Swimming, 16th January 2017

Posted on January 18, 2017 by james

So far this month I’ve just been swimming front crawl each weekday, generally up to 2.5km each session if time allows. Thus far I’ve clocked up 18,100m so far this year. From this week however I’ve decided to alternate between shorter distance training/skills work and longer distances.

So, today’s swim:

3 x 3 lengths front crawl, one length breaststroke, easy pace.
One minute rest
6 x 1 length front crawl, medium pace, 20 seconds rest.
3 x 1 length front crawl fast, 1 length front crawl easy
Rest until fully recovered
3 x 1 length front crawl sprint, rest 15 seconds, 1 length front crawl medium pace, rest 15 seconds
2 x 1 length breaststroke fast, 1 length breaststroke slow
One minute rest
Six lengths front crawl swim down

I also did some practice on front crawl turns, bringing the total distance for the session to 1,400m.

Total distance this month: 19,500m
Total distance this year: 19,500m

Posted in Swimming | Tagged | Leave a comment

Becoming a swimming coach

Posted on January 17, 2017 by james

Last September I got myself on one of the last “Level 1” Coach courses before the ASA stopped them running to revamp all the swimming coach courses. The course was partially online (most of the Health and Safety and Safeguarding bits) and the remainder took place at the Plymouth Life Centre, about 90 minutes drive from home.

As someone who never trained as a club swimmer and without access to a head coach (the club where my children swim was without a head coach at the time) I found it quite hard going. Although there were no significant prerequisites for the course there was a fair degree of assumed knowledge that there’s probably no reason to expect someone who hasn’t been involved in competitive swimming to have.

Most difficult of all was the requirement to actually write a session plan and then deliver it to a group of actual age-group swimmers. The course documentation clearly stated that as a Level 1 Coach you’d not be expected to be write session plans and the course itself had nothing on the syllabus that included teaching us to write session plans, but we were nonetheless expected to be able to produce one that was coherent enough to use. That was a stressful evening 🙁

In addition, whilst the course did cover how to behave and communicate with swimmers once you’re poolside, there wasn’t any chance to shadow someone else doing it or to have a go and get feedback before actually reaching the point of being assessed. Perhaps if you’re part of a large club with more senior coaches who have the opportunity to keep themselves up-to-date and who do mentor the more junior coaches that’s something you can work through, but coming from a club that at the time had only two Level 1 coaches keeping the whole show going I didn’t feel at all confident that I was doing things right (and sometimes that I really even knew what I was doing).

In the end however I passed and received my shiny certificate to prove it. Since then I’ve been coaching at the club three times a week. Sometimes it’s like herding cats, but it’s also incredibly rewarding to see people improving their swimming and then taking them to competitions and watching them do well. So much so in fact that I applied to get on one of the first “Swimming Coach” courses (the replacement for the previous Level 2 Coach qualification), which I start next week.

Posted in Swimming | Tagged | Leave a comment

Learning to swim

Posted on January 17, 2017 by james

Well, sort of…

I was taught to swim at primary school, but mostly in a “learn to survive if you fall in the canal” kind of way. If you could stay afloat and propel yourself around the pool that was pretty much good enough. Anything resembling a recognisable stroke had to be self-taught. I very much enjoyed swimming nonetheless. I just didn’t take it any further.

As I was spending a lot of time hanging around sports centres whilst my children trained with one of the local swimming clubs, I decided to get back in the pool myself and make better use of the time. That was back in April 2015. For the rest of that year I spent a couple of hours a week swimming whilst they were training, getting a little fitter, but not actually improving my swimming very much.

In January 2016 I set myself a target of learning all four strokes properly and learning to turn properly, as well as setting a distance target of 250km (or 10,000 lengths if you prefer) for the year which I felt was attainable, but far from easy. Initially I started swimming more regularly to further improve my fitness and then in April 2016 I decided I’d attempt to swim every weekday. Some private lessons followed where I picked up the basics of each stroke and one of the childrens’ coaches has helped me improve my front crawl further, working through a catalogue of faults that needed fixing 😀

By early August my swimming had improved sufficiently that I reached my target of 250km, so I revised it to 400km, which meant I was going to have to do some serious work on being able to swim further in less time (more of that later). Over the next couple of months I worked on building the distance I could swim eventually reaching 2km (80 lengths) of front crawl without stopping. Much to my surprise that meant I reached my 400km target on November 30th. Another revision was called for and this time I went for another 50km. That was really pushing things and as Christmas loomed I was starting to feel very tired towards the end of the week, but by 23rd December I’d hit 447.5km leaving me just 2.5km which I completed in a single session between Christmas and New Year.

