Bye bye moon

One of the finest documentaries I have watched in recent years was by the British space scientist Maggie Aderin-Pocock. It was called Do we really need the moon?

Do we really need the moon?

I like Maggie, she’s one of those tutors you wish you’d had at school, she’s just so good at getting you to understand a subject, and is just so good at making you feel at ease through her enthusiasm and energy. As well as being the Chancellor of our local university in Leicester, she can also be seen on the popular BBC space programme “The Sky at night”

This documentary was released about 12 years ago but is not available on BBC platforms at this moment. I have however included the link to YouTube where you can watch the programme in its entirety.

One of the fascinating facts, and one that had me questioning whether it was a contributor to global issues is that the moon is moving away from Earth at a rate of about 3.8 centimeters (1.49 inches) per year. This might not seem like a lot, but over billions of years, it sure adds up. Since the Apollo 11 landing on the moon on July 20th 1969 the moon has moved away from us by approximately 209 centimetres or 6.85 ft. That’s in just 55 years. The moon invariably has an effect on a number of factors here on earth, with the major one being its effect on the tides.

The moon’s gravitational pull is the primary driver of the tides on Earth. As the moon moves further away from Earth, its gravitational pull weakens, which in turn affects the tides.

Effects on Tides

  1. Weaker tidal forces: With the moon moving away, its gravitational pull on Earth’s oceans decreases, resulting in weaker tidal forces.
  2. Lower high tides: As the tidal forces weaken, the high tides will be lower than they would be if the moon were closer.
  3. Higher low tides: Conversely, the low tides will be higher than they would be if the moon were closer.
  4. Reduced tidal range: The tidal range, which is the difference between the high and low tides, will decrease as the moon moves further away.

Don’t panic though as these changes will occur gradually over an extremely long period. It’s estimated that the tidal range will decrease by about 1-2% over the next 100 million years.

These distances between earth and the moon are calculated quite accurately by a piece of space hardware placed on the moon by the crew of Apollo 15 in 1971. It’s called a retro reflector unit. When a high intensity laser is fired towards it from earth, the time it takes to reach the reflector and then be beamed back to earth is measured, and from this measurement they can give an extremely accurate reading of the current distance. This system is still in use to this day. It also features in the documentary.

I’m fascinated by everything lunar related as I was brought up during the space race and was very much around when all of this occurred. I’ve witnessed a space shuttle launch (STS-79) and long to head back and witness one of the many launches taking place now in this revival of space travel.

My favourite ever quote was the one that went so:

“Don’t believe the sky is the limit when there are footprints on the moon”

Adventure, exploration, breaking barriers and exceeding limits. Everything that the human race is capable and very good at doing.

And some people are just fantastic scholars at teaching the subject.

Maggie is one of those special individuals.

Stay safe. Shine.

Nintendo Light boy

What the listing stated:

Doesn’t light up when batteries inserted

EBay

Straight to the point. I think it doesn’t work. 🤷‍♂️

The original Light Boy

My original Light boy, for the Nintendo Game boy

Ive got a Game boy, I love it. However the biggest issue has always been as soon as it goes dark you’re stuffed. As the screen was never back lit you either had to tape a torch to your head or sit under a bright light. The Nintendo Light Boy went a little way to eliminating the need for the torch by incorporating a light and a magnifier within a unit that connected to the console.

This one doesn’t work though, which is good for this blog. I paid a good price of £14:95GBP considering original ones like this are selling between £40-£90GBP. There are cheaper alternatives, but hey, why?

Shouldn’t be the hardest fix I’ve ever attempted, but it will be a great addition to my Game Boy collection.

Assessment:

The unit has arrived and is in a very good cosmetic condition with only a few slight scuffs and marks that should polish out. Two AA batteries have been put in and switched on and true to the description in the sale, it doesn’t illuminate. Glass lens is in good condition and the screen folds as it should.

Looks tidy, just light not working
Some small marks. Nothing too bad or permanent

Repair:

This is a really simple circuit to be honest. Two batteries, two lights and a switch. That’s about it. The screen pivots and on here there are two teeth that make a contact with two small plates on the main unit when the screen is at 90 degrees to the console. When the switch is on, the lights should illuminate at this angle, and when closed contact will be lost and the lights extinguish.

Teeth on the screen hinge
Teeth connection with plate turning on lights.

When I put batteries in there was a very dim intermittent flicker, aha I thought, dirty contacts and they sure were.

I cleaned the switch and the contacts using some IPA and removed a fair amount of old dirt from the contacts. The switch was operated 30 or 40 times to really get to anything that was deep in the switch, and this worked.

