PupCam

Evening All Just back from a few days at the southern end of the A3 where a good deal of UP ©ChrisF has been indulged in. Nothing else to report at this time. Over & out.

You've got to love the sound of an 08 getting to grips with its load but be careful, the anti-noisests will be out to protest at such revelations. Psst - I can do you a nice little handcontroller for DCC++ EX with a built in digital model that will turn the compressor and exhausters on and off and a whole lot of other stuff automatically without you having to press F6, Shift F15 or whatever. Be nice to build it into the decoder itself but that's a skill several mountains away for me! 🤣 ION Seems like the embedded Arduino is in good shape and doing its job. 6.5 years of battery left 😀 TTFNQ

Soggy Morning! My main concern is the Pacemaker. If I go all funny I'll know what to blame! ION I've been trying to rationalise all my back-up drives; making sure I've got duplicates of everything important (blimey HOW MANY! photos are in the photos folder), and the same with docs and vids and then theres the "Special Interest" folders to sort which seem to grow exponentially with all the various astrophoto processing apps that I've been using lately. I've been reviewing each astro video or sequence of images and weeding out as much of the stuff as possible whilst not chucking away anything that with improving processing skills might yield something of interest later on. I've been quite savage with the "intermediate workings" stuff on the basis of I can't necessarily work out what it is and as long as I've got the source material I can probably get better results now next time. Whilst ploughing through long forgotten folders I came across these 3 photos. They may be of interest to @Barry O if no one else as they are from some of my very early aerial photography experiments. A cheap (£17 IIRC), automatic camera from Dixons, strapped to the side of a large trainer type R/C aircraft with a servo operating the shutter release. Flown from the Bragbury End sports field which was owned and operated as the GE Sports & Social club until it was seen as an unnecessary expense and extravagance and disposed of making the all of the sections including the model flying section homeless*. They were taken around 1996 I believe. Those experiments then led onto downlinking live video, way before it became common place with the drones of today, and culminated in live "In cockpit views" with a pan and tilt video system in a 1/4 scale Sopwith Pup at first followed by a 1/3 scale version. Imagery from which was used in a BBC documentary marking the Centenary of WW1 and a the 50th anniversary of a previous WW1 documentary that featured surviving (at the time) pilots. Hence the soubriquet PupCam. * We went on to bigger and much better things as an independent club, re-branded as the Knebworth Model Flying Club using a field belonging to the Knebworth estate. There's still a very, very, very long way to go with the process and I really must come up with a "proper" back-up regime (and no, the answer is not the Cloud before anyone mentions it). I went for another nice little run on the RD yesterday but unfortunately by the time the shopping had been done I'd missed the best of the weather. By the time I got out it was decidedly dreary but good fun nevertheless. Question for @polybear : Does Templot support designs for Brio train sets? Asking for a friend grandson. This afternoon sees an appointment at the hospital when they rest the "Giant Polo connected to a laptop" on my chest and start talking to the embedded Arduino. Hopefully all will be good and the batteries will be in a good state of charge 🤞 TTFN

Morning All! Having been doing a twice daily BP diary for some years now whenever I see two numbers on a display like that the immediate association is with BP. My first thought when I saw this was boy are they in trouble! Fortunately a second look revealed the units of measurement and thus a rapid revaluation of what it represented 🤣 That's an interesting one. I've never considered myself (well, since I became an independent adult thinker) as having (a?) faith but I like to think that I have at least a reasonable morale compass. It is of course for others alone to decide whether that is actually the case or not but please go easy on me! Conversely, one thing I am particularly intolerant of is the view held by very many that because A believes in THIS or B believes in THAT they must by definition be good people. No, the association with any one particular group of "us" or "them" does not automatically bestow goodness on an individual and I'm sure we could all come up with a very long list of examples* where this is clearly not the case. On the other hand I like to think that there are very, very many people without "faith", myself included, who are essentially good people. Or are all such people actually mad, evil, sadistic, axe wielding murderers? Maybe I should take a look at myself in a new light? 🤔 * But we won't for fear of moving into territory that we are not at liberty to discuss here. ION Junior Puppers made a Facetime video call to us early this morning to see if we were going to join them watching the Santa steam special pass through St Evenage or Hitchin. As we were still in bed at the time we declined the kind invitation 🤣 Another day of unspecified pottering with perhaps a degree of hunkering down is in order I think. TTFN

