As readers of my blog know, I am an amateur astronomer. And my road into astronomy has not been paved with the remains of rainbows or yesterday’s sunbeams. I have struggled mightily over the last 7 years, including some epic battles with my scope to get aligned.
In the end, two people in the club really helped me nail down my wayward astro gremlins, and now I try to pay it back whenever I can. I have a couple of posts that get a lot of foot traffic about the “proper” way to do alignment of a Celestron GoTo scope, and I’m of the firm belief that users of the SE series of scopes fall into very set categories:
75% of owners will use their scopes right out of the box without any trouble, it will work as intended, no gremlins;
10% will not get it to work, but it is more user error than anything else, and they will never get ANY scope to work, because it just doesn’t make sense to them;
10% will struggle mightily but will learn how to make it work; and,
5% will have serious gremlins that they won’t be able to banish, or even know what gremlins they face.
So I know that my type of scopes are popular, and I want to make sure no one is left dangling. It’s a horrible feeling. And since I have experience with it, I tried to do some training tonight for 4 intrepid souls looking for some assistance. Three made it out, betting the fourth might not of expected us to go ahead as it was looking almost like a thunderstorm was coming
One of the three has had a scope before, relatively understanding of the stars, just new to goto scopes; another was relatively new to astronomy but had set up a couple of times; and the third was brand new and had no idea how to get his scope going.
Unfortunately, both the last one I listed and me were not prepared properly for tonight. I started to set up my scope, and after a little bit of time, realized that I totally forgot my diagonal. I normally have it attached, but I did some stuff awhile ago and there was no joy in Mudville tonight. It wasn’t attached and I didn’t think to bring it, thinking the old one was still on there. Nope, removed it some time ago. Sigh. So I didn’t get very far. For the other fellow, the battery on his Red Dot Finder died. For the more experienced guy, something is off with his handset or scope, not sure which. So his worked, but not as well as it should have.
And honestly? That’s the type of thing that can drive you crazy…you think it isn’t quite right, but start to doubt yourself, so having an experienced person say, “No, you’re right, it isn’t supposed to do THAT!” is helpful, if not a solution. We’ll work on fixing that over time though.
I was surprised though about the training. I expected to run through pretty quick, and everybody would be able to replicate my steps. But it didn’t take long for that plan to fall by the wayside. One had problems with his red dot finder, another had problems understanding what he had to do, third was having equipment problems. Each of these meant stopping to help JUST that person. A fourth person would have messed that up.
Others had suggested only doing 1:1 but that seemed SO inefficient. I’m going to do some videos at some point, so this was a bit of a test, and as a test, I would say we’re going to be in beta mode for a long time. But one went away “solved”, more or less.
About two years ago, a member of our astronomy club was helping the widow of another astronomy club member who had passed away. Like many of the survivors of astro lovers, the widow inherited a bunch of astro equipment, digital remnants and a bunch of accumulated reference material. To wit, he had left behind a large collection of issues of Sky & Telescope.
For those of you who don’t immediately know (and why would you?), S&T started publication way back in 1942 and has been going strong ever since. Almost immediately, even during WW II, it moved to 12 issues per year. The late astronomer had every issue, as far as I can tell, from 1966 through to 2017. Quite the collection. And when the helper guy sent out an email asking if anyone wanted them, my initial thought was not “Hell no” but rather “What an interesting project.”
The potential bias of new-found passion
You see, I’m a latecomer to astronomy circles. While I was interested as a kid, I was 45 before I had my first real scope. As such, I am prone to that syndrome common to all late converts, the possible belief that astronomy really started the day we started observing, and that nothing that came before is worth reviewing. Get the basics, start new, and assume that everything you experience “new” is likely genuinely new.
People in religious circles experience it all the time…the newest converts are often the most passionate, assuming they know how to interpret scriptures because they can read and they know how to recruit people to their new passions too.
