Wesley's Tool-Box

2024 has been a complicated year, especially towards the end. I hope the year 2025 will be able to resolve a lot of loose ends and make fresh starts. Here's a photo of the sunrise that I took from my home in Naju to calm you over. Happy new year, everyone!

If you want to see the sunrise as it happened in real-time, here's a video I uploaded.

Device: iPhone 16 Pro
Settings: 120 mm equiv. - ISO 40 - 1/3195s - f/2.8
Time: 2025-01-01 07:56 KST
Location: Naju, Korea

On December 23, 2024, Korea Electric Vehicle User Association (KEVUA), with the support of the Ministry of Environment, held the 1st Annual Jeonjinsa Awards ceremony at Lotte Signiel Seoul Grand Ballroom. Jeonjinsa is the shorthand for "People Who are Serious about Electric Vehicles". This was a monthly event in 2023, but it was turned into an annual one this year to recognize a much more broad scope of people who aimed to push the era of electric vehicles closer in various aspects.

Of the ten categories selected, I was honoured with the "EV Info Sharing Award". The award committee recognized my works such as my book (Electric Car Common Sense Dictionary) and my YouTube channel as being helpful in enabling general public to learn about EVs.

The event has been covered in some news outlets:

- Electric Times
- Munhwa News
- Biz World

At 5 PM, December 14, 2024, National Assembly of the Republic of Korea passed the motion to impeach President Yoon Suk Yeol on its second attempt. This was the culmination of the huge backlash that was caused by the short-lived martial law that Yoon imposed on December 3. I joined the pro-impeachment rally that was taking place all over Yeouido, and held a spot right in front of the entrance to the National Assembly building from around 2:40 PM.

When the motion finally passed, the entire crowd erupted in a huge celebration, and the press photographers seized the chance to record the moment. As it turned out, I was in the frame in several instances:

- Korea Economic Daily (Hankyung)
- Hankyoreh (1), (2)
- Chosun Ilbo
- Hankook Ilbo (4th photo)
- Seoul Shinmun
- Dailian
- OhMyNews (3rd & 10th photos)
- Edaily
- Yonhap News (1), (2) [on Hankook Ilbo's Extra Edition (1), (2)]
- Workers' Solidarity

On a related note, I uploaded a video to YouTube that shows how things went from my perspective that day.

Along with my Bolt EV passing the 160,000 km milestone, the new battery that came with the recall has logged more than two years and 57 thousand kilometers of use. So it was a good time to check on how its performance compares to the original battery. The video I uploaded at YouTube on this topic covers everything including how the data was obtained, but I'll cut to the chase here. The data for the old battery is divided into two ranges, the first part that spans 25 months and 51,585.4 km, and the second part that covers 23 months and 52,940.1 km. The new battery's data is treated whole, totalling 57,945.3 km and 28 months.

The division on the old makes it ideal to explain its degradation trend in just two linear polynomials, and also is close to a single quadratic or cubic counterpart for the scope in question. The results showed that the degradation of the old battery in its first two years was steep, amounting to about 0.660 kWh of loss every 10,000 km. In contrast, the new battery was doing much better at about 0.311 kWh per the same distance. While the degradation slowed down for the old one in the subsequent years, it was still worse than the new one's initial performance. So it's evident that the new battery is much more resilient.

While many comets pass near the Earth every year, most of them don't get bright enough to be easily observable. The Tsuchinshan-Atlas (C/2023 A3) comet was an exception, and it was apparently bright enough to be spotted with naked eye in early October. But during that time the weather was either cloudy or rainy where I live, so nearly missed out on personally observing it.

Thankfully, patience and readiness paid off, and when the skies were cleared up for a few hours during the evening yesterday I got my iPhone 16 Pro out to take photos of the comet from the balcony. The best example of the observation is what you're seeing in the first photo.

Although the comet was no longer visible to the naked eye and there was plenty of light pollution from the city, the camera on the phone was still able to capture the comet with an 8-second exposure under Dark Mode. Marfik (Lambda Ophiuchi), a 3.8-magnitude star is right next to it, and the 4.3-magnitude Sigma Ophiuchi is below it, so you can gauge that the comet was at least as bright as a 3-magnitude star at the time. This is in line with my previous observations where the iPhone's wide-angle lens was good enough to capture a star as dim as magnitude 5.

Device: iPhone 16 Pro
Settings: 24mm equiv. - ISO 800 - 8s - f/1.78
Time: 2024-10-20 18:56 KST
Location: Naju, Korea