Some Musings on Wireless Charging

Back when I got my current phone (a Samsung Galaxy S9+) around this time two years ago, I discovered I could get a free wireless charging pad by pre-ordering (I had the immense good fortune to decide I could use a new phone about two weeks before the S9/S9+ came out). Seeing as it cost me nothing extra, I went for it, and had my first experience with wireless charging.

It was fairly nice; instead of having to fiddle around with plugging a cable into my phone at night I could simply place it on the charging pad, then retrieve it in the morning without needing to worry about an attached cable snagging on anything. However, it still required a degree of fiddling around to make sure it got aligned properly to start charging. (I usually read on my phone in bed a bit before sleeping, so when I finally put my phone on to charge it's dark and I'm sleepy.) Wireless charging by itself is nice and convenient, but it felt like the precision required to initiate charging holds it back somewhat from its full potential.

Enter the company Xvida, which I discovered last year. They've come up with a solution for the fiddly part of getting your phone to charge via making wireless chargers with a set of magnets built in. They also make phone attachments with matching magnets, which will stick your phone to the charger in a way that lines it up for optimal charging. They make full cases for a couple of the most popular phone lines (mostly ones from Samsung and Apple), but also a simple, thin magnetic card which can be attached to the back of most phones and is thin enough to live under most cases.

Out of interest, I picked up a matching charger and magnetic card back in November, and I can say that they're quite good. The manufacturing is solid, and the magnetic connection is plenty strong enough. (Xvida also makes car chargers, and I have no problem believing they'd be capable of holding a phone through all but the worst potholes.) Now charging my phone in the evening is as simple as holding it near the charger and letting the magnets align it in place. In the morning I just pull it off, and I'm good to go. After a month or so I picked up a second charger for use at my desk in Swinburne—this one's a much more elegant-looking stand, and I actually use it unplugged as a stand for my phone more than I actually do a charger. I also just tonight ordered their latest product, a wireless battery pack with the same magnetic connection technology. (I've been thinking about having a back-up battery for a while.)

Now, I don't usually write reviews like this for many products as I'm always worried something I've promoted might not turn out to be good or useful later on, but I feel pretty confident in Xvida's products and can recommend them. They're a pretty small, new company who got started from a successful Kickstarter project; I've asked questions by email and always gotten a very polite personal reply back quickly. Anyway, what prompted me to write this post tonight is that they're having a site-wide 15% off sale at the moment in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and I wanted to let people know about it. I've no idea how long it'll last as it doesn't say, so you might want to check it out soon if you're interested. Having tried wireless charging I wouldn't want to go back to cables, and I think Xvida's created a really nice product that solves one of the few remaining niggles with the concept. Hopefully some of you find this useful, dear readers! A hui hou!

Making a Painting of a Picture

Almost two months ago I posted an old piece of space art of mine that I was intending to turn into a physical painting. At this point in time I'm close enough to finished with it that I might as well show it off, especially since I didn't have space to bring it home with me from uni when I last left so I probably won't be working on it for some time. (I only had enough hands to carry my desk plants.)

If you recall, the original picture looked like this:

The painting currently looks…a bit different. The reason why is actually rather interesting; I decided that for this painting, instead of painting a simple flat black background as I've been doing for my space pictures, I instead wanted to paint a gradient going from dark red to dark blue to make the background more dynamic. Here's that gradient after I painted it:

At this point I realized that the gradient looked like the light was coming from off the edge of the canvas rather than from a star mostly on it, so I decided to shift the composition so that the star was covering the right edge of the canvas. Then I decided to make the star much bigger (so that most of it was actually off the edge of the canvas), and add a massive stellar flare erupting into space. And then I decided I might as well move the planet into more of a profile view and out from in front of the star. Here's what it looked like before I added the planet:

You'll notice it's also gone from landscape to portrait orientation; I think it looks more interesting this way. (Looking at it now, I'm reminded that I've read S-shapes in paintings can catch the eye, so maybe that has something to do with it.) You can see (or maybe you can't here) that I've done my favorite trick of using glass beads in the paint on the star, which gives it a remarkably dynamic look in person. Anyway, here's my first try at a planet roasting in the fiery heat of its parent star:

I definitely didn't like how the planet came out here, so I tried again. (Though the star looks amazing photographed on that red chair like that!) Finally, here's what the painting looks like at the moment:

I tried making the planet look a lot hotter, and think I've mostly succeeded in that; I also tried to make it look like the atmosphere is being blown off by the solar wind pressure, and I'm much less happy with how that came out. (Someone noted it looks like the planet is plunging into the star, and now I can't unsee that.) It also looks rather like the star is reaching out a grasping tendril to grab the hapless planet, which was also not my intention, but which I do find to be rather cool. I am quite happy with how the star and flare turned out; I've discovered I really like painting both of those things, and if I flatter myself, I think I'm getting halfway-decent at it.

The decision to move the planet to a side view like this was also partly inspired by the discovery of a hot Jupiter in an astonishingly-tight 18 hour orbit back in February, in a coincidental nod to the inspiration behind the original piece of art. In the linked article they note that the planet they found, NGTS-10b, has an orbital distance only twice the diameter of its parent star (a fairly Sun-like star, though about a thousand kelvins cooler). Which would put it a bit further out than this planet, but not a whole lot. (For reference, that's some 27 times closer than Mercury is to our Sun.)

I don't actually have a name for this painting at the moment, and I'll probably wait on one until I can get back to it and try to improve the planet and its escaping atmosphere a bit. In the meantime I figured I'd share it with you all rather than waiting till I could properly finish it. It's 14”×18”, if you were wondering. A hui hou!

Update: COVID-19 2020 edition!

I realized that I haven't posted here for a few weeks, and unless you've been self-isolating pretty hard the past few months it's probably not hard to figure out why. With all the global turmoil surrounding COVID-19* I've been a little busy lately and haven't gotten around to posting.

First of all, I'm fine. There are over a hundred cases of COVID-19 here in Victoria, and the government is cracking down hard on international travel and meetings of people, but no one I know has caught it yet. Most of the astronomy department at Swinburne (including me) has been voluntarily working from home this past week, indefinitely, and all our meetings and colloquia have gone remote.

Personally, I am loving working from home so far. I never really realized how stressful it was, upon waking up each morning, to have a ticking time constraint before I needed to be at the train station until I suddenly…don't. It's absolutely fantastic, and I've been reveling in this socially-acceptable reason to be the hermit it was apparently always my calling to be. Productivity has suffered a bit, this past week, as I settle into the idea of working from home, but I'm getting better at it. And not losing ~2 hours commuting each day definitely gives me more time to be productive.

It's also made me feel a lot more creative, as I'm no longer so drained at the end of each day from being out and about, so I might have some more stuff to post about soon. For instance, I've discovered that I can paint in the background while watching someone's talk from home—and I often end up paying better attention when I've got something to keep my hands occupied…

Anyway, that's what's been happening here. I'm sure this is just the start of some serious world-wide changes this year, but I'm in a pretty privileged position where my PhD is unlikely to be affected, so for now I'm just going with the flow and seeing what happens. A hui hou! 

*Can I just say what a boring name this is? It sounds like something astronomers would come up with. Given that it apparently came from a bat, can we call it “Bat Flu” or something? I'm just imagining telling my grandchildren one day about how I lived through the “Great COVID-19 Pandemic of 2020!”