OffSetLab

More often than not I find myself preoccupied with environmental and social concerns. I am not an activist but I acknowledge the fact that we do not live in a vacuum made out of our own self-interest.

We live in a constant state of negotiation with our environment and the influence it exerts over our lives. How we handle that negotiation influences our well-being in the short and long run.

Now, the setting in which I grew up in did little to foster awareness of such concerns - occasionally being warned not to litter was pretty much the extent of it. After all, my parents were born in the fifties and those were very different times.

In the past century, however, we have faced radical changes and taking care of the environment must be an integral part of our everyday lives if we want our civilization to exist tomorrow. We are in the middle of the sixth great extinction and global biodiversity outlook from 2010 states that not one of the countries has fully met any of the goals to preserve biodiversity. The Earth has lost half of its wildlife in the past 40 years, and still we're destroying it.

Disregard for the environment is not a fixed trait of human behaviour. We are not immutable. We learn and adopt new habits all the time and taking steps to take care of the environment does not require a complete lifestyle reshuffle to fit this singular pursuit.

We need to shake off the present bias and take some responsibility for our actions. To paraphrase Chris Hadfield: as a civilization we can do a lot of damage, and it can be seen, but we can also do a lot of good. Even though we should have done it before, the least we can do is start now.

It seems impossible that an individual can make a meaningful contribution, but large-scale change is often enough an emergent property of a society. I'm doing my part as best as I can.

For instance, I'm reducing my carbon footprint. The Keeling curve explains that the amount of carbon in the atmosphere has been rising steadily contributing to the greenhouse effect.

I don't have a driver's license. At first it was simply because I never had the money, but seeing how it hasn't posed such a significant inconvenience I have since decided to not become a driver. There are a lot of combustible fuel cars as is and there are alternatives around the corner like the battery powered Tesla cars and Google's foray into driverless cars. That said, owning a car is very expensive.

When I lived further away from work, I used to cycle. A number of cities have introduced bike renting services, which has increased the affordability and availability of this type of transport.

If available, public transportation is a good alternative as well, one which would be even more effective if the number of personal vehicles was lower.

Fortunately for me, today I can afford the simplest workaround of living close to work - it saves me time, keeps me in shape and it even saves me money in the long run.

While I know most of these things concern only the developed world, it's still better than nothing. Since the topic is extensive, I'll continue in the next post. In the meantime, if you have any questions, feel free to contact us via the channels in the footer.

One of the first projects being showcased here is the Solar Projector web. Vesna did the client-side for it. Currently it's a combination of Bootstrap, jQuery and D3 for graphs.

The data it uses comes from the NASA satellite launched in 1997 called the Advanced Composition Explorer. It has several sensors for monitoring the Earth-Sun interaction. We have since implemented only the display for the two of its sensors. The SWEPAM and the MAG.

The SWEPAM stands for Solar Wind Electron, Proton and Alpha Monitor. The SWEPAM part on the Solar Projector web displays the solar wind velocity. Normal values are around 300-400 m/s. Then there's the proton density and the ion temperature. It can be used to predict the incoming solar storms.

The MAG is a pair of twin, boom-mounted, triaxial fluxgate magnetometers (talk about a mouthful). It monitors the Earth-Sun relationship considering the magnetic field of the Earth. The most important data here are the magnetic field intensity (bt) displayed as the result of the magnetic xyz vector data. Values are in the nT unit.

The data is sent to the NOAA, and then published on the internet. We're parsing that data at certain intervals and offloading the whole thing on our server to play with the dataset.

The Solar Projector was actually made before the new OffSetLab and while the OSL still has some quirks I need to iron out, there are plans for Solar Projector as well. It would be really nice to implement other ACE sensors and change some graphs, along with some interface bits because it was a (re)starting point for us anyway. We'll update the information on it here when the update happens so stay put.

Another satellite launched this year is the DSCOVR (former Triana). The name stands for the Deep Space Climate Observatory. In September this year they plan to have a dedicated web for the data coming from the DSCOVR. We'll see what can be done about getting that data as well and possibly do some correllations with the ACE data. This will be a nice year for observing the environmental conditions from space. Unfortunately, just observing them cannot stop the climate change. It's way past time we do something about that, too.

After several years in Revolucija (a cool name, really wonderful people), I decided it was high time to challenge myself further. I can't say I saw it coming or worked towards in any deliberate way, but it was certainly a life changing event. So here goes...

I moved from Croatia to Ireland, 2000 km north by north-west, not so much as part of the emigrant workforce wave abandoning the leaky ship that Croatia is, but simply as a guy in IT getting the opportunity to live abroad a bit and work in a different environment - I started working in Ammeon, a big company that has very different dynamics compared to where I worked before.

Deciding to move on was difficult. I am not a person to lightly give up my daily routine, friends, colleagues, family. In essence, a lot of the things that meant something to me. Aside from the country differences in language, culture and people, there would be no more hanging out with friends every day.

Six months later, my probation period now passed, I'm working as a full-time employee. The weather has not been nearly as abysmal as advertised, the people and the overall mentality are great, as well as the food (which deserves a topic of its own). However, I do get a feeling I'm living like something of a recluse, just popping in on Skype to peak into the lives of friends and family back home.

This website has not been updated for a very long time and, all things considered, what better time to amend that than now. I do hope it will have a better second run. I moved it from shared hosting to a VPS because I wanted more freedom to experiment and now I'm using it as a platform for various side projects that can be showcased here. They are nothing special, but they are fun to develop.

I don't have anyone to design things, but with the new CSS libraries, something decent-looking can be produced. The client-side part has been taken over by Vesna (so I am not really typing away into the small hours of the night all by my lonesome) and she's doing all the code in that area, although I venture in there from time to time to keep myself in shape.

My drawing and painting has been hobbling along. Barely. I hope that getting my feet wet in game development will kickstart them a bit. It would be something other than the pure raw data that my projects tend to drench themselves in.

I'll probably be talking more once these posts become frequent enough. In the mean time, here's the new website.