Me and my new MP3 Player

Yesterday (Tuesday), I decided I needed to get further into the 21st Century and buy an MP3 player.  I wanted to try listening to audio books while at the gym -- and possibly at home.  I'd spent nearly a whole day on Monday going through audio books available on-line from my local library, and there were a lot of them I wanted to try.  I read science books every day while eating breakfast and lunch.  I can usually read them in 10 minute segments while eating (It takes about a month and a half to get through a book that way), but I can't read and enjoy novels in 10 minute segments.  I had tried reading science books and novels while on the treadmill and the Exercycle at the gym, but I need to wear my glasses to do that.  That meant that, at the start of the exercise session, I would take the book (or Kindle) with me and would wear my glasses while I did my "warm up" 30 minutes on the treadmill.  Then I'd have to take the glasses and the book back to the locker.  Then after about 20 minutes of various arm and stretch exercises, I'd have to go back to the locker for the book and my glasses before getting on the Exercycle the final 20 "cool down" minutes of the session.  It was just too much trouble - not to mention the fact that I couldn't easily hold and read the book while walking at 3.2 miles per hour on the treadmill, so I quickly gave up on that and only read while on the Exercycle. 

Yesterday, I looked on-line for the best local store to buy an MP3 player and went out and bought one.

The first startling discovery was that the MP3 player I wanted was a LOT smaller than I expected.  I was accustomed to seeing people at the gym with iPods and iPhones strapped to various parts of their bodies or falling off equipment and crashing to the floor as the owner exercised.  In the package, the MP3 player that best suited my needs looked to be about the size of a postage stamp.  When I got it home, it turned out to be about the size of a cigarette lighter.

Yet it has the capacity to store "up to 3,000 songs" and presumably dozens of books.  It comes with a clip that allows me to clip it to my belt or to the neck of my gym shirt.  (It weighs only 1 ounce!)  It seemed perfect for my needs, so why did it seem that everyone else was using an iPod or some other much larger and heavier gizmo?  Furthermore, my MP3 player cost less than $50, and iPods cost 3 to 4 times that much - or more.

I didn't have any answers.  And I needed to figure out how the thing works.  The first task was to charge the battery.  The instruction manual says that I do that my connecting it to my computer -- just the way I usually charge my Kindle.  (Or I also charge it by using my Kindle electrical plug adapter.) 

While the battery was charging, I downloaded a Jack Reacher short story called "Deep Down" into the player.  On the first try, I put it in the wrong folder.  The instructions are all about using the "Drag and Drop" method, which I couldn't make any sense of.  I think it's for people with iPads and tablets.  On my laptop computer, I used Windows Explorer to create a new folder in the MP3 player called "Books," and put the short story there in a folder called "Deep Down."  Then in the process of trying to figure out how to play it, I found that it should have gone into an existing folder called "Audiobooks."  The instructions say nothing about such a folder.  They say I should Drag and Drop it into a folder called "Audible."  But, no harm done.  I just cut and pasted the files into the Audiobooks folder and deleted the "Books" folder along with the sub-folder I'd created for "Deep Down."

This morning, I downloaded two science books I got on loan from the library into the Audiobooks folder and a free copy of "The Peter Gunn Theme" into the Music folder.  Everything seems to work fine.     

So, I'm all set to go.  In theory, I can start listening while making lunch.  Then I can continue while eating lunch, while changing clothes, while driving to the gym, and while doing all the various exercises at the gym.  I just need to take it off while taking a shower.  But, it's time to stop learning and planning and to start doing.     

WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED

I quickly realized that making lunch (or breakfast) is NOT an automatic (subconscious) chore I do without really thinking.  Plus, eating while I have plugs in my ears is awkward and uncomfortable.  So, I continued reading from my Kindle while eating breakfast and lunch.  Right now I'm reading a psychology/sociology book titled "Tipping Point: How Little Things can make a Big Difference."

I also realized that it's not a good idea to drive while you have ear plugs plugged into your ears.  So, while driving, I'm listening to CDs I burned for "The Mental Floss History of the World," a light-hearted history book that required 17 CDs.  I'm really enjoying listening to it.  Previously, I just listened to a "oldies" music station because there is no station in my area that plays jazz.  It's much more enjoyable listening to amusing and interesting history tidbits than to music I don't really enjoy.  The only "problem" I had was that I didn't realize that I could pause the CD when I needed to get out of the car to open or close my garage door.  So, I missed about 20 or 30 seconds of the first part of the book before I discovered the pause button.

