cucubits

We should probably pick up the thread we had going on NBR. This is still a big title to warrant more discussions and with today's big patch landing, I'm thinking it may even be time to start another playthrough. Well, maybe after Dying Light 2 🙂 https://en.cdprojektred.com/news/patch-1-5-next-generation-update-list-of-changes/

We developed a strange habit of re-watching all Star Treks over and over again. We get through TNG, we move on to DS9 (as we speak) then Voyager and by the time we're done, we start over with TNG. I like the original series too but I usually watch that alone, my wife's more into the others mentioned. We're doing this at the rate of about 3-4 episodes per evening. For some reason this never gets boring or less interesting, even though we've seen all episodes many times by now. 🖖

Astrophotographers hate the moon almost as much as we hate cloudy nights. The full moon completely disrupts the signal to noise ratio of the very faint deep sky targets where we need all the help we can get to acquire good data. Having said that, sometimes, there really isn't anything to do about the situation so we might as well adapt. With no chance to image anything else and a couple clear nights I decided to try a little project on the moon. It's a high resolution mosaic, made up of 6 individual images which in turn are made up of a few hundred very short images of sections of the moon. Essentially we shoot videos at high frame rates and through software we select and stack only the best frames where the atmosphere was most stable and the images were sharp. This way we get very detailed images of the moon (and the rest of our planets for that matter). Full resolution: https://storage.googleapis.com/dso-browser.com/astrophotography/picture-3a809d30dc7b37545479cc13ea971605-original.png

Forgot to mention, I tried my hands on Frostpunk. Kept hearing good things about it from friends and while I do like the atmosphere, graphics and music, it's just not my type of game. On my first run I couldn't even get the generator started. Then I got that but still people kept dying 🙂

To be honest I think I like the most efgxt. Either .net or .com, I think it's cool, like starting something new, growing a brand from scratch.

Am I the only one playing Dying Light 2? Even with all the downsides mentioned in the dedicated thread, I'm still having a blast with it and do not regret picking it up on day 1 at all. I am 25 hours in at the moment and I have just left the first area of the map. Fun to explore and find random side stuff but the main story is interesting too. Also, drop kicking everything that looks at you funny is very satisfying... and saves weapon durability, lol

911 (I love how the new 992s look so much) ...one day... one day!

Another linux fan here 👋 I'm sitting on RHEL for work, lots of cloud related activities lately, mostly Openstack, and now fresh on a new project we're moving to Kubernetes. Maybe we'll get a General Unix topic started, would probably be cool to share fun scripts and interesting tidbits.

I'm going to post my wife's Beetle. My new car should arrive only in April and I traded the previous one in already. We love this little bug, we've even been on cross country ski trips with it. It's a blast to drive and we love the color! It's a 2018, the year before the last ones ever made... Still sad they stopped making these.

I love that color. Mazdas are great. I had a 2014 Mazda 3 Hatchback. I miss it dearly, it was an awesome car.

Almost 20 hours in and unfortunately my post above is still completely accurate. Dying Light 1 fans are probably somewhat disappointed but it's still a fun zombie-ish RPG. I say zombie-ish because sadly the main focus now seems to have moved towards melee combat against human opponents. Compared to Dying Light 1, everything is just dumbed down and made easier. The absolute saddest part is that the nights are not scary anymore, just slightly annoying. Even the overall physics seem nerfed, fighting is a bit more clunky and doesn't feel as satisfying as it was in DL1. Now, had I known all this beforehand, I still would've picked it up. I'm a big fan of zombie games and the graphics/atmosphere are very nice. I like exploring, looking for all side-quests and the main story so far seems interesting and engaging.

not.notebookreview.com 🙂

Very nice results. Your picture of the sun reminded me of my never-ending fails of my attempts to catch an ISS transit. I've been out a few times very very close but it didn't work out so far. Once clouds rolled in and covered the sun literally a few seconds before the pass and another more painful attempt was messed up due to equipment failure... I had the capture running, I actually saw the ISS on the live preview in FireCapture but I had a bad cable and it dropped frames which of course included the pass too. One day, I'll get it one day 🙂

Yup, I almost feel bad that I kept saying signing up to all 3 is a mistake, but many did that and hopefully now more and more folks will move here for good.

🙂 No secret, all started from a seemingly random youtube video. I'm following almost exactly the steps from here:

