actually near Clifton bridge), as for the zoom, note the tree on the left there...

full zoom, that train in the background is in motion too.

It has a digital zoom but I disabled it as digital zoom is several kinds of evil

It must also have some sort of image stabilising too since I can't normally take a picture without shaking the camera and every one has been fine so far!

The Lair

Actually just a test of my new camera, click to embiggen....

Has a nice custom firmware (CHDK) which among other things enables RAW mode, massive exposure times and even contains a basic interpreter so you can write your own scripts which control every function of the camera (including the USB port for remote control and so on)

Very impressed with it, worlds better than the old L'Espion 1.3 mpixel camera it replaces, lol

Edit:

Well thank you Google for resizing the image without asking, heh, if you want to see the real full resolution one you'll have to view this link: camtest.jpg

Spectrum enhanced colour mode

Hihi

This is some new code by aowen/chev for the 48/128 Spectrum...

Normally due to limitations in the design (which did make sense in 1982) you can have only two colours per 8x8 group of pixels (as the 256x192 display is stored as 6KiB of bitmap and 768 bytes of attribute data, one byte per 8x8 cell, 3 bits of background colour, 3 bits of foreground colour, 1 bit each of bright and flashing)

This is normally extremely limiting however the interrupt driven routine pictured above gives you the same 256x192 display but with a set of 16x16 tiles using attributes of 1x8 instead of 8x8 (8 pixels wide, 1 pixel high), this is achieved by some rather CPU intensive rewriting of the attributes area while the display is being drawn. Unusually, this can be used from BASIC (as you can see above, the 48K editor running at the same time as the interrupt driven code!)

Plan to use this code to produce a Roguelike for the 128K spectrum :>