In a couple of weeks i’ll be entering mandatory military service for 9 months. I know it sucks but im trying to look at it from an optimistic point of view. Well, no matter what class/specialization i get, i know that i’ll be able to learn (ask an officer/military books/part of training -?-) how to *accurately* use a compass (i know how to but not without the use of a map) and other nice gadgets (useful for outdoor living). Other than all the interesting stuff, i think its a complete waste of time, since you spent most of your time cleaning, conditioning, guarding military buildings/bases 
(that’s what i’ve beed told) . If it was about *learning* how you may be able to protect your country when you’re needed, it would be an interesting experience. Lets hope that everything will fare well..
\/ World Peace \/
So you decided to give musca a go. Here are some stuff i use in my setup. I hope someone out there finds these useful.
One thing that musca lacks is a toolbar, but as the author suggests, dzen2 is a nice alternative. And guess what, he’s right.
dzen2 is so customizable that you ‘re to able to do nice magic with it. For example:
Why open a terminal to find your disk space or waste useful resources to have it displayed on conky?
Add sth like that in your .musca_start and you ll be able to call a new command named dfh to watch your disk space status.
alias dfh exec (echo Disk Usage; df -h ; sleep 4) | dzen2 -l 17 -fg white -bg grey10 -w 400 -fn '-*-dina-medium-r-normal-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*' -e 'onstart=uncollapse'
Weather conditions are vital for astro-sessions so having some extra info is practical too
e.g. for Greece using the weatherget application i have sth like this:
alias weatherget exec (echo Weather Report; weatherget -s GRXX0004 --metric ; sleep 4) | dzen2 -l 17 -fg white -bg grey10 -w 400 -fn '-*-dina-medium-r-normal-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*' -e 'onstart=uncollapse'
At the time setting rules is not ready in musca. But guess what! Musca is so groovy that you can actually “emulate” such configuration. Example.. I want to have gimp start in stacked mode or in a preconfigured tiled layout.
alias g1mp exec gimp
hook on ^g1mp stack on
or
if gimpfoo is a layout that suits your tastes for gimp window placement
hook on ^g1mp load gimpfoo
So when pressing Mod+m and typing g1mp you’ll have gimp in stacked mode 
to be continued!
One of my favorite eye candy programs from the past is xplanet (the other one is electricsheep ). It works perfectly with almost all window managers and the final product is not only beautiful but also very informative. The documentation is pretty straight forward and easy to understand but i haven’t seen any configurations lying around in the web. Anyway i provide here my own along with a small (wannabe) guide for it. As of the images or scripts that were used for this, i’ll just provide the necessary links.
Lets assume that we got xplanet sources and have them installed and working. As the README suggests, i took the default configuration provided and xplanet and built upon it. The base configuration provides sth like this:
Very nice huh? The default image provided is very nice but if you want to move a step forward or want sth with a bit more resolution you can get one of the monthly versions of Nasa’s Visible Earth.
The first 3 things that are missing from the image are, the moon, clouds, and finally background stars.
Well by default, all celestial objects of our solar system are loaded so you ll probably see it if you have xplanet refreshing every (eg 10 minutes) the problem is that moon is small and you ll likely see it rarely. So to watch the moon more ofter i added to my conf
[earth]
magnify 40
[moon]
magnify 10
A little bit more magnification to moon and it will look like a twin planet
Next step is the clouds, which are explained pretty much in the main page. There are 2 scripts that are used to fetch the cloud image. Both will do the job, i just altered them a bit to get the 4096 version of the clouds and save them to my .xplanet dir to keep things tidy. The cloud images are updated every 3 hours so i just added the script to a cronjob with
0 */03 * * * /path/to/script/
If you’ve created a .xplanet dir to store your configuration just throw the image in and add
cloud_map=clouds_4096.jpg
to your xplanet.conf. If you prefer to store it in another folder eg. images in .xplanet just add
cloud_map=images/clouds_4096.jpg
Finally you need a nice background to complete the picture. According to documentation all you must do is to start xplanet with xplanet -config xplanet.conf -starmap /usr/share/xplanet/stars/BSC. I even used the commands that are suggested by the FAQ but it wasnt very nice. I found out that the provided solution is very nice if you set the -fov(field of view) option to eg 50. If you prefer this solution its a good idea to use the constellations marker file and start it by adding
marker_file=constellations
marker_file=brightStars
You can find it in /usr/share/xplanet/arcs/constellations.
