I swear this sounds like the setup for the kind of 50s B sci-fi movie that would have found a home on Mystery Science Theater 3000. Or possibly a SyFy Original Movie.
Of course, in the real world, the tuna are less likely to grow wings and fly around the beach, killing surfers and bikini-clad sunbathers before they make their way inland, knocking down the Hollywood sign on their way to the intense battle with the US Army in and around Downtown Los Angeles.
Backdated
I always feel weird when editing old blog posts at my main site publishes them here in Tumblr. I mean, I like that it works, and that they get properly backdated, but they still show up as new in the dashboard.
Even if they’re about events that happened six years ago.
Photo with 1 note
Eclipse Scope Eyepiece on Flickr.
Looking at Sunday’s solar eclipse through a filtered telescope.
» More photos & writeup at my main blog.
Photo with 1 note
Sun viewed through eclipse glasses on Flickr.
Of the various ways I looked at the solar eclipse, my favorite was a set of “eclipse glasses” made from exposed photographic film. Everything else felt like I was looking at a picture of the sun, rather than watching something here and how, except for this and the welding helmet. And the welding helmet turned everything green.
After looking at the sun for a few seconds through the glasses, I stuck one in front of the camera and took this shot.
» Full blog post & more photos.
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Photos: Solar Eclipse from Los Angeles (May 2012)
I had several plans for viewing today’s solar eclipse, depending on the weather. As the hour approached and clouds loomed in the west, I decided that my best bet would be to get above the cloud cover, and drove up into the hills to Del Cerro Park at the top of the Palos Verdes peninsula.
I’m glad I did, because a lot of other people had the same idea.
Individuals, couples, families, groups of friends, groups from schools — and everyone had a different way to see the eclipse: pinhole cameras, binoculars projecting on cardboard, welding helmets, “eclipse glasses” and more. There were also people who were just out for a day at the park, and wanted to know what was going on.
If J had been a few years older it would have been a family event for us too, but at a year and a half, I don’t think I would have been able to explain anything beyond “don’t look at the sun.” A partial eclipse is easy to miss if you’re not paying attention.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/kelsonv/7239399000/in/set-72157629825338642
I’d cobbled together a pinhole camera the day before from two Amazon boxes, a sheet of paper, a sheet of aluminum foil, and lots and lots of packing tape. I actually started with just one box and I decided the image wasn’t big enough, so I grafted on a second. Even then it was only about 3/8” across, but when testing it I could see the edges of clouds drifting across the sun, so I figured it would work. It did.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/kelsonv/7239397104/in/set-72157629825338642
I set up “shop” near a couple who were working on their own pinhole camera, but decided that mine had a better image and used their to prop mine up. It was far from the best view of the sun, but a lot of people stopped to check it out.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/kelsonv/7239402172/in/set-72157629825338642
One of the groups with a filtered telescope was letting anyone walk up and take a look. It was a really impressive view: still very bright, but orange, and a lot sharper than anything I could see on the pinhole camera’s screen. I tried putting my camera up to it, but the lens was just too long. My phone, however, was just about perfect.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/kelsonv/7239400410/in/set-72157629825338642
The woman whose pinhole camera ended up being used as the support for mine discovered that she could aim her iPhone a little bit away from the camera and get a fainter image of the sun in the lens flare. I was surprised that the iPhone’s lens was long enough to flare, but it also pretty much confims my suspicions about the weird lunar eclipse photo I found in a box a few years ago. Naturally, I had to try my own hand at it.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/kelsonv/7239401354/in/set-72157629825338642
At the peak of the eclipse (what would have been totality a few hundred miles north of here), 85% of the sun’s diameter was covered. It was still too bright to look at the sun, and still broad daylight. Though it did seem dimmer, it’s hard to be certain how much of that was it being later in the day, since at 6:38 it was only about an hour before sunset.
About this point, I borrowed one of the welding helmets. It felt a lot more immediate, since I wasn’t looking at a projection or a reflection. Even the telescope, despite the large image (or perhaps in part because of it) felt more like I was looking at a picture of the eclipsed sun, which you can see anytime. Still, the welding mask made the sun look green, which made it seem a little less real.
The best were the eclipse glasses (made from fully-exposed photographic film). Not only was it immediate, because I was looking right at the sun, but the sun looked orange - much closer to expectations. I took a photo through the glasses, so you can see roughly what it looked like.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/kelsonv/7239402658/in/set-72157629825338642
As the afternoon wore on, the fog moved inland and up the hills. When I arrived, the ridge of Catalina Island was just barely visible above a layer of clouds, and the nearby coastline was just visible below them. By an hour in, both were buried. We were starting to wonder if the fog would block the view, but it stayed well below the sun’s elevation (even if it crept up on ours).
http://www.flickr.com/photos/kelsonv/7239403092/in/set-72157629825338642
Shortly after the maximum eclipse, the college(?) group with the telescope gave the sun a round of applause. As the moon blocked less and less of the sun, people started leaving, with a mass exodus around half an hour later.
By around 7:10, the festival atmosphere was gone. Around 100 people along the hilltop ridge dwindled down to about 20 in scattered groups. It gave the park the feeling of early evening at the beach, after most of the people out swimming or sunning have left, and those left are gathering around fire pits. A few minutes later, most of them had gone too, with only a few of us sticking around for the sunset.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/kelsonv/7239406832/in/set-72157629825338642
A few more people arrived after all the hubbub had died down. It’s a nice evening spot to just get away from it all and watch the sea, or the clouds, or the sunset. Locals arrived walking their dogs, and the park took on its usual feeling of solitude.