Many new converts to hobbies suffer the same passion bias…they want the newest book, the newest gadget, the latest technique. But I’ve been down that road in lots of different disciplines and I know that while you might toss the bath water, you make sure you save the baby first.
But here was 50 years of recent astronomy history, doled out in monthly increments. What riches are hidden in those pages? What lessons learned could I glean if I went through them, in relative order, that wouldn’t be apparent just from reading a current issue? How would I know the best way to interpret the current context if I don’t know from whence it evolved?
More pointedly, what is truly “new” and what is merely “old song and dance routines dressed up in new costumes”?
Enter the project idea
I wasn’t 100% sure what the project would be, or what form it would take, but I had some initial inklings. I took them all. No, I didn’t ask my wife, and she has politely refrained from asking me if I am completely f***ing nuts, mostly because she already knows the answer to that. She believes me to be a hoarder, and in some senses, she isn’t wrong. But that is not what this is. I have no desire to hang on to them in perpetuity, they are disposable in my view.
I want to read them, in order, but quite frankly, I know I don’t have the time. What I CAN do is skim read them, noting things that leap out at me as interesting. There will be some obvious big leaps…how do they react to the latest eclipse or comet? How did they respond to a bunch of the space era milestones of the ’60s? And when our first explorer crafts approached the other planets, how did the magazine cover it? All of those are fair game.
But that’s not really what I’m most excited about in my browsing and reading. I’m really looking for things that haven’t changed. Advice, for instance, on getting started. The importance of learning the sky. Maybe some enduring legacy approaches that are interesting to see in context. Is it a planisphere? Is it a moon map? Is it a simple version of our modern day star charts? Is it endless lists of RA and DEC coordinates?
In short, I don’t know. And I wasn’t sure if/when I would ever know. All the magazines came in boxes initially, and then I put them on a storage bookcase, mostly stacked by decade. So, for example, all the 1970s were grouped together and took up two “cubes” in the shelving. But within that decade, nothing was further sorted. It was just all jumbled together. Mostly there were 4-5 issues together that were in order, mainly from where I moved them off their original shelving in the widow’s inherited library, one handful at a time. Then again when I took them out of the boxes. But if I’m going to do this project, I really need them sorted at some point.
Since I was moving them across my basement, and moving the shelving it was all sitting on, now is the time to do a sort and get it “done”. 52 years, 12 issues per year, plus asundry other magazines here and there stuck in, probably another 75 or so…call it 700 issues in total. That is a lot of sorting. Oddly enough though, I have some experience sorting magazines. I did it A LOT back when I worked at the library during my undergrad at Trent. Normally it was alphabetical — A-F, G-M, N-S, T-Z (a 6,7,6,7 split). For this, it was simpler, group by decade first (pretty much already done) and then take a decade at a time, dropping them into years, before then sorting a single year at a time in reverse chron order. I thought it would take a lot longer than it did. I was about 40% of the way through, staring at a large number of remaining issues and thinking I should just stop at that point and dump the rest together without sorting them further.
But I stuck with it and the rest wasn’t that bad, improved partly by the layout of the magazine. For an extended period of time, they produced thicker issues with the month and year on the spine. Much easier to sort than looking for it on the cover where it moved around about 6 times over the 50 years. That would have drove us nuts in the library back in the day when we were trying to do binding because we had to fill out forms that gave details about where certain info could be found on the issues. Annoying if it moved around as it did here. Oddly enough, I found myself thinking a lot today about my time at Trent. Most of the people I worked with are all gone now, and I mean that literally. Most of the permanent staff were all at retirement age when I left 30 years ago, and the ones I was close to have all passed on. I feel a bit of a void from different parts of my life, and that is one. I guess those will increase as time goes on.
Anyway, I digress. As I said, I persevered, and they are all entirely sorted for the years that I have them at least. I can access electronic versions for the missing years, and I’m inclined to go all the way back to the beginning.
