4/3/2024 I've decided to purchase the Celestron NexStar 8SE after seeing it on sale $1.1k for used, on Adorama site. Probably from demo. This article on using this scope for astrophotography was helpful. This would be my 4th telescopes (Celestron Omni XLT 150, Meade ETX80, Evscope) and the largest aperture. I also bought a $40 Piggyback Mount adapter and $34 Battery (Talentcell 12V Rechargeable Lithium ion Battery Pack YB1206000, DC Output for LED Strip and CCTV Camera, 11.1V 6000mAh Portable Li-ion Batteries with AC/DC 12.6V 1A Charger) from Amazon, for hooking up my DSLR camera (Nikon D5100?), a solar filter $26 from Ebay (I don't know why they cost $60+ on most sites as they all use Velcro to latch on), and a $140 Angeleyes case from Ebay.
The choices of my scopes are basically so:
ETX80 - for highest portability, quickest setup. The motor doesn't run well and I don't really need it for the quick setup. Manual adjustment is fine.
EVScope - Probably the second in portability. 114mm (4.5inch) aperture is slightly larger than ETX80. Also for easy digital astrophotography, all operated by app, no manual.
Celestron OMNI XLT150 - For its conventional use. Newtonian mount. 6" aperture is the average desired size. Probably good for all kinds of customization, as I also motorized the mount recently, motors work, but untested with actually tracking.
Celestron NexStar 8SE - I highly depend on its 8" largest aperture I own as well as built-in computerized motors. Hopefully more advanced astrophotography will be done with this, along with a DSLR camera.
I first came across it in The Knowledge Project Podcast, where Bryan Johnson was interviewed for his Blueprint Project diet. There's been a lot of focus on Blue Zones (1. Ikaria, Greece, 2. Loma Linda, California. 3. Sardinia, Italy, 4. Okinawa, Japan, 5. Nicoya, Costa Rica) diet lately. Now that Doctor Mike interviewed him as well, as the man who wants to live forever, testing/measuring his body to the extreme, peaked my interest. I haven't watched Doctor Mike's interview but just putting the video below for reference. It's interesting to note that Bryan Johnson, of Mormon background, born 1977, was the one flipping Venmo for $800 million (sold to Paypal in 2013), after buying it for only $26mil.
Tainan, Taiwan introduction by Dodomen (I've also marked all the restaurants mentioned in google map):
4/1/2024 Run OCR against PDFs/images from browser. Using PDF.js & Tesseract.js via Ai platforms such as GPT-4 vision, etc. Simon Willison did it: https://tools.simonwillison.net/ocr
Just called Labcorp this morning and finally got confirmation that they've received my 1199 Insurance Company's Explanation of Benefit and that acknowledged that the patient's balance should now be zero, and not $286.65 as claimed by the email of delinquent status sent to me by Labcorp last Friday 3/29. She said she'll put in a note to get this changed and that I should just disregard the warning letter. This is quite a relieve, and I hope I don't see this problem resurrected.
Checked out Tractor Supply Co. on Route 35. They don't have chicken poop, nor live chicken. Staff said they used to have live chicks until Monmouth County banned it. She suggested me to go to Old Bridge branch.
3/30/2024 Fixed the flip mirror that fell off in my Meade ETX80 telescope. When that broke off, I felt urged to buy a new replacement telescope, perhaps an ETX 90 or 125. But the lack of backpack support like the ETX80 discouraged me to look into it later. The Flip Barlow is somewhat broken, the RA? motor has issue. Years ago, I had slightly damaged the built-in Barlow lens of the telescope when I attempted to project the Sun to the ceiling with it in my Flushing apartment. It practically melted some mechanism in there that the Barlow switch just wouldn't work to swivel the Barlow lens away. I realized today that I had forgotten about the built-in Barlow, that I could through the rear port of the scope, use my fingers to manually swivel the Barlow off the eyepiece holder while the flip Barlow switch still can swivel it back into view. So technically, I should have no issue with the built-in Barlow lens feature. After some help from the cloudynights forum linked above, I also managed to remove the Objective Lens cell by unscrewing the focus knob from within its chamber to the right of the eyepiece holder. I the super glue (one of those Dollar Tree Cyanoacrylate glue) to glue the flip mirror back to the flip platform in the telescope. It was a challenge as I couldn't really reach the platform by hand easily. So I basically aimed the glue to the mirror holder platform and drip to it through the tube of the scope. I didn't want to trouble myself by removing the fork from the tube to gain easier access as some had mentioned in the forum. Now that it's fixed, I should have no urge to buy a new scope as I can tolerate the weak motor of the scope.
3/29/2024 https://demo.hume.ai/ Probably not as smart as chatGPT but the first realistic voice to voice chat with an AI that I know of.
3/28/2024 Just learned this morning from Principal advisory chat that I could sign up for an account at ssa.gov to see my Social Security retirement benefits.
3/27/2024 quick exercises for those working in front of a computer.
3/25/2024 Free courses on AI by NVIDIA