Headworx

On the astrophotography front I am happy to report about my recent wedge upgrade. A wedge is an important part of a tracking camera mount, a kind of mount which compensates for the rotation of Earth and allows long(er) exposures.  Precision of a tracking head directly impacts the quality of long exposure photos of the (night) sky. Equally important is the stability of a tripod as well as sturdiness of a wedge, which must be calibrated for each session. Some of you may remember I have been using the Fornax Lightrack II tracking head which offers a great balance between precision and portability. Initially I had tried several 3rd party wedges with the Lightrack, but all of them were shaky and flimsy, so in the end I decided on getting the original wedge from Fornax. It did the job, being very sturdy, but with that came the weight and the size. Also the Fornax wedge was difficult to align precisely, as the mechanism lacked a method for (very) fine adjustments.  Quite recently Wi...

I have an electric water boiler which is probably responsible for majority of my electricity bill. A hot bath or a hot shower are the luxuries I enjoy every day. And heating water consumes a lot of energy. This is because water has high specific heat capacity. To heat 100 liters of water from 15 to 60 degrees Celsius requires about 5kWh. An average car consumes 0.20 kWh per kilometer. So this energy would allow a car to drive for 25 kilometers.  The high heat capacity of water also means it is a quite effective energy storage. Or - in other words - it can stay hot (in a properly insulated tank) for quite a long time. This also means the 100 liters I need for a bath in the morning could be heated at any time during the day. In particular during the period when we have oversupply of energy (when the Sun shines and wind blows and people are not taking baths and the industrial machines are switched off). It is a dead simple idea. An I thought it was only where I lived that this idea wa...

Enjoying the second year of relative slowdown across the board, I do not have too much "gear"noise to offer. But having said that, there are several items I really enjoyed throughout 2021. And one of them undeniably was the Palm Phone . Make no mistake, I did not use it as my primary phone, which BTW the Blackberry has continued to be (one of my top picks for 2017 ). But the Palm was with me on many occasions. Especially on the trail runs, where I enjoy listening to variety of audio content. About half of the runs (which I continue doing daily at a very consistent level), I had only the Garmin watch with me, loaded with the podcasts I subscribe to. But there are other content sources which do not transfer that easily to the watch. Among them are Audible audiobooks, which can be copied over to the watch, but that requires transcoding them to the MP3 format. The transcoding itself is not that difficult, but they end up being big long files and the Garmin does not have a proper...

2021 was very calm, as far as gear purchases are considered. I'm very happy I have reached this state of tranquility, not chasing variety of new (often cool, but rarely indispensable) gadgets. It seems most things I have, are just OK and good enough. It is a pity though some of them are being phased out by the service providers .  Entering 2021 I had big backlog of ideas and I'm really happy I managed to accomplish several I had had in mind for many years. One of them has been a single remote to operate my multimedia system which includes a menagerie of products, among them: A Panasonic video projector (~10 years old) A Bose Lifestyle audio system (~25 years old) An Apple TV as the primary source of video content As you can imagine each of these has its own remote. The projector has a very sophisticated one, which is used only to power it on and off. The Bose audio system has another, which turns the audio on and off and controls volume. Then there is the Apple TV remote which ...

As I was lamenting last week on the terrible service end-of-life policies rendering fully functional products useless, I was going through some important upgrades, breathing new life in some other devices. When Android TV showed up in TV sets about 5 years ago I thought this was the best thing since the sliced bread. Finally the promise of a single remote and a TV set as an application platform capable of receiving terrestrial, satellite and Internet content, with a local storage for recording and pausing. I bought a 4k Android TV made by Philips and this was a huge disappointment. First it was very laggy. An ageing phone was snappier than this device. Then it was buggy, requiring a reset every now and then. But I was literally stuck with this 55 inch of a glorious 4k LCD screen bundled with a completely crappy computer inside. I could never decide on trashing it for the environmental reasons (and also because the LCD part of it has been quite good). So just last week I decided to tur...