My idea, as I said, is not to read every word, there is no time for that and this isn’t an academic research paper going for an in-depth comprehensive consideration of every article. Instead, I’m looking for things that appeal to the new astronomer. Almost paper-based versions of outreach, in a sense. The electronic versions are going to be hard as they are scanned PDFs, and the quality isn’t that great for the original typeset nor the scan itself. But it’s a start.
I’m undecided how much volume my reading will produce…I’ll blog as I go, but I don’t know if I’m talking a short blog for every issue, a blog for every year, or a blog for every five to ten years. All three appeal to me, to be honest. And I’m hoping to include them as articles for our local astronomy club, although again, I don’t want them to be too long yet I also don’t want to be trying to do 10 years of articles in 500 words or something. We’ll see what I get as I go. I will likely start off with a blog for each year, but we’ll see how much that produces. At least I’m semi-organized to start now.
Today I choose to start a long-term astro project, reading all the back issues of Sky & Telescope magazine back to 1942. If I cover a year a month, it’ll take me almost seven years to clear everything out. I’m hoping to get it down to about half that, but we’ll see. Depends on how interesting I find each issue and if I get bogged down anywhere or not.
A number of weeks ago, I moved our big TV from the basement to the living room as Andrea and Jacob tend to watch TV in the living room, and the one that was there was a little small to watch when subtitles came on. Equally, for some strange reason, Jacob’s video games would not resize properly on the XBox One S to fit the screen. Not quite sure what that was about. Anyway, I moved it upstairs.
As part of the planned reorg for a bunch of things, that also meant I moved the old TV downstairs and I’m going to attach various video game systems to it…an old Playstation 1, an N64, Xbox 360, possibly a computer system running RetroArch, and if I can get it to work, the old Wii. Unfortunately, my old TV stand isn’t really conducive to that kind of setup. For one thing, it sits very low to the ground. Which was fine when the TV was bigger. Now that it’s a small one, not so handy. Equally, there wasn’t enough space underneath for the various game systems. I could likely run 2-3 okay in it, but 4-5 connections? Not so much. Plus I have to find room for a DVD player and my VMedia box.
So about 4-6 weeks ago, I went shopping online, checked out various stores in Ottawa, found a decent enough TV stand at JSYK, they had it in stock in Orleans, so I jumped some hoops, tweaked my schedule, and off I went. It was one of my first real outings with my full mask running to a “new store”. I’d been to Staples, groceries, Shoppers Drug Mart, but this was my first outing ever to a JSYK, let alone to Orleans and figuring out pickup from the back of their store.
$179.99 regularly and technically it’s a “sideboard”, not a TV stand, but the dimensions were good and enough shelving in it to handle all of the equipment. I think.
And it is has been sitting unopened in the basement ever since. I opened it on Friday, unpacked a bit of it to get a feel for the build on Saturday, and today I dug in amid a bunch of other chores for the day. Andrea helped me with the middle section of it, which was great, I really needed a second hand for those stages or I’d probably still be going.
The quality is okay, although it was missing a dowel for one connection (I used an extra one from another build project that came with extras from Amazon) and there was supposed to be a little “holder” for doing the finishing nails so you don’t risk mashing your thumbs trying to hold them, but it was missing too. No biggie for either one, I adjusted.
The unit is together, and other than the fact that I’m missing the power cable cord for the TV, it mostly works. Except remember how I said it’s technically a sideboard, not a TV stand? Welllll, that also means that there are VERY few ways for cables to go out the back. In my defence, it DID show photos of it in the pic of having a TV on it. Anyway, it likely means I’ll have to cut some little box holes in the back of the unit (it’s just simple particle board) to let the gadgets connect. But it’s together and done. On to other issues for the basement.
Today I choose to assemble a new TV stand for the basement, giving me a setup for all the gadgets to be together.
I have already upgraded my desktop, bought Jacob a new laptop, and bought new office furniture. Seems like I’m already set up. Why am I futzing with an old laptop now?