Meanwhile, I found that I can listen to my MP3 player from the time I've changed into my workout clothes at the gym until I take them off again to take a shower.  There's no problem counting repetitions while listening to someone reading the popular science book "What Einstein Told His Barber."  Counting reps is evidently a nearly automatic (subconscious) activity.  So, I'm getting over an hour's worth of listening done per day, which means I should be done with the book in about 8 or 9 workout days.  

What I need to do is check to see if I can find a device that would allow me to play the MP3 player via speakers in addition to using earplugs.  That way, I can switch back and forth between ear plugs at the gym and the speakers at home without losing my place in the book, since the MP3 player controls where I am in the book.    
   

A FAKE picture of the REAL Earth and REAL stars

Today, I discovered a new NASA web site that provides daily images of the Earth taken by the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) satellite, which is in an orbit around the Sun, 924,777 miles away from the earth.  The satellite is in orbit around a Lagrange point where the Earth's gravity is exactly the same as the Sun's gravity.  So, the satellite is, in effect, orbiting the Sun just inside the Earth's orbit, moving in sync with the Earth, and it can continually take pictures of the side of the Earth that faces the Sun as the Earth spins on its axis.

Because the exposure time to take a picture of the Earth from that satellite is much faster than an exposure time that would be needed to take pictures of the stars, the pictures do not show stars.  They show the Earth and a black background. 

I wondered what the Earth would look like with a starry background, and I created this FAKE image of the REAL Earth (from HERE) and REAL stars (from HERE):

You can click on the image to view a much larger (and more spectacular) version.

The images were combined using paint.net.

Someone advised me of a REAL picture that does show the Earth and stars.  Here it is:

Of course, the only reason you can see both the Earth and background stars in the picture is because the Earth is so small and isn't significantly brighter than a star in the picture.  As a result, the same exposure time will capture the Earth, the moon and some of the brighter background stars.   

Looking around the Internet, I found a picture HERE taken by US astronaut Reid Wiseman on the International Space Station (ISS) that shows part of the earth and plenty of stars:

The problem with it, is that he had to use a 3-second time exposure from the moving ISS, so the stars are blurred and so is anything else that moved relative to the ISS. 

And the fact that the above picture was a time exposure reminded me of the time (about 60 years ago) when I went down to the shore of Lake Michigan to take a time exposure photo of the moon over the lake.  Here it is:

There are no stars visible in the photograph, yet it was a beautiful night and the sky was full of stars.  (That white dot just above the horizon on the right could be Venus, or it could be a blemish on the color slide.) The time exposure just wasn't long enough to make the stars visible.  If I would have left the shutter open longer to capture the stars, the moon would have moved and turned into an oblong shape.  

Some of my favorite Apollo missions archive photos

I've been going through the newly released Apollo Moon Mission photo albums, and I've downloaded and saved about 315 pictures so far.  Initially, I made a mistake of just saving the photos using the NASA file numbers.  For example, this is photo #21062657803_1b5573f7dc_o.jpg:

I'd downloaded about 50 pictures when I suddenly realized that if I wanted to mention them in a comment, I had forgotten in which album the photo was located.  And there is no way to tell from their photo number what mission or album the picture is from.  I couldn't tell anyone where I got it or where they could find a full size copy.  Duh!

So, I started methodically going through albums to try to identify where I'd found those 50 pictures, so that I could rename them.  The photo above is one that took a long time to locate.  I knew it wasn't from the Apollo 11, 12, or 14 missions, since they didn't take a "moon buggy" along until Apollo 15.  Finally, by using TinEye, I found it was from album Apollo 15 Magazine 82/SS.

The photo below is a favorite from the first mission to land on the moon: Apollo 11.  There are 8 albums of photos from Apollo 11.  The picture below is from the Apollo 11 Magazine 40/S album.  It's the 8th picture I saved from that album, so my photo number is: A11-M40S-08.jpg.

