Posts in category 'hacking'
Wiki Upgrades
So in attempt to stay reasonably current, I’ve upgraded the version of OddMuse I’m using to the latest revision. If anyone finds anything odd, lemme know so I can fix it… assuming it worked before, of course. ;)
Firefox + Go = FoxGo
Man, I really have Go on the mind lately. This time, I’m releasing a very early version of a new Firefox extension I’m working on called FoxGo. It’s a very basic SGF viewer that integrates directly into Firefox, which is pretty darn handy if, like me, you tend to browse games on GoBase or play games on the Dragon Go Server. Of course, one can’t release a GUI program without providing a requisite screenshot, so…
As you can see, it does all the basic SGF-viewer-type-things, allowing one to move up and down the game tree, move back and forth between variations, and so forth. ‘course, it’s missing some very notable things: A game tree. Icons for the variation switching buttons. Editing features. Etc. Etc. Ad nauseum. But it certainly accomplishes the basics, and is my primary tool for exploring SGFs, walking through variations, etc.
Boredom...
It’s amazing what a little boredom can do. After exploring Sensei’s Library, I thought to myself, you know what Oddmuse is missing? A module for displaying Go boards! Well, here it is!
Edit: Okay, I lied, this worked when I was using Oddmuse, but now that I’m on Jekyll it doesn’t anymore… so we’ll just have to use our imaginations.
Now, it doesn’t quite support all the features of the formatter at SL, and it uses a different board definition format (it’s more flexible… although, in truth, it was mainly designed to be as easy to parse as possible :), but as you can see, it certainly does the job. I even worked a little magic so that text in the captions is formatted just like any other wiki text! Snazzy, eh?
Anyway, if anyone is interested in this thing, just write a comment and I’ll put it up.
You can also see that I’ve been fiddling around with the formatting so that text flows around the goban. I’m not sure how I feel about it, just yet (if there were multiple boards one wished to discuss, it could get annoying), but it does look kinda cool.
Astronomy Hacks
Tonight I decided to get my Red Green on and hack together a really crappy camera mount for my telescope! It’s made from various pieces of vacuum tubing (which happens to be 2” in diameter, the same diameter of the eyepiece holder on my scope), some hardboard, and much tape (unfortunately not the duct variety… yes, I am ashamed. I had to settle for electrical). The end result was this thing:
Yes, it’s as hackish as it looks. The idea is that it sorta fits over the eyepiece holder and has a separate sliding component which allows the mount to adjust for the camera lens position, differing eyepiece lengths, etc.
So, with it, I decided to take another crack at lunar photography. I captured the following image with my wide-field 25mm eyepiece (for about 60x magnification) (in this image, north is to the left):
I’ve sharpened the image to adjust for some atmospheric turbulence and poor focusing on my part. In addition, there appears to be some blurring toward the left edge of the image which is probably a result of the camera not being evenly positioned against the eyepiece.
After staring at a Lunar Map for quite a while, I managed to identify some of the more interesting features. Among them, toward the right edge of the image you can see the famous crater Tycho (it appears smaller than some of the others, but has a prominent central protrusion). This particular crater is the epicenter of a set of lunar rays which, while not incredibly prominent in this image, are visible.
