Recent content by Jonathan Scott

This is what the eclipse image from my mirror pinhole looked like a few minutes after maximum, projected onto the wall in a convenient shadow just above a door frame. The pinhole gives an image rotated by 180 degrees.

Didn't notice any gravity problems (!) but my family just enjoyed a 92.5% partial solar eclipse here in the south of the UK. We bought a pack of eclipse glasses, which worked well, and it was strange being outside in "dim sunshine". I also projected the crescent sun indoors onto a wall using a...

I was satisfied with the old style, which seemed stronger. The new style seems visually like an old sepia photo in comparison. I don't particularly like it but accept that I might get used to it. However, it also gives an impression of having significantly more blank space around stuff...

Unread items in the "Alerts" list are no longer quickly distinguishable by background shade from read items, as they differ only very slightly in a shade of something like beige, although they now have a spot on them which I presume is also an indication of unread.

When a plastic bottle collapses in one direction, it gets larger in another, creating an elliptical cross section or even more crumpled state. I suspect the volume change is less than one might think from a first glance, and quite compatible with what happens when warm air is cooled.

I'd be fairly sure that the lower temperature caused the air pressure to decrease in the bottle, and that caused the sides of the bottle to be pulled in at the weakest point, before the water had frozen (raising the water level a little), and the subsequent expansion of the frozen water was not...

They don't seem to be very good at it. I found out about stag beetles flying a few years ago on a summer evening when a loudly buzzing slow-moving object bounced off my face. It could barely lift itself, let alone navigate, despite apparently trying to fly up vertically, and it kept bumping...

In April, I went round the front of our house to photograph some flowers and while I was doing so I was surprised to find two juvenile wood pigeons pushing past my feet and into the road (which is fortunately very quiet). I went out beyond them and moved towards them to encourage them to move...

Nice to see a street piano that appears to be in usable condition (not missing any keytops and no keys appear to be stuck down). My piano's a Yamaha too, but a C2X (5'8") grand.

Coming from England, I learned to understand Swedish in Gothenburg (where I worked for 4 years) and Stockholm, but had difficulty with the "Skånska" accent from the south of Sweden, which to me sounded very similar to Danish in the vowel sounds (a bit like English West Country accents). And...

A snag with Exbury Gardens is that it is popular in good weather so there are many people there, but I don't like to include random strangers in my photos of nature. I sometimes don't have the patience to wait until there are no people in the picture, or I fail to spot them until afterwards...

Isn't that simply because it's oil for using on teak, not oil from teak?

Back at Exbury Gardens, UK, today. Fewer rhododendrons this time, as most have now finished flowering, but still a beautiful place. And an unexpected beetle - I think it's a rose chafer: All taken with my Panasonic Lumix DC-TZ200 as usual.

I don't know what was intended, but in 1974 I was trying out things in IBM mainframe assembly language and didn't like having to wait for compile job turnaround so I started an interactive debug session on an existing dummy program and poked machine code into storage in hex to test it, saving a...

In my first job with IBM, as a vacation student in 1973, I had some free time and I worked out how to use overpunching on the IBM 029 card punch to create patterns, which could then be duplicated by copying the card. An unofficial version of the IBM logo one was popular (I still have a copy)...