I cropped the above picture to create the picture below as photo #A11-M40S-08A.jpg:

Here's a cropped version of a picture the astronauts took during the Apollo 16 mission.  Interestingly, they got dirt on the lens and nearly all of the photos in magazine 114/B show the smudge:.

Here's a cropped shot from the Apollo 16 mission after they put in magazine 117/F and cleaned the lens (or maybe it was shot by the 2nd astronaut who didn't have smudge on his camera lens):

Here's a cropped favorite from the Apollo 17 mission, film magazine #134/B:

Below is another shot from the same film magazine, but this shot shows the astronaut holding the corner of the flag to straighten it out.  The lower gravity on the moon apparently was enough to cause the flag to straighten out all by itself.

When I mentioned this collection of photo albums on a Facebook page, it didn't take long before someone wrote: "Sure. Kubrick was such a genius."  I think he was joking, but I had been wondering how long it would take before a "Moon Landing Truther" would argue that all the pictures are faked.  And I was also wondering if there was anything in the pictures that might convince a "Moon Landing Truther" that we actually did go to the moon.  Probably not.  But, would Stanley Kubrick's special effects experts have created dozens and dozens of pictures that look nearly the same?  Would he have created smudged pictures and partial pictures from the end of a film roll?  Looking through the albums, I could not help but think how the astronauts weren't taking time to compose artistic photographs.  They were photographing everything, and the result was often a dozen pictures of the same rock from slightly different angles.  A "Truther" might argue that a picture was faked, but it gets pretty hard to say a picture is a fake when it is one in a series of thirty shots taken from the moon buggy as they drive across the moonscape.  Where on earth would anyone find such a landscape and such a sky?        
 

Newly Released Photos from Apollo Moon Landings

While browsing the Huffington Post web site, I came across an article titled "Now You Can Watch Amazing Stop Motion Video of Apollo Space Missions."  That video led me to the Project Apollo Archive on Flicker.  And that in turn led me to the page that shows the available albums of photos from the Apollo missions.  I don't know how many images there are, but they number in the many hundreds, they are full size and they are in the public domain.  Most may never have been released to the public before. 

As an example, here is a 1600 x 1569 pixel photo from Apollo 11 Magazine 40/S:

You can click on the link above to see how large it really is.  It's 4048 x 3968 pixels, but Google won't allow me to provide a picture that large on this blog.  Of course, you can download the pictures and crop them or resize them to fit your needs.  Here's a cropped shot I created from an original in the Apollo 16 Magazine 107/C album:

The photos include dozens of shots of the earth taken during the trip to the moon and from orbit around the moon.  An example:

I could go on and on.  But,  I recommend that you view the images yourself at your leisure.  If you are a science nut like me, you'll want to save copies.  If you are not familiar with the way flickr.com works, it may take a few minutes to figure out how to best go through the albums and how do download pictures, but it's definitely worth the effort.

weight & balance issues on an airplane

I took a round-trip flight recently from Milwaukee, WI, to Lynchburg, VA, with a stopover to change planes in Charlotte, NC.  On the flight from Milwaukee to Charlotte, and again on the flight from Charlotte to Milwaukee there were "weight and balance issues."  It was 14 years since the last time I was in an airplane, but I'd only encountered "weight and balance issues" on a plane once before in my life.  That was on a small plane hopping between islands in the Caribbean.

Anyway, on the flight out of Milwaukee, shortly after everyone was aboard, the flight attendant got on the speaker and said that they had a "weight and balance issue" and they needed someone to volunteer to move from one of the first four rows back to the rear of the plane.  I was in seat 3A, from where I'd just taken this picture:

It looked like everyone else in the first rows were couples, so I raised my hand and volunteered.  I moved back to seat 10C where I took this picture:

On the return flight from Charlotte to Milwaukee it happened again.  Only this time the flight attendant asked that TWO people volunteer to move from the first four rows to the back.  I was in seat 4F, but someone in row-1 immediately volunteered, and while he was getting up to move to the rear, someone in row-2 also volunteered.  So, I remained in seat 4F.

But the experience made me wonder about "weight and balance issues."  On the schedule I'd printed out for my flight, it said that there were occasional delays on the flight from Charlotte to Milwaukee.  Was it because no one volunteered to change seats?  What would they do if no one volunteered?