A good clean with IPA was all that was needed.

Batteries back in and unit at the correct angle, switch to the on position, and hey presto we have a constant uninterrupted supply of light.

We have light. It’s working.

The little marks and scuffs on the shell were all removed with a little cleaning solution. This item is now in a perfect state of repair and looking right handsome!

Result:

This is undoubtedly the easiest repair I have had yet but I’m not complaining. It always amazes me about the sellers on these platforms. I purchased this as spares and repairs damaged, when there was absolutely nothing wrong with it, well at least it only required a tiny bit of maintenance. They could have done this themselves and easily have charged a price at least three times what I paid for this unit. Fools 😂

All assembled
Working as intended
All assembled, cleaned and working

Anyway their loss is my gain as they say, I now have a perfectly good item in perfect working order and now looking as good as new. And all it needed was a clean and some TLC.

Sometimes it all goes so well. Today is one of those days.

Thanks for passing by. It is always most appreciated.

How many days have passed since the first photograph was taken?

I was intrigued to know just how many days ago that the first photograph was taken.

There are a few things to consider before we make such a calculation, first a little history.

The first photograph was taken by Nicéphore Niépce in 1826, using a process called heliography. This process involved coating a pewter plate with a light-sensitive substance called bitumen, which hardened when exposed to light. The image, titled “View from the Window at Le Gras,” shows the view from Niépce’s window and took about eight hours to expose.

To calculate how many days ago the first photograph was taken, we can subtract the date of that photograph (1826) from the current year (2025).

2025 – 1826 = 199 years

Since there are 365 days in a year, give or take the occasional leap year, we can then multiply the number of years by 365 to get the total number of days.

199 years x 365 days/year = 72,635 days

So, the first photograph was taken approximately 72,635 days ago. (Give or take a few days)

Wow

That doesn’t seem as great a number in my mind compared to the 199 years, maybe because we relate to a day being considerably shorter than a year (Obviously 🤦‍♂️). It sounds as if you could have even been around when the photo was taken, obviously you couldn’t have been and this is just me having an early morning ramble. So the next question is how many pictures have been taken since then?

Considering the usage of mobile technology I’d suspect that the answer is unobtainable due to the sheer volume of pictures now taken on a daily basis.

But I have put this question to one of those A.I apps available on my phone, to see what it says, and here is the answer that it has given, I asked:

“How many pictures have been taken since that first one in 1826?”

Estimating the Number of Pictures Taken

Using historical data and trends, we can estimate the number of pictures taken since 1826:

  • Pre-digital era (1826-1970s): Assuming an average of 1 million photographs taken per year (a rough estimate), we get approximately 150 million photographs taken during this period.
  • Digital era (1970s-2007): With the advent of digital cameras, the number of pictures taken increased significantly. Let’s assume an average of 100 million photographs taken per year during this period, resulting in approximately 3.5 billion photographs taken.
  • Smartphone era (2007-present): With the widespread adoption of smartphones, the number of pictures taken has grown exponentially. According to a report by InfoTrends, over 1 trillion photographs were taken in 2015 alone. Assuming an average of 1.5 trillion photographs taken per year since 2007, we get approximately 23.5 trillion photographs taken during this period.

Total Number of Pictures Taken

Adding up the estimates from each era, we get:

150 million (pre-digital) + 3.5 billion (digital) + 23.5 trillion (smartphone) ≈ 23.8 trillion photographs taken since 1826.

Keep in mind that this is a rough estimate and should be taken as a rough order of magnitude rather than an exact figure.

Meta A.I

Wow. Big numbers.

Amazing. Just like you. Have a great day.

Who are you? Peter Pan

The boy that never grew up. I guess that was intentional regression and not recreational regression on his behalf, however today in a supermarket whilst doing the weekly shop, my wife believed I was attempting to re enter my youth. I was accused of having a middle aged crisis!

No! You are not having highlights, are you having a middle aged crisis?

She was wrong, but I understand why she thought that way😂

Anyone who reads my posts will realise I have recently written about restoring old ABS plastic from the 80s back to life and removing the yellow hue that they acquire over time. Retrobrighting.

We were walking around the local supermarket doing the weekly shop, I asked where the hair care aisle was and she pointed me on the way. She did tell me that she already had my hair gel, but I said I was looking for something else. I could see the look of suspicion in her eyes.

When I returned from my little detour I asked her to scan the item in the picture above, a small bottle of 40vol 12% peroxide.

She looked at the bottle that says, “Blonde” and at this she’s instantly reverted back to when she first met me about 36 years ago, when I used to have highlights in my hair and changed its styling as often as the weather changed.

