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Getting back to it!

Manuel Marques October 11, 2014 No Comments Uncategorized , , , ,

So yeah, I’m back to Canterbury after a much-needed holiday. Too be absolutely honest, it wasn’t much of a relaxing holiday (with teaching, half-marathons and stuff), but then again it was enough for me to wind down a bit in terms of my lab work (in essence I had a holiday from the lab!).
And now I’m back to “normality” – after more than two years in Canterbury (and over a year and a bit in my current place) I feel I’m already getting slightly rooted to this place, and being in Porto feels foreign, almost as if I’m just visiting from a tourist point of view!

Even though I have just arrived a couple of weeks ago, soon I’ll be off again – I managed to be able to attend a big international conference which is not in Porto (because I’ve done two of those already…). This time I’m off to Tucson, Arizona for Frontiers in Optics/Laser Science 2014, where I’ll be presenting some of the work published earlier in the year (and depending on the outcome of the post-deadline abstract we submitted earlier this week, perhaps even a bit more! But I’m not holding my hopes too high…).

It feels really exciting, as I’ve never been in the States before (actually I’ve never travelled outside Europe!), and this conference in particular seems to have people from virtually all over the world (I’ve been in touch with a few other participating students in order to arrange cheaper accommodation and they do come from basically everywhere, ranging from the United States themselves to the Far East!). And, unlike the two other international conferences I’ve participated so far (EWOFS back in 2010 and RIAO/OPTILAS last year) this time I’m actually giving a talk! Even though I’m quite accustomed to public speaking this is quite a daunting task, especially since there might be some top “celebrities” in our area of research in the room.

So yeah, it will be fun. And after the conference I’ll head to the Grand Canyon for a couple of days – very looking forward for the drive, even though it will be quite a long one (380 miles just from Tucson to Page, by the Glen Canyon Dam). Better get some appropriate soundtrack for it!
And on the meantime I’ve just been busying myself with more lab work (some exciting things and collaborations seem to be happening, with a lot of potential research avenues to explore! Although I will need to start forging a concise path soon, as I only have 1 year of PhD left…), teaching (can you believe that the undergrads are back already?? Soon there will be tonnes of marking as well… 🙁 ) and lots of rowing and running (the weather has been relatively kind to me, even though it got significantly colder over the previous weekend!). And I have to prepare Sao Silvestre – it is already in December and my goal for this year (which seems a bit too overly-ambitious) is to go under 40 minutes… (at least I need have a better time than my 43 minutes and something from last year!)

OK, I’m off! Catch up soon.

And… done!

Manuel Marques September 16, 2014 No Comments Uncategorized , ,

Already completely recovered from this past Sunday, which is surprisingly good! (today I’m already going out for a “light” training session, just to get the blood flowing)

Me
Me and my half-marathon partner Diogo. Here we were about 5k to the finish line!

The race was great, weather-wise it was a bit dodgy at first with some thunderstorms and the skies blackening up but when the time came the weather actually cooperated! Only a little breeze and relatively cool temperatures (esp. when compared to last year, although it did not prevent me from having some fantastic tanlines – see below!). This year I did most of the 21.1k accompanied by one of my rowing buddies (he did push a bit further at the end) which helped keeping the pace constant. We were averaging about 4:27/km during the first half of the course, dropping slightly to 4:28/km in the end which enabled an overall time of 1h35m01s (656th out of about 4400: not bad!) – more than 12′ less than last year!

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I’m very happy with this, although this now means that the stakes are now much higher for next year – I need to go under 1h30m! 🙂

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Here we are, more than ready to do those 21k!

Later on I’ll be having a very well-deserved francesinha with all the people that have trained with me. And this coming weekend we have our annual river descent, so I’m very looking forward to that too. And then… I say goodbye to Portugal, as I’m only back for Xmas (and S Silvestre… 🙂 ). Definitely a good send-off, and I am now fully energised for another term of research and teaching!

This
This year it didn’t turn out defocused but there’s still a finger in front of it! 🙂

Getting there!

Manuel Marques August 13, 2014 No Comments Uncategorized

Actively preparing for the Porto half-marathon which will take place in about a month’s time. My aim this year is to go under 1h40… we’ll see about that 🙂 😛

 

Vauxhall/Opel Corsa B heating control panel lights servicing

Manuel Marques July 6, 2014 6 Comments Uncategorized , , , , ,

When I first got my car I was a bit surprised for not having any illumination of the heating controls, which can be a problem especially in the Winter, when the days are short and you need to use these controls a lot more!

Anyway, there is illumination indeed, the issue here is that the lighting is designed to stay on regardless of whatever setting you may have on your outside lights. Add to it incandescent bulbs and a horrible procedure to extract them from the panel (more on that later) and no wonder most old Corsas lying around have no functioning lights any more – the owners are coping with it the best way they know, either by turning on the courtesy light or simply by memorising the position of the controls.