So, when I got home I did some research.  It turns out that "weight and balance issues" are fairly common on smaller airplanes.  And they are particularly common on the CRJ-200.  Here's a picture I took of the Canadair Regional Jet (CRJ) aircraft shortly after I'd gotten off in Charlotte:

And here's a stock shot of a CRJ-200 I found on the Internet:

Looking around the Internet I found a web site HERE which calls it a "Barbie Jet" and says that there are also other names for it: Satan’s Chariot, Climb Restricted Jet, Mini Lawn Dart, the Flying Bus, and Future Beer Can.  The person writing that article tells of being asked to move from seat 2D to 12D for "weight and balance purposes."

Personally, I had absolutely no problem with the aircraft or the flight.  I just thought the "weight and balance issue" was interesting.  And I wondered what would happen if no one volunteered.  But, further research indicates that it might be more common for the flight attendant to TELL someone they need to move to the rear for "weight and balance purposes."  The instruction carries the weight of law, since the flight attendant is an acting agent of the captain.

I found a blog HERE where 37 passengers were asked to get off the plane in England because someone had accidentally put too much fuel in the tanks.  I found a BBC News article HERE where 71 passengers on another flight from England refused to stay on board because of "weight and balance" issues and demanded to get off the plane.  Apparently it was because a cargo door was jammed and they couldn't use that space for luggage, so it created a "weight and balance issue."   It doesn't say how many were asked to move, only that 71 got off.

A blog HERE says:

The CRJ-200 can be a pain when it comes to weight and balance. It is usually no big deal where the people are seated when it is under about 40 passengers. It's only when it is nearly full that you often have to make sure the empty seats are toward the front.

and

RJs can be VERY sensitive to W&B issues. Part of the issue is that each person in this example is 2% of the theoretical total pax weight load, instead of say .5% on a 200-pax plane. So yes that's definitely an issue for small planes. 

I could only find one place on the Internet where someone refused to change seats.  Click HERE:

Aircraft less than half full. Me sitting over wing in an aisle seat, vacant middle seat and a person at the window.

Just before take off, a female cabin crew approaches me and states

"I am sorry sir, but due to weight and balance reasons, you will need to move three rows back"

What the is this about... seriously. If an 80kg person moving 3 metres is so critical to the W&B of a 400+ton aircraft, then we are all in trouble. Hopefully no-one leaves their seat during the flight.

Unfortunately, the request was so stupid, that I politely refused, told her I was comfortable where I was and asked her to explain her why.

Just a thought.... if you treat passengers like idiots... they might just take offence and become uncooperative.

Could someone shed some light on this ridiculous request. Is it used often for some reason? Why would the request be made... keeping in mind the aircraft was less than half full... and CC are not Load Controllers.

I haven't found anything in that blog which explains exactly what happened when the guy refused.  I assume that someone else simply volunteered.  The passenger says that the Flight Attendant just went about his/her business as if nothing had happened.  But, it's interesting that the guy felt it was some kind of demeaning request and that it was beneath him to submit to such a request.

For what it's worth, there were no "weight and balance issues" on the much smaller planes I took from Charlotte to Lynchburg and back again.  Here's a photo of one of those planes (a Dash 8-300) at the airport in Lynchburg, VA:

(I thought it was also unusual that of the 8 times I had to get on or off an airplane, only once did the passengers use a loading ramp (when boarding in Milwaukee).  All the other times we used stairs to the pavement and a ground-level door in the terminal.) 
  
And now I think I know all that I need to know about "weight and balance issues."  It's "normal," particularly on the CRJ-200, and most of the time people just volunteer.  But it was relatively new to me.  The time I encountered the issue when I was in the Caribbean, I thought it was because of the heat and the air being too thin or something.  But, it was probably just a "weight and balance issue" there, too.

Cleaning up photos using paint.net

On July 13, 2016, paint.net issued an update.  The update caused paint.net to sometimes start up in a virtually worthless mode that doesn't include the cloning tool and the "Auto-Level" feature described below. I'm not sure what causes it, but it usually goes away when you start it a second time.

