Hippopotamus
Solo Stars at Kaʻohe
Solid Rock is Not Forever
Living with active volcanoes, one gets to see new landforms appear regularly. The landscape can get rearranged with little notice, with places I once visited buried under new rock. In my time living on Hawai’i, I have seen roads, bays and tide pools, and entire neighborhoods disappear under new lava. Watching new land created by these flows of liquid rock is mesmerising.
The opposite is also true around here, sometimes prominent landforms are erased by the actions of flowing water, or the incredible power of wind and wave.
Thus we bid farewell to the Hōlei Sea Arch, cast into the sea by the heavy surf generated by Hurricane Nolo.
The arch was one of the features of Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park found along Chain of Craters Road. Featured on park maps and served by a viewpoint and interpretive signs, thousands of tourists have stood atop the cliff to admire what waves had sculpted from the jagged black sea cliffs.
Those same waves have erased what they carved. Sometime around September 27th, the arch fell into the sea. Apparently, no one witnessed its fall, there are no Facebook posts or YouTube videos of falling rock. All we have are before and after photographs. This is understandable as the park was closed during the hurricane.
I last visited the arch over a year ago, travelling the park with my parents. It had been noticeably eroded by the waves, appearing much thinner around the base than on previous visits. It was only a matter of time.
Watching Episode 45
Neptune at Opposition
Today the planet Neptune will pass through opposition, directly opposite the Sun in our sky. The planet will be well placed for observation all night long, rising at sunset, transiting at midnight, and setting at sunrise. If you are looking to observe Neptune, it is currently shining at magnitude 7.8 in southern Pisces.
As the outer planets Uranus and Neptune move so slowly across the sky, the timing of oppositions is driven by the Earth’s orbit and occur each year at nearly the same time. Neptune’s orbital period is 164.8 years, taking over a century and a half to circle the celestial globe once. As Neptune was discovered in 1846, it has completed a little over one orbit since discovery.
Episode 45
Throw me Away
Cleaning out an entire business operation has led to a few discoveries.
Hidden caches of tools, bottles of unknown substances, pieces of strange equipment that even I struggle to identify, and so much trash… All of the stuff a couple dozen employees leave behind in five years of a busy algae-growing operation.
This included a stack of five laptop computers, two Macs and three pc’s. So one evening I handed off the Macs to my wife to check while I diagnosed the pc’s.
One Mac is toast, a cracked screen and damaged case, clearly dropped at some point. Checking the model and vintage, we find it is not worth the effort to fix… One for the bin. The second Mac is questionable, with a flaky charge port and dodgy WiFi.
The pc’s? One, a very low-end HP model seems fine.
The second machine, a more promising-looking Lenovo IdeaPad that is only a couple of years old. Opening the machine, stuck beside the trackpad, I find a bright yellow sticky note with large, friendly letters written in Sharpie… “Throw me Away”.
Hmmm… Maybe not.
Well? The machine boots easily enough, screen, keyboard, and trackpad are working just fine. I am presented with the login screen for an employee who left the company over a year ago. I cannot go further, Windows and the drive are locked down pretty hard.
This is not a real concern, I really do not want another Windows machine. I downloaded the latest version of Ubuntu and set up a USB drive. The machine boots just fine into Linux off the thumb drive. It took some command-line futzing and a fair amount of AI assistance to find the right Linux commands to wipe the hard drive. I cleared the encrypted Windows partitions and configured an Ubuntu install.
After waiting for Ubuntu to install, I found I have an operational laptop that seems to be in pretty good shape. I wonder… why the doomed sticky note? Was it the lockdown and encrypted drive that stopped anyone from re-using the machine?
Well? I need a reliable work machine, and Windows has become increasingly unacceptable over the years, time to get serious about Linux. I peel off the yellow sticky note and follow the instructions… I throw it away.
Photographing the Eruption
Poinciana Blooms
Hurricane Season
It is a wee bit active out there…
Three major hurricanes are wandering the eastern Pacific right now, two uncomfortably close to the islands.
Last month’s hit from Hurricane Lala did significant damage to the southern parts of the island, dropping up to 40 inches of rain, flooding Waiʻōhinu and Nāʻālehu, destroying homes and businesses. At our house, we spent a day without power and lost one of our mature plumeria.
It was only a couple of weeks, and we are facing another round…
Hurricane Lowell has passed us here on the Big Island, but is forecast to take an abrupt turn to the north, threatening Kauaʻi and Niʻihau. Hurricane Karina is forecast to swing north of us, but close enough that we may experience some impact.
With a record-breaking El Niño warming the water of the central Pacific, it is more than likely we will see even more storms beyond these. To live in interesting times…