I acquired this Paul Waechter microscope a while back. It was in quite a rough shape, most of the brass plated parts had the brass rust off or corroded.
I decided to only fix the severely broken parts and keep as much of it original, as possible. I’m generally not a fan of making old things look new and shiny again, old things have the right to look old and used.
Microscopy Insights #4: Lamprohiza Splendidula
I found this firefly Kleiner Leuchtkäfer Lamprohiza Splendidula on my balcony caught in a spider web.
I released it afterwards.
Naturwildpark Freisen
All pictures taken with my Sony SLT-a77 with a Minolta AF 28-100mm F3.5-F5.6, Minolta AF 50mm F1.7 and Tamron SP AF 70-300 F/4-5.6 Di VC USD.
Storks Deers Arctic Foxes Foxes Raccoons Raccoon Dogs European fallow deer Mouflons Geese Falconry Old Agricultural Machines Lanz LK20
Saarschleife
All pictures taken with my Sony SLT-a77 with a Sony DT 18-55mm F3.5-5.6 SAM objective.
Cleaning a Thales MEZ
So I got this Thales MEZ a while back which was in a super bad shape:
In particular after a general outside clean I redid the paint on the front-panel, as the majority was rusted off:
However, I did not clean it on the inside at the time and just put it into my shelf to sit there. Now I decided to finish what I started and repair the rest of it. The first thing being cleaning it from the inside, which I didn’t do so far.
Landsweiler Reden
All pictures taken with my Sony SLT-a77 with a Minolta AF 28-100mm F3.5-F5.6, Minolta AF 50mm F1.7 and Tamron SP AF 70-300 F/4-5.6 Di VC USD.
View from Eschberg
All pictures taken with my Sony SLT-a77 with a Minolta AF 28-100mm F3.5-F5.6 and Tamron SP AF 70-300 F/4-5.6 Di VC USD.
Zoo Neunkirchen
All pictures taken with my Sony SLT-a77 with a Tamron SP AF 70-300 F/4-5.6 Di VC USD telephoto lens.
Elephants Snow Leopards Dholes Peafowls Vietnamese Sika Deer & Blackbucks Miscellaneous Bald Eagle Showing the Nictitating membrane. Falconry Other birds from the falconry.
Fixing the RRD IO Hell
So I’m using collectd to monitor my systems. For a couple of machines it was fine, but as soon as it got more collectd caused a constant load on my disks due to all the RRD files that need to be written.
In order to reduce this I decided to use rrdcached, which comes with the default RRD install on FreeBSD. It can be configured for collectd on FreeBSD as follows:
<Plugin rrdcached> DaemonAddress "unix:/var/run/rrdcached.sock" DataDir "/var/db/collectd/" CreateFiles true CreateFilesAsync false CollectStatistics true </Plugin> Restarting collectd the results became immediately noticeable:
Website Improvements
I did the monthly configuration revision on my systems and decided to do some changes to my web server and this website.
Don’t load JavaScript when not needed (Hugo) Originally I had KaTeX included on every page on here, but decided to limit it only to pages where I actually need LaTeX support. The majority of pages on here does not use LaTeX after all.
I did this by adjusting the Hugo template to only include it when the page parameter needLaTeX is set.