Google earth sunset azimuth mapping

Google earth recently added a “heading” display to their measurement tool, which made me realize I could accurately map out where the sunset will happen from our house on a few important dates – The two solstices and the equinox. 

Steps:

1. Use this page to get the correct date’s for the solstices + equinox
2. Use this page to calculate the azimuth (heading) for those dates for your house (I had to use Concord, NH: About 15 miles from my house).  After getting a “Rise/Set Noon Time” chart, change the columns to “Rise/Set time/Azimuth”
3. Use the measurement tool to place a placemark/pin about 50 miles from my house at the correct headings.
4. Use the Path tool to draw a line from my house to these place marks.  I got “pretty close” at first, then zoomed in and edited the paths to be very accurate.
5. Modiy the paths to have 10pixel width and 50% opacity
6. Delete the placemarks/pins

After doing this I can easily generate a view like this:

Also very kewl is being able to follow the lines out and see that (as observed) the sun sets directly between Monadnock Mnt. and Crotched Mnt. on Winter Solstice.

Very handy info to have for lining up things  sacrificial alters, pyramids, large ceremonial buildings and the like.

Piano Tuning

Had the piano tuned this week – and it is wonderful to have it playable again.  The past few months I would sit down to play and after a few min find something wrong with the tuning, or more often, a mechanical problem with the action. 

Most mechanical problems I can fix myself, and I had the action out of the piano preparing for such a repair.  Unfortunately I left the room and the children entered it.  I came back in to find them playing with it and one of the hammers was broken off it’s flange.  I repaired as best I could, but it was wiggly and would cause the key next to it to play – so the piano was basically un-playable – if you wanted a C5 in the song anyway.

The piece of wood that part #6 screws into is what was broken.

Enter Mark Dierauf – of NH Pianos. He was able to fix the bad hammer + flange with a new pin – which required having about a dozen different sizes of pins – the tools to get them in and out of little tiny wood pieces – and the knowledge that a new pin would even solve the problem.  In the process he broke and fixed a few other things – and the result was 87 of the 88 keys working enough to be tuned, and the one broken one being the lowest key on the piano so not missed during regular play.

The very kewl part of this visit was the software that Mark uses called TuneLab – which runs on his windows cell phone.  Mark indicated it didn’t run on the iPhone yet because of Apple’s approval process holding up it’s release.  It would, however, run on the little netbook we have. 

The software is currently released as “nag ware” in that it is 100% useable but every once in a while it will freeze up for a couple of min.

So while Mark was tuning I was able to get it running and hopefully getmyself to a point where I can do a maintenance, or “Touch up” tune on the piano if a couple of keys go way out of whack before Mark visits again.

The software costs $340 – and I don’t think I’ll be buying it anytime soon as I’d only be using it to tune my piano.  It did get me thinking about the market for piano tuning software, and I didn’t realize that it’s a semi-popular interview question to ask, “How many piano tuners are there in the world?”  This page claims about 20k.

What caused me to blog about this though is the pleasant feeling I know get when I walk into the room with the piano – compared to the nagging frustration I had when it was broken and out of tune.  It is as if the house is more in harmony with the world then it was before.

Orion

Saw Orion for the first time this season.  It’s my “ski constellation” because it’s most easily seen during the winter months. 

Around 11pm I went out to check the cloud cover and visibility in anticipation of the Leonid meteor shower.  Leo rises in the east (actually, everything rises in the east) and while looking that way I spotted my old friend Orion.

Most years I spot it first during early October, but this year it’s halfway through November before I saw it.  Not sure why this year was so late and am hoping it’s not because I spend less time looking at the stars – but I think it is.

Got up at 3am to go looking for Leonids.  Sky was perfectly clear and I stood there tired and cold for about 5min and spotted 2 Leonids.  I told the kids about it in the morning, and they asked why I didn’t wake them up – and I reminded them that there we’re only 2 in 5 min and that if it was more I would have got everyone up.

My daughter asked me what I wished for – and I admitted I totally forgot.  That gave me the idea that the next time there’s a meteor shower to wake them up for, I’ll remind them of all the wishes they get to make – which is a part of a meteor shower I never thought about until now.

Cat 5 dirty little secret

I just got a 2nd access point working at home.  It’s about 50ft away from the existing access point.  I had this working before, but replaced the main router (replaced dLink with Belkin) and it stopped working.

I was able to rule the problem down to a cable running about 20ft from my main router to the 2nd router.

• If I plugged the 2nd router into a 4ft patch cable it worked fine.
• If I plugged the 2nd router into the 20ft cable it didn’t work at all – no lights on either router, no ping response, nothing
• If I put a continuity tester on the 20ft cable it showed all 8 wires were connected in the right order.

So – Short cable worked fine – long cable didn’t work at all.

After much research and a call to Belkin (who said 15ft is the max cable length) I solved the problem.  It boils down to what I consider a dirty little secret of network cabling:

When creating a cat5 cable you must wire the ends such that twisted pairs end on specific pins.  It is not enough to just get the two ends wired the same. Pins 1&2 must be a twisted pair and pins 3&6 must be a twisted pair.

Here’s the dirty part:

Those are the only 4 pins you need to hook up.

