LAKESIDE ROOPHLOCH

Naturally I had it in mind to try a ROOPHLOCH post during one of the 
dam visits that I've been doing lately, and I did sort-of do one 
early, but the opportunity didn't really present itself within the 
time frame. So I decided to detour on the return from my routine 
weekly shopping/posting trip into town to check out the nearest 
lake. I mentioned my last visit here in a previous post, and I was 
curious whether the level would have risen given the recent rain. 
No, it turns out it's still below both the water markers and the 
overgrown boat ramp still looks like some sort of joke, basically 
sitting in a typical-looking paddock.

This probably isn't the sort of place that I'd find in my normal 
tours - the access isn't really obvious on the map. There is 
another access point from a paved road, but there's not much in the 
way of parking there (well there isn't here either, but nobody's 
likely to go down the lane anyway).

I've been overdosing on computer stuff lately, so that I'm now at 
the point where I alternate between enthusiasm and repulsion from 
them, nevertheless completely obsessed with solving whatever 
problem has fixated me. In one case it's got to the point where I'm 
considering whether there might be a hardware fault. Other 
endeavours have been more successful though, in particular I 
finally got my Internet Client system set up to be easily usable 
running on a laptop instead of its 'headless' Atomic Pi SBC, for 
when I want to access my internet-related software away from home.

Mainly this just meant setting up the window manager (mostly a 
copy-and-paste job from another system, as usual). Today I also 
took on the task of getting my mobile broadband modem working on it 
though - which was always a bit dodgy in Devuan, let alone the 
obscure Linux distro that I'm using for this. Anyway I think it's 
working, but this will be the test of that. Assuming there's 
reception here anyway I suppose - I'm within sight of a tower but 
it's a long way away.

There's a seagull standing in front of me trying to figure out what 
on Earth I'm doing right now. I wouldn't be surprised if a human 
gave me a similar look, were they here. Mind you it could be worse 
- I didn't bring my infra-red glasses. I found the guide for making 
them while researching EMP generators for my EMP Engine idea. You 
can buy a particular colour of filter 'gel' for stage lights and 
layer it up in front of some clear glasses. It's a Blue filter, but 
for mysterious reasons it actually lets through much more IR light 
than Blue. If you block out all other light getting to your eyes, 
your pupils dilate and effectively amplify the little detection of 
near-IR light that gets through. The result is that you get to see 
a little into the IR range of daylight that's normally invisible. 
The best things to look at are plants - they reflect a lot of IR 
and glow different shades of Red, without much relation at all to 
the colour you see them normally. In contrast with the Blue it 
really puts the world in a post-appocalyptic perspective. You just 
can't resist touching the plants as well for some reason, so you 
definately end up looking like a nut case - walking around in 
blacked-out wrap-around safety glasses (even with 
slightly-steampunk round lenses in my case), touching up all the 
plant life that you enounter, while bumping into lots of other 
things that you can barely see.

I've also got interested in coil guns lately. I think I've worked 
out a design for a recoilless coil gun. Not entirely for the sake 
of one of my vaguely ironic titles for things, but, well, yeah 
mainly that. I probably won't get to that for a while though. 
Actually I haven't been doing so much electronics stuff lately. 
Mainly just waiting for a lightning storm so that I can _finally_ 
see whether my cloud charge detector works. I have picked up on a 
big project though, which I'll document elsewhere so I won't 
describe it. It's actually on a self-sufficiency bent, but very 
much "my way" as opposed to usual methods. Potential for explosions 
is actually pretty high, but it's safer than my deep inner ambition 
for building a nuclear reactor at least.

OK, enough rambling. It's been a nice day today but I'm feeling the 
wind now, and getting hungry as well. Better send this off. I 
didn't really talk about the lake much. Well actually it's pretty 
featureless - the only really nice feature from a photography POV 
is this one fence. I actually took my digital camera along, so I'll 
try uploading some pics either now or later. Probably later, I need 
to get my shopping home and into the fridge as well.

 - The Free Thinker.

Back home (before bed actually):

I put some of the photos that I took over here:
gopher://aussies.space/1/~freet/photos/lakeside/

Here's the website with the IR goggles design:
http://amasci.com/amateur/irgoggl.html