Not for me, though! 🙂 – I hate knowing something could be working but it isn’t, but at the same time I hate forking out money on seemingly “little” things (and Vauxhall charges £50+ for the “privilege” of sorting these lights for you!). Hence, armed with some LEDs I got from eBay, my Haynes manual and a few more bits and pieces, I set on trying to sort this out.

Firstly, here is the part in question which holds the lights in place. It definitely doesn’t look familiar to anyone owning one of these cars, as it is buried deep into the fascia:

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Or, as it sits in the fascia (I took the previous photo as I was testing the lights hooking the part to a 12 V DC power supply),

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To access this holder all you have to do is follow the instructions from the Haynes manual: pushing the vents down to reveal the screws behind them, which will in turn release the multi-function display on top; and after removing the air recirculation switch and the knobs you can finally get to the lights.

Unfortunately there is something the Haynes manual misses – of these three bulbs only two of them are socketed, given that GM changed the design of this holder in ’97 and with that the central bulb became soldered inside the central switch (the one that controls the fan and the demister). Hence, I had to pry it open in order to get to the bulb,

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thus separating it from the remaining bulbs, which sit on those two arms:

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Given that I had intended to replace these lights with LEDs in order to avoid going through this procedure all over again in a year or two’s time, I had to be careful with the polarity. The pins on the back of the assembly are labelled as far as I remember, one of them having a plus sign, hence you can always test with a DC power supply before you take apart half of the car to replace the lights.

My advice – given that you will necessarily have to pry the fan/demister switch open to replace the light, get a used one off eBay or a scrapyard (they should be cheap…) and work on that one – in this way you can just replace the whole unit and be sure it effectively works correctly.

That’s it, folks! Hope you’ve enjoyed the tutorial, I felt I should do one as I kind of missed one when I attempted to do this myself (there were a few images in an enthusiast forum, but they have since been removed…). Any questions, please do ask!

Jazooli web cam

Manuel Marques July 6, 2014 No Comments Stuff reviewed , , , , ,

After getting my new “old” monitor I am now running my ThinkPad with the lid closed off its docking station, much to the dismay of my grandad who cannot “see” me now. I then went to get the cheapest webcam that I could find which would be Linux-compatible (and stress-free).

The Jazooli had reviews on Amazon with people successfully running it on Ubuntu with apparently no big dramas, plus it was only £1.99 (+£1.99 P&P 🙂 ), so I went for it. It features not just the camera itself, but a built-in microphone (great since the inbuilt mic of my laptop is on the screen bezel and, as mentioned, the lid is closed..) and 6 LEDs whose brightness you can control through a little knob – for those occasions where you are working in semi-darkness and can’t be bothered to turn a light on if someone calls you on Skype!

It arrived relatively quickly (although I feel that things off eBay with free delivery tend to arrive sooner than the ones from Amazon, even the ones specifically fulfilled by them!), and I immediately set it up on top of my monitor (it has a hook in its base which secures the camera in place, quite a clever design, and it can also be used with a laptop screen!). Plugged it and fired up Cheese to test it – perfect, although its claims of 16 MP are grossly exaggerated – this is a VGA (300k-pixels) sensor, and it can only do VGA at 15 fps anyway, which caused some issues with Cheese. Lowering it to 320×240 seemed to do the trick.

I started having trouble when I fired up Skype and started a video call to test it – Skype was pulling the default configuration and assuming the maximum resolution of the camera, which obviously wasn’t going to happen, and as expected the video feed froze and crashed.

After editing the Skype configuration for my Skype name (under ~/Skype/yourskypename/config.xml ) and adding the following tags to the file,

<Video>
 <CaptureHeight>240</CaptureHeight>
 <CaptureWidth>320</CaptureWidth>
 <Device>/dev/video1</Device>
 <Fps>25</Fps>
 </Video>

I fired up Skype again and hoped for the best. Nope, it was still happily pushing the video feed at full resolution and obviously crashing. Moreover, with Google Hangouts I had exactly the same issue, which led me to think that maybe this was something transversal to all of these programs (but Cheese). After doing a bit of research and installing some Video4Linux configuration/testing software, I did what normally solves 99% of the problems I have when running a 64-bit Linux system – symlink libraries, in this case v4l1compat.so, which existed under /usr/lib/libv4l but not under /usr/lib64/libv4l.

And that seemed to do the trick – both Skype and Hangouts now work perfectly with no frozen video. And to top it off, this camera behaves much better than the ThinkPad’s integrated one, both in terms of white balance (I no longer look like I have liver disease, the other camera made me look so yellow!) and low-light performance (the camera would just shut itself off if the light level was below a certain threshold!).

It gave me some trouble in the end, but nothing major (and probably related from running a 64-bit version of Fedora… 😛 ). For 2 quid it is a good buy indeed – obviously not HD, but my family is not complaining… 🙂

Whew!

Manuel Marques June 29, 2014 No Comments Uncategorized , , , , , ,

Again, it has been a while! 🙂 Where to begin?

