Be Excellent To Each Other

Did someone say green trainers?

Approved

They’re nice

I’ll see your green trainers and raise you an orange jacket.

.

Just in time for the good weather.

Looks great. I like a jacket that makes someone easy to spot in a crowd of dull people.

And it matches my new synth.

Which is the main thing.

Looking good

New pickguard for the telecaster

You'll have to post up a pic of the Tele with that on. Telecasters are so classy. I hate Strats, they make me think of Bryan Adams but Teles are the best.



Picked up this watch. I'm maintaining a strict one in/one out watch box now. Bought this primarily because a) it's yellow and summery, b) it has a full lume dial. The dial isn't as lumey as hoped though and I sort of hate the bracelet (I like the look but it's not super comfortable and I feel like the pins could fall out). I think this will get some use but I don't know if it'll hold down a permanent place in the box. But I do like the yellow-ness of it.

EDIT: I took the photo before I saw Mali's post. But that's my cheapy Tele clone, well the neck of it. And my brother in law's bass. And my fat Ibanez at the back..

Looks like an RNLI publicity shot.

To replace the old one that has finally lost the plot after about 15 years.

Some battery powered garden tools.



I already have some Fatmax tools like drills and drivers and they seem to be pretty well suited to my needs and I like them. This also means I have a selection of batteries so there are always some charged up and ready to click in, which is important as having to stop a job partway through because all of the batteries are flat would be really annoying.

They are much more convenient, and are lighter and easier to use than the petrol tools that I've got. Mixing up the petrol and oil is a PITA and using it leaves me smelling of fuel and fumes too, and I don't enjoy messing around getting the cheapo petrol tools started.

The blower and strimmer aren't quite as powerful as the petrol ones, so I'll be keeping the petrol powered tools too, for when I need a bit more ooomph. Haven't used the polesaw yet but just from the feel of the box it will be nice and light and it extends longer than my current petrol one anyway.

These new ones are dead easy to get out and do a quick 5 or 10 minute job, I think I'll be doing more of the gardening in a 'little and often' style rather than letting the jobs pile up and doing it in one large tiring slog on a weekend that leaves me feeling knackered out. I can also blow off the deck and patios a couple of times a week to keep them nice.

I do also remember Snappa commenting about how much CO2 the petrol powered leaf blowers put out.

Dropped MacBook. Damaged SDXC card cover. Bought a replacement even though the damaged one is still working.

Why is Finder so fucking useless for copying whole file structures from one storage device to another and why don't they put a proper spring loaded card slot in the thing?

Well this is nice!

This just came today:



It's a really cool little smart telescope. Just had a really quick go with it and managed to get this:



and this earlier on:



Now just need to sell my bigger scope that's been gathering dust forever.

Whaaaat?! Mark, that first photo is stunning. I didn’t know you could get anything like this with a home telescope?!

Wow, that’s an incredible thing. Please, please share more photos.

Cheers, I’m well impressed with it. It turns out that a lot of deep sky objects like nearby galaxies and nebulae are actually quite big in the sky but just really faint, so while this scope has relatively low magnification it uses a camera so if you let it stare for long enough it’ll take lots of images and stack them up. It’s super easy to use AND you can stick it out in the garden and drive it from the sofa.

That’s pretty amazing. The detail is extremely impressive. Please do share more pictures when you take them. I’d love to see some things that are there but invisible to me.

Yeah, that’s sweet.

Wot, no eclipse pic?

Well it was pretty cloudy but perhaps the bigger problem was that it was on Saturday and this got delivered yesterday.

Cor, that's ace!

Excuses, excuses

Here you go then

One more I got last night here:

Stunning

Wow, that's amazing

Having just looked into these, what made you choose the S30 over the S50, Mark? Price?

Yeah, price and size and having watched a few comparisons the difference in image quality between the two isn't really all that staggering. There's *always* bigger and better with telescopes but even the S30 produces images that a few short years ago you'd have been into thousands and thousands and then an awful lot of learning to produce anything as good.

How many stars would you give it?

His name's not Mark Price.

Seriously, I had no idea such devices existed. I have a 4" refractor that I've had for years, from when I was a member of Macclesfield Astro Society, but I had no motor drive with it and to be honest, I never really mastered it. Even just setting the alignment up was pretty difficult. I used to spend ages trying to locate objects and struggled to keep them in the field of view. I hadn't kept up with my membership, or with developing scope technology, so I'm amazed by how far it's come and how compact these things are. Time for me to start saving up.

That is amazing

I'm well impressed so far, I've got a 130mm reflector that's now on ebay. Got quite into it for a while but where I live isn't exactly ideal and it weighs a bloody ton. I was a bit worried that using a smart telescope might feel little disconnected like just looking at pictures of this stuff on the internet and there is something about looking down an eyepiece that you lose I guess but then most people into this hobby seem to end up doing astrophotography anyway rather than just looking at stuff directly. But although it does a lot of work for you in terms of finding the targets etc. there's still lots of choices to make and watching as the image builds up is pretty addictive.

I was wondering about that feeling, as there seems something really cool about the idea of that light having travelled all that distance and then directly into my eye (via some lenses and mirrors and stuff). However, having al the fiddly set up and tracking done automatically sounds super neat.

What's the software like? Is it easy to use?

Really easy, just an app, like one of those night sky apps but with all the stuff to control the telescope.

More from last night.

I remember the first time I saw Saturn and its rings through my own telescope, although it only appears as a tiny white sphere with a white ring around it, at an oblique angle. And then Jupiter and several of its moons, all lined up and even being able to see them move in their orbits. It's definitely something magical to see it directly, rather than on a screen.

And I thought look at dem tiddies