I can only assume that the different functional arrangement of the new petrol tap did it but I don't really know. Looks like the weather might have put paid to the plans for the Sunday morning bimble or thrash 🙄 I'm reminded of the wonderful Spike Milligan epitaph 🤣 TTFN

Afternoon! Which is precisely what the masking wearing by the masses was intended to do here. But so many of the people I know had the misguided view that putting a piece of toilet paper with a couple of strings attached over their oral and nasal orifices was going to save them from Covid. No it wasn't, not by a long way. What it was going to do (and all it could really) was to catch a significant proportion of potentially contagious material ejected at high speed from the wearer. The wearer's protection came from everyone else wearing such masks. Unfortunately us cynical old engineering types would generally think such a dream is, well, just a dream! The squadron of pigs can be seen being fuelled and readied for flight as we speak. At a "certain place" the chap responsible (at one point) for running "Lessons Learned" type activities announced that he no longer called them that and re-named them as "Lessons Identified" because, as he said, we never actually learn the lessons. I found his acknowledgment of that fact refreshingly honest. He didn't stay long .... It was suggested the specialist cardio nurses on a number of occasions that I could usefully increase the dosage of one of my non-cardio medicines on an occasional as-and-when-needed basis. Unfortunately to do so involves a discussion with the GP. Well, that's unlikely to happen anytime soon and I asked the nurse if she could include the review & increase the dose in the list of GP Actions in the notes. Unfortunately not, demarcation and all that, being non-cardio they can only "suggest" it in the general notes. I believe there is an over the counter version and I must get myself down to the pharmacy and have a word. In this instance I would willing cough-up (surprisingly literal that statement) what in this case would be a token amount of my pensioner budget to get the additional safety net as it would only be required once in a blue moon and the drug is "cheap", unlike Neil's, by the looks of it anyway. I'm with SWMBO on that! I adore large churches, cathedrals etc not because they are "places of worship" but because they tend to be beautiful and in many cases stunning pieces of architecture with an atmosphere so heavy you can almost cut it with a knife. Everyone is, or at least should be, free to believe & trust in whatever they like just so long that that belief does not materially harm the well being (in all senses of the word) of others. There's been quite a lot of discussion lately about "us" and "them" type groupings and the damage they can/do cause. I might venture to suggest that that some of the largest "us" and "them" gangs might be associated with various such beliefs. I'd best stop there. ION A good degree of unspecified pottering (Chris_f ©) today including a little more data collection for the Life Book. Also a trip into Hitchin for a number of errands and a quick thrash on the RD which was most enjoyable during the early morning sunshine. A bonus was that all fuel pipes remained completely full of fuel. Glory be! I've been re-processing some of the most recent Jupiter data again. I even managed a diffraction artefact (spiky cross) on the moon with this. This sort of detail seems to be about the best I can get but I don't know if I could/should expect better with my specific equipment with better technique and/or better conditions or whether this really is approaching the limit for such "modest" equipment? Anyway, it's fun way to spend a wet afternoon and by all accounts there'll be an opportunity to do some more over the weekend. Looks like it's time for me to getamoveonwiththedinner. Apparently a G & T has been poured in order to assist this process 😀 TTFN

And Puppers wheels out his long playing, broken record once again .... The answer isn't always the F............ Internet! The quicker those in-charge realise, the better it will be. Yes, I know, a lost cause but I don't care it's still wrong (just like the idea of the universal battery powered electric car but that's a different rant). Alan

Which reminds me of the time mother-in-law was walking through Bovingdon (Hertfordshire) many years ago and was asked for directions to the Tank Museum ... The instructions should have gone something like; Go back to Hemel, down the A41 to Kings Langley, get on the M25, off at the M3 and aim for Dorset. Bovington is a long way from Hertfordshire! 🤣

Soggy Morning All I suspect that's Ramsey in Cambridgeshire .. A man not easily fooled! Although it appears that the IoM did have a Nationwide in Douglas. Note the tense 🤔 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nationwide_International Brekkie & drugs time. Back later. TTFN

