Butterfly - Personal Time

It's pretty hard to have some personal time when you have your own family. However, it's still possible.

As an amateur astronomer, I still try to go out after all the kids slept, and then I will try to rush back home before they usually wake up. Of course, this could be really hard, but then it's still possible.

And there's some easier way. For example, when my daughter is having interest class, I will usually try to bring her there if I am on leave, and then before I picked her up, I can walk around and have some personal time, too. I have tried to do solar imaging outside, I have tried to take photographs, etc.

This time, my daughter is having a piano class at home, and then I took my camera outside to have a 30 minutes walk, here is what I got:-



It's not something special, but to me, it's good enough to have some personal time.

Macro extension tube testing

Nothing special, just to try it out. Light source is always a problem so I took some brighter objects, using ISO 1600, but I was too lazy to setup a tripod, so the focus is not very good and you can see the shake!



It's one of the LEDs of my cable modem.



It's a switch, nothing special.

Last Day

Last day means a departure from your comfort zone.

Last day means a termination of certain relationships.

Last day means reaching a certain goal.

Last day means leaving some people alone.

Last day means running for another goal.

Last day means a beginning of certain relationships.

Last day means going for new challenges!

Free lighting?

Recently, my home building is having some renovation work on the drainage pipes. With the overhead work, and to avoid "unwanted people" to go inside our home via these mesh of bamboo, they placed quite a number of spot light around.

This is my living room window at late night, I didn't turn on my own light. You could see that it's actually enough even to read newspaper.

The kitchen is even worst, you can cook without turning on a light. Luckily, none of my sleeping rooms are affected.

As an amateur astronomer, we knew that there are some research work which shows that excessive lighting might actually increase theft instead of decreasing them. But I'm pretty confident that this type of lighting is another story altogether. Anyway, I just hope that it will finish really soon.

Network Attached Storage (NAS)

NAS is getting popular in office and at home, for they're small, convenient and probably suitable for small offices when they have no MIS person.

I got a chance to try out a model from Taiwan:



It features a 500MHz+ CPU with 256M memory. Obviously it's running Linux inside, you have so many features, and some of them are truely attractive.

The casing is made of metal. Installation of a SATA hard drive is simple and secure, the mounting is made with excellent fit and finish. The casing serves as a big heat sink and you can actually feel the warmth. It comes with a backup software and it works quite nice.

The performance is not great, but it's enough for normal users. If you have more than 10 active clients, I would recommend you to look for something else. Having said that, it's stable even under relatively high loading.

The bottomline is that, it's really convenient and powerful for a home user.

Modifying a ceiling light

Disclaimer: Don't try to follow the steps here if you are unsure and feel even a very slight hesistation about doing all these work. It could be extremely dangerous or even fatal if you are not properly trained. Household electricity is not a joke, so please consult trained technicians and asked them to do it for you.

Before doing anything, switch the power off and test before placing your hand on any of the wires. Some very poorly connected wires can still carry electricity even when switched off! So, be extremely careful.

First question: why?

It's simple, if you ever used a similar ceiling light like the one below, you will know why. This is some very old technology, you have a transformer inside, you have a starter, and if you have circular big tube light inside. If any one of them gone wrong, it won't even turn on. Frequent failure is the prime motive! Nowadays when energy saving light bulb is so cheap and popular, it does not make sense to use this kind of old technology any more!

As you can see in the picture below, I have highlight a screw in which the transformer is attached. You actually have two screws like this, one on each side, and you can use any one of those for fixing the light bulb socket.

First of all, remove all those old technologies:-

Then attached the light bulb socket there in any one of the fixing screws, since they're originally decided to fix a heavy transformer, the small socket with the small light bulb is definitely fine:-

Connect the wires, nothing can go wrong since it's alternating current:-


Done! It's now so simple and elegant, you have a single light bulb to go wrong. You can switch to a higher power one to have a brighter room, you can easily replace damaged bulb, and it's instant on as well!

Extension tube for macro photography

Another item which I ordered from Deal Extreme is a Canon macro extension tube. This one is truely cheap and you don't have to consider before buying one. The closest alternative should be the one from Kenko and the Kenko is a step up from this one for sure, since the Kenko will allow you to change aperture, and it also retains the auto-focus ability of the lens. Of course, it comes with a price. Guess what, the Kenko is 10 times more expensive! That's why I buy this one without any thought.

To adjust the aperture, you can put the lens on your DSLR without the extension tube. Set the aperture of your lens (say in Aperture Priority mode), then press-and-hold the deep of field preview button on the camera, and then remove your lens at the same time. Done.

To adjust the focus, remember to switch your lens to manual focus mode, and you can do it by hand. People always said for macro photography, manual focus is always desirable. Simple, right.

For macro photography, we are interested to know the magnification of your setup. I've found a method to find out the magnification here. To skip all the detail, here we goes:

1. Find out the original magnification of your lens here.

Suppose we are using a 50mm f1.8 II lens, the maximum magnification is 0.15

With this value, we can calculate the effective built-in extension (X) by solving this equation:

X / 50 = 0.15

So, we have the value of X = 7.5mm

And now the new magnification is the length of your extension tube.suppose it's 25mm so the new effective extension will be X + 25 = 32.5mm

So, put the value back into the magnification equation:

Maximum Magnification = 32.5 / 50 = 0.65

Simple? Yes!

Here are some of my first shots:

An illuminating switch:-


Guess what?


That's it, the same lens without the extension tube:-


All hand held, and very rough focusing.