An amateur astro(nomer/photographer)'s log

    An amateur astro(nomer/photographer)'s log

    May 9, 2020
    In december 2019 I realized just how exciting photography could be; soon after I got my second hand Sony NEX 5T I felt I wanted to get into astrophotography. And I found a fully fledged telescope, with a motorized mount for 375 EUR (410 USD).
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    Polyphasic sleep

    Polyphasic sleep

    May 9, 2020
    One man's quest to stay awake consistently during the night whilst still waking up early. What could go wrong?
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    Switching from Wordpress + MediaWiki to Jekyll

    Switching from Wordpress + MediaWiki to Jekyll

    May 6, 2020

    Wordpress was a great place for me to start my blog. It was easy to use, and had a beautiful post editor. However, issues arose around hosting it, mainly due to performance. So I decided to convert my blog to a static site using jekyll and host it using Netlify (free for small sites). And oh boy, was it not easy. But let’s start at the beggining.

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    VanLife – Power and lights v0.1

    VanLife – Power and lights v0.1

    Dec 26, 2019

    After living without AC power, with only handheld LED lamps and my phone light for 2.5 months in Rusty, I decided enough is enough and installed some lights and a 300W inverter.

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    Silencing a noisy car inverter

    Silencing a noisy car inverter

    Dec 23, 2019
    I bought a 300W continous / 600W peak 12V DC to 220V AC inverter for my car. It was pretty cheap, at around 25$. However it has one major drawback, a continuously on small noisy fan.
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    DIY Vintage Fallout Radio ♫

    DIY Vintage Fallout Radio ♫

    Dec 3, 2019
    My Secret Santa match is a work mate who is a yuge fan of the Fallout series. I remembered talking with him about how cool it would be to place a Bluetooth speaker inside of an old radio enclosure and listen to Galaxy News radio.
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    Nightfall – Isaac Asimov

    Nightfall – Isaac Asimov

    Nov 28, 2019
    An interesting short story written by Isaac Asimov that later became a novel. It explores what would happen to the people living on a planet that is exposed to starlight only once every 2049 years.
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    iTec2019 – Style transfer rover

    iTec2019 – Style transfer rover

    Nov 24, 2019

    iTEC is a contest dedicated to pupils and students with an interest in IT. This was its 13th edition; over 200 participants showed up. It consists of a couple of short (~6 hour) challenges and 4 hackathons (web, mobile, game dev and embedded).

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    VanLife – Heating with the Propex HS2000

    VanLife – Heating with the Propex HS2000

    Nov 21, 2019

    In order to heat my van I decided on buying a Propex HS2000 (https://www.propexheatsource.co.uk/heaters/hs2000) heater. It is efficient, consuming on average only 142 grams of gas / hour and it can run on LPG, which is quite common in Romania and in Europe in general.

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