And on a different theme completely .... I see St Ives harbour has a giant white rabbit visiting and it's not even the 1st of the month 🤔 Perhaps Rick can nip over and investigate? 🤣 Night All

What is this "Auto" of which you speak? 🤣 ..... but how much did they cost* and how much use did you get out of them? 🤔 * You don't get owt for nowt after all

As I quite like living (I'm sure my end will come far sooner than desired anyway) I think that that would have given me the will to bank elsewhere. No doubt our attempts to stem the march to "do everything online/on the App" is futile but at least we've got the morale high ground. As I may have mentioned once or twice IT IS WRONG TO DISCRIMINATE AGAINST THOSE THAT CAN'T OR WON'T DO EVERYTHING ONLINE and in other areas of life apparently any form of discrimination is wrong and quite rightly so. Alan

Morning (pre-munch) All My My Rick! If that's you modelling on track, you seem to have changed somewhat since moving to the Distant Signal (West)! Where there's muck ..... It's more than sad. I would venture to suggest that it is criminal and those doing it should be immediately dismissed from office and banned from holding office again. I suspect that if my suggestion was implemented though that there might be an empty "Big House"* up Westminster way up for let. * Other Big Houses are also available I know a GE that was like that and then whenever a new project started up they decided to ignore that and then come up with their own version. Which users than ignored as well ... Oh how I used to enjoy doing design reviews where much time was wasted spent pointing out non-compliance with the required "Scratch & Sniff" and wasting precious time that could more usefully be spent actually "exploring technical". And I thought word processor templates were meant to make such waste redundant. Still, I don't give a tinker's cuss now 😀 ION Had a relatively inactive day yesterday but felt very tired. The evening BP check revealed very low BP. Although I'm on BP meds I suspect that the main reason is the fact that the pump is knackered ...... And thinking about that, thanks to a certain @polybear I thought I'd start the Life Book. It could take some time. When it got to the Pacemaker bit I thought I'd Google the fitted device and download the technical stuff. I don't think I'll try interfacing it to an Arduino and a WiFi or Bluetooth module. Anyway, I've been meaning to do something like the book for ages so a very worthwhile kick up the donkey. I really must get round to updating (and making rather more comprehensive) my will as well. A very nice walk (~3 miles) was walked this morning with Mrs Puppers. As it is such a beautiful day I had thought before we went out I might go for short ride on the RD this afternoon. The sheets of black ice around the lanes where the weak, winter sunshine has yet to (and thus won't) penetrate would tend to suggest what a foolhardy idea that was (particularly as there's a will that needs updating) so that won't be happening. I never tire of this view from the church on the hill at Pupper Magna. And to think we nearly bought a flat in the middle of Milton Keynes when first married but fortunately a friend suggested taking a look for a place in Puppershire which halved the potential 50+ mile each way commute at the time before we signed the contracts. I am eternally grateful to him! It must be Munch Time. TTFN

Morning! ..... but Woolies closed about 20 years ago - Doh! Heating! You've got heating! Brrrr. Just remembered, the thermometer now says December. We can put the heating on - Yippee! 😀 ION I've checked my weather radar (Mk 1 Eyeball) and it's persisting down. Mrs Puppers has nipped out to "pick up a few bits". I was going to get the dancing girls round but instead I might nip over to the local Screwfix and pick up a new central heating programmer (well, it's December after all) as the old mechanical one ceased to fully function some considerable time ago. Mrs Puppers was enquiring as to suitable Christmas presents pour moi. I was thinking along the lines of another monstrous hard drive for all that astronomy "data" but my old PC monitor takes 30 minutes to get going now and this morning when it finally did I noticed the back light was flickering at the top. Chrimbo present plan changed, new monitor for Chrimbo ordered. Still got the tricky task of finding something nice for Mrs Puppers though. No bike riding today but earlier on I was thinking of going for a walk. That's been cancelled in accordance with the outcome of the earlier weather report. So perhaps the idea of having another play with some Jupiter data whilst supping on a hotmugocoffee and scoffing a couple of biccies seems quite appealing. I might even put the heating on! TTFN

