Category: General

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I have cobbled together a pinhole camera out of two Amazon.com boxes (one at first, but the image was too small), a piece of paper, a piece of foil, and a lot of packing tape. The test run looks good: The image isn’t that big, maybe 3/8 of an inch, but I was able to see the shapes of clouds as they drifted in front of the disc, so it should be sharp enough to show the eclipse.

Since I was building it around the same time of day that the eclipse will be happening, now I know what the sightlines are going to be like. I’ll definitely have to go somewhere less obstructed, probably somewhere higher in case the clouds roll in tomorrow. Update: I did.

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  • “Transformers” Hostess Cupcakes And Sno Balls Roll Out – OK, I have to admit that "Chocwave" cupcakes are inspired.
  • Emergency Preparedness: Cell & Home Phone Guidelines. In particular: wireless home phones require power. Keep one landline phone with a cord on hand. And for non-emergency communications (“I’m OK, hope everyone else is”), stick to texting, email, or social networks so that emergency workers and people in immediate danger (“Help, I’m trapped under a fallen wall”) can use the voice channels.
  • Whenever I hear someone complain about “hipsters,” I always think of this comic.

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Some sites I’ve linked to on Twitter, Facebook & Google+ over the past few weeks.

Comic strip with two stick figures talking. 1: You should join Google+! 2: What is it? 1: Not Facebook! 2: What's it like? 1: Facebook! Pause Second figure clicks on a computer. 2: Oh, what the hell. I guess that's all I really wanted.

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Saturday night we went out to the Redondo Beach pier just in time to watch the sun set over the Pacific Ocean. One thing that I found a bit odd was that it appeared to be setting behind a line of distant mountains. While the coast does curve westward at Santa Monica, I was pretty sure that due west of us was nothing but sea, though I figured it could have been the Channel Islands, or a very sharply-defined cloud bank.

So I did what any geek would do: looked up the angle at which the sun had set that evening.

I found two tools: The NOAA solar position calculator let me figure out, given latitude, longitude and time, the sun’s declination. Then I found another tool that let me enter the latitude, longitude, and compass bearing and see a line drawn on a map.

It turned out that the sun was setting roughly 21° north of due west, putting it roughly in line with the coast from Malibu toward Ventura…on the seaward side. The line finally connected with land out toward Point Conception, roughly 120 miles away. That’s probably too far away to be visible from near sea level, depending on how high the mountains are out there, but if the angle was off just a little bit (I did estimate the time), it could easily have be the Santa Monica mountains above Malibu (more like 20 miles).

So yes, I did watch the sun set over the ocean and over land at the same time!

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  • Very cool! 175 Photos of Day Taken at Night
  • Humans TXT: We Are People, Not Machines. Cool idea, but I’m not sure how practical it is without (ironically, I know) a machine-readable standard. If we can’t get most people to watch the credits on a movie, who’s going to go looking for a text file that’s referenced in a hidden link?
  • The Android Market is finally viewable on the web! I love being able to look for and download an app directly on my phone, but sometimes the desktop environment is just easier to deal with.
  • What happens when the cloud evaporates? Flickr: Too big to fail (We hope?) at ZDNet. (TL;DR case study: Flickr accidentally deleted a photographer’s entire account with 4,000 photos. He had his own copies of the pictures themselves, but all the account structure: links on his blog and elsewhere, titles, descriptions, labels, etc. were lost until they were able to dredge it up out of system backups.)
  • Webcomic SMBC asks: Where’s the ball?
  • Sad balrog has no one left to play with. 🙁