“No. You are not having highlights, are you having a middle age crisis or something?” This was her comment.

It took some skilful diplomacy to explain to her that it was required to complete a project I was working on. And I’m still not sure she quite believes me. I will have to show her what I will be doing for her to believe me.

Her parting comment before we moved into the washing powder aisle was, “Who are you? Peter Pan?” So I still don’t really believe she heard and understood my explanation.

I used to love those highlights though…..I wonder 🤔

Tweety pie is being noisy

First a little history. We live in a two bed semi that was built sometime around 1935. Yes it’s aging and has a lot of charm and character. Our neighbours on one side are quite vocal at times but that’s about it, in general life is quite peaceful. They have had a parrot in residence for a number of years who used to live in one of the loft rooms who you only heard occasionally when the loft window was open and you were in the garden. You’d be in the garden listening to all the small birds chattering, when the beauty of it all was broken by a parrot raucously squawking like a banshee with a sore throat above it all. However it was rare and totally acceptable if not strange to hear.

So innocent looking 😇

However things in the homestead next door have changed. The old fellah that used to be the head of the house passed away last year, bless him, and I don’t think he appreciated the birds presence, hence its indoctrination in to the loft space. Now he is no longer there, the daughter has placed the bird in the living room with a full view of everything at the front of the house, and he has a lot to squawk about.

This is not a major issue, please don’t judge me I’m not complaining, things could be an awful lot worse. It could be a dog constantly barking, it could be people constantly shouting, so we should really count ourselves lucky.

It’s just that the wife, even with her hearing problems will often comment, “That bloody bird” so in theory my biggest issue is keeping my wife under control and reassuring her that things could really be a lot worse.

I have personally on occasions been known to comment similarly. But I’m the only person who can control my thoughts and feelings (How very Stoic!) and I choose to remain generally unaffected by it all.

So why did I write this post?

I’ve answered all the daily prompts, and whilst I was thinking of what to post, all I could hear was Tweety pie.

I guess it was just to reiterate that sometimes you just need to accept what you have and embrace it all. The alternatives could be better, but they could also be a lot worse.

And to me there is nothing nicer than the sound of a bird even if it sounds like it has a 60 a day habit and a voice as rough as course sandpaper. 😂

Have a lovely day.

Retr0bright – What’s that then?

It’s a process used to restore old Yellowed plastic back to its original state. Or at least it’s a way to try to. Read on and I’ll explain.

(Here is my understanding of the ABS plastic Yellowing process. There may be slight inaccuracies for which i apologise. Please do your own research on the subject. Further enquiries may be needed to satisfy your curious minds!)

Anyone who has any dealings with items built in the 80s/90s such as me will have come across an issue, especially related to anything built with ABS Plastic, and that would be the common phenomena of “Yellowing”.

If you own a game console or toy with white ABS there is the good chance that all or at least some of it will have turned a shade of yellow,

ABS plastic – otherwise technically known by its scientific name of “Acrylonitrile butadiene styrene” is a thermoplastic polymer. This means that it becomes pliable at an elevated temperature and solidifies on cooling. ABS was a flame retardant material that was regularly used as a casing for computers, gaming consoles and similar items just in case they were to overheat and catch fire. It was also used in Lego bricks for some reason, god knows how these were meant to catch fire though!

The yellowing issue lay with a chemical used in the manufacturing process called Bromine. When exposed to UV light or excessive heat this caused the photo oxidation of polymers within the chemical to break polymer chains causing the plastic to yellow and become brittle.

Come on then, tell us what retrobrighting is..

Retrobright or retr0brite as it is stylised by the guys who discovered the process, is an approach to removing yellowing from these ABS plastics, a kind of bleaching process if you like. The original recipe for Rerobright was discovered purely by chance by the CBM Museum at Wuppertal in Germany in March of 2008. I’m not going to go into the finite detail in this post, however you can read all about it here at the original Retr0brite project site: The Retr0brite Project.

The process can be a little hit and miss, however there are a lot of documented cases of it working very well. There is a downside that the yellowing can overtime return, as this process only really whitens the surface problem whilst those old polymers are still breaking down deep inside the plastic where this treatment doesn’t reach.

Before and after effects of this process. Pictures copyright The Retr0bight project

The process

I’m only going to touch on the process here, there are many other detailed explanations available on line, that explain the process far better than i could, here is one for example from the “How to Geek” site. How to clean old yellowed plastic on retro computers and game systems.

I will explain the process briefly below, but in no way do i accept responsibility for the way you approach the process. That is down to you entirely and i suggest you read up deeply on the subject prior to attempting this process. You have been warned!