Morning! Welcome to the new world of better customer service .... Absolutely! No respect required, just a flippin' idiot. These people walk amongst us. Not so much a retaining wall more an ultra thin skim of concrete. And I thought oil on water and graphene were the only things you could get one atom thick. I miss going to work ........ like a hole in the head. Happy belated birthday! That would explain it, about time somebody did something about it. ION Had friends round for the day yesterday which was most enjoyable. Mr Friend begged to see the RD. Who was I to refuse? Mr Friend and I bought identical RDs from a local dealer back in the mid '70s. You can take the man off of the RD but you can't take the RD out of the man (or something). I also introduced them to the joys of planet spotting with your very own eyes when it got dark. I think they were impressed. Got an offer of a lift to the motorcycle auto-jumble at Kempton Park today. I've never been and keep thinking I'd like to but WAY TOO COLD today for Puppers so another time then. Talking of planet spotting. I had yet another go at Jupiter the other evening. I took 10 videos, each of about 210 frames and processed the resulting 2100 frames to give a total exposure of ~ 45 seconds. Probably the best yet but I seem to have lost a couple of moons along the way* during processing. Here's one of the many source images and the result. Very clever software ... * Because of poor alignment the image kept getting close to the edge of the frame and so on many frames the moons were out of shot. TTFN

Evening All! 20 MINUTES !!!!! I was going to add a comment exploring that but I'll refrain for fear of offence. So everyone will just have to put up with my incredulity and wonder exactly what I think this mad world is coming to! I bet a few can guess ..... ION Not a huge amount to report. A trip to beam land to extract the old photo archive. Youngest Junior Puppers was after a few photographs of her in her "relatively freshly hatched" form. Suitable photographs were found, scanned and dispatched by the wonder of the Interweb. I also found a couple from an interesting part of my working life when I was involved with putting a fairly large chunk of an airliner into an even larger tank of water and then constantly abusing it for something like 40000 simulated flights. A period when I leant a lot about control systems, 3 term controllers, hydraulic servos and Cheese &.Onion Toasties* * You've got to have something to look forward to on a cold winter's night at 2:00 o'clock in the morning when you've just done an inspection of the test facility stuck in the open on the middle of an airfield. A trip to the local (this time) hospital this afternoon for more blood tests. I was rather pleased at the end when the phlebotomy nurse thanked me for making her laugh, she said it had brightened up her day. She "told herself off" when she said to me the standard statement "You'll feel a small scratch" and then said many people say "That's not a scratch you're going to stab me" which of course is rather over-dramatic. I said that I had noticed they'd changed the script from what they used to say a few years ago; she laughed and said "I know exactly what you mean and we're not allowed to say THAT any more!" I mentioned I would have been terminally offended (it's all the rage) if she had 🤣 And that's it really. Night All

I lied! I was going to do some more disk sorting but I stumbled on yet another astrophotograph processing package on the interweb so I thought I'd give it a try with one of my recent Jupiter videos. Whoop-de-doo! Very, very* pleased with how that's turned out! You can even see some of the white cloudy bits (technical term). * Best make that Very, very, very, very, very I hear the cooker beeping, it must be dinner time .... TTFNQ

Afternoon All Street Level Models (Charlie Connor) IIRC. Looks like things have moved on; the physical and web addresses in the CMRA programmes are obsolete This appears to be the current website with trading via an EBay store. Having said that, the tram related stuff seems to be conspicuous by its absence now. That's some seriously dodgy track! Not even the S4 Society's Deputy Chairman's Cup dodgy test track is that bad! I love COLD baked beans! Just open the tin and give me a spoon. If you don't mind me saying, that shows restraint above an beyond the call of duty. ION Another trip to a local B&M store was made this morning. Purchases included more Really Useful Boxes and B&Ms seem to be the cheapest best value for money source although locating the ones you want can be tricky as they seem to be spread randomly around the shop. Puppers needs quite a few, stackable, relatively small jobs for storing his growing collection of metallic and non-metallic material stock in the garage. The boxes currently used are too big and I can barely move them. This afternoon I have been looking down the spark plug holes of a friend's newly acquired Vincent Black Shadow. He wanted to check the bores and pistons so Dr Puppers called round with his endoscope. Seems alright as long as those streaks are streaks of oil and not gouges in the bore. Looks like it's got a very fine magneto on it as you could almost arc weld with the sparks! And now back to disk sorting ... TTFN