This will draw all the constellations around and with brightStars you’ll get the names.
Personally i dont use the above method. I just got a nice star field from an image search, played a bit with its contrast and brightness and used it as a background with the -background option. I also changed the default earth and specular images with the ones found here and the result looks like this:
Take a closer look at the marker_file option. With default supplied marker files you can add borders, coastlines, hamradio stations, capital names etc. You can also add information about volcanoes, storms, satellites and quakes using the Totalmarker binary. For example in my setup i have set a cron job that connects every hour to Norad and gets the appropriate tle files to mark the position and path of the requested satellites on the xplanet image.
0 */01 * * * /path/.xplanet/Totalmarker -Norad
Well all that info about earthquake and volcanoes and such its really nice but it gets pretty crowded so i prefer to keep track only of the satellites (ISS, HUBBLE, etc)
All the above is for earth alone. Its possible to view all planets of the solar system with the -body option and of course gather info for their artificial satellites and moons. In my setup i use the images provided by this site, which are very very nice and detailed. You can get my conf from the downloads page. To launch it and update it every 10minutes you can use the below command:
nice -n 19 xplanet -config ~/.xplanet/xplanet.conf -transparency -utclabel -background ~/.xplanet/starfield-1.jpg -wait 300 -hibernate 600
Another nice option here is -random 
Bored and tired of using plain cp/rsync to backup my data so i started looking around for a backup system that would do the job right. I played a bit with rsnapshot and dar but i found out that for a simple backup task of 2-3 computer systems its an overkill. Rsnapshot by the way is really really nice and very practical, and i think i ll use it again some time. Anyway i decided to make a little snippet that will arrange my files in date folders using rsync
folder=`date +%Y_%m_%d` mkdir -p /backup/destination/$folder rsync -avH /folder/to/backup /backup/destination/$folder #rsync -avhe ssh /folder/to/backup user@remote:dir/ tar cfj /backup/destination/$folder.tar.bz2 /backup/destination/$folder
in conjunction with a daily cron job of 22:30 every day:
crontab -e
30 22 * * * /bin/rsync-bak.sh
Its a good idea to bzip the product of the above operation.. saves a lot of space. I like it.. works better than a simple cp -r or rsync -ahv
The past days i got a wireless adapter and setup an ad hoc network to be able to use some wireless devices. There’s still the matter of WEP vs WAP(2) thing but nevertheless with a good password you’re good to go in both cases. Also there’s the option to increase/decrease the signal strength so security is just a matter of usage.
Anyway, i made a small console script for WEP and a bit of configuration for WAP(wpa_supplicant) and :
#!/bin/bash # # TODO: Option to set signal strength # echo "Create Ad-Hoc Network" echo "_____________________" echo INTERFACE="wlan0" echo -n "Type prefered ESSID (e.g. My Network, Conan's home, etc): " read ESSID echo -n "Insert prefered Mode (e.g. ad-hoc, master, managed etc): " read MODE echo -n "Channel (e.g.auto, 3, etc) : " read CHANNEL echo -n "Desired pass key : " read KEY echo -n "IP Address : " read IP_ADDRESS echo -n "Netmask : " read NETMASK echo ifconfig $INTERFACE up ifconfig $INTERFACE $IP_ADDRESS netmask $NETMASK iwconfig $INTERFACE mode $MODE iwconfig $INTERFACE essid $ESSID iwconfig $INTERFACE channel $CHANNEL echo "Setting up key passphrase.." iwconfig $INTERFACE key $KEY echo -n "Seems that all is good.." echo -n "Press any key to continue..." read
Yeah i know its very simple but it works for me If one of the steps fails you ll see an indication.
As for WPA i changed a bit my wpa_supplicant.conf to look like this:
ctrl_interface=/var/run/wpa_supplicant
# By default, only root (group 0) may use wpa_cli
ctrl_interface_group=0
eapol_version=1
ap_scan=2
fast_reauth=1
# WPA protected network, supply your own ESSID and WPAPSK here:
network={
# scan_ssid=0
ssid="CONAN-DUDE"
mode=1
proto=WPA2
key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
pairwise=CCMP TKIP
group=CCMP TKIP #WEP104 WEP40
psk="*****************************"
}
# Plaintext connection (no WPA, no IEEE 802.1X),
# nice for hotel/airport types of WiFi network.
network={
key_mgmt=NONE
priority=0
}
and just issued the below (in a script)
killall wpa_supplicant
ifconfig wlan0 down
ifconfig wlan0 up
iwconfig wlan0 essid "CONAN-DUDE" channel auto
iwconfig wlan0 mode ad-hoc
wpa_supplicant -D wext -iwlan0 -dd -Bw -c /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf
dhclient wlan0
I have the intel 3945 wireless adapter so wext is the option for it.