Well, Porto came and went (too quickly, indeed…) and I returned to the island and to my busy schedule (at times). Funnily enough, as soon as I got back one of my university mates came to visit and we spent a nice weekend roaming around Kent, with the mandatory stop at Whitstable to get some oysters.

May was a bit slow… between work at the lab, a pile of lab reports to mark (yeah, I gave myself a proper holiday in Porto and didn’t even look at them during the whole time I was there – but then the problem came in May when I had to finish them all in a very short span of time! 😛 ), and a very busy time at PARSUK (we had to assess the student applications to the summer placement programme we are sponsoring – and there were a lot of applications!!) I didn’t have a lot of time to do anything else.

My mom and my little sister did came to visit me by the end of the month, which was nice, if it wasn’t for the horrible weather we had and all the miles I had to drive under that rain (unbelievable the spray that forms on the motorway, it came to a point when the water was being projected over the central reservation into the opposite carriageway!!). After showing them the views and going to London for some sightseeing, using a bank holiday weekend for that purpose, I felt happy but also a bit tired (after returning from dropping them at the airport on Tuesday morning I have to confess I didn’t do much in the lab for the remainder of the day!).

June started with a few meetings and workshops. I attended a National Instruments (NI)/Institute of Physics half-day meeting at Kingston University (SW London) with some of the usual suspects from the lab where I gave a little presentation in conjunction with Adrian B about the NI hardware/software we use and how that helps us achieve what we need, research-wise. It was interesting and I chatted with a few interesting people, namely one of the top level execs of NI here in the UK.

At the Summer School, where I got an award for one of the best poster presentations – feeling proud!

A few days later I went to Teddington to attend a Summer School at the National Physical Laboratory, sponsored by SEPNet (the group of the South-East universities with Physics degrees, Kent being one of them). It was interesting and refreshing, even if myself and Yong H were the only ones in there doing Applied Optics, as far as I saw… but they had some very interesting workshops, an innovation challenge that brought up the “soft skills” we are never taught but are definitely important, and Jim Al-Khalili as the keynote speaker! (oh, and there were a few social events as well… the weather was remarkably good for those, and in the end I even managed to cram a few nice runs in the morning, in particular a ~10k one partly following the Thames in the Kingston/Hampton Wick area – absolutely beautiful!).

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All the participants of LUSO 2014 congregated for a group photo after the event. The venue was quite unique as well!
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And here it is, the PARSUK committee for 2013-14, possibly our last group photo of the mandate. It has been quite a ride!…

And in the following week I headed for Bath, to attend the 8th LUSO (2014) – the annual meeting of the Portuguese students and researchers in the UK. Ultimately this would be also the time to pass on my duties as a treasurer for PARSUK, given that our mandate finishes at the AGM, which took place the day after the conference. It was very intense but also good fun, and I feel privileged to have been able to work with such a great bunch of people. Definitely worth the horrible ~4-hour drive there on Friday afternoon through the congested M25, followed by the congested M3, congested Windson and congested A46, all under a scorching sun (“why would I need a car with air conditioning in this country?”, I naively asked myself when I purchased my car. Well, on a day like June 20th it would have come handy… 😛 ).

Cake
Cake skill – acquired!
(actually it is only a yoghurt cake, possibly the easiest cake to bake on Earth, but it was still quite yummy! ) And please do not ask why I am topless, it was really warm that day and the oven being on didn’t help! 😛
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Almost ran this little fellow over with the lawnmower today! Fortunately I managed to stop in time, and it stayed enough time for me to take a few shots…

At last I managed to have a weekend for myself – this weekend included some rowing, some running, and general tidying up of my house, my car, the garden (managed to mow all the lawn, trim the hedges and tidy up before the rain started!! Big WIN!! 😀 ).

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A selfie at the boathouse! Nice boat, this one…

With regards to running: Richard, one of my rowing mates told me about this fantastic nature reserve in Blean – Blean (duh) Nature Reserve – just a stone’s throw from campus and featuring a fantastic 7-8 mile loop through forest paths and rolling countryside, hard to believe that we are less than 5 miles away from Canterbury city centre! Given that I have just presented myself with a shiny new Garmin Forerunner 310XT (which should arrive this week – eagerly awaiting, and a review will follow!) I will probably use it to log a few of these trails, which are not very well documented, which is a shame!

OK, I think I’ll end here. It is late and I need to catch some sleep, I am dead tired today 🙂 Hopefully will update soon!

Now I can most definitely work!

Manuel Marques June 28, 2014 No Comments Uncategorized ,

Now I can most definitely work!Via Flickr:

Got this lovely desk a few months ago on eBay for £25 (had to drive to Sittingbourne to get it but it was worth it – it is absolutely immaculate!). Speakers (good ones!), Microsoft keyboard+mouse set all from Freecycle.

My trusty ThinkPad sitting in its bigger dock (the smaller one – the Advanced Mini – is in my desk at work), and the newest addition, this lovely 20” ViewSonic which is obviously not new, but serves its purpose admirably, especially taking into consideration how little it cost (£35 with free P&P).

I can now work, and indeed I have already done so 🙂

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