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Puppy Cam
Bald Eagles may have been a bit more majestic, but these Shiba Inu puppies are a lot cuter. They have just become active enough over this week to move themselves towards the pile when they get cold, instead of having a mysterious hand reach in from off-camera and move them manually.
Preserving Sand Dollars
While visiting the coast for a relaxing beach weekend, I went exploring and found a whole bunch of sand dollars on the beach. Taking a break from my electronics projects, I figured I’d preserve my finds for collection and display.
The last time I found sand dollars was after a tropical storm on the west coast of Florida, so I was pretty excited to find some more. I ended up collecting 24 of them, of various grey and stained colors.
After a thorough rinse followed by an hour’s soaking in fresh water to remove residual salt I flushed the sand dollars and added a 1:1 mix of fresh water and bleach, then left them to sit for 15 minutes before a second thorough rinse. Then, onto the drying rack:
Out of the 24 I collected, 22 of them came out great. Two others took on an odd orange color from the bleach instead of turning white, but that’s why I collected so many. The next step is to paint them with a half and half solution of Elmer’s glue and water to protect against chips (the dried and bleached sand dollars are very brittle) and put on display.
Look at these bald eagles.
This is a live webcam on a nesting pair of bald eagles, with eggs that are going to hatch sometime in the near future.
The live camera feed is available over at Ustream, where as of posting there are around 130,000 people watching.
Spotty GPS is Interesting
I’ve just returned from Whistler, BC for the season-ending weekend on the downhill mountain bike park, and wanted to track my progress using Google’s free My Tracks application which records your GPS position on the map for review later. I’ve used it successfully many times to keep track of my biking stats and see my trail runs, but it seems to have had some trouble up in the mountains of Canada.
At the very top are the markers indicating where I actually was. All the other pins were recorded at the same time, but seem to have no particular relationship to anywhere I was at any time during the trip. Since Canadians have almost third world Internet, I kept data off to avoid $10/MB roaming charges. Android GPS devices receive some amount of GPS assistance from towers setting up, so this lack of a cell connection may have resulted in the unit using bad GPS data. Or, it was just a weird bug – it’s impossible to tell. The weather was perfectly clear and we were on exposed mountain faces, so there shouldn’t have been an interference or coverage issue.
I was quite impressed with the top speed I managed on my bike of 496.0 MPH, and a min-max elevation change greater than the Space Shuttle’s orbit.
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