Technical Reports and Papers from my work. Message boards: Muon1 Project Forum Software here General/Rubbish Discuss things. Miscellaneous: Black hole images Obtained by tracing photons through warped spacetime, done during my final degree year at Oxford. |
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Browser Wars 4-in-a-row tournament by web browser Colunms Columnar challenge... Tubetris Tubular Tetris. NCGi website A half-written Asteroids game? | ||||||
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2026-Oct-01 00:28:18 On Venus, wouldn't a helium balloon generate a lot more lift because of the higher density of the atmosphere? |
2026-Sep-30 23:10:03 It's #Mars year 39. #space #astronomy
https://x.com/NASAMars/status/2105431612905369814 |
2026-Sep-30 20:23:48 Historical water storage structures are being brought back into use in India.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260820-india-is-turning-to-ancient-water-systems-as-modern-ones-run-dry |
2026-Sep-30 00:40:02 There were four big deer in my garden when I came home, one even in the front garden almost getting in the way of the door. |
2026-Sep-28 23:31:19 #Starship deploying Starlink satellites on its latest mission. [video] #SpaceX
https://x.com/Starlink/status/2104603601943339071 Also there's a whole new episode about the making of Starship: https://www.spacex.com/content/starship/holy-grail-of-rocketry |
2026-Sep-28 18:16:58 Just powered on the 397nm and 866nm tunable diode #lasers for Doppler cooling. Next, a wavemeter will be added as a feedback loop to try and stabilise the frequencies. Eventually they will be fired through the ion trap to cool Ca+ ions to milli-Kelvin temperatures. #physics #accelerators
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2026-Sep-27 19:06:53 I guess it is really greenish.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenish_warbler |
2026-Sep-27 17:30:57 Despite worrying noises last night, the nor'easter mostly took down a lot of leaves and twigs here, no damage. I went out just now to collect the medium-sized branches and make it look less like a disaster area. 🪵 #weather
Main thing was I cut away some vines that fell down from a tree and were getting in the way. |
2026-Sep-27 00:27:29 "A 100 foot-wide (30 meter), 28-million-pound (12.8-million-kilogram) boulder, was found to have moved 460 feet (140 meters) on #comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in the lead up to perihelion in August 2015," #space
https://images.nasa.gov/details/PIA21565 |
2026-Sep-26 23:09:15 This is where #Starship Ship 40 currently is at sea. #SpaceX
https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/details/ships/shipid:255286/mmsi:249364000/imo:9592848/vessel:FORTE |
2026-Sep-24 17:17:44 This ShaderToy shows the stable region of a nonlinear periodic system (analogous to some accelerators). Like the Mandelbrot set, black indicates stability and colours show how long unstable particles take to escape. By dragging the mouse horizontally you can change the "phase advance" before each nonlinear kick and observe patterns of 6,5,4,3 "islands" appearing when this advance is near 1/6, 1/5, 1/4, 1/3. #physics #accelerators #dynamics
https://www.shadertoy.com/view/7XVGDz
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2026-Sep-20 19:29:10 Boring Company 200mph tunnel loop planned.
RT https://x.com/boringcompany/status/2101743162838647183 |
2026-Sep-20 18:21:41 OK! Redid my Surface Laptop with a 6GB swap partition and hibernate works now. Also disabled secure boot and the startup is funny now:
Microsoft logo -> big red opened padlock -> GRUB bootloader -> Debian |
2026-Sep-20 05:45:10 The Windows Surface Laptop (yes, the one Microsoft made) will not upgrade from Win10 to 11 because they didn't put enough SSD in it (64GB). Google tells me Debian 13 will happily go on there and there's even a kernel package to get the Surface touchscreen etc. working again.
[Later] Well, Debian 13 is on the Windows Surface Laptop and even the touchscreen works. But it seems I need to redo it with a swap partition larger than my RAM if I want to hibernate. My duck's-head-shaped USB install media died though. :( Another 15 year old USB stick I had lying around worked though. I need to buy more, I thought I had loads of these. |
2026-Sep-19 22:15:02 Put thread locker (red) on my lawnmower's wonky wheel nut 3 hours ago. I'm pleased to announce my lawnmower wheel is constrained in 5 degrees of freedom (that's 6 DOF minus the one it needs to rotate). |
2026-Sep-19 19:53:41 New lunar crater 200m across. #space #moon #astronomy
https://www.skyatnightmagazine.com/news/mcgetchin-crater-moon-lro-discovery |
2026-Sep-18 19:19:01 Lasers moved. My office is tidier now. |
2026-Sep-18 02:04:05 First new #cat species discovered in 100 years.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/meet-the-first-new-cat-species-discovered-in-100-years |
2026-Sep-17 20:45:22 "My boarding pass will be the first thing in downloads, right?"
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2026-Sep-17 19:43:23 Went on a tour of the RF facility at Jefferson Lab and noticed this drift tube structure at 1497MHz. The drift tube bore is smaller than a finger, unlike the larger 201MHz DTL tanks I've seen. #accelerators #physics #RF
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2026-Sep-17 04:06:17 Found a little frog on a bollard.