The fog pushed its way over the hills, not quite reaching the one where I stood, but pouring over the next ridge as the sun descended behind it.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/kelsonv/7239407972/in/set-72157629825338642
By sunset, the clouds had rolled up through the foothills, blanketing the slope down to the coast.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/kelsonv/7239409966/in/set-72157629825338642
I’d half-hoped to get some shots of the setting sun while it was still eclipsed, but you really have to wait until it’s almost at the horizon…just a few minutes after the eclipse ended. I settled for the next best thing, and caught this shot of the sun “eclipsed” by a pair of trees.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/kelsonv/7239410812/in/set-72157629825338642
I’d left the pinhole camera by a bench facing outward toward the sea. After the sun dipped below the horizon, I walked back to retrieve it. It ended its life as a dog toy.
So it goes.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/kelsonv/7239411434/in/set-72157629825338642
Eclipse Ring on Flickr.
I’m planning to catch today’s partial solar eclipse, with much better planning and a better camera than this lunar eclipse from 1994. Because I’m pretty sure it was taken with a point-and-shoot fixed-focus 35mm camera (though I *had* an SLR by that time that my grandfather had given me, so I’m not sure why I wouldn’t have used it).
But even if it’s a really messed-up picture of an eclipse, it’s still an interesting-*looking* picture, IMO.
Delicious, Twitter, and Linkblogging
The classic link-sharing site Delicious is still around, trying to find a niche in the new social media world. One of the things they’ve recently done is set up a way to import all links you post on Twitter. It does a historical import when you link the account, and then pulls in new tweets going forward.
It’s a cool idea, depending on how you use the sites, and they’ve made it just flexible enough that anyone who might want to do this in the first place will find a way to match their use case.
In my case, I mainly used Delicious as an additional bookmark store that I could access across browsers and accounts, though for the most part that’s been replaced by Xmarks. I haven’t used it as much for deliberate sharing, though I’ve posted the occasional link in the hopes that someone might notice it.
Anyway, I linked it up with my personal Twitter account, left the site for a few hours, then came back to see just how far back it had imported. It went back about 3 years, pulling in over 1,000 links that I’d posted to Twitter.
The Good:
- It merges duplicates.
- Links are backdated to the day you posted the tweet.
- All imported links are tagged with “from twitter” (you can change this), making it easy to filter.
- Hashtags are imported as tags.
- The text of your tweet becomes the comment.
- It extracts titles and thumbnail images from the links.
- It can follow some redirectors, including Twitter’s own t.co.
The Bad:
- It doesn’t follow all redirectors. There are an awful lot of bit.ly and is.gd links in there.
- That also means that if I tweeted the same link twice using different link shorteners, it doesn’t resolve the duplicates.
- A lot of those links were only of short term interest.
- Three years is plenty of time for a redirector (or, of course, a target link) to shut down. Fortunately, it looks like I didn’t use tr.im much.
- My blog automatically tweets links to new posts, which means every post I’ve made in the last three years is in there - the earliest with an is.gd or tinyurl link, the later ones with bit.ly. I don’t need those in my own bookmarks (with a few exceptions), and as far as sharing goes, it makes me feel spammy to plug three years’ worth of backlist at once.
- Searching for links gives you less-functional results than simply looking at your list or filtering by tag. Not all details appear on the results page, bulk actions aren’t available, and you can’t always delete a link if you edit it from search results. This meant I couldn’t, for instance, search for “New post” or “K-Squared Ramblings,” skim the titles and bulk-delete the bookmarks to my own content.
Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been taking a few minutes here and there to go through what started as 60 pages’ worth of imported links, delete the ones I don’t want to keep and fix up the ones I do. It started out faster than my last Twitter-related cleanup project, but that’s because there were a lot of auto-posted links I could just delete without taking the time to evaluate or label them. It’s already slowing down.
I could just leave all the clutter there, but part of the point is for this to be my bookmarks-away-from-home, and it’s easier to find stuff without the extra junk.
On the plus side, between this and the broken link cleanup, I’m getting to see a bunch of old posts and photos I’d forgotten about. That’s been an interesting process.
It’s also convinced me that linkblogging round-ups really don’t belong on this blog. I still do them on Speed Force, but that’s in part because Speed Force has readers who don’t follow the social networks. (OK, let’s be honest: because Speed Force has readers.) Here, where it’s just a personal site, I’m better off sticking with the best medium for each post. That means Twitter, Facebook and Google+ for short posts (barring a few categories that I’ve got history here, like license plate spotting), the blog for longer posts, and social networks for link sharing.
Photo reblogged from The Bird and The Bat with 108 notes
@GameOfThrones’ Daenerys with 3 familiar dragons. I could not love this more.
You can view this piece of art and much more at the opening of HEY GEEK GIRL! at the LTD Gallery in Seattle tomorrow.
3 days away from opening of HEY GEEK GIRL!!
So MORE PREVIEWS
Mother of Dragons by Mona Collentine
Source: ltdartgallery
Photo reblogged from This is so babies with 6,393 notes
Ugh. It’s bad, Boromir, but not worth losing your head over.
Source: klingonbard
Photo with 1 note
I just spent too long troubleshooting a failed file transfer by email. Appropriately enough, it turns out this cartoon is the top search result for “file transfer.”
Source: xkcd.com
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