So I have a strange history with laptops. Back in about 2000 or so, I was convinced what I wanted was a small laptop with no CD/DVD drive, basic memory, decent battery life, small footprint. NOBODY sold them. The closest I could find was a Sony Vaio model, not sure which one, but the price was close to $2K. Because it was super slick and portable, the price was high. Which is frustrating, right? I’m looking at laptops that are close in size, but they have a DVD crammed in it which adds weight. I wanted “less” but would have to pay more? I thought about “removing” it manually, just using the rest, but I wasn’t that brave. I even reached out to David Pogue who was then the NYTimes tech reviewer, and said, “Is there ANYTHING out there like what I want?”.
And the simple answer was no. The curve was toward desktop replacements so companies were putting in larger hard drives, full DVD burners, larger screens, more memory, and bigger keyboards. Eventually, I bought a basic unit, used it for a few years, still have it but will be purging it, likely soon. I can’t remember if I ever put LINUX on it to try to reduce the overhead, I forget, but it is way too slow to use currently.
NetBooks exploded onto the scene about 7-8 years later. Exactly what I had been looking for originally. I bought an Acer One at one point, used it for a while, and put Linux on it at some point to lower the overhead and improve the speed. Back when you could go to coffee shops, this was the small portable computer that I would take. I thought I would write my first novel on it. But I find it slow and clunky. By the time it boots, I’m already through a hot chocolate and a muffin. It never sang to me, to be honest.
Eventually I bought the new HP model I have now, 15″ screen, and it has served me VERY well over the years. I’ve had it about 6 years I think, and it runs full Windows. It has a larger screen and I have used it instead of my desktop on quite a few occasions. For the last 5 years, it has been my basement computer when I was watching movies or TV shows, streaming tons of stuff.
But back in late June or early July, I found it was acting up a bit.
Dun, dun, dun
I had tried to connect it to something, and it hadn’t worked. I didn’t think much of it, assumed it was some wireless glitch while trying to connect from the basement, and I just emailed myself the files through the wired network. Easy peasy, lemon squeezy.
But then we went to the cottage in July and I tried to connect my phone to the Rogers hotspot. It wouldn’t connect. Well, no problem, I hadn’t planned on using it anyway, I have a hotspot option on my phone and 20GB of data, I was covered. Except it wouldn’t connect to the phone either. I fought with the settings, tried everything I could think of, it would not activate the wireless connection. I even had the latest drivers, I *knew* I did, and when I came back, I played with it some more while maintaining a full ethernet connection. No joy in Mudville.
But the problem felt a bit familiar.
A few months ago, I had a huge problem with the video driver not letting me use the built-in webcam. Since I don’t use it normally, I had disabled it long ago, and had NO idea how to reenable it. I tried about 20 different places in the laptop to tweak the setting to turn it back on, and I was about to go nuclear when I finally found a setting buried in a totally different part of the setup. Ah, gotta love/hate the old Windows menus. Although, in equal honesty, part of the problem was the naming convention the laptop was using, it gave it some ridiculous name that didn’t look ANYTHING like a webcam or even a camera at all. Kind of like trying to fix a doohickey when the thing is labelled thingamabob. 🙂
But this problem with the wifi feels/felt really similar. Is it possible that I had accidentally done something to the setting and I just can’t figure out what? It certainly wasn’t something I would disable. And the laptop works fine on ethernet, just no wireless. It’s possible over the years it has been bumped enough times that something has come loose, or it just went kaput. But there is the nuclear option first.
The laptop has one really sweet feature that I find is not as common as it should be in laptops, or even big PCs. Like a tablet or phone, it has an option built-in that you can use to reset it back to factory settings. Three keyswipes, that’s it, and it will literally WIPE everything and load a fresh but old version of Windows on to the machine. Plus a lot of bloatware for HP, but well, you can’t have rainbows. And it will be set up exactly as it was on the day I first activated it, having done a full reset for both hardware and software.