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2026-Sep-13 21:31:14 In any case I got my Apache+SSL+certbot+Let's Encrypt+PHP or whatever stack running on my home computer. |
2026-Sep-13 21:27:30 Well nothing's perfect, this one lacks an ability to re-order virtual desktops. And it consistently lacks it in all three places you'd expect to find it! Apparently this is coming soon in Debian 14. |
2026-Sep-13 20:32:59 Alright so I want Kate to open files as new tabs, but I have several windows open with different sets of tabs and it always chooses the one that's on a different screen on a different desktop and forcibly switches to it. I wish it had a setting to open a tab in the "nearest" window by some measure. #KDE |
2026-Sep-13 19:59:28 Having used the crappy Windows 11 virtual desktops at work, I've activated them on KDE Plasma now and ooh this is good. Worth learning the basic keyboard shortcuts for moving windows and switching desktops. #Linux |
2026-Sep-13 19:35:12 Now it's getting brighter and I heard a cockerel crowing! |
2026-Sep-13 16:35:02 Such a big raincloud it feels like it's night time here - very gloomy. |
2026-Sep-13 00:32:39 Low tide was in the evening this time. |
2026-Sep-12 21:01:48 Don't know why but the grass growth has decelerated so I don't need to mow the lawn this weekend. |
2026-Sep-12 21:01:40 #Drone going inside a gasometer. [video]
RT https://x.com/AtomsNotBits/status/2098875923391267151 |
2026-Sep-11 22:53:56 Some octupoles. #physics #accelerators #magnets [photos]
RT https://x.com/muota_here/status/2098296639614243321 |
2026-Sep-10 19:17:55 Had to summarise all our research in only one poster, so I split it in two, makes for a busy poster. #physics #accelerators
https://stephenbrooks.org/ap/report/2026-11/Brooks_LDRD2026_poster.pdf |
2026-Sep-07 17:53:40 Fly-by photos of one of Earth's quasi-Moons, but it's rather small (20m). #space #astronomy #asteroid
https://www.skyatnightmagazine.com/news/asteroid-2016-ho3-kamooalewa-tianwen-2?utm_source=flipboard&utm_medium=activitypub |
2026-Sep-07 01:41:18 Apparently I can use KWin rules to force a fullscreen #OpenGL program to act as a desktop background. Might be interesting to try. |
2026-Sep-06 20:13:05 https://www.theregister.com/public-sector/2026/09/06/us-troops-can-still-be-tracked-by-purchased-location-data-and-congress-wants-to-know-why/5294652 |
2026-Sep-05 22:43:48 And now this game works on #Linux too:
https://stephenbrooks.org/games/tubetris/ |
2026-Sep-05 21:53:11 Four more of my old website programs ported to #Linux:
https://stephenbrooks.org/archive/condensation https://stephenbrooks.org/archive/lights https://stephenbrooks.org/archive/galaxies https://stephenbrooks.org/archive/glowsurface |
2026-Sep-05 20:48:25 Isar Aerospace gets to orbit! First orbital launch from continental Europe. [video]
RT https://x.com/AtomsNotBits/status/2096335505298444377 |
2026-Sep-03 19:36:07 Apparently this subtly-different thing is ALSO a solution of Maxwell's equations. And it doesn't have the dEz/dx bit integrating to zero along z. 🤷 A bit puzzled if this breaks any practical rule. |
2026-Sep-03 14:44:50 Here's another #RF mode: a skew (vertical) TM mode in a smaller "cavity". Really I just reduced the length of the field region relative the length of the soft edge or fringe regions.
The idea was to get an Ez field that varies linearly in the transverse (x) direction. This field does this, but if a particle passes through along z, in the low frequency limit, the Ez contribution integrates to zero. So in reality the deflections of particles have to be evaluated taking that integral, which pushes me to higher frequencies relative to the transit time of the particle. #accelerators #physics |
2026-Sep-02 22:43:17 An organisation is not a person. A person's actions have motivation behind them, but an organisation can emphatically do two contradictory things at once. |
2026-Sep-02 22:42:24 Sometimes in life it's good to give yourself an arbitrary challenge. In fact, that's all life is come to think of it. |
2026-Sep-02 00:41:02 Floating island.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgk5jk6nkxzo |
2026-Sep-01 22:17:27 https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj9lxkyydk8o |
2026-Sep-01 20:18:55 Here's the calculation for the #RF field model derived from behaviour near the axis. The RF multipole case got quite complicated, maybe there's a simpler way but I wanted to see if this method, which I'd used for magnetostatics (magnet field models), could be generalised.
https://stephenbrooks.org/ap/report/2026-9/rffield.pdf #physics #electromagnetism #accelerators |
2026-Sep-01 16:06:08 The electric (blue) and magnetic (orange) fields in an analytic model of an #RF dipole deflector. I wanted a series solution that I could use in particle tracking calculations, taking a function f(z) that's the intensity of the field on-axis and then working out the rest using Maxwell's equations and the desired frequency and symmetry. It took a while to derive and debug but it does appear to satisfy Maxwell's time-dependent equations now! #physics #accelerators |
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