Amateur backyard astronomy

I’ve been wanting one for years, but a few weeks ago I finally went out and bought myself a telescope :)

Some assembly required. (This is a Celestron Astromaster 130EQ, by the way.)

Sadly, I haven’t had the chance to do much star gazing these last few weeks — partly because I’ve been busy and partly because it’s been cloudy on almost Every. Single. Night. that I’ve been free.

To look at the stars your best bet is to go to a place with minimal light pollution (ie away from a big city) on a dark night (ie when there’s no moon). So far the most I’ve been able to do is the exact opposite: set the telescope up in my front yard on a full moon night. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Photo taken with my Google Pixel phone’s ‘night sight’ feature.

That might be worst set-up for looking at stars and nebulae, but it’s excellent if you want to look closely at the moon :)

Photo taken with my smartphone placed over the telescope’s eyepiece.

So while I haven’t yet made the most of my intermediate-level telescope, at least I’ve been able to a good look at the moon.

It’s a start.

Selfie Sunday

Selfies at a Sunday afternoon birthday with, respectively, Dr Nadia Niaz, Dr Nuzhat Lotia, and Dr Asha Bedar.

Plus one bonus ‘golden light’ selfie at sunset with Nadia :)

Blocking the sun so we can see ourselves in the phone camera.

Camouflaged neighbourhood cat

Now that is a well camouflaged Cat of Kingsville.

I saw it only two steps before we walked by it, so all I had time to do was make sure Maggie stayed close to me on her lead on the other side of my legs.

Maggie, in the meantime, didn’t notice it at all. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Blending into the dirt and and into background.

It’s a little easier to see from across the street, when it doesn’t have all that dirt and background to blend into.

But even then, given how still it was sitting, you’d miss if you weren’t actively looking out for animals as you walked your dog.

Camouflaged cat is watching you.

Happy birthday Nadia!

Another year, another birthday. (Which, of course, is the very definition of an annual day to celebrate your birth.)

#AllSmiles

This year we celebrated Nadia’s birthday with dinner at my sister’s house while watching the men’s cricket world cup.

#ThumbsUp

And we got Nadia to blow out only once scented candle — which she was quite okay with :)

Posing for the photo.

Happy birthday! <3

Also, Bob’s Burgers fans will appreciate that one of the presents I got Nadia this year was this fabulous glow-in-the-dark Kuchi Kopi!

“Nice to see you, Mr Bob.”

Cats taking the high ground

Coming back to our cats of Kingsville series, though, today we saw two cats.

This one that decided that vertical separation was better than horizontal separation as I walked Maggie down its street (Maggie sniffed the base of the tree but didn’t even register the cat’s presence).

Cat up a tree, unimpressed with the fact that I’m taking its photo.

And this one that was particularly frowny about us walking by its domain :)

Disapproving cat-on-a-post is disapproving.

Friendly cat in Yarraville

We take a break from our usual cats of Kingsville coverage to show a friendly cat in Yarraville that loved getting scritched by Nadia :)

Turned up after we’d parked our car, got a few scritches, and then wandered off through the hedge into the neighbouring park.

Snoozing dog

One of the perks of working from home is having a snoozing dog in your eye line the whole time.

It’s a cold day and that’s a big gas heater on the back wall. Maggie is very happy.

It’s also a little amusing when you start to speak in a conference call and startle said sleeping puppy :)

Wha..?

Warm and stylish!

It’s important to be warm and stylish when Nadia takes you for your morning walk on a windy, overcast 4-degree day in Melbourne :)

I’m not sure how much she appreciated the coat, but she was certainly looking forward to her walk!

Happy puppy :)

Happy puppy :)

Bypassing the YouTube recommendation algorithm

How many times have you watched a YouTube video that’s ended with a variation of this phrase: “please like and subscribe, and remember to click that bell icon so you get notified every time I upload a new video”?

If you watch YouTube as much as I do [1], you hear this All. The. Time.

What’s with the bell icon?

Why are YouTubers so insistent that viewers clicking that bell icon?

Veritasium (Derek Muller) explains this in his recent ‘My Video Went Viral. Here's Why’ video. In that he presents his “theory of everything when it comes to YouTube”. If you’re a big watcher of YouTube videos, I highly recommended you watch it.

But, basically: clicking that bell icon is great because doing so lets you, essentially, bypass part of YouTube’s recommendation algorithm (while also, technically, giving it more data). This, of course, is the algorithm that, among other things, determines which eight recommended videos you’ll see at the top of your YouTube home page.

If, however, you watch videos from your favourite channel by clicking on a YouTube notification instead, two things happen.

  1. You don’t have to wait for your favourite channel’s newest video to appear in your recommendations list. This is great because now you don’t miss a video just because the algorithm determined, for whatever reason, to not feature that video in your top recommendations.

  2. Once you’ve watched the videos from your favourite channels, YouTube doesn’t need to recommend them to you anymore. That means it can now recommend other things in your recommendations list. Which, depending on how you look at it, can be an excellent outcome.

But…I use an older magic

That, however, is not the method I use. It would make sense if I did – I do subscribe to 454 channels on YouTube, after all. But I really don’t want to be bombarded with all those notifications and emails.

Instead, I use a much older, much simpler, and much less obtrusive way of keeping track of every video a channel uploads: RSS.

Yes, I subscribe to the RSS feed of all the channels I want to watch most (if not all) the videos from :)

Some of the learning and science YouTube channels (and blogs) that I subscribe to.

Some of the learning and science YouTube channels (and blogs) that I subscribe to.

Depending on which RSS news reader you use, this is super easy to do. My reader of choice is NewsBlur so all I need to do is copy-paste a YouTube channel’s URL into NewsBlur’s add-feed dialog and, voilà, I am subscribed to a full feed of this channel’s videos.

So, if you’re someone who watches a lot of YouTube and also uses an RSS feed reader, I highly recommend you give this method a try. It will make your life much easier and you’ll be free of those pesky notifications.

—

[1] About and hour and half a day, on average.