Over a million Americans were diagnosed with skin cancer in 2007, making it one of the fastest growing types of cancer in the United States. UV exposure is the leading cause of skin cancer and to avoid overexposure many people protect their body with sunscreen.

Unfortunately, if people are protected the coral reefs suffer. A new study finds that chemicals in sunscreen wash off swimmers and awaken dormant viruses inside coral reefs.

NPR: Linkfest: Swimmers’ Sunscreen Killing Off Coral

For the last couple weeks I’ve been thinking that I either needed to find the local reef group or else start one. Thankfully I just found wamas.

I just joined their group, and am looking forward to meeting them next Saturday in Manassas.

I seem to be having problems getting my ph readings on my fishtank to act accurately.

In the past couple weeks I’ve replaced my ph probe three times. I’ve also tried re-arranging the cables and restarting my sampling system. I’ve even re-installed older versions of the data collection program.

My best guess is that I have some form of ground loop throwing off the readings, or that my DrDaq is broken. Problem with the DrDaq is that the company is based in the UK so it not only takes months to get a replacement, but you also have to pay shipping and fill out a bunch of customs forms. Totally not worth it.

So I’ve decided that I’ll switch to one of the Neptune Systems Aquacontrollers. Specifically the JR which has gotten cheaper to the point where they cost about the same price as the DrDaq. Plus, maybe I won’t have to spend $20 and two months to return a defective temp probe that was sent as a replacement to an already RMA’d original probe (horrible customer service). Oh and bonus, they appear to already be paying attention to things like Ground Loop issues and have a Ground Loop Interrupter (albeit as a really high price, but I guess that if they’re the only supplier, they can charge whatever they want).

So in the next couple weeks, I’ll be switching my Windows box that’s running DrAquarium to a Linux box doing a serial port query and pushing that to a web page. In terms of ultimate webapp, I like the design over at ShallowReef.

Added to the list - either try to get webcam streaming (flash) support, or buy one of those Axis cameras on Ebay.

Tonight I was working on my fishtank. I’d recently rearranged some corals to let them get a little more light and also free up some new space for some new ones. The side effect was that I’d noticed that one coral was stinging another one (too close together) and had decided to move them apart. While I had my hand in the tank, I noticed a pins-and-needles feeling in my arm that was underwater and moving the coral.
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I’ve had the same old cam for about five years, and was disappointed that I couldn’t get a better picture on the fishtank. Surely there had been advances in technology since my last purchase right? Right! Logitech Quickcam Pro 5000 - actually has more bells and whistles then I need (comes with microphones, headsets, goofy comic facial recognition system) but the picture is beautiful and it also has a low-light setting on it. $30+shipping on ebay, sweeet!

That blue glow that you’ll see until about 4:30pm is the blue led moon lights. The metal halides turn on at 4:30PM and keep going until about 2:30AM (my home hours).

And the creation of an artificial reef. Awesome pictures.

Today I received a full X-10 home automation kit that I purchased off Ebay. For $37/shipped, not a bad deal. Four Appliance modules, Four Lamp modules, one Firecracker module, one transceiver, one controller, three light switches, and three keychain remotes.

Using the Firecracker, Transceiver, and an Appliance module, I now have the rotating fan in the fishtank support room set to automatically turn itself on when the ambient room temp gets over 70′F and turn itself off when the temp is below 65′.

I also added a Firecracker status query link to my little front end mockup. If I got another appliance module, I could use the automation software to turn my lights on and off too.

Today I received my chiller from Aquatic Exchange. I want to highly recommend the site and it’s owner ‘Bob’ for excellent customer care and communication. When the original one I requested wasn’t in stock, Bob offered to match the price on a more expensive one - he also checked out my work in progress for the fish tank monitor and offered compliments for the little progress I’d made so far. I’ve changed a little so that I’m scraping the straight stats from the Dr. Aquarium website then feeding them into rrdtool every five minutes to make my own graphs.

Now all I need to do it plumb it.

Also, if you look at the temp stats, you’ll see that there’s no “sump temp” being plotted. That’s because the temperature sensor no longer works and I’m trying to RMA it. Kind of a drag it broke already after two months.

The Labjack is cheaper and supports more items. However, it’s a bit more complicated then just hooking up a probe.

What’ll be really handy in the future is when wireless usb becomes mainstream and instead of running cables to sensors all over the place, you just put the sensor wherever you want.

While searching online for some of the concrete plugs that people use to clone/frag their coral, I stumbled on Reefball.com.

These man-made reefs are designed to quickly transplant and re-deploy existing threatened coral - step by step how-to.

Among their accomplishments is basically rebuilding entire reefs.

Sadly, it probably won’t be enough.

The developer has allowed me a chance to beta test the newest version of software.

I finally got around to setting up all the dyndns/port forwarding etc. So, here is a live link to the web interface for graphs.