Ramblings

  • Is it summer?

    Is it summer?

    It’s been sunny for over a week now, in Ireland. Dry too. One might say summer had arrived, though there’s a definitely nip in the air still. East coast has daytime highs of 16 – 18 C (west coast is hitting mid-20s), though the winds are pretty light out of the north to east –…

  • Flirtations with a flash

    Flirtations with a flash

    Many, many moons ago I picked up a set of Pocket Wizard Plus Xs (archive) and a pair of LumoPro LP180s (archive) to complement the Nikon SB80 that I already owned. David “Strobist” Hobby (archive) had been quite enthusiastic about this hardware, and at the time I thought I might be going more into my…

  • A cruise ship and a filter

    A cruise ship and a filter

    The air intake filter has been replaced; the old one was in a shocking state, and I can only hope that none of it went into the engine. Thursday afternoon was brilliantly sunny when I left the house, and overcast by the time I dropped my mooring into the water. Still, made for a nice…

  • Relaying a solenoid

    Relaying a solenoid

    As mentioned in a previous post, Blue Opal has had issues with the starter motor for several years – turn the switch, press the button, and nothing more than a click is heard from the solenoid. It’s intermittent, but I’d prefer to know that the engine will turn over on the first push. A proposed…

  • MiniPlex and Linux – the socat edition

    MiniPlex and Linux – the socat edition

    Getting the Windows executable for the MiniPlex configuration program working was pretty neat. What would be neater is being able to perhaps write a Linux-native (or platform-agnostic) program that can at least display the configuration and stream the activity. Perhaps even update the configuration, though new versions of the firmware would result in new features…

  • MiniPlex and Linux

    MiniPlex and Linux

    The folks at ShipModul (archive) who make the MiniPlex-3 currently provide software only for Windows and MacOS; though with the latest release of MPXConfig it’s only available for Windows. I happen to run Linux as my primary OS, though I do have access to Windows either via my work laptop or a virtual machine. That…