Personal Blog

Enjoying the sunset from my new home in Nicosia. Not the best city to live in, but not bad either. I just wish it had less traffic and more... green as every big city. Sunset in Nicosia, Cyprus over the buildings. Sunset in Nicosia, Cyprus over the buildings.

Not long ago i remember buying my 3dfx Voodoo3 3000 and running my old games. I remember the huge difference that the hardware transformation and lighting could provide. I was fanatic of Need for Speed III: Hot Pursuit at this period. I had a good friend from the neighbour home and from time to time we were playing together in the PC trying to make the best time. I still remember his expression when we lunched the NFS again and saw the new graphics. My setup was a Cyrix 6x86 350 running at 250MHz with 32MB of ram initially that i upgraded them to 96MB later. My first graphics card had something like 4MB and with the upgrade to Voodoo3 3000 i went to 16MB. Enormous difference. Take a look on the difference of using Software vs Glide of 3dfx: At that period i was using my PC mostly about playing games and nothing else. So the first thing i did is to install the games included with my 3dfx card. I remember two or three games. The first was the Descent 3  and the other one...

The Acropolis of Rhodes is an acropolis dating from the Classical Greek period (5th–3rd century BC) 3 kilometers from the center of Rhodes in Greece. There are a number of monuments that someone can visit, including the temple of Apollo, the stadium, and the ancient theater. I have a good friend that prepared a very nice video of this area: I also included various photos from the area: There is also an ancient stadium that exists nearby the acropolis temple:  

Couple of months ago i got the idea of observing the sun using a solar filter. I ordered a cheap solar filter from Israel and  placed it front of the telescope. Note that you have to adjust the filter in front of the the telescope not between the body and the eyepiece because high temperature can be developed inside the telescope's tube. The next step was to point to the sun. Compared with the night sky it is really hard to target the sun, as you can't look (or you shouldn't) directly to the sun. The easiest trick is to align the body of the telescope with the sun to minimize the shadow created as shown in the next two pictures: Aligning the telescope to the sun using its shadow. Finally, we align as perfect we can the telescope. I aligned the telescope without the eyepiece because it was easiest to move it. The final result, note the sunspot on the right. Not perfect aligned and not the best quality, but for the 20$ price tag of the sun filter is ...

A good friend of mine, Stavros Ladikos , makes his first steps on video production. One of the recent videos produced is for the old town of Rhodes. Enjoy: