Wesley's Tool-Box

If you look towards the south around 9 to 10 PM in summer, Milky Way can be seen flowing down to the horizon... if you're lucky enough to be in a place with a dark sky. As someone living in a city, I have to rely on a camera's long exposure to catch a glimpse of it, like what I've done 9 years ago. Still, I wondered if iPhone's Night Mode can replicate this magic even after a decade of urbanization that took place here. As it turns out, the answer is a resounding "yes". A bit of post processing needed to be done to bring out the details, but the same can be said for the earlier photo as well.

All I had to do for the capture is to wait for a clear night sky, move to the edge of the city with fewer lights, set the phone on a tripod, and do a 30-second Night Mode exposure. Fortunately, the Liberation Day weekend provided the right atmospheric conditions, and the southern part of the city is still just full of rice fields after all these years. I was worried a bit about iPhone's finicky focus under low light, but it didn't cause a trouble this time.

In the end, I was able to take more than twenty consecutive photos of the Milky Way. Due to the ambient glow in the sky, the original photos still came out looking a bit washed out. But adjusting some settings like contrast and black point in Pixelmator Pro fixed that issue.

Device: iPhone 16 Pro
Settings: 24mm equiv. - ISO 1250 - 30s - f/1.78
Time: 2025-08-15 22:08 KST
Location: Naju, Korea
Processed with Pixelmator Pro 3.7

What if you don't have a tripod handy? Well, you can do the Night Mode photography with bare hands and still capture the Milky Way, as you can see here. As a matter of fact, my first attempts were done this way. When I realized that a reasonably good quality can be had despite the relatively short (10 seconds) exposure and high ISO, I brought out the tripod later on. It's amazing what smartphones can do these days.

Device: iPhone 16 Pro
Settings: 24mm equiv. - ISO 2000 - 10s - f/1.78
Time: 2025-08-15 20:56 KST
Location: Naju, Korea
Processed with Pixelmator Pro 3.7

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.