We need to talk about ChatGPT
There are other, more detailed analyses, looking behind the curtains of ChatGPT, this is just a short summary of my own experiences. For more details, look e.g. here: ChatGPT: Interacting…
Temperature measurements with an NTC thermistor
Following a discussion on Facebook I put here an online tool to calculate the output of a voltage divider consisting of a fixed resistor and an NTC thermistor following a first order Steinhart–Hart equation.
The calculations are based on a voltage divider where either the voltage over the NTC or over the pass resistor is measured. You can change the values in the script according to your own settings. If you break the script for some reason, just reload the page.
SageMath uses Python as programming language.
Unschlagbares Angebot der Firma Elektor.
Top deal of the week?
Today I received a newsletter from the publisher Elektor. I am offered a special deal on a Peltier power generator which can power an LED light from a small candle. And this for an astonishing price of €99.95 instead of the normal price of €119.95.
I’ll have to buy this – or wait a second…
I know the IKEA LED light Jansjö from the add quite well, so I thought until I noticed that this was an USB rip-off from the same series:
IKEA Jansjö spot light: 3 W power, 88 lumen
IKEA Jansjö USB: unknown power(ca 0.5 W?), 10 lumen
We can supply an LED light with probably 0.5 W and 10 lm from the heat of a candle, isn’t it great?
If we stay at IKEA we can buy these candles, 24 with a burning time of 4 hours for €0,99. These together could light our LED light for a full 4×24 hours = 96 hours. Thus we get a total of 96 h x 0.5 W = 48 Wh or 0.048 kWh for €0,99. This corresponds to €20 per kWh, about 100x more expansive than electricity from the wall outlet (in Germany) – ignoring the downpayment on the gadget itself.
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Nerd or not?
Today there was a geocaching event celebrating Nerd Day. I must admit that I wasn't aware of the significance of today's date, but I also knew that I can probably…
The end of a short story in life…
This afternoon the birdsnest outside my office window has been plundered by a crow or raven. Even though the parent-birds got reinforcement by two other fieldfares they never had a chance.
The small birds only had a few days of life but they somehow enriched my days.
BirdCam – feeding in slow-motion
Because there was a problem with the Raspberry Pi again today, I took the opportunity to film my fieldfares live for a short while. In this slow-motion video you can see how first the female arrives at the nest with a fresh worm. A short while later also the male arrives with a beak full of worms for the small ones:
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Hatching time
Ten days Mrs Fieldfare has been sitting in her nest – today was the big day: until late afternoon three eggs had hatched. Now also Mr Fieldfare has to show some effort who has not been much around the nest lately.
This is the first day in the life of the young fieldfares in time lapse:
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Touch down!
BirdCam v4
It took four attempts to finally get a suitable webcam to observe the bird's nest outside my office window. Most cheap webcams, even those which show off with true 720p…
Setting up webcam exposure under linux
I had some problems with fswebcam to set the automatic exposure. The exact way how to enter certain parameters is not clear from the lacking documentation, but it works fine…