I'd have to have a machine it could learn on ..... Perhaps a simpler route would be for Puppers to just get better at astronomy/astrophotography and not fill the disk up with junk in the first place? Not attempting to do it when the atmospheric conditions were "inappropriate" might be a very good start 🤣

Evening All Makes the VMCC boys in Puppershire seem very tame by comparison. Come to think of it there is no comparison !!! And on a motorcycling related note; I was persuaded out for a ride and brecky this morning, sort of against my better judgement. Boy oh boy it was perishing cold and depressing out! We didn't venture far, about 10 miles. Breakfast was good as was the company but really, as a fair weather rider, I should have stayed at home tucked up in bed. ION I've been going through one of my big but just about full hard drives today. This Astrophotography malarkey doesn't half consume some disk real-estate! "Relentless deletion" has been the order of the day (sounds like a Punk group?) although I can't say it's freed all that much space up. The trouble is that it is a very time consuming processing, looking at hundreds of images and trying to work out whether they are worth keeping or not and then if they are going through and deleting just the ones where individual frames are poor due to variations in the "seeing" (astronomy term referring to the degradation of an image or view caused by atmospheric turbulence.). Puppers fears he has not been relentless enough and a 2nd and maybe even a 3rd pass might be needed ... TTFN

Afternoon All I wouldn't have thought so. The only thing they are likely to have found is larger backpacks! We're firmly in the "cook-your-own frozen ones at home" are best camp and the frozen ones can generally take the knocks whilst getting back home. 160 degrees, 20 minutes, allow to almost cool - lovely! Reminds me of the description of the engines in the Sepecat Jaguar aircraft; "Constant thrust, variable noise". ION It appears that I need to increase the frame rate not the duration of my Jupiter videos to get more frames due to its relatively high rotation rate. Could be tricky on the ageing laptop used to capture them! TCs It appears I missed seeing a Deltic on the ECML yesterday. TCs squared. It also appears that it will be travelling past Hitchin / St Evenage at ~ 19:30 tomorrow evening. Should I go and take a look in the dark I wonder? TTFN

Evening All! Very late on parade. A trip to B&M's (the cheapest vendor I could find) for some Really Useful Boxes (can't be doing with the cheap & poor imitators) to house the Brio railway of the the grandkids. This has recently swelled by a donation of redundant said items from next door. After lunch a thrash was thrashed on the RD. Now the mixture has been richened by two needle notches it's going nicely and no sign of it cooking so that's a big tick. As the sky was mostly clear this evening an early start was made on the astronomy. Fortunately I got reasonably lucky with the polar alignment and I was able to track Jupiter reasonably well with the remote control of the mount. If the polar alignment had been spot-on no intervention should have been necessary but I was prepared to fiddle to get a decent sized set of data as in this game there is no substitute for cc's. In all I took 10 videos totalling something like 8400 individual frames. A quick process of just one of the videos this evening has produced this ... I think that shows real promise and I feel like (at last!) I might be getting somewhere. I'll do the full processing tomorrow and it will be interesting to see how much better I can get it with a heap more data. Anyway, time for bed said Zebedee

I'll have you no that that Email address is* confidential !!!! * was There, fixed it for you. ION I'm tired. I think it's bed time. Night All

I've just remembered, I can't participate in it. I'm washing my hair that weekend. One of the neighbours, today 🙄 Mine did! Night All!

Pre-Muunch All! With friends like that stuff the Templot! We haven't been to Hughendon for absolutely ages. Hmmm, perhaps it's time for a visit?🤔 Well, well that's not too shabby at all. Is that the giant red spot I spy? Slowly, slowly. catchy monkey (no, not you Chimpy!) although there's still a long way to go. Where is the colour advisor when I need her to assist the colour-challenged amateur astronomer? ION The carb needles have been raised another notch to richen the mixture on the RD. Just waiting for the drizzle to B OFF so that I can go and give it a quick try. TTFN