It doesn't have to be a pipe dream and you most certainly don't need to jump straight into the expensive end. I started with just a simple mirrorless camera with a zoom lens and a very inexpensive star tracker mount. Sure, the target selection and end result quality will be up to a point proportional to the gear but you really can start out with a small investment. I would say the mount is the most important. If you can get a good, reliable one from the start, it'll help a lot along the way. One you progress away from a regular camera and get start looking for an actual telescope, it cat get a bit tricky. You would need to choose the telescope smartly according to your sky conditions and more importantly for what sort of targets you'll be looking at. If you want to image galaxies or planets as opposed to nebuale, you'll choose the telescope accordingly. I'll post some videos and channels which helped me a lot along the way. This is a great video answering these exact questions and shows real results from all price levels. Nico's videos were actually the ones that helped me get into all this from the start with zero prior knowledge. He's very thorough and helpful. He's even replying to emails with extra help if needed. A few more channels on the topic which I follow and I have to admit watched every single video: https://www.youtube.com/c/Astrobiscuit He's genuinely funny and informative in all his videos. Not too many, very well produced. https://www.youtube.com/c/CuivTheLazyGeek Cuiv is awesome. He's a french dude living in Tokyo, plagued by light pollution and has lots and lots of content. You can learn from him a great deal on post processing and about the control software NINA. https://www.youtube.com/c/DylanODonnell Dylan is more on the funny/sarcastic end. I absolutely love his attitude and his content. There are many others out there but this is my top three. They really just work hard to spread the knowledge, without pushing sponsors and products like many others do. Having said all this, in hopes that my wife doesn't find this thread, this is my deep-sky setup (the small telescope used for nebulae): Telescope - 80mm aperture Altair Astro EDT-R. Not sure, I think it was about $700 Field flattener (sort of an optical corrector needed to get good stars across the whole image): $200 Mount - Rainbow Astro RST-135, $3800 Main camera - ZWO 2600MC, $2000 Guide camera - ZWO 462MC, $300 Guide mini telescope - $250 Motorized Focuser - $200 Filters: $500 Strudy tripod: $300 Additionally you would need either a laptop with a control software, connected to a good USB hub which goes to all the parts from the telescope or a purpose built mini PC connected permanently to the gear and you remote connect to that.

7.5 hours update (no spoilers) Started the first main story mission but also went rogue from time to time just to explore and do side stuff. While it's still fun as a rooftop-exploring-sandbox-zombie-RPG, unfortunately it doesn't feel like Dying Light 1. Sad to say they dumbed it down a lot. Night time is nowhere near as scary or as dark as it was before. If in Dying Light 1 I was genuinely terrified to go out at night, here it's just slightly annoying but I had zero urgency to find shelter. The new "immunity" mechanic is just stupid in my opinion, won't go into details to not spoil anything. I'm holding a tiny bit of hope that it's just because I'm still during the first main mission so who knows. I haven't seen volatiles roaming around yet and the regular zombies are just as slow at night like daytime. Anyway, I still like it and will play it of course through the whole story. As a new zombie game, it's great. As a new Dying Light game, not so much.

Is buying antiviruses still a thing? I've been using the default windows defender for quite a few years now without any issues at all... and I can't say I'm too careful. I mean I don't open obviously bad links but I do browse on all sorts of questionable websites and I'm not that rigorous about caches/cookies cleanup.

Great idea with this topic. I enjoy cooking a lot as well. If I am to choose a few examples, lately I've been improving my pizza, bread and crepes. For the pizza I keep experimenting with higher and higher hydration dough but I haven't reached a point where I can settle at one recipe. I keep changing all the time. I wish I had a hotter oven. The bread is a very simple but very effective ciabatta recipe. Takes a long time but it's extremely consistent and always turns out great. Crepes are awesome, I've been making these since way before we moved to the US. I love to spread nutella on half, strawberry jam on the other half and roll them. I'll think of some more and keep posting here. If we build a repository of cool recipes/ideas here, it may even help when someone just wants to browse and get inspired 🙂

I love Boneworks. I remember not so fondly how quickly I gave myself motion sickness with it. Eventually I did work up to almost 1 hour long sessions of jumping and climbing around but sadly I haven't touched it in over a year now. I should really pick up VR. I have a shiny Index sitting and waiting for me to set it up again.

I've resisted the urge to join the apple-side of the phone world and have been on Android all the way. Currently on an S20 and actually just read that TMO is rolling out Android 12 updates so I'm curious to see how that will work. I usually keep phones for a long time until they either get too unusable or fail. Before the S20, I had and S7.

I'd happily supply full resolution images of either of those. Original ones are from an APS-C size sensor so 6248x4176. You'd be able to crop to your aspect ratio. The Rosette is actually still work in progress, I'm still learning a lot about the post-processing and planning on re-doing it.

This makes me think of Curse of the Necrodancer. The music was awesome but I just couldn't keep up and found it a bit too difficult. Loved watching videos of others playing it though.

Thank you for the kind words! Yes, imaging from the middle of a light polluted city full of street lights is no fun and borderline not worth the effort. What I mean is to combat light pollution to get the same amount of useful data, from the city you must expose for much much longer than from a darker location. To get an idea, imaging for 10 hours from the city can give similar results to just 1 hour from a dark location. Usually it's worth a few hours drive to get better data but it's not always doable. For one image, I usually take my whole setup and image from our apt complex for 1-3 hours per evening for a few days. Since it's an apartment complex and not a private backyard, I can't leave the telescope out, I have to sit close by. Way too expensive to lose sight for even a little bit. Gear does help: the telescope is fully automated. Once I prepare everything I just start the sequence and it does everything by itself: it finds the target on its own compares and confirms pointing accuracy with a sort of digital star chart communicates with the mount to start that very accurate tracking I mentioned focuses on its own (this is way more complex than regular cameras as even a few degrees of temperature change will expand/contract the glass and telescope body enough to need refocusing) cools the main camera (yes, astro cameras have built in peltier coolers on the sensor. Shooting at very low temps, keeps a type of noise down) starts taking the pictures Another very important piece of gear are filters. Many of those images showing the colorful gas and dust clouds would not be possible from the city without these. They are highly specialized (and expensive) filters which cut out almost all unwanted wavelengths of light while leaving to pass only a very tiny section. By very tiny I mean around 5-10nm only gets through from the whole spectrum.

So, winter storm in texas, who else made snow angels today? snow.mp4