Vacations in Rhodes, Greece

It was about time. After almost 4 months of non-stop working and trying to understand the huge amount of source code written in C and assembly i decided to go for 6 days and visit my friends in Rhodes. Rhodes is an island located in the eastern Aegean Sea in Greece,. It is a quite big island in terms of land area and population, with a population of 110000 permanent residents. In the summer the population explodes due to tourism. In mid of August at the highest peak of the season it is expected that around 30000 people are going to use the airport.

Back to our topic: vacations. One of the things i like more in Rhodes is the dark skies. At least if you are living outside of the city center the night skies are quite dark for the observation: light pollution is class 4 or 5. After the sunset the temperature comes down and allows relaxing observation of night sky.

Looking at the stars during summer with my telescope (Astromaster 70AZ).

The second thing i like most is the beaches. In many cases, just outside from the city, in less than 15' travel time, you can find beautiful beaches without a lot of noise and people. On the downside, you have to take everything with you from home or hotel. There is nothing around. One of these beaches is Afantou beach.

One random picture from the beaches of Rhodes.

Time to sign out...

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

Static linking with gcc and g++

In this tutorial, we will explain what the static linking is, how this affect the size of final binary, and why statically linking with g++ sometimes is pain. By definition, a statically compiled binary is a group of programmer ‘s routines, external functions, and variables which are packed into the final binary executable. The compiler or the linker produces the final object and embeds all the functions and variables and the linking phase. There are two reasons of using dynamic linking and shared libraries: 1) Avoid creating a huge binary, if all the programs use a standard set of libraries why not having the operating system providing to them 2) Compatibility on operating system and machine dependant characteristics: sometimes the libraries must be implemented based on the architecture or the operating system and using dynamic linking is an easy way to avoid this catch. On the other hand, static linking is the ideal way of distributing one software product, paying

Homemade NAS after two and half years

Few years ago, I created a NAS system using my old PC. The old pc is powerful enough to do the basic NAS operation except real time transcoding of 4K or more than one 1080 streams. The setup was setup as follows: 1 SSD 128 GB for boot device 2x 4 TBs for the main storage configured as RAID 1 The hard disks were from different manufacturers (WD red plus and Segate) to avoid catastrophic situations: disks are part of a bad batch and you will have a second failed disk during the build of the RAID array. Here is a list of my mistakes: My first mistake was CentOS. I wanted a stable machine without surprises, unexpected behavior, as much less bugs affecting my setup. I had three free/open source options: Open Media Vault: Debian based Linux with many configuration options. The main downside is that you don't have support for ZFS and you have to very often use the command line to fix things. Moreover, there are a plethora of open issues/bugs that can make your life harder than expected

Personal Blog

Search This Blog