The Ek’s Files

It’s makin’ me wait…

Sorry–couldn’t resist.

I’m anticipating a lot of things right now. Mostly, I’m longing for warmer temperatures and longer days. For a lot of reasons. Many things are on the workbench, waiting for meteorological conditions to be more favorable.

QRP to the Field is just a month and a half away, and that’s my first real excuse for getting out of the house, onto the trail, and into my sleeping bag for a weekend of fun in the woods.  My anticipation of backpacking season usually starts on the first nice day in January, and I’ve been working on finding the perfect soda can stove all winter (I think I’ve finally settled on a pressurized sideburner). If you’re a backpacker and you haven’t tried one of these, you really ought to check them out. For a weekend of backpacking, my stove and cookpot together weigh less than a half pound, and I’ll use only four ounces of denatured alcohol. It’s a heckuvalot lighter than my Gaz stove and canister, and it’s more fun to use (okay, that may be the latent pyro tendencies talking…).

The total lunar eclipse we had a couple of weeks ago also has me longing for warmer weather so I can set up my 8″ Newtonian telescope on its equatorial mount and try some things. You may have seen my digital setting circles project for astronomical telescopes. I spent a ton of time developing that, and I continue to spend a fair amount of time answering questions about it and helping people who build it to get it working correctly. Yet I bet I’ve only spent a couple of hours actually using the one I built for myself. In fact, up until last weekend, I hadn’t even bothered putting my bare circuit board into an enclosure, but I finally stuck it in a box that I can screw to the telescope mount, so it’s more amenable to actual use. So maybe I’ll start experiencing the joy of observing that others have told me they’ve experienced after building my interface project.

The lunar eclipse also got me thinking again about doing some astrophotography. I tried this many years ago with film and my 35-mm SLR, but these days amateurs are all going digital. In fact, many folks are using converted webcams quite successfully for astro imaging. I recently found myself a Logitech QuickCam 3000 on Ebay for precisely that purpose, so that’s one of my projects for this spring and summer. I’ll let you know how that goes.

Another reason I long for warmer weather is that I’m ready to start biking to work again. Last year I logged around 800 miles just by riding my bike to work a few times a week. It’s only about 13.5 miles round trip. It’s downhill to the office and (obviously) uphill back, with an elevation change of about 500 feet. For an old fart like me, it makes a good workout. Most of my route from home to work is off-road, on the decent trail system that we have here in Colorado Springs. I’ve outfitted myself with a Kenwood TH-F6A and an ear mic I found on Ebay (in case the Ebay link dies, it’s like this one), so I can listen to the local repeaters or my favorite FM station while I pedal. Right now, the radio just clips to the waistbelt of my backpack, but I have a handlebar mount for it that I’ll probably press into service once I find a dual-band antenna that I can mount on my rear rack. Then I’ll really look like a pedaling geek. Pictures to follow, if I get that far.

(You may have noticed that I find a lot of my stuff on Ebay. I always try to buy specialty cables, like GPS and ham radio programming cables, on Ebay because they’re a fraction of the price of the cables that are sold by manufacturers or retailers here in the U.S. I’ve had excellent luck with the cables I’ve bought from sellers on Ebay, but I only buy from sellers with excellent feedback ratings. Lately I’ve bought from GadgetInfinity and qMall and have been happy with the products they sold me. )

Warmer weather and longer days will also allow my wife and I to go out jogging a little more often. I use the term jogging loosely, because right now (we’re just getting started) we jog a little and then walk a little (mid-forties, in case you’re wondering). We’ve even taken my twelve-year-old Aussie dog Cookie,  and she loves to run, but she’s pretty pooped for the next couple of days. So her jogging days are numbered.

Finally, I’m anticipating the arrival in a couple of days of a new hard drive and CD drive so that I can finish putting a hand-me-down computer back into service. Or maybe it’s a hand-me-up–my soon-to-be-a-college-graduate son gave it to me after he upgraded to a faster system. At any rate, it’ll be faster and have more storage than my current 1.5GHz Athlon that has a 40GB hard drive and 750 MB RAM. This new machine will have a 2 GHz processor, 160 GB hard drive, 1 GB RAM, and a DVD burner. I’m going to try to set it up so that it multiboots to Windows XP, Ubuntu, and possibly other linux distros. I’m also going to experiment to see if Windows and the linux distros can share the same Documents folder (that is, the My Documents folder in Windows is also the ~/Documents folder in linux). Details to follow.