A trip to kaloi limenes (south of Crete)

Recently i visited south of Crete to take a taste of the beautiful beaches. The waters on the area were the clearest i have seen in Crete. The trip going from Heraklion to kaloi limenes takes around 1 hour and half. It i will be better to start early and take as much water you can. The sun is really strong on the summer and then temperature is probably higher than anything you have felt.

Map with the trip from Heraklion to kaloi limenes (good ports)

Here is the route we used. Unfortunately the route is not easy especially in the last part.

Here are some photos from the trip:

View of inner Crete.

Here is the top view of the beach. Note the oil storage and terminal facility, located on the small island of Aghios Pavlos ("Saint Paul") at the port's entrance. Despite the industrial appearance the beach i exceptionally clean.

View of the beach of kaloi limenes south of Crete. Note the oil storage.

View of the beach. Note the oil storage.

View of the beach south of the Crete, kaloi limenes in Greece.

View of the Beach. Few people only and mostly locals.

View from the road of the beach kaloi limenes south of Crete, Greece. The area is perfect for organized and non-organized camping.

View from the road. The area is perfect for organized and non-organized camping.

Sunset on the way back to Heraklion. Another 1,5 hours driving back!

Processing Milky Way in RawTherapee

This text is an analysis of a video I did some months ago how to process photos of our Milky Way in RawTherapee. You can find the picture here . The photo was taken by wiegemalt. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Editing: Step 1: Fixing lighting The first thing someone notices when opening the picture is the extreme noise due to high ISO used (1600 - check the picture on the right). The first thought is to de-noise the picture, however, if you do that you are going to loose the details of the night sky. The main reason for the high noise is the additional exposure Rawtherapee adds when the 'Auto' button is pressed. In particular, the RT adds +2.4 EV to equalize the picture. This is Wrong! What we want is to keep the noise down and at the same time bring the stars up. That's why we are going to play with the Tone Curve of the RT. To adjust the light properly we increase the cont...

RTL-SDR Blog V3 Arrived

I recently bought a new RTL dongle that supports Direct Sampling that allows frequencies less than 40Mhz. In particular, the model I ordered was the RTL-SDR BLOG V.3. DONGLE that was really cheap compared with other solution. It still can't reach the quality of the other more expensive receivers, but it still a step up. The Dongle comes with a long external antenna. The RTL dongle. So, the question now is how better is from my old SDR. I did a check with the RTL power tool to see what is the difference. My old SDR Dongle (Fitipower FC0013) has coverage from 22 to 1100 MHz. The new Dongle RTL Blog V3 a has Rafael Micro R820T has coverage from 24 - 1766 MHz, but it also contains Direct Sampling that allows for High Frequencies. A word of warning here, the reception using Direct Sampling is very bad, especially if you connect the antenna without a filter band or/and preamplifier. I did experiments using the rtl_power, and the results showed much more gain for the ne...

Auto - Vectorization with little help from GCC!

This tutorial helps the programmers to benefit the progress of the auto-vectorization algorithms that are implemented in modern compilers, such as gcc. Before you start playing with the vectorization of your code i assume that you don't have any bottleneck in you code (like dynamic memory allocation etc) in the critical path. In this tutorial we will use the gcc 4.4.1, but the same steps can be applied to newer or older versions. First of all there are two issues with auto vectorization: 1) gcc must know the architecture (eg what SIMD instructions are available) 2) The data structures must by properly aligned in memory The first step is to find the architecture of your processor and point it to gcc using the flags -mtune=... / -march=... you specify the architecture. For example, my laptop is core2Duo so i put -march=core2. You can find more more information here . The next problem we must solve is knowledge of memory alignment. ...

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