What it means is you wire both ends something like this

Pin1: Orange Wire

Pin2: Orange & White striped Wire

Pin3: Green Wire

Pin6: Green & White striped Wire

And you leave the rest empty.

More info on 1000bast T cables (which need all at this link.

I know I have asked network guys and cable pulling guys specifically if there were any tricks to wiring the plugs, because I suspected something like this for a long time – and they all refused to tell me.  I vaguely remember one or two of them having an evil grin when they told me this.  Job security?  Maybe.  It was hard to learn, it should be hard for you to learn kinda thing? More likely.

Light bulb life span

We moved a year ago and in that time I think I’ve had to replace about 4 light bulbs in the new house.  In the old house I was replacing what seemed like 2 or 3 a month.  I’m not sure if it’s a property of the wiring, or some quality of service from the electric company. 

I don’t think I’ve had to replace a single CFL bulb in either house.

Airport Express doesn’t like 802.11n

Bought a new router (net connection was dropping for a second a few times a day) and replaced it with a Belkin N Wireless Router.  All hard wired computers were back online pretty quick.

The Airport Express that I use to play music in the office did NOT connect though.  When I tried to configure it I would get this:

An error occured while trying to access the Apple wireless device.  Make sure your network connection is valid and try again.  Error 10057

After trying MANY things I flipped my router from “802.11b & 802.11g & 802.11n” to “802.11g” the Airport Express now works.  I don’t know what this does to my range/speed for devices that are able to talk 802.11n.

The bigger problem is the long network cable that no longer works… zero changes to that end of things but connecting a computer directly to the other end fails to work.  Little choice but replacing the entire cable, about 20ft long… through the basement… through a hub.

I hate networking – but not as much as I hate printers.

Tell me more…

The basic idea: A method of presenting information such that you get as much detail as you need based on how long you read/view the info.

Example one: The Red Sox beat the Orioles last night… the key piece of info is who won.  So one of the smallest versions of this story could be “Red Sox Win.”  Most people will want more – like the score, maybe they didn’t know who they were playing or where… so another version is the obvious “Boston Beats Baltimore 3-1 at Fenway.”

For purely academic discussion: If the news query was “How did the Red Sox do last night?”  The answer could be boiled down to a single bit.  1= They Won, 0 = They Lost. If all I had time for was a single bit – this would be a great piece of information.

Continuing the academic discussion: What if I had time for 2 bits?  Maybe there’s nothing useful in a 2nd bit… or maybe it could be defined as “At home?”  So last nights story in two bits is 11, which translates to “They Won, and they played at home.”

The score and opponent are usually viewed as important pieces, so we have to define how many bits for this info, and we eventually get to a “11111101″ = which breaks down to “They won, at home, 3 to 1 against the 4th team in a list of MLB eastern league teams.  An algorithm could be designed to fit useful info into as few bits as possible.

Back to the big idea – currently we have a very established system of “Head Line” and “Story.”  I’m sure there’s a commonly accepted maximum length for the Head Line – maybe 100 characters, and the Story tends to range from a front page “couple paragraphs” to magazine styled “as much as can be read in a typical bathroom session.”

My idea is to enable an author to write a story such that it can be consumed in almost any size.  The Sports story is easy to define – but where this really hits the fan is international political stories where the audience has a questionable amount of previous knowledge.  Someone very up on their geopolitical events could get a short version, but someone without this background could consume more bits to deepen their understanding.

Weather is another topic that could probably be broken down to the single bit response to “Will it be nice out tomorrow?” to the more complex, “What temperature will it be during school hours?”

Sliding Doors

Our house has at least 10 sliding doors.  I think 2 of them work like they are supposed to.  Last night the sliding door on the shower decided to go off track and I can’t get it back on.  Found out the sliding door in the bedroom is letting mosquitos in.  I’m looking for something to replace all the sliding screen doors, as almost every one I’ve owned in my life has been problematic.

Obama get’s same map

I installed my map in my office back in September, and just read a blog post detailing NatGeo giving the same map to the President as a gift.  Although his is actually a map cabinet that holds lots of maps.  Kinda kewl to have pix of my office and the oval office in the same blog.

iPhone OS3 Upgrade breaks eReader Bookshelf

After upgrading to v3.0 of the iPhone operating system the eReader Pro application can no longer switch what book your reading.  A big problem.  The reader still worked, but if you finished a book (as I did last night) and tried to open another one you’re kinda just lost… it didn’t crash, it just didn’t go to the bookshelf.

To the developer’s credit their company, Fictionwise responded to an email I sent complaining with this:

We apologize for the trouble. A fix is currently in progress. We do not have a definite time for when it will be made available at this time. But it should be soon.

The most surprising thing about the response is that I got it about 5min after sending the complaint. Expected response from this kind of thing is days, not minutes.

I found reports of this problem in a couple places, but only buried in the iTune store application reviews did I find the work around: Delete eReader Pro and re-Install it.  This gives you a chance to open a new book – but has the side effect of deleting all the books you’ve downloaded as well as resetting your application preferences.

Had I got this from fictionwise I would have been much happier.  Ideally I would have liked to find a great big, top of the page kinda support link on their help pages detailing the problem and the work around.