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Eclipse rainout

I am disappoint.

Unfortunately our eclipse experience here got rained out. We were all disappointed here, but had a good time hanging out with friends.

The day started off fairly decently with some high thin clouds, but then the cloud cover started getting denser, and by the time 2PM came around, the sky was getting pretty dark out to the west.

A few minutes later, the lightning started and a steady rain followed.

At least I was able to experience everything slowly getting dark, and then getting brighter again.

There’s another eclipse happening in 2024. Maybe we’ll have better luck with that one.

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An unusually cool morning

18°C in the morning wouldn’t be unusual around here in the fall, but on a July morning, it’s very unusual. 28°C is a more typical temperature for a July morning.

I’ll take it.

The dogs were certainly enjoying the “cooler” weather this morning.

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Vacuum cleaner shopping

Well, the epoxy job I did on my old Dyson vacuum cleaner didn’t last quite as long as I thought it would.

Broken Dyson
Broken Dyson

Maybe I didn’t use enough epoxy, although I think if I made the epoxy layer much thicker, things like the hose and bin wouldn’t have snapped back into place as easily.

I think rather than trying to slather on more epoxy, it’s time to retire this Dyson. It’s done an excellent job over the past 10 years. Mostly likely it will be replaced with a Dyson Animal Ball 2, which has only a slightly smaller bin capacity than my DC15 (2.0 liter vs 2.5 liter for the DC15), and significantly larger bin than the other newer model Dysons that I’ve seen.

Dyson tear down to come.

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Manual kmod rebuild

Just leaving a note to myself for future reference.

Needed to rebuild the kmod-wl package because of a borked update process (something made the computer crash mid-update).

A bit of Google searching brought me to the script in /etc/kernel/postinst.d/akmodsposttrans.

Running sudo /usr/sbin/akmods --from-kernel-posttrans --kernels `uname -r` rebuilt the missing kmods and a modprobe wl got the wifi back up and running.

Running sudo /usr/sbin/akmods --force (for the current kernel) or sudo /usr/bin/akmods --force --kernels kernel version (for a specific kernel) works as well.

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Summer reading pile

My pile of reading for the summer.

Summer reading
Stacks of Radiology and Radiographics

One of the radiologists leaving the department set out his collection of journals (Radiology and Radiographics) for anyone to grab, presumably because he didn’t want to move them (I wouldn’t want to either).

I decided to grab them because I figured they’d be interesting to flip through, and it’s always good for diagnostic medical physicists to know what’s going on with the clinical side of things.

Even though I can look at all the articles in these journals online, I find sitting down with a journal and flipping through it so much more satisfying.

It’s unlikely I’ll keep all of them. I’ll spend some of my evenings going through two or three issues at a time and keep the ones with interesting articles for later reference.