So, where am I now?

I’m relatively happy with my front crawl. I do need to work on my front crawl turns though. If I can get those sorted then I think it should be possible to do both 1,500m in less than 30 minutes and 50m in less than 30 seconds.

Breaststroke I find quite difficult and often suffer from pain in my knees when I swim more than a few lengths, I believe due to the sideways stress on the joint when returning my legs to the streamlined position at the end of the kick.

Backstroke I have not swum very much, but the flags are now generally left in at the pool where I swim, so I’ll be working on that more from now on.

And butterfly. Hah 🙂 It’s tough. Really tough. I’m getting there, but it’s going to be a while before I can swim 100m IM 😀

Now I just need to set myself a plan for 2017…

Posted in Swimming | Tagged | Leave a comment

A return to posting

Posted on January 17, 2017 by james

It’s been an exceptionally long time since my last post. That’s probably a reflection of “real” life getting in the way. It’s been a very busy last couple of years balancing family (especially as children start to have more active lives), work, hobbies and the usual domestic stuff and I reached the stage where sitting at a computer of an evening as well as all day for work was just something I didn’t want to do any more.

However, whilst I’m still as busy as ever I’m going to try to get back into posting again, catching up with what’s been happening over the last couple of years and keeping track of new things too.

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Now we know the origin of “Black Friday”

Posted on November 30, 2014 by james

And it’s nothing to do with “the day when shops get out of the red and into the black”. As far as I can see from the news reports of the last two days and recalling the same from last year, it’s actually called “Black Friday” because of the way people behave.

There is nothing I have or could wish to have that I would be willing to put someone else at risk of injury to obtain either at a discount or even full price. I would rather go completely without. To behave in such a way as the news reports say, demonstrating such greed and lack of care for others is not clever or shrewd or decent or reasonable. It’s not even human. People who behave like animals should have no complaint if they end up being treated like them. It disgusts me more deeply than I can express.

Even worse, the Sun newspaper is quoted by the BBC News website today as saying “Packed stores and overflowing tills do wonders for the economy. Ok, the occasional shopper got over-excited. That’s a (substantially-reduced) price worth paying.”

Really? So as long as people get a cheap television, the fact that others are getting punched in the face or ending up in hospital or committing assault isn’t a big deal? What utter scum-sucking bottom-feeder wrote that? Somehow I find it hard to believe that were it one of their nearest and dearest who was the victim in such a situation that they would be writing “Oh, well, as long as someone got a cheap TV, never mind that my granny is in hospital”, for example. I find myself unable to comprehend how sick such a person must be to condone such casual violence.

Whilst we fail to speak out against this behaviour our society is doomed. We won’t have a society. We’ll have a group of greedy, self-serving individuals who don’t give a damn about anyone else, even though those very same people they’re treating so shabbily may well be ones upon whom their very existence depends.

I’m tempted to say “I hope you’re proud of yourselves”, but that’s really just not true. Actually, I hope you rot in Hell at the earliest available opportunity. The Human race has absolutely no place for you.

Posted in Random | Leave a comment

Installing OSX 10.8 on a Mac Mini2,1

Posted on November 8, 2014 by james

I wanted to be able to build and test oaCapture on different OSX releases, but only Snow Leopard and Lion would install on my old Mac Mini.  It would have been very convenient for me if I could also have tried Mountain Lion, but the installer just stopped at boot time with a “not allowed” icon 🙁  There’s no major reason the install shouldn’t work as far as I can find out.  The later versions of OSX don’t have the proper driver for the video card, but for just testing that software would build and run that didn’t bother me too much.

After grubbing around on Google for some time trying to find the right thing to search for, I discovered two useful things:

  1. the OS installation contains a file listing all the hardware that Apple wants the OS to run on, and
  2. it is possible to boot a Mac into what’s called “Target Disk Mode” by pressing the “T” key on the keyboard when it boots.  This makes the machine behave as an external disk connected by FireWire (or Thunderbolt, presumably).

The file listing the “compatible” hardware is /System/Library/CoreServices/PlatformSupport.plist.  It contains lists of the board ids and hardware types allowed.  Hardware type in my case was fairly obvious as “macmini2,1”, but the board id was more troublesome until I discovered that this command, run in a terminal window, would give it to me:

ioreg -l | grep board-id | cut -d\" -f4

So, I noted that down and dug out a FireWire cable, connected the Mini up to another (later model) Mac, powered on the Mini (holding the T key down) and waited.  Shortly it displayed a large bouncing FireWire symbol on the console, at which point I put in the install media for Mountain Lion and booted the second machine.  From that point on everything worked as a normal installation.  I just had to select the FireWire disk as the place to install the OS, which the installer was quite happy to do.

