The Moon, shot with an iPhone using Cortex Cam

Celestron C5 with iPhone 4S for scale

First, you need a telescope. Any one will do, but I use a 5″ Celestron spotter scope. It’s not the best, but it’s what I have and I’m very fond of it. Second, you need an iPhone. Again, mine isn’t the best, it’s a 4S, but it’ll do. Lastly, you need a way of looking through the telescope with the phone’s camera, and that’s where the Magnifi comes in. This is an adapter to allow your phone to latch onto an eyepiece. I got it when they were announced on Kickstarter, and it’s proven very useful.

Magnifi adapter

I use electrical tape wrapped around the end of a 24mm eyepiece to ensure the Magnifi fits properly. There are many eyepieces you could use, but some won’t fill the phone’s camera. In fact, the 24mm I use isn’t perfect, when shooting normally, as it doesn’t use the whole of the camera’s sensor.

24mm Celestron eyepiece with electrical tape

However, when using Cortex Camera, it is ideal and it fills the screen completely. Cortex Camera is an application on the iPhone that uses the HD video mode of the camera to produce a better quality still photo than you’d get normally, similar to the way stackers and webcams manage it, albeit not in a manner designed for astronomy. Again, it’s not ideal, but it’ll do.

Mounted phone

Once you have this set up, it’s really quite easy to take simple photos of the moon, especially if you use the Apple headphones with the mic attachment as a cable release (like a remote trigger for the camera so you don’t wobble everything when pressing the button) and a decent tripod.

Ready to shoot

Of course, what would be ideal would be a telescope with GPS-based tracking, but I’ve not tried one of those out with the phone. Yet.

On a Tripod

One important lesson I learned was to practice when it’s light, so when it gets dark, you’re not fumbling about, trying to fit everything together. There’s a church clock visible from my back window I use to test the setup in daytime.

Church clock

Experiment with different eyepieces and extenders to get the perfect settings with your own local landmark in the daytime and the practice will pay off when you try to take pictures of the moon.

Clock using Cortex Cam

Ed Balls

— Ed Balls (@edballsmp) April 28, 2011

Ok, ok.. Because it would be rude not to..!RT @edballsmp: Ed Balls

— Ed Balls (@edballsmp) April 28, 2013

Add this to /etc/fail2ban/jail.conf

[apache-wp-login]
enabled = true
port    = http,https
action   = iptables[name=WP, port=http, protocol=tcp]
filter  = apache-wp-login
logpath = /var/www/vhosts/*/statistics/logs/access_log
maxretry = 3

The logpath should include every access log on your server, or at least the WordPress ones. Mine is ideal for Plesk installs on Linux.

Add this to /etc/fail2ban/filter.d/apache-wp-login.conf

# Fail2Ban configuration file
[Definition]
failregex = <HOST>.*] "POST /wp-login.php
ignoreregex =

Restart fail2ban and you’re set.

Tablets with keyboards are called Kebablets.

— Jared Earle (@jearle) September 5, 2012

Some of Nokia’s biggest fans are Apple customers who want solid competition in the phone market. Shame they don’t buy Nokia’s, though.

— Jared Earle (@jearle) September 6, 2012

So no, you’ve not missed much.

ps. Blame autocorrect for the possessive apostrophe. Oh we’ll.

This morning, Louise Mensch, MP for Corby and canny social media user, added some of the horrifying sexist abuse that passes for how to treat a woman on the internet to her favourites list so she could share it with the world. This is the sort of thing that should be done to expose the seedy underbelly of sexist, racist and downright hateful idiots that prove the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory daily. There was just one problem; I was on that list.

Now, hopefully, many of you would instantly see that my jibe isn’t one suggesting Louise Mensch get her kit off, but one that conflated her outrage at misogyny with her undying and over-the-top support of Rupert Murdoch, purveyor of The Sun, famed for its topless women paraded on Page 3, and hopefully laid out its utter hypocrisy in one short tweet.

Unfortunately, it didn’t get interpreted that way. I expect this from The Telegraph, as this falls firmly into their narrative, but even The Independent labelled me as one of the worst examples of misogynistic tweets.

As I don’t buy my ink by the barrel, this little blog post will not make anywhere nearly the same sized splash as the original reporting, but that’s the price we willingly pay for a free press. I’m sure Ms Mensch agrees with me on that point, at least. I stand by my stance that supporting Rupert Murdoch while, at the same time, railing against misogyny is hypocritical, but I do regret, if nothing else, the timing of my statement.

Update: @Hannah_Furness of the Telegraph contacted me and updated her article accordingly. Oh, and Darren Saunders said nice things about me, too.

Dave Allsop paints SLA Industries

Yes, very exciting.

Go on, buy a Kindle, make me a quid.

Feel free to ignore this experiment; you probably adblock the junk anyway. At least it’s not like tit-wank.com with NSFW adverts.

Huh, looks like a lot of British TV

Luckily, there are a few places that offer proxy or VPN services to allow you to watch out-of-region TV and I settled on a one-week free trial ($5 canadian dollars a month out of trial) of Unblock US to see if it worked. Unsurprisingly, given the title of this blog post, it did indeed work. Following their instructions for the PS3, I now have access to US Netflix with my UK account. Netflix don’t care where you are, as long as you’re paying them, it would appear. So, now you’re set up, hopefully by using my affiliate link, what more is there to do? Nothing, and if that’s all you want, you can consider this article finished. If, however, you want to tweak stuff, read on …

The way Unblock US works is that it offers its own proxy servers by changing the DNS entries for a few sites to its own IP addresses. If this makes no sense to you, stop reading now. We are about to get a bit technical and if you didn’t understand that, you definitely won’t understand this.

jearle@sausages# dig t.hulu.com | egrep '^[a-z]'
t.hulu.com.		193	IN	CNAME	track.hulu.com.
track.hulu.com.		193	IN	A	208.91.157.68
jearle@sausages# dig @208.122.23.22 t.hulu.com | egrep '^[a-z]'
t.hulu.com.		180	IN	A	184.154.113.147
t.hulu.com.		180	IN	A	50.22.86.53
t.hulu.com.		180	IN	A	68.169.54.229
t.hulu.com.		180	IN	A	173.208.155.19
t.hulu.com.		180	IN	A	173.208.170.19

What that demonstrates is that Hulu’s tracking URL is being proxied to a selection of servers when you use the Unblock US DNS servers. This is also true of the other Hulu IPs, but I chose that one as an example. What if we just want to watch Hulu on the Mac Mini plugged into the TV, but not use the Unblock US DNS servers? Open the Hulu webpage and see all the URLs it loads. Look up the DNS for all of them and add them to the hosts file until the page starts showing TV in the UK. You should end up with something like this:

jearle@sausages# grep hulu /etc/hosts
68.169.54.229	hulu.com
69.89.9.138	t.hulu.com r.hulu.com s.hulu.com

As long as you have an Unblocked US account, you should be able to pick and choose which services you watch on your Mac and leave the DNS server settings on the PS3 for Netflix.

I’m sure there are more tricks you can manage if you run your own DNS server and I may look into some of those later, but in the meantime, that should be enough.

Thanks to Ananyah for suggesting Unblock US to me in the first place. She’s on Twitter, too.