Given that I just removed a ton of stuff from my main system by doing the upgrade and blowing off a lot of old stuff I don’t need anymore, the nuclear option was attractive. I just had to move all the data off of it onto a portable USB hard drive at speeds that tortoises would mock. My lord it was slow. It probably took about 4 hours for it to transfer everything. And while I was at it, I decided to uninstall a bunch of software just in case the reset didn’t go cleanly. I basically rolled it back to almost new anyway.
Then 3 keystrokes, confirmed I wanted to do this, and sat back and waited. It took about 30 minutes for it to complete the wipe and then I had to give it the “test”.
The post-nuclear test
It was connected by ethernet and it found everything it wanted during setup. It even went off to the internet, found a few updates, downloaded those too, and was away to the races. Eventually whatever websites it was using will be dead, like a MySpace installer, but for this attempt, they all still worked just fine.
I booted up Internet Explorer, loaded Google, ran a test search, all good. Then I pulled up wifi, connected to my hotspotted iPhone (it couldn’t find ANY other networks even though my phone can find dozens in the neighbourhood, so it’s range is limited), and loaded Google again with the ethernet cable unplugged.
Bazinga!
Yep, all fixed. I’m assuming the webcam is working again too but haven’t actually tried that yet. In the meantime, my laptop is shiny and new. Not fast, it was NEVER fast, but a lot of accumulated crud is gone. I will have to spend some time removing some other bloat stuff (One month of McAfee? Trials of Evernote? HP suppliers for ink? Game links? Bye bye!) but it’s working.
Today I choose to nuke my laptop and revert it back to its default settings so I can configure it for its new life as a more portable machine for me around the house. My laptop is untethered from the TV and wifi is working again, so I can use other PC units as my downstairs streamer. I might even take a Zoom call on the deck next week.
My wife, son and I used to share an office on the second floor of our house. It’s a big room, one of the huge selling features when we bought it, as we have our master bedroom, decent sized-room for Jacob, a smallish guest room, and then this big 15’x15′ room over the garage. We had three desks in it, one for each of us, lots of office supplies, printers, charging stations, etc. But Jacob’s computer was pretty basic.
And when we started our COVID time at home, it became increasingly clear really fast that Jacob was either going to be spending a lot of time in our shared office while we were trying to work, or he would need something more portable to work on around the house. So we bought him a decent laptop, capable of gaming even. Which he took to like a duck to water and never looked back. With the exception of the colour printer, he has no real need to use his office computer, or even his desk, as we have a new desk setup for the first floor for him. Yet a lot of his files were still on that office PC.
Today, I decided it was time to “cut the cord” and move all his files to his laptop. We had been initially thinking he would use both computers from time to time but the office is really just Andrea’s office now, while he takes the first floor and I’m in the basement.
He still had a couple of games that hadn’t moved yet, a bunch of school files, some writing that he’s done, some pictures here and there, a bit of data, enough to keep me busy for a little while. One of the games runs out of a single directory (not really installed, just boots from the drive), and I have NO idea where it saves one of the data elements. But the rest of it transferred fine.
I even set him up with a bit of a file structure in MY DOCUMENTS, and he’s good to go. I haven’t decided if I will move his old computer out of the office, but I know how annoying it can be to try and maintain two sets of files and work on two different machines…he has even emailed himself files a couple of times when they were in the wrong place. Not a serious problem, just annoying, and if it was me, I would want them moved. I asked, he agreed, so consolidated they were!
Unfortunately, for some reason, the colour printer does NOT want to print from his laptop which is connected wirelessly to the LAN. The printer is wired to the LAN, and I even tried reconnecting it higher in the router structure, but his laptop just cannot see it. I thought it was the same problem Andrea’s computer was having earlier with photos, but doesn’t seem to be. I’ll try one more time tomorrow, see if I get any farther.
Otherwise, it is all good. He even synched his iPhone with it to back up all his photos and videos onto the machine. Slow as molasses over wireless, but it worked. Soon I’ll have to do a full backup onto a portable drive plus tothe cloud. Onward!
Today I choose to consolidate Jacob’s files for him on to his laptop so they’re all in one place.