When I digitized all my photographs that were in slide format, I also converted about 2,400 regular photographs to digital format.  About a third of the photos were in black and white.  The rest, of course, were in color.  Color negatives look like faded color photographs, and the gizmo I used to do the digital converting also converted the negative images to positive color shots.  But, it appears that some of those photos were also slightly faded and also have blemishes.  Since I'm working with negatives, the dirt spots and blemishes tend to be white, not black as they were with slides.

Here's a photograph I took in Venice as it looked before I used the "Auto-Level" adjustment feature in paint.net (you can click on the image to view a larger version):

  
There may not be any way to tell if the color needs adjusting or not, until you do it.  It could have just been a purplish day in Venice.  But, it's clear that the dark line down the right side shouldn't be there.  Evidently, the negative just wasn't properly positioned in the gizmo device I used to convert the color film negative to digital format.

There were no blemishes to eliminate, so here's the same photo after I used the "Auto-Level" adjust feature to adjust the colors and after I used the cropping feature to eliminate the black edge:

Obviously, the colors did need adjusting.

I also found a photograph I took in Monaco that had a bad scratch that definitely needed fixing.  The colors looked in need of adjustment, too. Here's what it looked like:

There is not only the white scratch in the lower right corner, but there are also lots of white dust spots in the sky and elsewhere.  Using paint.net's "Clone-Stamp" tool, I fixed the blemishes.  And here is what the final image looks like:

The next step for me was to figure out what the building was in picture.  I always thought it was the Grand Casino in Monaco, but when I looked for current images of it on the Internet, I found that it could also be the Monaco Opera House, which is part of the Casino Royale in Monaco (or vice versa).  I finally figured out that it's the view of the side of the building that faces the Mediterranean.  That's the Opera House side.  The main entrance to the casino is on the opposite side of the building.  

Live and learn.

Another thing I learned is that I should have spent more time during the digital conversion phase figuring out when the pictures were taken (or developed) and using that date as part of the names of the picture files I was creating instead of letting the conversion program assign file names.  I think the pictures above where taken sometime in the 1980s, but I'd have to find the packet with the negatives to be certain.  The develop date is usually on the packet, and it could also be on the end or side of the strip of negative film.  Most of my photographs are also in albums where photographed dates and other information is included with the photos.

For my experiences color adjusting and repairing digitized slides, click HERE.

Cleaning up slides using paint.net

About five years ago, I bought a gizmo that allowed me to digitized all the photographs and slides I'd accumulated during more than a half century of taking photos.  Some of the slides were faded and the conversion software that came with the gizmo couldn't fix them.  While looking around for software to use to create images for my web site and this blog, I came across paint.net, which is available for free.  To my great surprise, it has an option that will put color back into faded slides.

For example, here's a faded slide from my collection (you can click on it to view the full size version):

Note that the picture is not only faded, it also has a black line along the right edge where the scanner captured part of the cardboard holder for the slide.  Plus, there are tiny hairs and spots on the picture as a result of leaving the slide laying around in a closet for decades.

Using paint.net, I found that I only had to click on "adjustments" and then on "Auto-Level" to automatically bring back the color:

But, it also made the tiny hairs and spots more visible, particularly a faint dark streak of some kind that runs from the upper right corner of the photo to the bridge.

And, paint.net also has a cloning tool that I can use to get rid of all those spots, hairs and blemishes.  They call it a "Clone Stamp."  You select the size of the cloning tool by choosing a brush size, then you press CTL while you left-click your mouse to select the area you want to clone - a piece of unblemished sky next to a dirt spot, for example.  Then you move the cursor to the area with the spot and when you left click the mouse again, the clear piece of sky is cloned and placed over the spot.  After that, the area to be cloned will move when you move the mouse, and you just need to click on the spots you want to correct (being certain that the clone area doesn't also contain a spot), or you can hold down the mouse clicker while you clone over the entire bad area.

I used the "Clone Stamp" to get rid of all the hairs and spots and the streak, plus the dark line down the side.  Here's the result:

And, just because I found it to be interesting, here's a photo I found on the Internet which shows the same scene as it looks today:

I'm not sure exactly how the "Auto-Level" adjustment feature works, but here's another faded photo of New York City from the 1950s:

Here's the color corrected and cleaned up version:

And here's a photo from the Internet showing what the location looks like today:

Now I just need to clean up about a thousand other slides in my collection.  

For information about color adjusting photographs from negatives, click HERE.