What you need

  • The offending piece of plastic
  • Clingfilm
  • Paint brush or suitable application brush
  • Protective gloves
  • Eye protection
  • 40 volume oxidising cream (Hydrogen peroxide, salon hairdresser strength.
  • Sunshine (Hard to find here in the UK) or a UV lamp

For starters make sure the item you want to brighten is clean. Make sure you have eye protection and gloves on as the peroxide can cause skin burns and the last place you want it is in your eyes, believe me.

Lay down some cling film. Place your subject matter on the clingfilm. Apply some cream onto the object you want to lighten and smear it around ensuring the whole item is covered in the peroxide solution, failure to do this can cause blushing and streaking. When you are happy that the subject matter is fully treated, cover the whole item in the clingfilm ensuring there are no holes where the solution can evaporate from.

Next place the item where the whitening can take place. Out in direct sunlight and leave it there for the entire day. Indoors a UV light lamp can also be used. The UV rays that originally caused the yellowing will now react with the Peroxide to reverse the process. This does take time though and in some cases where the yellowing is particularly bad a second or third treatment may be required.

Remove the clingfilm after a sufficient UV exposure and ensure the subject matter is washed thoroughly to remove all traces of the peroxide developer. Again, ensure you have gloves on until all traces of the chemical are removed.

Dry the subject matter or allow it to dry naturally. Hey presto! Job done. And thats basically it.

I’ve covered this subject, as it is something i will be attempting over the coming months. I will address the process in individual posts relative to the item i will be working on at the time.

Thanks for passing by, it’s always appreciated.

Latest Icelandic Volcano eruption

Whenever we go to Iceland one of the things I’ve always wanted to view is an active eruption. But they always happen just after we leave and stop just before we go.

Today an eruption has begun on the Reykjanes Peninsula, the eleventh in just over four years and the eighth since December 2023. The eruption appears to have occurred just southeast of Mt Þorbjörn.

And as quick as it arrives, it’ll disperse just as quick. So by the time you get to peruse this video, it may well be over. Sorry about that. That’s Mother Nature for you.

Live volcano cam

And we were there about five weeks ago. Missed it again….damn.

All joking aside, here’s praying everyone in the area stays safe.

Nature at its most violent.

Spray paint artist

In 30 minutes this street art guy turns an everyday mirror into a work of art.

What a talent, he should be displaying his own work.

Street art at its finest

Enjoy.

You fake

Imposter syndrome. The black dog is back.

Imposter syndrome, also known as imposter phenomenon, is a psychological experience that causes people to doubt their skills, accomplishments, and intellect. It can manifest as a persistent feeling of self-doubt and fear of being exposed as a fraud. People with imposter syndrome may feel undeserving of their achievements . 

Wikipedia

I’ve even removed the final part from this quote, “and the high praise that they receive” as it embarrasses me.

I’ve pretty much suffered this issue the whole of my adult life, I haven’t made that diagnosis, that was made by far better qualified persons than I, that I have seen over the years. I can manage it most of the time and then for some reason I have a rotten bad day, like yesterday when I totally withdraw and slink into a dark area where I do nothing but run myself down.

You’re useless, you’re crap, you’re no good, you have no purpose, you’re a failure, you’re an arse, you’re incompetent….. you name it, anything bad, I quite openly said it to myself yesterday. I don’t know why.

All the arty stuff I’ve done recently, I just went and binned, because in my eyes it’s crap. A child could have done better, why show it to other people. You’re useless. I’ve had such a brilliant, positive attitude of late that I don’t know where this came from. It’s just as if I’m punishing myself for feeling good.

It was a bad day, and unfortunately I’ve upset those closest to me and I’ve now got to start rebuilding bridges.

It takes me to some dark places at times and I’ve controlled it so well over the last year or two, I don’t know where it came from this time.

That’s the problem with these ailments. You think you’re got it sussed and then BANG 💥 it hits you right between the eyes… it’s back, and it’s overwhelming.

It’s the retracing my steps and rebuilding those bridges I hate. I’m lucky to have understanding people around me, but just how much more can they take?

Peace.

Artist and craftsman at work

Wow.

If you like large scale modelling you really need to spend 30 minutes of your time watching this guy at work. His name is Parma, he is a Brazilian chap who has a channel dedicated to large scale modelling and the thing is, he does it all from a small room in his apartment that he has converted into a workshop. He wants to prove that you don’t need a massive work space to create these masterpieces.

I love model making but you look at guys like this and feel totally inadequate. He is a true master of his trade.

Artist and craftsman at work

His channel can be accessed here: @OficinadoParma

Enjoy.