Finally I opened a terminal window, edited /System/Library/CoreServices/PlatformSupport.plist and added my board id at the end of the “SupportedBoardIds” section and “macmini2,1” at the end of the “SupportedModelProperties” section. Then I shut down the newer Mac, powered off the Mini (in that order), unplugged the FireWire cable and rebooted the Mini, which happily started in Mountain Lion. The display was a bit ugly given the lack of a suitable driver, but I decided I could probably live with that.

By sheer chance however I happened to come across a set of rebuilt 64-bit GMA950 drivers that were claimed to work with Mountain Lion, packaged up as “3624-Kexts GMA950_X86_64.zip”. I downloaded them and in the knowledge that I could now re-install the OS should anything go horribly wrong, unzipped the file and dropped the Kext files, the bundles and plugins into the /System/Library/Extensions. One more reboot and I had a properly functioning display as well.

Now it’s done I don’t use the OS for much other than testing or checking out bugs, but for that purpose it’s been exceptionally useful.

Posted in Computing | Leave a comment

Trouble never comes alone

Posted on November 8, 2014 by james

Just as I thought I had a temporary resolution to the previous problem with oaCapture, another one gets thrown in my face 🙁

Inclusion of the cfitsio library causes binary portability problems left, right and centre because the libraries have slightly different versions on systems that are otherwise happy to run the same binary.

I think my fix for this is just going to be to reconfigure the build scripts to ignore the FITS library unless it’s forced on the command line or the build is on OSX.  For the time being, binary distributions will just have to do without FITS.  I’ll fix it when I get around to producing proper .deb and .rpm files for each environment.

Posted in Astronomy, Computing, Linux | Tagged | Leave a comment

Just when the finishing post is in sight…

Posted on November 8, 2014 by james

I thought I was going to be able to finish off everything for the new release of oaCapture today, but just at the last moment I’ve found a problem with the support for the Starlight Xpress filter wheel.

I’ve written support for the wheel using libusb although in actual fact the device claims to be a HID.  It all works on Linux, but on OSX the kernel forces a driver to load for HIDs and they can’t be detached via libusb.  So, the driver won’t work.

Looks like the solution is going to be to re-write the driver using a HID interface.  But not for this release I think.  I’ll put it on the list for the next one.

Posted in Astro Equipment, Astronomy, Computing, Linux | Tagged | Leave a comment

The joy of supporting filter wheels

Posted on October 22, 2014 by james

I’m working on support for filter wheels for oaCapture at the moment.  I’ve had a few hardware niggles that I’ll document separately, but just getting the code right is proving something of a struggle.  Every time I make a change somewhere I think of some knock-on effect somewhere else that needs handling.  The multiple layers of indirection from a list of possible filters to their possible inclusion in a filter wheel and in what position and then the selection of those filters as part of a capture sequence is a bit mind-bending to say the least…

I hope I’m now most of the way through it.  I do have (largely untested) code that will run sequences of captures selecting filters in turn from a list between each, so now I need to test it and do some of the remaining tidying up though I think some of the advanced stuff can wait for another release.

On the subject of releases, I did want to make this release available with a full build system for making .rpm and .deb files, but I don’t think that’s going to happen as I’d really like to get something out some time around the end of the month.  Even whilst I’ve been writing this piece I’ve thought of one more item for “future development” and another to be done before the release goes out.

Posted in Astro Equipment, Computing | Tagged | Leave a comment

Astro EQ conversion of EQ3-2 (part 5)

Posted on October 17, 2014 by james

Once the RA motor mounting was sorted I started on the DEC bracket which is somewhat simpler, being made from a section of 4mm thick aluminium angle. Again there’s only one bolt for fixing to the mount, so the bracket is wide enough that it can’t rotate about the fixing. The hole for the bolt (lower left in the image below) was drilled and threaded for an M5 screw which fits through the slotted motor mounting lug on the EQ3-2 saddle.

astro-eq-04

 

The remaining holes on the left are for the RJ11 socket, and those on the right obviously for the motor itself.  Here it is fitted together:

astro-eq-05

And finally, all the bits and pieces fitted to the mount body and connected up to the worm drives.

astro-eq-06

Posted in Astro Equipment, Astronomy, Projects | Tagged , | 1 Comment