Dammit Jim!

I’m just finishing up a contract making maps of telemetry data from satellite tagged animals. Basically just finding daily positions and making a pretty map out of them. It’s taken me a little while to write the code for it and while I’m not sure a whole lot of other people will be able to use it, I thought it might help one or two people out if I posted it online. The boss ended up wanting that as part of the contract too so pretty good motivation.

It’s not completely automatic but if you want pretty hexmaps of animal positions and you’re reasonably proficient in R (with maybe a little knowledge of GMT), then this may save you a good bit of time (or least let you skip some of the stumbling blocks I ran into). There’s also a function to read the output from the Douglas Argos Filter which could be handy if you’re working with Douglas filtered data in R.

The project page is here. Feel free to leave any comments or suggestions below.

There things sure are easy and kind of fun to put together so I’ll try another one.

Camera Tips from an Engineer

I’ve been wondering if companies (and consumers) have been concentrating too much on megapixels. This engineer thinks yes.

Explorer 1

It was the 50th anniversary of the US’s first satellite. I didn’t know they sent a Geiger counter up in it.

Happy Face on Mars

Not a whole lot more to it just a pretty cute picture.

Asteroid Almost Hits Mars

An asteroid almost hit Mars but didn’t. Now we don’t know where it is (although this was expected).

More Mercury Images

Some new pictures from the MESSENGER flyby. I especially like the annotated image to help out people (like me) that can never seem to find what people are talking about.

Henry Rollins on Evolution

Nice to see the Liar Liar guy seems to have his head on straight.

18′ Shark Surprise

Pretty cool video of a big six-gill shark.

Potential Presidential Science Debate

Sounds like a good idea and it’d be in Philadelphia so maybe I could go.

Evolving Virtual Creatures

Interesting examples of applying evolution to create virtual creatures that fulfill tasks like fast movement, grabbing a ball and fighting each other.

Laptop Repair Guy points out that Toshiba has issued a warranty extension resulting from a class action lawsuit. As far as I can tell (I’m not a lawyer so better check for yourself) I’m out of luck since I’m in Canada but definitely better to have Toshiba fix it for free than try yourself.

After I put up a post about repairing my laptop power connector, Laptop Freak left a informative comment:

As you see on the photo above, the positive connector oxidized and almost black. If you put a fresh solder on the connector like this, the power jack problem will reappear very soon. I usually remove the power jack from the system board (with iron gun and solder sucker), clean oxidized pins on the power jack and pads on the motherboard and only after that resolder the power jack.

It turns out, unsurprisingly, that he was right. The power jack started coming loose again after about a month and a half. I was in the middle of a bunch of things so I didn’t really feel like messing with it so I just opened up the computer and threw some more solder on it. When the power jack started jiggling again a few weeks later, I knew I had to do something better to fix it. So I picked up a desoldering sucker and some desoldering wick.

Laptop Repair Guy points out that Toshiba has issued a warranty extension resulting from a class action lawsuit. As far as I can tell (I’m not a lawyer so better check for yourself) I’m out of luck since I’m in Canada but definitely better to have Toshiba fix it for free than try yourself.

My Toshiba Satellite A70 started having power problems several weeks ago. Although the power cord was plugged in, the computer was not charging and was draining the battery. The little ‘plugged-in’ LED would come up but the battery status LED would still show power coming from the battery. I could jiggle the power cord and it would come back up so I ignored it and got used to jiggling. Unfortunately, the power got more and more touchy and I spent more and more time jiggling the stupid power cord. I first guessed it must be something with my power adaptor but (after cutting open the outer wrap of the cord), I finally put it together that the ‘plugged-in’ LED was coming on but not the battery charging light. This seemed pretty odd. So I finally went out and bought a multimeter. For $20 it was a really good investment and I wish I would have bought one several hours of jiggling frustration earlier. Anyway after the multimeter showed the cord was giving the appropriate 19V without any interruptions, I finally got the bright idea to google the problem and found out that this is a common problem for the A70. Although I have soldered maybe once in my life, the repair didn’t look all that difficult so I thought I’d give it a shot. I ran out and grabbed a crappy Radio Shack iron for $15 and a pack of resistors and circuit board to practice on for $10. You could skip the practice if you were already confident in soldering.