For testing i run
iwlist wlan0 scan
I still have a masochistic preference for wired networks though ;p
Searching for something in freshmeat a couple of days ago, i stumbled upon a small tiling window manager named Musca. You’ll say “What? Another one? For what reason?”. Hey! Why not? Well we all know that the 3 kings are ratpoison, dwm and ion. All features that were first introduced by them made tiling window management what it is today. Now take all the features that you actually liked in all of them and implement them in something new. The result is Musca. Musca is a tiling window manager that is written from scratch in C and has many features including:
- Extremely small (binary is 97Kb and zipped package 37Kb), light and elegant
- Simple configuration via
config.h(Yes it needs recompiling) - Manual window tiling, that means no restrictions on layout setups
- Group management support, that means no pesky tagging but actual groups
- Simple mouse tasking, following click to focus philosophy
- Frame management is followed by color indication so you actually know in what mode your frames are.(ie the catch-all mode that forces all windows opened in a specific frame is green)
- Musca has multiscreen support out of the box and can manage groups to screens automatically
- Uses dmenu as requirement for windows,groups and wm management
- No obstructive status bars, panels, and such but you can use one if you like (e.g. trayer,dzen2 etc)
- It is named after a star constellation…Yes that’s a plus.
- A nice feature called unmanaged_windows ( remember remember ). That let’s you make musca ignore windows and not assign them in frames.
I really like Musca. Its light, small and configurable. Its still in devel state but its very usable and i have put aside stumpwm for now. I had all my key bindings configured in seconds and Musca’s engine/group management philosophy was like second nature since, i use ratpoison and stumpwm. 
Musca is actively developed and created by Sean Pringle. His website can be found here where he hosts his projects and other fun stuff.
UPDATE: New version of Musca, as of 9th March, is out with a *TON* of features that simplifies a lot of stuff including
- floating support (via stack Musca command)
- Added new commands!
- Layout saving..thats means ENDLESS CAPABILITIES!!
- Musca now has an external command interface for client management
- Now you can undo layouts No more accidental layout windows
- External startup configuration file to configure your window manager
- Its getting better and better each day!!
UPDATE: The post is a bit old of course. Musca is more mature now and has even more features
A pic of musca running on my Slackware 12.2 Laptop
This is a post about making a simple collimator for your newtonian/dobsonian telescope. I will not go through the process of telescope collimation which can be found in an excellent article, here. Its easy and it costs nothing. It might not be as cool as a laser collimator but it needs no battery and after some time and with experience you may be able to collimate your telescope perfectly. It’s a method that it already has been described in some forums and books but it harms none to be repeated.
All you need is a film can (tube length is not an issue) and a small knife or scissors. Open a small hole (3-4mm) to the center of cap’s can. It usually is marked already so you’ll not have to make any geometrical calculations for that. You also need to cut the bottom part of the cap. So why a film can? Because it has the diameter of an eyepiece (1 1/4in-3cm) so it fits nice on your focuser.
(Optional) If you want, theres an option to make your handmade collimator, cross haired. You ll be able to “target” the center of your mirror that way and you ll minimize the effort of collimation. Thats easy too! You just have to calculate the points of the circle where you ll place the threads. I have made a small drawing to show you the way. All you need to do is to draw circles of the same radius, centered in the perimeter of your main circle(film can). See the 4 x’s ? All you need to do, is to find the middle point of the distance between them(in pairs). There’s another way, like drawing more circles around until you have something like a starry cross in your circle(that’s easy too-if you want it just drop me a comment) but i was in a hurry and i made it as in the photo (took me some seconds to draw that). When you have found the magic spots just make 4 small cuts and place in them, 2 small pieces of thread.
Thats all! Just saved yourself 20-50 USD or euro. Soon, i ll upload full plans of a Cheshire collimation tool.
