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I'm a novelist and have an interest in space science and physics. I've been a programmer for more than 40 years and I like reviewing new and up-and-coming authors.
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Pi-Mars v1.1
Pi-Mars is a clock for the Raspberry Pi, that tells the time anywhere on Mars. It has options to nominate ad-hoc locations, pre-selected locations and sites of the various missions that made it to the Martian surface. It is skinnable and highly configurable.
Having written several clocks that tell the time at various locations on Mars for my Mars Weather page, I immediately knew I wanted to make a physical clock - something that could sit on my desk or such like, and tell the time on Mars.
Pi-Mars Installation
You require an RPIv2 or later (to use the SmartiPi Touch 2 case, you require an RPI4). It will not run on an RPI1 or an RPI-Zero. This installation and configuration guide assumes you have installed an operating system on your Pi and can login either directly (with a keyboard/monitor attached to the Pi) or indirectly through SSH or VNC across a network.
Note the operating system you install must have a Desktop, and the PI must be configured to boot into it. If you choose an operating system other than Raspberry Pi OS, you may have to adjust some of the instructions which refer to the LXDE Desktop manager configuration.
Weather Page Update
Mon Aug 10, 2020
I've made some updates to the Mars Weather page.
- Bugfix to Wind direction chart to correctly show most common wind direction and sample count
- Smoothed the max/min data lines in the Temperature over Time chart so anomolies don't distort the location of the lines
- Added new comments about NASA adjustments to the data so this is more clear
- Improved the description of the data smoothing technique
- Added °C and °F table for max, min, average temp in highest, lowest, range and current values (after smoothing)
Site Statistics
For the last year I've been using a plugin for my site that generates a statistics page, through which I can keep an eye on how well the site is doing. A couple of days ago, it stopped working. After a bit of analysis I discovered the data structures it was creating in memory had consumed too much of said memory and my hosting service had auto-assassinated it.
I decided to process the logs myself, by first downloading the logs, then uploading a page with the stats in it. What I found was surprising.
Hogfather Update 2
The Website will be down for a short period Sun, Aug 2nd 2020 while the site is upgraded
I shall be taking the site down for a while on Sun, Aug 2nd 2020, while i perform the upgrade. Although I have a local copy of the website, I also do a bit of experimentation on it, so the two are not perfectly synchronised, so I'll have to make a backup of the site and download it first. It'll actually take longer to do that than perform the update. It should all be over in less than twenty minutes, then it's back to business as usual. Thank you for your patience.
The website has now been updated to “Hogfather”