Author Archives: james

My First Astro Image

I didn’t really know what I was doing when I took this — just put a webcam in the end of the diagonal and did my best with to get an image as it travelled across the camera. I know … Continue reading

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Skywatcher Startravel 80 Telescope Review

I’ve had the ST80 for about seven weeks since I was given it at Christmas and I’ve had a few decent nights stargazing with it so I thought it was about time I wrote down some of my thoughts. The … Continue reading

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Chainsaw chain-changing cheer

When we moved here I “inherited” a heft Stihl 08S chainsaw. It was a bit of an animal when it came to cutting up logs, having a 21″ bar, but really too heavy to use comfortably for a long time … Continue reading

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Loading MySQL data for phpunit testing

I’d been bugged for a while because when I was writing phpunit tests for some of my code, I couldn’t find a tidy way of pre-loading data into a MySQL database for testing against. Everything I came up with seemed … Continue reading

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Searching for the longest match with MySQL

I’ve been involved with Carbon Guerrilla, a project to allow organisations to manage and track their CO2 emissions for some time now. Yesterday I was working on some code to allow people to compare emissions across locations by re-basing emissions … Continue reading

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Sortable list of Messier Objects

Although I’ve been interested in the stars for years, I’ve only recently become a telescope owner.  Despite the lack of clear nights since receiving my new toy, I’ve spent some time looking at the obvious things like the moon and … Continue reading

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