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Today in the morning i went shopping down town. Being there i located an astronomy shop that i used to visit its website more of out of habit and to see how astronomy equipment is faring here.. I always thought that they try to keep up with all astronomy shops world wide and that they try to expand the astronomy idea to all ppl. Of course not. Most of its working stuff are very experienced sellers that were forced to study telescope mechanics (some), following the “aggressive selling” philosophy (which i hate), plus its prices are ridiculous. Being there, the salesman told me of a mechanism that kept the tripod sturdy and with no vibrations. Well, i asked for the price, and when i was told, i fled running and laughing. He was trying to sell me plastic tripod leg enhancements for 60 euro..(77 USD). To tell the truth i don’t know if that’s a cheap or expensive component, or if it does reduce THAT much, vibrations, but i would never buy something like that at a price i would normally buy a relatively cheap eyepiece.
What i do to my tripod?(I am a dobsonian lover but i still use my old trustful newtonian). Its plain physics and its lots of fun.
I took a half filled (with water..you can use it to water your plants later
) plastic bottle and made a small hole in the center of the cap. Then pass a piece of rope from the center of the cap and tie it under your tripod base holder and in between the tripod legs. Water will absorb vibrations through the rope and you will have a much stabler experience even in mild wind conditions. More $$ saved ^_^ .. must find that clave eyepieces now…
After some years with fluxbox (with tons of eye candy) and the last 2 years using a combo of ratpoison and dwm, I finally ended up with stumpwm. Stumpwm is the Lisp(y) brother of ratpoison and its actively maintained by Shawn Betts. Ratpoison still kicks buttocks but stumpwm has more features and since its based on lisp, is more configurable[and since im learning lisp it's good exercise!!]. Most ppl use laptops in observations and i think its a good idea to use a tiling window manager like ratpoison or stumpwm. All my astronomy programs run smoothly and in fullscreen (which is very good for my eyes), plus i have keybinds for calculations that show results in the stumpwm engine.. which is very practical. Of course any kind of coding becomes better and the reason is the absence of obstructive applets, eye-candy panels and such. You have the space to focus on your work which might be a maximized window or a custom layout that suits your need.
In its default state is very spartan and it might require a day or two to fully bring it to your liking. Also according to this post there’s floating support added in the git version. It works pretty well with no resizing yet, but that’s not a problem.. You can check my .stumpwmrc in the ‘Downloads’ page and a screencast which shows a portion of stumpwm’s features, made by male in here. Below, a screenshot with stumpwm running on slack 12.2
UPDATE: Just changed modeline readbility.. seems sexier now..
I spent some time the past days searching for a minimalistic eyepiece set, in order to minimize the weight added in my observation sessions with my 10″ f/5 travel dob. After all christmas is near and i want gifts!! I wanted to gather up three or four pieces including a barlow to be able to achieve as many as possible and variable magnifications as possible. After doing some research using different calculations for a set of different telescope magnifications i ve reached the following result..
- 32mm Televue Plossl (or maybe a GSO but anything in that length..) as a finder, starhopper, DSO allarounder… If you got the buck hit a 27mm Panoptic…its great.. This eyepiece will be replaced by a 2″ derivative.. It gives me 39.7x, 79.4x Barlowed (but i dont need that) and a wooping 1.25º true field of view.
- 13mm Televue Nagler T6 (everything in that length with a bit of wide field). This one is ideal for bright objects, movement observing, comet hunting and others. One of the grooviest eyepieces It gives me 98x, 196x barlowed and 0.83º true field of view.. not bad.. So with one eyepiece i have almost 100x and 200x..
- 9mm Televue Nagler T6 (same as above). With this i can take a close look in almost anything.. from moon to nebulae and galaxies. It provides me 141.1x, 282.2x and 0.56º true field of view.
- 9mm Baader/UO orthoscopic (_optional_… i would take that with me only to study the moon or close planets..). This is ideal for planetary and moon work.. I can achieve very good magnifications but i have to move the secondary cage to stay in track of orbit. Very small field of view but great views and colors…
- Barlow 2x. Provides more magnification and a bit of FOV. Its a necessity in a small all arounder set. My opinion goes to Televue Barlow 2x or if you want a shorty i would go for Celestron Ultima 2x.
Im not a televue junkie… My favorite views were from Clave eyepieces but i have not been able to aquire one.. 
The ideal and most cost efficient for me is to replace the above naglers with plossls but nothing beats the great TFOV. The great thing about this small set is that it can fit in small bum bag so no need for uber ultra extra resistant 100$ eyepiece case
Aaaahhh.. imagine yourself with a small dob, 3-4 eyepieces, in a lonely coast of a Greek island …
