I hadn't been able to go in a few years, glad to be back and find other electronics, batteries and other stuff I might or might not need, but looked enticing :) (I ended up finding a bunch of lithium battery packs for a good price, that will work for my burning man bike, and maybe LED outfit as a backup source of power, I may even be able to use them to power my laptop)
The Texas Eclipse Festival did not end as planned, organizers cancelled
the event for weather risk reasons, although in the end the weather was
so much better than forecast (forecast said we'd never see the sun at
all and it would rain).
When I heard about the cancellation on a thread fo bar one of my 2 cell
phones,while barely awake, I managed to tear up camp and start driving
out in just 15mn and got out of the festival in just over 45mn, before
traffic got really bad. I then realized I had just enough time to drive
my friend Marc Antoine's ranch 50mn away, and the fact that 2 lane roads
in TX have 70mph speed limits, sure helped. I got to his place 30mn
before totality.
It did not rain, and the sun came out just at the right time for the
eclipse and went hiding in the clouds soon after. Timing was perfect.
And I happened to capture some solar flares and mercury with my not so
great handheld camera, so I'm happy :)
When I got out of the festival, partial eclipse hadn't started yet, but the sun was barely visible
Marc sent me the GPS location of his ranch, and GPS said I could barely make it and thankfully the roads were near empty
I pulled over a few times when the sun was visible for barely a minute
Most of the time, it was fully overcast, as per the forecast
but the sun came back out a few times
And in barely 50mn I made it to Marc's ranch and got to meet his family. We had just seen one another 2 weeks prior at beyond wonderland
all ready
fun thing is you can see a partial eclipse without glasses
getting there, so close
and yes!
even a decent shot frmo my cell
it got dark :)
I caught some sun flares on this one
on lower right, I think I you can see mercury. Einstein used it the lensing effect of gravity in his theory of general relativity
my best lucky shot!
and way too soon, it was over already :)
and the sun soon went to hide under clouds again, perfect timing!
The eclipse festival didn't end well, but the eclipse itself went way beyond expectations!
Video:
I wasn't quite ready for it, as I didn't know it would be visible in California, but turns out it was for the short amounts of time clouds didn't hide the sun.
Here are a few shots:
Lithium Batteries have a voltage between 3V and 4.1V, but recently they have been turned into the 1.5V form factor with some electronics that step them down to 1.5V and custom chargers that know how to recharge them via a special protocol, or for the EBL batteries, they have a micro USB plug onboard.
They are of course not all the same real usable capacity, and I've learned not to trust vendor capacity claims anymore either, due to the amount of sellers that plain lie on amazon. The good news is that Neither Xtar nor EBL lied about their cell capacity as long as you understand that the actual energy you can output will be lower due to conversion losses and some safety buffer to give the cell longer longevity.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1z9o7O5o70SxJnQwKHJD8JdlPdScZZ1o09scHqUlDxeE/edit?usp=sharing
Here is a quick summary without pictures:
New Xtar: Rating: 4.15Wh, Charge: 5.5Wh, 3.45Wh Usable discharge at 1A
This is the only lithium battery that drops its voltage to 1.1V to give you a low voltage warning. Other batteries I tested just die with no warning. That alone is a reason to select it. I tested it with my garmin GPS and it gave me 2H of low battery warning before finally dying. Very nice!
It is also the battery that gave me the most actual discharge capacity
Seller is not lying about cell capacity (thank you) which of course is higher than actual usable energy due to conversion losses
New charger is unfortunately bigger than the old one and drops the USB-A output feature to use your batteries as an emergency USB charger
Verdict: this is the best battery I tested and what you should buy as long as you don't need a built in charger like EBL
Old Xtar: Rating: 3.3Wh, Charge: 5.3Wh, 2.7Wh Usable discharge at 1A
This is the older Xtar battery. It had best in class capacity until the newer one that came out with added low voltage warning. There is no good reason to buy this battery anymore, get the new one.
Its capacity is equivalent ot the EBL battery with built in USB charging, so the EBL is more versatile
The charger is very compact and can act as a USB power source, that's a nice feature.
10.6Wh to charge 2 batteries, or 5.3Wh charge per battery
EBL 3.3Wh rating, Charge: 4.3Wh, 2.7Wh usable discharge at 1A
There is no low voltage warning, but the battery capacity is actually equivalent to the old Xtar despite the space lost to the built in charger. The new Xtars last longer than the EBL though.
Interestingly EBLs need less energy to charge than Xtar for the same output capacity, they are more efficient
Big warning: if you try to charge the batteries via USB while they are in use, they are going to output 5V instead of 1.5V. This is unexpected and fried one of my GPSes. You cannot charge them while they are being used.
Deleepow 3.4Wh rating, 3.8Wh charge, 2.4Wh usable discharge at 1A
Amazon, you suck, I'm sorry, you just suck.
If I buy an Ebook to do trip planning I want to cut and paste from it into a doc, just small bits, you know, because retyping is kind of stupid. No, I'm not trying to pirate copy the book, simply to use a few bits for my personal use, the trip I'm planning. https://github.com/ccimpoi/ACRExtensions made it clear that all the extensions that went around the copy and paste restriction, won't work anyomre, I quote "I checked the new reader and they totally moved everything server side. Client gets only images and highlight is done using empty DIVs with server side provided coordinates. Looks like the end of the road... :-("
So sure, you can still screenshot each page and OCR them, something pirates will do, so that doesn't stop them, but for legit personal use, it's just too much work.
I guess I'm now going to get my kindle book refunded, because fuck this, and avoid them in the future.
